A Confession

I have a confession to make.

In front of all of my readers, I'd like to confess, that in my heart of hearts, my soul of souls, that I am...

A dirty hippie.

Well, maybe not so much the dirty part, but the hippie part for sure.

I see your, "Huh?" faces now!

Let me explain. I don't mean the stereotypical, pot smoking, musk smelling, no underwear wearing, dread rocking, free love giving hippie - I mean the nature lover, up-cycling, living off and giving back to the land as much as possible hippie. In my heart of hearts, I want a natural life with the smallest foot print possible. I feel now I'm too wasteful, with too much clutter and it's cluttering my mind!

But I also want internet and P is a TV freak...so we need to have technology! Maybe we can coin the term Techno-Hippie? :P Ahem, anyway..

I have a dream and in that dream, P and I live in a decently sized house, with a small garden out back, a compost pile, my cats, and simple decorations that are up-cycled/recycled/redone. I want to make my own soaps, shampoos, deodorants, lotions, chapsticks, and candles - and maybe have a side business doing this as well. I would love to figure out how to live as inexpensively as possible but still be able to comfortably pay all the bills that come with having a house.

I have ideas on how to do this (check out my "The Crunchy-Granola Life" pinboard on Pinterest by following the link at the top of my blog), but we need to make some BIG changes first. I plan to do some cleaning out, tossing, selling and giving away starting this week and I hope to document this endeavor here! Stay tuned!

LET THE DE-CLUTTERING BEGIN!

Look What I Made Monday!

When we moved in January, we moved into an awesome condo that has great windows.  I love all the light the windows offer, however, one set of windows in our stairwell looks right out to a kind of busy road.  I knew in January that I wanted to cover these windows but didn't want to block the light coming through them during the day.  While putting together my sewing room, I found this fabric that my mom sent me.

She found this fabric for $1 a yard at a discount store in Solvang, CA and bought yards and YARDS of it.  She made curtains from this fabric for her walls of windows in my parents' master bedroom and the result was bright and airy.

So since this fabric worked so nicely in my parents' room, I thought it would be perfect to use for our windows.  I think the result is beautiful!

  I kind of cheated and didn't sew any seams in the panels.  I just cut two 91" lengths, clipped them with these cool curtain clips and strung them on tension rods since the window casings are wood - and we are renting.  I also kept the selvage edges since the selvages are kind of neat looking.  My husband got into the action and opened and clipped on those those neat clips for me.  They are so hard to open even though they are some kind of fake metal!  The hold on to the fabric really well though.

I might take them down and seam the bottom, but to be honest, I'd rather leave them raw in case I decide to switch them out and use the dot fabric for something else.  I don't see me needing to do that any time soon though since I still have a couple of yards of that dot fabric left!!  :P

I can't believe it took me so long to do this project.  It only took about 20 minutes when I finally got to it and it was fun!  Tell me what you think!  :)