Goodbye Christmas

Well, the home-made advent calendar has been raided of it's treasures and it's almost time to pack up the Christmas decorations. Our biggest gift this year was to have The Captain home for Christmas. Below are a few pictures of my home-made Christmas decorations. The advent calendar was a total up-cycled project; one that I'll give a bit of a "twist" for next year.

Happy day!

Door make-over

I picked up this old door from a junk yard (my favourite place to find "treasures") for about 20.00 ZAR and knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. 

I removed the handles and hinges and gave it a good sanding. The solid panel at the bottom got three coats of chalkboard paint  and at the same time I brushed a few strokes of the same paint all around for special effect later.

Masking tape and newspaper blocked off the panels for the frame to be painted.

Voilà! What do you think?

paint swatches from here

I'm not quite sure if I want to leave the glass panel as is, or give it a coat of magnetic paint in a lovely pastel shade. I love all of these colours above, but will I find something similar in magnetic? I'll keep you posted!

Happy day!

Fire lighters

With all the woodworking The Captain does in his spare time, he's  forever looking for a way to get rid of use all the sawdust that he gathers from him projects. He read somewhere about making fire-lighters with sawdust, candle wax and egg cartons and since we're still having cold evenings and making a fire every night to keep warm, I decided to give it a try. Glad to finally have another use for my egg cartons (besides the seed bombs I wrote about here), and of course, all the little bits of wax left over from the candles that I love to burn so much, this is what I did; 

You will need:

 a few handfuls of sawdust

 egg cartons

 leftover bits of candle

 Method:

1. Put the wax in a heat proof dish and melt it over a pan of boiling water
2. Stir in enough sawdust to absorb the melted wax
3. Immediately scoop the mixture into the hollows of the egg cartons and press down firmly
4. Allow to set and ................

 ready for use

 I break them up and use two at a time...

they burn so well, and you don't have that nasty smell that one can get with store bought fire-lighters