Hallowe'en Decorating

Last year, Nebalee found the coolest Hallowe'en craft that we were unable to do, because finding pool noodles in Colorado in October is practically impossible. However, this year, I stumbled across some at the Dollar Store, and snatched up enough to make both of us the gothic candle craft that we couldn't make last year.

All it took was $20 in pool noodles, $5 in spray paint, $5 in black ceramic plates to act as bases for Nebalee's, and $83 solar tea lights. Yes, you read that right, eighty-three dollars! So much for a cheap craft, lol. The solar tea lights are worth it, because of the time saved in not having to turn on and off all of the tea lights if they were battery-operated. To me, it's worth it to not have to waste time remembering to go out and turn on twenty lights, then turn them off in the morning.

I knew I wanted two sets to put at the end of Whimsy' archway, and two sets to put into Maggie's gothic bird cages, plus two sets for Nebalee's house. The first thing I did when I got home was to cut them in staggered heights, then tape them together so I could glue them.

All taped and ready for gluing.

For a smart person, sometimes I'm not so smart. Do you know that hot glue and foam pool noodles don't play well together? If I'd stopped for three seconds and thought about it, I might have picked up some glue when I picked up the pool noodles. I finally figured out a way to make the hot glue and the foam pool noodles play nicely enough to stick together. Jay then added some wood glue (the only glue we had at the time) around the top, and let it run down so it would look like melting wax once painted.

Wood glue on foam takes forever to try, and I impatiently waited until it was "dry enough" to take outside and paint.

Once they were all painted and dried, I took them to their assigned spots. I wired the two for Whimsy to her arch, since I knew the winds would blow them away if I didn't. I mean, if the wind can blow down a whole outhouse, my foam gothic candles wouldn't stand a chance. With them in place, I again had to wait for the tea lights to be delivered. And then I had to wait until I had time to go add them to the candles.

The tea lights didn't fit down inside the hole of the pool noodles, so some creative carving was required, which was messy and time consuming, but so worth it!

The first night, I only had time
to carve holes in one set of candles.

But look at how amazing these are!

It took a week after the first tea lights were installed to get the rest installed. Digger and the Gremlin were over the night I was carving and installing the rest of the tea lights and I basically just ignored them in my quest to complete the project. I think they'll forgive me.

I love them in the gothic birdcages,
and they're protected from the wind.

I realized that my candelabra would go very nicely on the shelves I moved into Maggie, so I moved it from the potting bench over to the shelves. Those tapers are battery operated, so they only get turned on for "special occasions", i.e. when I feel like walking out and turning them on.

Last month, Jay had won a gold skull in a game, and he thought it would be great in Whimsy, if I added a tea light to it. He's right - it would look amazing in Whimsy, but once I moved the candelabra to the window shelf, I decided that the skull needed to go there, too. Since we live on an old farm, "treasures" resurface every spring, and I've been collecting them. This year's treasures included a lot of animal bones, so I made a temporary wreath of rib bones for the base of the skull.

I just love the way this all came together. Yes, Maggie is a bit lopsided, with the candelabra and skull in one window, but I still love it. There's still time, I might find something to go in the other window before Hallowe'en. This is honestly the first time I'm disappointed that we never have any trick or treaters.

This just makes me so happy. <grin>

Latte Coffee Candle

 Before I talk about our crafty day, I just wanted to give a quick update on the kombucha flavored with stuff I grew! The watermelon cucumber was so refreshing, I loved it. Jay had a bottle of the honeysuckle and enjoyed it enough that I'm going to try to gather enough flowers to make a half gallon of it. I only tried a sip of the grape the other night as I moved it to the fridge, but didn't get much grape flavor, so I've been letting it sit in the fridge a bit longer. This morning, when I looked at it, it had more color, so I'm looking forward to trying it with dinner tonight.

~~~

Each year, since I turned fifty, I've been trying to learn a new skill. Even though we don't have a family history of dementia and just a minimal history of stroke (Grandma Mary had one, but she was a life-long smoker), it's always in the back of my mind that I can do things to prevent, or at least increase chances of recovery. Not to mention, I want to be able to wipe my own butt when I'm 90, so staying physically active is important. Hence the reason for learning new skills each year, in an effort to keep my neurons cranking out the myelin and exercising both sides of my brain. 

Since I've turned fifty, I joined the circus, learned to paddle board, learned to crochet, have been learning Italian, and tried picking up little skills here and there. Hell, Mom and I built Whimsy together - there was a lot of learning that went on, and is still going on, with that project. This year, though, I didn't have a big learning goal, which is where the little one-day classes are coming in handy.

I told you all of that so that you'd understand that I was already primed when I saw a Facebook ad for a Skill A Week. The intro cost was steeply discounted (I think I paid $15 for three months), so of course I signed up. I figured that this was something Mom and I could do together on Mom nights. Already, I'm behind because I have to order the supplies for each week's skills. It's a good thing the classes were so discounted! 

The first week's class was candle making, specifically a candle that looked like a latte. 

I forgot to take pictures of the process of making the ice cubes, but I did learn one really important thing, should I choose to make candles like this in the future: direct heat is your friend when melting high-temp gel wax. I tried using a double boiler. After 45 minutes, I gave up and went straight to direct heat. The gel was melted within five minutes. Now I know. It's a good thing that I followed the instructor's advice and made the ice cubed in advance, because if I'd waited until Mom got there, that's all that would have been accomplished.

Almost forgot to take this picture, too.

I chose to use pint canning jars, since I have an abundance of canning jars, and I know they can handle high heat. After we put the wicks in, we added the ice cubes and got started on melting the wax for the coffee and milk. The wax for the coffee/milk was a lower temp wax, so the double boiler was used effectively. We added in the scent, then split the wax into two pour jars: one to be the milk, the other to get colored for the coffee. Then, we started pouring the candles.

The milk went first,

then the coffee.

Pouring was the easy part, waiting for it to cool was the most difficult. Luckily, we'd planned to eat dinner and watch another episode of Reacher, which kept us entertained and not messing around with the candles as they cooled.

They looked like chocolate milk, not a latte once they cooled.

I reminded both Mom and myself that we needed to trust the process, and broke out the heat gun to warm it. The instructor said it would bring out the coffee color and we needed to "melt" the ice cubes to make it more realistic looking.

It worked!

But as it cooled, it started looking like chocolate milk again.

I think I was a little too generous with the heat gun and melted the wax too much. <shrugs> It happens. This was a ton of fun, and I'll likely make candles again in the future, though probably not something that requires more than one color.

Butterfly Baths

The original craft that Nebalee wanted to do for our sister craft day was to make Butterfly Baths. She found a cute example on Facebook, and had her heart set on it. Unfortunately, the cost of terracotta pots has skyrocketed and it quickly became cost prohibitive to make these, so we settled on the garden poles.

Jay has taken up a side hustle as a reseller on eBay and spends time every week hitting the garage sale circuit. When I am off on Fridays, I join him. A couple of weeks ago, at one of the garage sales, I found an assortment of terracotta pots for $12, so I scooped them up. They were smaller than the large pots shown in the example, but I was certain we could make them work.

I was so excited to get to do the craft Nebalee originally wanted to do, that I was super impatient and strong-armed her into coming over after Mom and I did our glass class.

The first thing I did was stack the pots different ways, to see how we could make them work. I only had enough of the right sizes to make one stack like the picture, so I declared that stack Nebalee's. Mom and I played around with what was left and decided we could make a double-decker butterfly bath each. While waiting for Nebalee to arrive at my place, we went ahead an painted the backgrounds. That way, when Nebalee joined us, we could jump right in to painting the fun stuff.

Oh, by did we make a mess!

We each ended up with a different shade of blue. Mom had brought down some paints from one of her earlier projects, and I picked up some cheap acrylic from Wally World. The base coats dried just enough that once Nebalee got there, we could get to painting.

We loosely followed the example, but it turns out, we all have different interpretations of what mushrooms and butterflies look like. We spent a couple of hours happily painting away

I didn't have any little terracotta pots for the top of the baths, but for my 50th birthday, Nebalee and our friend wrote out words to describe me on fifty different rocks. I've been holding on to those rocks for the past four years, not knowing what to do with them. I dug them out of the potting shed, and we each chose a few to add to our baths for the butterflies/bees/bugs to stand on and not drown.

Once we were done painting, I broke out my favorite glue of all time, E6000, and we went about gluing all the pieces together. Nebalee had to run, so we quickly took pictures and sent her on her way. Mom and Neballe left their baths with me to finish drying/curing, and for me to seal the next day.

The horses are busy bodies and had to inspect them all.

Chonky Skeeter was just sad it wasn't edible

Nebalee's, Mom's, mine

The next morning, I got up and ran outside to spray the first coat of sealant on them. I picked up by rattle can of sealant, shook it really well, then blasted the top of Nebalee's bath.

Wait ...

The sealant is clear, right?

Why is it spraying white?

Oh, shit!

Yep, I'd sprayed right across the top of Nebalee's beautiful butterfly bath with white primer, not clear sealant.

I was horrified! All of the work that Nebalee put into hers, and with one careless mistake, I'd erased part of it.

Luckily, I still had all of the colors, so when Mom showed up to watch court with me, I fessed up that I'd have to repaint some of Nebalee's bath. After we watched the judge give yet another continuance to the defense attorney, we went outside and started painting. I painted Nebalee's butterfly bath, and Mom painted the trim pieces for Maggie.

I couldn't get the primer off the rocks, so we chose some bright colors that matched the colors on the rest of her bath and I started re-painting. I had to go back to my pictures to see which rocks she had chosen in order to re-write them. I'm so thankful that I was able to biggerfy one of the pictures to read her rocks. Finally, all of the baths got sealed, with sealant this time, and got distributed to their respective homes.

Mine went in with my "garden in
a box" native flowers.

Nebalee's went into her "garden in a box"
butterfly garden.

We don't know where Mom's will end up yet, but if I'm guessing, it'll be in her rock garden, near her garden pole. But that's just a guess.

Update 8/20/25 from Mom:

Text from Mom this morning.

Nestled in the geraniums for now.

One Last Birthday Craft with The Best Sister Ever

Painting our garden poles was a ton of fun, but I had one other craft I was determined to complete on Sister Craft Day. The week before, when I put out the new round bale of hay for the horses, I found some barbed wire sticking out of it and pulled it out. I threw the barbed wire away and put it out of mind.

However, a couple of days later, Jay and I were at an antique mall and I happened to see a coil of rusty barbed wire that instantly made me think of a wreath. Then ... my brain made the connection between the coil of barbed wire in the antique mall and the length of barbed wire I'd just thrown in the dumpster a couple of days earlier and I knew I had to make a barbed wire wreath for the outhouse.

I went dumpster diving when we got home, pulled the barbed wire out, and cut away all of the hay net that had gotten tangled in the barbs. Jay was kind enough to coil it while I looked up pictures for inspiration on Pinterest. One of the pictures showed a horseshoe in the middle of the wreath, and I remembered I had an old rusty horseshoe that we'd found in the yard this spring. Since we don't shoe our horses, I knew that it was old and had to have come from a horse other than ours. I held onto it to put on Maggie's door, but knew it had to go into the wreath instead.

Barbed wire from our hay bale,
horseshoe from our yard.

When we were finished with our garden poles, Nebalee helped me wire some silk flowers to the wreath, which was surprisingly more difficult than I expected it to be. 

It's rather minimalist, but I love it.

Putting it up on the outhouse was one of the many "little" chores I had lined up for the next day, and I wanted to see it on the outhouse so badly that it jumped to the top of my to-do list and I knocked it out first thing Sunday morning.

Just ignore my finger.

I love it, but I might add some more greenery to it at some point. Or maybe not, it depends on how badly I want to risk tetanus. Either way, I love it on the outhouse door. Once it cools down, Mom and I are going to use stencils to paint flowers around the base of the outhouse to liven it up a little bit.

Birthday Crafts with The Best Sister Ever

Birthday #54 was last week, and I was traveling for work, so it was pretty low-key. Nebalee and I had planned a craft day for the Saturday after my birthday, and I was so excited about it. She and I don't spend nearly enough time together any more. A couple of years ago, we were doing monthly 5 and 10k, but life keeps getting in the way. The fact that we both love and enjoy spending time with our significant others is a hindrance, too. 

We had planned to make butterfly baths out of terracotta pots, but that became cost prohibitive very quickly, so Nebalee came up with an alternative craft - making garden totem poles. I looked at Pinterest for a few ideas and was pretty overwhelmed. I love me some crafts, but I'm not super creative or artsy. I do best when I can look at a few ideas and steal them to make my own, so that's what I did.

Our "practice" beam on the left.

I tried, and failed, to paint flowers
so I made Nebalee paint them for me.

Nebalee's flowers.

I wish I'd thought to do my flowers like this!

I'm always hashtagging my pictures
#WeLiveInAPostcard so it had to
go on the post.

After I saw Nebalee's dragonflies,
I made her add one to the flowers I'd 
previously made her paint.

Side-by-side. Mine is taller because I had to
sink it securely in the ground. I don't need the
wind treating this like the outhouse.

#BestSisterEver and I with our completed posts.

We planted hers in her butterfly garden.

This was such a fun craft! While I was initially overwhelmed with possibilities, once I settled down and decided to simplify the post, things went much better. Right at the very beginning, I had a thought of painting vines to wrap around each side, but I didn't like the way they turned out. You know what the beauty of painting is? If you hate it, you can just paint over it. So I did, and ended up with lady bugs, bumblebees, flowers, and our hashtag. Every bit of my garden pole makes me smile. 

I was determined to get my garden post planted right away, so the next morning I pulled out the auger and got to work. It's scary how fast I'm getting with the auger - it no longer intimidates me, so it's no big deal to just pull it out and dig a hole. Jay did come out to help me with the last couple of inches - I'm not quite tall enough to get the leverage over the top to dig down as far as I need sometimes. This was one of those cases, and when I saw all of the shale dust come out of the hole I understood why I came to a standstill with my hole digging.

I decided to plant my garden pole at the end of my newest arch. The arch was supposed to support the watermelon I planted. Unfortunately, my watermelon plants didn't make it. I may have been a little over-confident in my growing abilities this year.

After Jay helped me dig the hole deep enough, he broke up the flagstone for under my little arch, and helped me move my antique school bench from Whimsy to the archway. This was another one of those "it'll just take a minute" projects that sits and sits. With his help, it did take just a minute, and I'm thrilled with how it turned out. This fall, I'll sprinkle some creeping thyme seeds in between the flagstone to germinate over the winter.

Just picture this next year with some sort of climbing edible plant.

The Bionic Cowgirl and I took a moment to enjoy
the new seating area.

The Ecclectic Me

I like lots of things. Sometimes I even have time to do the things I like. For instance, today I took the Glock out to play. It was frustrating and wonderful

The evil Dot Torture, right handed

Dot Torture, left handed

I did not do so well, but it was a great way to blow through 100 rounds of ammo and get some "me" time on the range.

Then I crashed my niece's birthday party. I hadn't really been invited, but Mom let it slip that she was going to have a faerie garden party and I wanted a faerie garden, so I called Nebalee and invited myself along.

Pre-planning

Laying it out with rocks

Unicorn

Pegasus

I couldn't decide between a faerie forest or a faerie beach, so they got both.

I love Sand Beach Lake - it's one of my all-time favorite destinations, so I built the little faeries their own version of Sand Beach lake. It doesn't look quite this good after the car ride home, but it's still cute. Here's hoping Speed Racer doesn't find it and help himself to, well, everything.

Asset's garden turned out really cute - what a great idea to have a faerie garden party.

It was so much fun, I want a faerie garden party for my birthday too! I'm going to have to plan a "girls' day" very soon.