Fall Craft Fun, and a Fail

Kayci saw this candy corn wreath in a magazine.  We looked it up and saw how to make it--looked pretty simple, minus the hot glue gun...I'm an adventurous Mommygirl, not a crazy one.  Everything was going well until we got to the curve of the wreath and the candy started sliding off.  Kayci made the executive decision to just have candy on the front of her wreath...I want to be a supportive parent, but I have to say--this photo, while horrible quality, is extremely flattering.  You can't see all of the orange drips from melted candy...or all of the uncovered white where there's supposed to be candy.  So, go, Bitty!

 That was the crafty fun.  Here's the fail.  I picked up the Real Simple "Family" edition last week, and they mentioned a cupcake liner garland.  Sounded easy and fun, so I picked up some fun cupcake liners in Bastrop and went to work the other day.  Ummmmm....no.  I went ahead and hung it up, thinking maybe it would look better up in the air.  Nope.  Uh uh.  I tried (see the sad right side?) to kind of make the liners look like beads or something...that just made it worse.  James summed it up well yesterday morning over coffee:  it's not even almost cute.  Hmmph.  Well, he's right.  But there's $10 down the drain.  (Did I mention I got all Kristi and used fun ribbon instead of string?)  Anyway...I'll take it to MOPS today and see if one of my crafty friends can salvage it.  It's a Fail.  Big time.

And here's a horrible picture (I took these early yesterday morning without many lights on in the house, which explains a lot...) of some beautiful flowers.  I saw my orange tin pot in the laundry room the other day when I was straightening it...there's a story there, I'll get to it...and then I found these flowers at WalMart, of all places.  I put a mason jar in the pot, thinking the flowers would kind of hang over, but no luck--you could see the neck of the jar.  So I improvised...I put some fake fall leaves and mini pumpkins around the neck of the mason jar to fill in, and it actually turned out pretty well.  Who knew?

The story behind the laundry room:  last week, after all of the lice laundry (don't read my blog?  Backtrack a bit!), I finally got through all of the linens in the house and threw in a big ol' load of jeans.  (Remember, I was out of town for 5 days before the lice...I had a week's worth of laundry for all of us.)  The washer filled up and then made a horrible noise and wouldn't agitate.  Sigh.  We had to laugh--we're within spitting distance of being debt-free, so it seems like things are just going out or breaking right and left (last week it was a couple of key hard drives).  Turns out, it costs about a bajillion dollars to have someone else do your laundry for you (a week's worth), but man, it smells nice.   :)  What's even funnier is that I took the laundry to the cleaners so we'd have clothes for Bastrop last weekend and planned to deal with the washer on Tuesday, since I had to go to work on Monday.  (Unusual, but necessary this week.)  So...with that on my plate, I go out on Monday morning and the car won't even start.  It's D-E-A-D...dead.  It was hard at that point not to assume the worst, but we kept our senses of humor and kept at it, rolling the darn thing up the hill that is our driveway to finally jump it with the truck.  Turns out, Noble turned his door light on as we got out of the car on Friday.  That'll drain a battery big time, apparently.  Man, were we grateful that's all it was!  And the washer?  Turns out, it wasn't crazy-expensive.  Only $50 more to fix than it cost to do the laundry last week...