A Freebie for Friday: BIG MOMMY BAG GIVEAWAY!

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lots of people seem to celebrate the beginning of summer. i assume these people are all teachers with really good childcare, models who enjoy wearing less clothing, or folks who dont support an entire herd of mosquitos every time they step outdoors. i am: none of the above. 

you know what is something worth putting a celebratory facebook status up for? the start of COLD WEATHER! not only does it mean that my kids (and the scary teenagers *shudder*) are locked back up in their cages of learning, but it is also that magical time of year when there are 3 layers between the general public and my outermost fat roll and cellulite dimple. after 5 months, i can finally stop sucking in...and STOP shaving.  PARTY TIME!!! 

so with my kids headed back to school next week, and the delicious "-ember" months just around the corner, i decided to host a giveaway celebrating the start of "my" summer. (let's pretend like this is a better time for a beach bag giveaway than the the start of the season).

if you've always wanted one of my Big Mommy Beach Bags of giganticosity, but cant sew one yourself and didnt want to pay me to make you one....your time has come.

the winner of this giveaway is gonna get a beach bag in their choice of colors from my insane collection of fabrics, as well as the option of adding a big adorable fabric letter monogram and a zipper closure to the top. that makes this prize worth seventy-five dollars worth of pricelessness (#math).

you have until next thursday night to enter and you can enter LOTS of times. each entry must be verifiable though (like you have to be able to show that you actually did tweet about it, were a FB follower before the deadline etc). the giveaway widget will load in a moment below.

a Rafflecopter giveaway
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you can leave a comment for fun, but all entries must be made through the rafflecopter helper robot above this section.  i'll announce the winner next friday. until then, i'll be sweating, shaving and dreaming of wearing sweatpants 24/7. .
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"I love you because..." chalkboard tutorial

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when i first saw the idea for an "i love you because..." chalkboard sign on pinterest, i knew that having one in our house to constantly remind jesse of his awesomeness would totally help me get some action. 

by "action," i, of course, mean, "you watch the kids while i eat cheese, read embarrassing fiction (seriously), and then fall asleep."

but i noticed that the price for such a wondrous item was about $50. naturally, i figured i could make a passable version myself for much less. (if you arent DIY-ish , but want one of these, go buy yours from this creative, lovely genius, who provided the inspiration for my own DIY twist on this project).

so not only did i make my own version for less than $5 (i already had the chalk paint), but it's actually more of my style than the one that is for sale because i was able to pick a font, frame and colors that felt like "me."

here's how:

supplies:

-an old frame (mine's from goodwill!)

-spray paint/primer in the color you want your frame

-acrylic craft paint in the colors you want your permanent lettering (sky blue and red above)

-chalkboard paint (i used this brand and it was a dream)

-paintbrushes (one medium size and one fine-tipped)

-ball-point pen

-access to a printer

1. remove the glass and spray paint your frame (prime first if youre extra awesome). make sure to get all the weird, hidden angles and crevices, and resist the urge to go thick. many light coats is always best.

2. pretend this piece of wood is the glass from my frame. continue to pretend that i didnt break the glass and have to custom cut this thin piece of wood as a stand in. luckily, both glass and wood worked just splendidly for this project. it's easiest to just use your perfectly-sized and smooth glass.

3. stir the chalkboard paint very well and then start applying it to the surface of your glass/wood with a brush (i used this modge podge one because it was cheap and i could toss it after...washing out paintbrushes is of the devil). you'll need a few coats and will want each to dry before applying subsequent coats. 

sooooo, while your chalkboard paint is drying:

4. set up a word doc (or whatever the cool kids use these days) with your chosen font and size/spacing options for how you are going to want your permanent saying to look. i used the free font "channel" and just googled "heart graphic" to get my chosen buddies.

print it out and place it behind your (empty, spray painted) frame to get an idea for the sizing. you may need to play around with it on your computer until it's just the right fit.

5. once you have the perfect-sized printout, you are ready to transfer the pretty writing onto your (now dry) chalkboard surface. lay the paper over the top of the chalkboard exactly where you will want the letters to be. tape to hold in place.

6. take the ball point pen and trace over the outline of the printed letters and heart. you want to push down very hard; the idea here is to dig into the paint with the tip of the pen, creating a nice outline to frame the paint. BE CAREFUL with the glass when you are bearing down. i'd recommend putting a folded towel under the glass plate just to be sure you dont crack it between the pen and your hard surface. (P.S. i learned about this technique from this blog)

7. check to be sure your entire phrase outline has transferred visibly into the chalk paint below. if you have a good outline you can remove your paper template.

8. get your fine-tipped paintbrush and start painting within your outlines. the indentations from the pen will make little paint gutters, making it easy to stay inside the lines of even a fairly scripty, finnicky font like mine (which i could NEVER freehand paint without tragedy striking). 

*i made two of these boards...that's why there is white here but a red heart in the other photos

 it may take a few coats if you've picked a light color

9. this is the hard part: WAIT THREE DAYS for your chalkboard paint to cure before you put any chalk on it. i had to hide mine in a coat closet because i lack the self-control it would have required to keep seeing the chalkboard and NOT write on it. after the three days, you are ready to put the chalkboard in its frame and then break out your box of dusty buddies and get to writing!

10. before you compose any sonnets to your sweeties, you need to "season" the chalkboard paint first to make it easier to write on. that just means you do this:

on your mark,

get set,

rub-a-dub!

11. after it's good and chalky all over the writing area, wipe it off with a DRY cloth or paper towel.

doesnt that look just as perfectly-seasoned as a grade-A steak?

now you're ready to tell your sugar-sweets just how he/she gets your motor turning. obviously the first thing in my mind involves cheese and sleep. 

true story: if jesse is waking me up from a nap, he has learned that i WILL be grumpy and has finally found a great way to avoid getting snapped at: he hands me a chunk of cheese immediately after waking me. this is to quiet the monster as i transition to human. not even joking.

it's like how divers throw chum in the water to draw the sharks so they can swim elsewhere without getting eaten alive. most of jesse's marriage advice comes from shark week. 

i hung our sign right over our keyhook/mailbasket by the garage door where we leave and enter the house every day.you could make your own key attachment by just screwing little hooks into the frame as well.

since we are the only two literate people in the house right now, there's no guessing about who wrote each note. (this one was me, too. is it possible that i only love jesse because he gives me food? how cavewoman of me).

that's it! now go get your dusty love-talk on!

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our garden update and some questions for the green-thumbed

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ok so the organic veggie garden.

we jumped riiiiiiiight on in with a dream, a prayer, and a fat bucket of ignorance. but what's complete cluelessness against the entire assembled might of the World Wide Web? i mean, surely the garden would know and appreciate the sheer volume of google searches we were conducting on its behalf, right?

well,  perhaps not, because we are not the farming prodigies we assumed we'd be (too bad misplaced confidence cant nourish flora).

so here's a quickety rundown and some specific questions:

the view from the aisle. watch your elbows.

here is a pic of our whole setup. you might be able to tell that we arent quite utilizing all of our space. well, we WERE, but now several things have gone extinct (spinach...due to heat i think...not a GA summer plant apparently, and herbs due to some freaking lower mammals getting their salad bar on) so there is some free real estate and square footage of shame now being grown. :(

 the cuke trellis.

holy crap, cucumbers are the freaking easiest, fastest and most rewarding thing ever to grow (if you consider cucumbers a reward and not a punishment). i pretty much can just walk away from the garden for 10 minutes and there are 16 new cukes growing. this is all from ONE PLANT. we pick about 8 huge cucumbers a week. if we miss one at harvest day, it will grow to GIGANTIC proportions...but not long, just super stout and girthy. 

examples (left pic was taken on sunday, right was taken tuesday).

we built a lil' custom trellis to help ventilate and let the cucumbers hang down so they would grow straight and that was way smart. we did underestimate how tyrannical this plant was and how it would want to SPREAD. next year we will make a bigger trellis. i plan to perfect the Ted's Montana Grill method of half-souring cucumbers into pickles. 

our sad watermelon. i'm feeling rather "watermelancholy"about it. (it was all worth it just for that pun)

this guy doesnt do much. he seems to flower only sporadically so i'm not sure how it's going to get impregnated and make fruit. are those holes on the leaves from some pest? i put slug and snail killer (organic) down but the holes persist. the watermelon vine is super aggressive and was caught last week bullying the red bell pepper plant in the fashion of a venemous tentacula or devil's snare. since we disentangled it it has decided to just climb the chain link and take out its strangulative urges on it instead.

 red bells. 

this guy grows super slow (though they flower a lot) and i've heard these are a really difficult plant anyway. awesome choice for us to tackle. again: more tiny holes on the leaves? what is this!?!? disease, pests, poor nutrition? 

the bell peppers dont seem to be too good at supporting their own weight and topple in rainstorms. do we need to splint them or will they get stronger?

zucchini. holy crow this thing got out of control FAST.

we planted one zucchini plant ad this beast EXPLODED. it was flowering like mad, but never seemed to fruit. i looked online and figured out how to spot male/female flowers. i literally never could find a female flower! did i accidentally buy an all-male plant?!?! where are the ladies?

and then this thing got insane out of control with its sprawl (so much so that i had a nightmare where i was running a race and a massive zucchini plant was an obstacle. luckily i remembered my skills from dumbledore's army and zapped it with a quick REDUCTO spell. nailed it). but in real life i just decided to prune off a few of the extra major branches. this was evidently an error because the whole plant seems to have died because of it. it has gone so sad and yellow and wilty and stopped flowering. curse my inadvertent zucchini vasectomy. 

okra dwarfs.

i planted 10 okra plants from seeds. only 3 survived transplanting and/or predators to become teenagers. i was told that these things would explode with growth and okra out the wazoo. so far they are our slowest growers...only flowering just recently (while friends' okra are 6-7 feet high and totally harvestable now!).

okra is my favorite vegetable of all time and i want to eat these!!! our variety are now called slowkra. what gives?

 toma-toes

we planted 4 tomato plants. these things compete with the cukes and zucchini plants for most rapid growers. so we bought these wire fram trellises to help support the upward sprawl: huge mistake. these things suck and cant hold the weight. definitely should have DIY'd some vine-helpers with wood and string.

despite their less-than-ideal frames, the tomatoes are doing well it seems. we actually ate our first one in dinner last night. it was very exciting and delicious. jesse did some research as to why the plants were getting oh-so-never-ceasingly-tall and found that our type of tomato will grow to indeterminate heights if you dont prune them. so he pruned.

ever since then, these have not been thriving. could he have over-pruned? can cutting off high vine branches hurt the overall plant?

also: we are getting some yellowing and browning on the leaves of these guys and dont know why.

the humble eggplant

i have 3 eggplant plants and they dont really do anything. they make leaves impressively, but thats about it. they do flower, but dont appear to be making any fruit yet. and again: the holes in the leaves...what is happening?

 RIP my fluffy basil bush.

i planted basil and sage in the raised beds and they were rocking it and getting harvested and starting to bunch prettily. and then i think something came and ate ALL MY BASIL! that's what happened above, right? i mean i'm assuming no pests would decimate basil like that and leave only stems?!

but i wasnt giving up on an herb source. i HATE spending $3 on a wad of fresh herbs and i really feel like i should be able to handle the growing of a few cooking plants. so i tried to rise from the ashes and try again. target's dollar section crazy inspired me one day with the galvanized metal pots and cute magnets. 

a few nails and a pallet later and we have a crazy cute, portable, hanging herb and flower garden that is hopefully out of reach of any backyard salad-eaters. 

you will be pesto one day, my friend.

this whole pallet garden is obviously portable and totally customizable. i love it hard.

so there is a rundown of where we are, horticulturally (not pictured: jalapenos which are kicking major BUTT!). 

3 considerations:

1. for complete dumb garden noobs, i feel like we're glad that ANYTHING is working at all. so i dont want to get too discouraged. especially since i tried to murder the entire garden in its infancy back in march and everything we have going now has bounced back from the brink of death by trashbag. 

2. it has rained an INSANE amount in GA this summer. almost literally every day. i'm wondering if overwatering is a culprit?

3. the place we put out garden doesnt get a ton of sun. yes, i know, we are idiots for that, but we had planned to take a bunch of trees down to ameliorate the issue and we just never did. could all of the stunted growth be from inadequate light? (i realize this is photosynthesis 101, but i have been deluding myself that they got enough light).

and just so you dont think i am some sort of gardening dilettante (i kind of am though), let me present to the court some evidence of my dedication:

yall, i brewed COMPOST TEA!

seriously, i have never felt (or smelled) so hippie. i bought my tea-brewing supplies (basically fish tank stuff) and used our thriving compost to brew this potion that i sprayed all over everything and was supposed to work miracles and bring great insects that would HELP our plants thrive. i have seen no such miracles, but perhaps even the murky eau d'eden isnt enough to overcome flood conditions and limited sunlight.

ok there's my sad little story. yall chime in and gimme some help with any/all plants that you know about and what we've done wrong!

as mysterious and fails-ville as the garden seems like, it is still super fun and gratifying. we will definitely be doing one next year, armed with experience. at worst, it's just another tool in my post-apocalyptic skill set (thanks, walking dead, for making me think this way...also, can a human survive on cucumbers?)