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Click here to view all of my 31 Days Project Week 1: 01 - Destinations Sign 02 - A Morning Without Coffee Sign 03 - Butterfly Mobile 04 - Adhesive Felt Pumpkins 05 - Snakes on a Wreath 06 - Coin Art 07 - Halloween Costumes - Kids Week 2: 08 - Halloween Costumes - Adults 09 - Alis Volat Propriis Sign 10 - Wax paper Stained Glass 11 - Upcycle: Curtain Hooks to Magazine Rack 12 - The Best Laid Plans 13 - Upcycle: Torn Jeans to Girl's Dress 14 - Upcycle: Stained Dress to Skirt Week 3: 15 - Curtains, Fort, and Monkey Bars 16 - Chandelier Redo 17 - Fairy Bedroom 18 - Halloween Costumes - Kid's Viking 19 - Hot Glue Faux Candles 20 - A New World (Map) 21 - Give Thanks Ornament 22 - Fish Tank: Primered 23 - Tissue Paper Stained Glass 24 - A New Light 25 - Fish Tank: Painted 26 - Pantry Can Rack 27 - Cupcakes and a Fail 28 - Halloween Costumes: Zombie 29 - Be a Fruit Loop 30 - Halloween Costumes: Alice in Wonderland 31 - Double String Beaded Necklace Have you heard about the 31 Days? It...

I LOVE your comments and I appreciate the hell out of them. I do. And I would love to tell you how much :) I always read the comments and if you have a blog I go and look at that too. But if you don't have an email attached to your profile I can't respond to your thoughtful comments. Not sure how? I'm not sure how it works on Wordpress, etc but on Blogger it's really easy. On your dashboard just click Edit Profile Check the box to show your email in your profile and choose where you want that mail to go. And save. Easy peasy done. Because I really would love to be able to tell you how much I appreciate your thoughtful comments that mean so much to me.

I cannot express enough how important I think art is to children. Even the littlest of projects may stay in a child's mind forever and help shape the person that they will become. My grandmother was a very artistic and creative woman and started in early teaching us kids to love it too. She enrolled me in my first sewing class, helped us make enamels, taught me how to twist wire for jewelry and make coils (like this ) and was always such an inspiration. Her home was very colorful and expressive and filled with interesting things for the kids and adults to find fascination in. She also gave me my first copy of Anne of Green Gables and helped cement my love of reading. I can only hope to instill in my children all of the gifts that she gave to me. Below are a couple of the projects she helped me with. They created memories that I will never forget and, while they just seemed like fun at the time, it started a love of art that I'll always have. Age 11: (I wasn't really ...

I knew that my living room needed a couple more chairs and when I saw these unloved and filthy little things at the thrift store I knew they would be perfect to fill the space. Then they sat there for a month as I tried to figure out what color to paint them and what fabric to put on the seats. One of the guys at work said I should use a cow patterned fabric like they have on the seats at the corner bar and that jump started my imagination nicely. Sadly there was no cow fabric to be found, though I did find some fun zebra and I like how it worked out. Pulling the seats and backs off of the frames and recovering them was pretty simple but my staple gun has recently turned into an automatic and made that part of the project a little dangerous and living-on-the-wild-side kind of scary. Husband suggested painting the frames teal to match the DVD shelf in the room and I certainly won't turn him down when he comes up with bright color choices (yay!). So we jumped in to our newly or...

When our home was first built I skipped the option of upgrading the knobs on the cabinets and just kept the chrome knobs that were standard. The builder wanted some ridiculous sum of money ($350 ish if I remember right) and I just figured I'd do it later. 3 years later and now I have been looking at options and at $3 a knob, which only affords the plain and kind of ugly cabinet pulls, it would cost me about $120. Yikes! This is where we started: Then I saw a link on Pinterest to these and LOVED them. But, they are $75 for 4 of them. So, um, that's $750 for my kitchen. Right, keep looking. It was at this moment I noticed a jar to my right. It was filled with rocks my grandmother had once collected, I believe from Washington. I had kept them for sentimental reasons after she died since I collect random rocks myself and didn't want them tossed into the flower beds, which is sadly where they were headed. As I looked at them I realized that better than random rocks with...

I made a couple wreaths for Fall/Halloween this year. I decided to do a fall/not-holiday-specific mantle and make a Halloween wreath for the front door. Since the fireplace decorations aren't holiday themed they can stay up till I break out the Christmas stuff later in the year and I won't have to fuss with changes. One grapevine wreath and a few dollar store picks like the one pictured below and I got started on the first wreath. I pulled all of the leaves off the picks and started fitting them into the wreath. I DID NOT use any glue or adhesive for this. Since the wreath is made of vine there are a million little places to tuck in stems that they'll stay put and if I reuse the wreath for something else later I didn't want it all gummed up. Here's a closeup of a way to tuck the leaves into the wreath if you want to avoid adhesives. I have the harvest sign from last year and I thought it might be cute in the middle. Clear string would have been preferable but I...

Fall officially begins on Friday which means that it's about that time of year again to get the Halloween stuff out! This year someone else is hosting the party but we'll have quite a few kids over here so I'll be decorating again. Anyway, here are a few things I did in years past and I'll be posting some new things over the next month. The pumpkin pendant : Adhesive felt and pipe cleaner pumpkins . We'll be doing them again this year so I can't wait to see what creative ideas the kids think to add this time (the hands were one of their ideas last year). From the party decorations post : A spider webbed ceiling. This will be repeated but moved to another room and changed up a bit. The spookified chandelier. Another one I'll repeat but add onto. Bats over the moon and cheesecloth webs. I can't find the bats :( But I'm sure we'll have some fun out there. Are you getting ready for Halloween soon? What have been some of your favorite decorati...

My home was built about 3 years ago. So I want a time machine to go back about 3 years ago and tell the builder to fire the electrician who installed the lights in my house. While working on Erin's room I took down the old light so I can install the small chandelier for her room. The diagram below is what a basic installation for a light is going to look like (image from here ). If you haven't replaced a light before it might take a little while to figure out but it's not overly complicated, right? Below is what the electrician did in her room (and I assume the others, I'm going to have to look at those). There was NO cross bar. The screws that are supposed to screw the bar into the ceiling were screwed directly from the light to the ceiling like the orange lines indicate. They had to be screwed in at an angle because the holes don't line up. On top of that, one of the screws they put in the ceiling missed the hole and they kept driving the screw anyway wit...

Turning Stones is now on Facebook! Want to know what is going on in between the posts? Are you interested in seeing sneak peeks of upcoming projects? I realized that a lot of my personal Facebook posts are related to my blog and it seemed like the right time to graduate my blog to its very own page. So come join in the fun and see what we're doing!

Having redone the older boys' room recently I figured I should turn my attention to the 3 kid rooms upstairs (the girls and K2). I've started on Erin's redo first only because the idea for it seems to be falling together first (Erin has had some fun ideas for her room that I think are pretty cool. Yay for my creative 7 year old). The first project for her room was getting the full size bed in and the twin bunk bed out. In order to get the full in she was going to need a headboard. I saw this on Pinterest (originally from here ) and loved the idea. Now, I don't have any salvaged wood so I went new. Also, for the theme I working on in there I thought "grow" would be a good word to put on hers instead of "love". I cut 5 1x6 boards (about $3.50 each) down to 54" and 2 1x3 to 48" I stained the front and sides of the boards and used the 1x3 for legs. The square made sure I had it all at the correct angle. I left 20" at the bottom for...