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Crafts for the Uncrafty

Potato-Stamp Valentines: A DIY For Procrastinators (Like Me)

What's more fun than painting potatoes? NOTHING.

My feeling about Valentine's Day, in a nutshell: I want to be all "Ooh! A teachable moment wherein my child can learn the value of giving and receiving love, albeit via paper cutouts!" But I also do not want to put any real effort into the Valentine's Day-celebrating process, because few things are less fun than dragging two children through Rite Aid in search of something - anything - that doesn't have a picture of a Minion and "You're One In A Minion!" written on it.

Regardless of your personal attitude towards Valentine's Day, here is a fact: When you have a kindergartener, you have to help him or her make and distribute Valentines, because that's in the contract you sign when you procreate. Fortunately for the begrudgingly-participatory Valentine's Day celebrators among us, I have a friend named Mollie who is about as interested in fussy DIYs as I am...and yet seems to be always creating beautiful things. When I want to look like a crafty genius (but don't want to, you know, try too hard), it is Mollie to whom I turn - and so it only made sense to ask her to start publishing her (actually completely for-real accessible) ideas to RG.

Decor

The Throw Pillow Problem (And Ten Spectacular Finds To Instantly Refresh Your Home)

Spring has sprung! (In my bedroom, anyway.)

The other day, Kendrick walked out of our garage and into our kitchen, all wide-eyed and horrified. In his hands were two (extremely cute, just saying) pillows, still all bundled up in plastic wrap.

"...Why?" he asked, holding them out at me like (electric orange, stunningly hand-stitched) sacrificial lambs.

Decor

Build-A-Bed

This may just look like an Ikea daybed, but oh, it is so much more. 

Remember how my friend Morgan has this magical ability to put together the actual, for-real, zero-exaggeration most comfortable bed in the world? Like, the kind of bed that I want to fall onto and then stay there forever and always because nothing has ever felt that good, ever? And remember how sometimes my children nevertheless come up with diabolical plans to stop me from sleeping anyway?

SHE DID IT AGAIN.

SIDESSALADS

In Which I Drink A Cactus

Cactus leaf

Let me start this post with a caveat: unless you are already at least somewhat into juicing and used to buying copious quantities of fruits and vegetables and leafy things (or are a blogger trying to make something cool to write about, ahem), you are probably going to have to leave the cactus out of this recipe if you're ever going to actually make it. Because let me tell you: de-spining a cactus leaf is no small job, and I have a very sad finger right now to prove it.

You might, at this point, be asking yourself what I am doing holding a cactus in the first place, let alone trying to drink it. Because I've been pretty clear about the fact that, try as I might, I am not a green juice person. I pick up a couple of pre-made bottles in Whole Foods from time to time when I'm feeling guilty about my various excesses, but within a day or two I typically remember that there are things that taste better than green juice, like everything, and start eating and drinking those things instead.

Decor

The Sputnik Solution

Look way up at the top there. See that big light fixture? Did not like. 

Over the weekend my parents came to visit for an early Christmas celebration, and one night my dad and I were sitting at my dining room table talking about how unfortunately cavelike the lighting in my dining room/kitchen area is. The two primary problems: I had recently moved my dining room table from the center of the room over to one wall, and the pendant light that had previously hung over the center of the table now hung in the center of the dining room. Like, at head level.

The second problem I discovered on the day we moved in: the only light in our kitchen comes from one of those big, square 1960s-era fluorescent monstrosities. It's huge and ugly and casts a sort of sickly half-glow over the room, but I've always been nervous to pry it off because god knows what's underneath.


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