Garden Started

This is what I've been up to.  I know you are major impressed with my beautiful garden, or not.  I let the garden get completely overrun with the crab grass that is infecting our backyard so this past week with a shovel and a rake cleaned out half of our 1st garden bed.  I thought I would be more inspired to clean up the rest of the garden and yard if I had something planted and growing.  Positive reinforcement to clean up the rest of the yard.  I planted kale, beets, arugula, radishes, and chives.  I hope to have more of the garden cleaned out this weekend so I can plant onions, spinach, and some herbs.  

In case you were wondering in the left front corner of the photo is my compost pile.  It is surrounded by bricks that are coved in dead grass.

Weekend Things

Saturday we went to The Snake Saturday parade in North Kansas City.  The parade route was just down the street from Rob's store so we parked there and walked down.  We should have shown up an hour or so before the parade but didn't get there till it started at 11:00.  It was super packed, we walked around till we found a spot we could see the action.  Gretchen was neither interested or amused with the parade.  She just wanted down to run around on her own.  We hung out for almost 2 hours ate some brats then headed back to Rob's store.  We look cute in our green though and she wore her shamrock headband that I made for her last year. 

 Gretchen got to work deleting work emails, more fun than a parade.

Sunday I attended a blogger meet up with the KCbloggers.  It was a bit rainy and the theme of the event was using your instagram app on your iPhone.   I was the only one with a cool flip phone but we visited this cute, well curated vintage shop Thistle and had a good time.  I may not have taken very many photos.

The owner had piles of bed springs out which had me thinking about my garden.  I saw a garden picture that had a twin size bed spring in it and it looked really cute though it would probably just look a mess in my garden.  We are having super warm weather all week so I'm planning on prettying up the yard and starting up the garden.

Neon Painted T-Shirt

Neon is apparently making a comeback as a new trend this spring and I'm into it.  I am also always into Native American motifs.  For this project I took a Forever 21 $4 t-shirt, 3 colors of neon acrylic paint, fabric medium for the paint, paint brushes, a black fabric pen and a copy of a Native American design out of a coloring book.

Since the t-shirt is white I could just lay the design underneath the front of the t-shirt.  Use the fabric pen to trace out the design.  I simplified the design a bit for ease of painting.  Mix your paint colors with the fabric medium and stick a piece of cardboard in between the t-shirt layers so the paint doesn't bleed through.  Then just color in the design with paint.  It is a great reality TV watching activity.  After the paint dried I went over the lines again with the fabric pen to clean up my painting.  I heat set with a hot iron then just wash and dry as normal.

Now instead of a $4 Forever 21 t-shirt I have an $8 Forever 21 t-shirt.