saturday nights with scissors and paint

We’ve been staying pretty busy around here, but it’s a different kind of busy. A relaxed kind of busy, if that makes any sense. In between a series of fun events, we’ve been able to slowly clean and organize some corners of the house. M sanded and touched up the baseboard in the stair hall and primed the trim (there is a lot of it!), and then he cleaned and organized the work area in the dining room that was meant to be temporary, but somehow managed to stretch into a long term look. Some years are like that.

Anyway, the house looks suddenly larger and cleaner, although there’s still a lot to catch up on. It’s nice to have the time to tackle little pieces here and there, and it’s also nice to sit and relax for awhile with nothing on the agenda.

Even when the to-do list grows, I’m trying to be very intentional about how I approach it. Last Friday we had two events going on, and I had a part of the organizing and errand running roles for each of them. The weekend before last I started to slowly go through some of those items. Saturday night M took the girls indoor rock climbing, and I had the house to myself. I turned on the symphony (did you know that KWMU broadcasts the performances live on Saturday nights?), gathered up a few materials I had around the house, and got to “work”. It was lovely.

Just a couple of quick pictures – these were some items for the sixth grade social event at E’s school. It was a movie night, and these items were for the food portion of the event. We served movie popcorn in cute little popcorn boxes, colorful IZZE sodas in big metal tins, and Gus’ pretzel twists in individual bags. We also did a candy concession bar with glass containers full of concession type candy, and cellophane bags to fill with treats.

I found this great vintage ticket paper at Artmart, and so I cut out the individual tickets and stapled one to the front of each candy bag to make it easier to grab one and open and fill. (They tend to get stuck together easily.)

I also took some leftover kraft paper from another event and grabbed some white paint and made a quick movie night sign. I raided my stash of paper and made some very simple, unmeasured pennants spelling out 6th grade movie night. I would normally do this with an x-acto knife, but I wasn’t really in the mood to sit at the table, and so I did this one with quick scissor cuts – I even made the “holes” of the letters with the background paper to speed up the more tedious process of cutting out the centers. I used washi tape to attach the triangles to twine and I was done.

I can’t take any of the credit for setting up or running the event – I was at my office event that same night, and M and my friends did all the hard work. But the prep work was so enjoyable to me – it was so nice to sit down and be creative in an unstructured and relaxing way. I’ve got a few more things to make tonight for the Book Fair tomorrow, and then it’s onto my holiday cards… I think I’ve got a plan!