Home made Clocks: AKA Last minute Father's Day gift

I am a procrastinator by nature.  I have made my peace with it.  I also know that I am my most creative when under pressure.  Its a fact of life, but it usually means I am scrambling at the last second to make creative gifts and that I am frequently late. This is compounded when I have to get things for the men in my life. I never seem to think of something "good" and useful until the 11th hour, and then I usually have run out of time to mail it (my entire family lives in CA, minus hubby and little man.)

Unfortunately for me, my dad was born June 12th, which lands just before, just after, or sometimes, smack dab ON Father's day.  So I am almost always late for BOTH of the most important gift giving days for him.  Well, this year was going to be different.  It wasn't, as it is now the 13th and his gift is only now made and not yet mailed... but I will make it by Sunday! I hope... so at least I was half on time!  All this talk about time... hmm...

Yes, I made him a customized clock.  I ran through about a zillion ideas of ways to make a clock just for him (he is an avid clock collector so this is a PERFECT idea for him), and nothing struck me until today, a day late, of course.  The idea sprang from this post about a recycled plastic flatware clock.  I looked into buying a clock kit, and they were stupidly expensive.  So hubby and I went to goodwill and bought the ugliest clock we could find.  Hey, no sense in wasting a PRETTY clock when its just gonna get destroyed anyway... :-)

I then cannibalized the pieces and decided to mount them on a photo he took.  As I mentioned, my family lives in CA and my dad has this wonderful beachy house a few blocks from the waves.  He is also an amateur photographer, and his pics are often quite lovely.  I took one of his best shots of the beach for the background.  I am terrible at reading analog clocks and my dad has enough other clocks around to actually tell TIME with that I dispensed with the idea of adding numbers, and just went with the clean, spectacular photo.  There are about a zillion awesome variations to this project, so post your ideas and results!

Customized clock

Materials needed:
crappy old clock or a clock movement (mechanism) and hands kit from a craft store
large photo or other face you would like (I used an 8x10)
frame to hold the photo with a backing deep enough to fit the mechanism and still lay flat on the wall (alternately you can use the frame of the clock and cut your photo to fit)
pliers, wrench, adjustable wrench, or socket wrench set
white glue
hot glue
awl
scissors
a paper clip
cardboard (optional)

1) If using an old clock, the first thing you will need to do is take it apart.  If you purchased the hands and movement, skip this step.  Don't worry if you break the frame or the cover, you wont be using them.  But do take care not to bend the hands.  To take the hands off, bend your paper clip into an "s" shape and use the small hook to gently pull off the second hand.  The minute hand and the hour hand may have a small nut that you can unscrew with your fingers, then remove them by using your paper clip.  Sorry, I forgot to take photos of this step, but its pretty easy.  If you're really scared, buy two cheap clocks in case you break one. :-)
2) Next, you will need to take the movement off the old clock.  If you are using the clock frame or if you bought a kit, skip this step.  There should be a small nut and washer holding the movement to the clock.  Use  your tool of choice to remove the nut.  I used an adjustable wrench because it was what I had handy, but as it is not on there super tight, even a simple pair of pliers will probably work.

a REALLY ugly clock!

Nut and washer removed successfully.

The movement is now liberated and ready for a happier, prettier home!

3) Next, take the new frame and examine it.  Mine had the unfortunate personality flaw of being a front loading frame with plastic crossbars that met in the center.  I worked around it, but this is by no means a NORMAL frame.  Remove the glass.  Take out the cardboard backing.  If yours has a plastic cross bar, poke a hole in it with the awl and use one blade of the scissors like a drill to cut a hole in the plastic.

If yours is NOT really weird, use the awl and scissors to cut a hole in the center of the cardboard and the photo.  Make sure they line up. They don't have to be perfect since the washer will cover the edges of the hole, but don't make the holes too big or the photo will move around.

4) Take the cardboard backing and glue your photo to it.  You may want to cut an additional piece of cardboard the same size and use that as well to make the clock face stiffer, but it is up to you.

5) Place the cardboard and photo into the frame and using the hot glue, glue it in place.  Make sure the holes line up, and that the photo is in right side up if there is a hanger on the back (not that I am speaking from experience or anything... oops).  (I glued it in as an afterthought so ignore my out of order photos with the movement already installed...)

6) Next, poke the center of the movement through the holes in the frame and photo.  Replace the washer and the nut and tighten with your fingers and the tool of choice if needed.  Make sure to hold the movement in the back while turning, otherwise the whole mechanism will just spin...

7) Replace the hour hand and the minute hand, then screw the little screw back in place and push the second hand back on (if you had one).  Manually advance the clock with the wheel on the movement just to make sure all the bits are on securely and will be moved by the motor.  Then push all the hands up to 12 o'clock so they will be offset by the right amount when advanced to the correct time (ie, the hour hand will be half way between 8 and 9 when the minute hand is at 6 for 8:30).

8) Finally, glue in the movement so that it is nice and secure on the back, using the hot glue.

9) You are done!  Add a battery, set the time, hang it up, and revel in your amazingness.  Or give it to Dad to revel in your amazingness. :-)

Bottom Line:
Old crappy clock from Goodwill - $1.50
8x10 print from Walmart - $3
Frame from Walmart (should have gone to goodwill but I forgot while I was there) - $3
Total cost: $7.50

Total time: about 1 hour, including disassembly

Cost in store - Who knows?  A custom clock?  But expensive fancy ones you could replicate go for about $20.

Total Savings: about $12?


Cool Variations:
use something other than a photo for the face of the clock or use a collage.
Omit the frame entirely and just have a cool open concept photo clock on a piece of cardboard
Do not center the clock hands and have them off to the side or hanging over an edge or something.
If you love a frame that isn't deep enough to conceal the movement, glue small blocks of wood to the top and bottom of the frame on the back, drilling a hole in the top one to hang it from, so the clock can still lie flat against the wall.

Running a household on a budget

Hubby and I just finished taking the Financial Peace University class by Dave Ramsey. I also just discovered the living on $28,000 series from the peaceful mom blog. Needless to say, I've been thinking a lot about money lately.

Now, I'm going to sound arrogant, but bear with me for just a sec. After going through both the class and the blog series, I was a little bitter because I didn't really learn anything new for my day to day budget. I did learn a lot from Ramsey about insurance and investing, but for my household budget it was all stuff I already did. But I didn't always do that, and I figure what if i knew then what I know now? Maybe we wouldn't have spent the last several years unburying ourselves from a mountain of debt.  And I do mean a mountain.  I guess I'm just the wrong audience for this stuff because I learned the hard way.  I did really enjoy both, don't get me wrong.  I just get disappointed when I think I will find some new exciting ways to save, and I come up empty.

So of course, I thought, well maybe I should give my own advice!  I love to save money and Hubby and I have made it a kind of hobby to uberbudget and see how much ahead of our schedule we can get.  I am a stay at home mom, so we are on one income, but thankfully its not too much of a hardship.  Hubby just happens to love a lucrative field, so we are not exactly living on ramen and pork and beans.  But as Dave Ramsey says, there is a difference between being broke and poor, and with all the credit card payments and student loan debt, we were pretty broke.  I don't want to give you the impression we are swimming in money now, because we are still on a very tight budget, but we do have a comfortable income for being a single income household.  That being said, I am still incredibly frugal. :-)

I don't exactly know where to start in sharing my experiences, so I figure I will just add posts as I go that share some of our money saving tips.  But for the first post, I think I will share HOW we started budgeting.

I hated my job when I lived apart from my now husband, then fiance.  When my lease for my apartment came up for renewal, I didn't think I could realistically stay there another year.  Yes, I hated it that much.  I was so depressed and so hopeless, it was all I could do to get out of bed each day.  Needless to say, it killed my husband to see me so upset.  So, we decided to look into moving in together.  Two people can live more cheaply together, and we were saving for a wedding so it seemed prudent.  I always intended to work, but the job market was just so bad, I went on interview after interview and came up with zip, despite always being in the top few candidates.  Now we really had to look at our money.  We had fallen in love with the idea of living together, but with only one income, how could we?  So we started tracking our spending very carefully, took a look at my husband's income, and categorized all of our spending.  We have many categories, such as mortgage, groceries, bad debt (credit cards), student loans, gifts, church (charity, really), and a category of "fun money" for each of us that we use to buy each other gifts, to buy things we want, and generally relieve that pressure from living on a budget.  It also includes a slush fund which we nicknamed the "ice cream cone" fund where extra, unbudgeted money goes (such as tax returns, bonuses, interest on savings accounts, gifts, etc) until we decide what to do with it, like pay off debt, donate something to charity, go out to dinner, take a trip, etc.  We often leave it there for a while until it accumulates enough to do what we want to.  Its also an additional buffer for emergencies or if a budgetary item goes off track because we didn't plan quite right.

Our real budget, minus the numbers

Hubby is a whiz with spreadsheets and we use Google docs so we can collaborate on it.  Each of the pages on the bottom link to our itemized spending for that month, which deducts from this first page automatically.  There are also "plan" spreadsheets for each month so we can account for things like insurance that are not paid monthly, and it also spells out how each paycheck is allocated.  For the most part it is the same each month, but for some things it changes, like around Christmas for the gifts budget we save a little extra.  The first column is the amount in the "bucket", the second is the "plan" amount, or how much we should have there at that point in time to stay on track to pay those irregular bills, especially key since bills are once a month and we are paid twice a month, and the third is the difference between the two - this tells us whether we are on track or not.  Green means we are ahead, light green means we are a little ahead, white is perfectly on track, yellow is a little behind schedule, and red is critically behind.  This first sheet is the snapshot of how we are doing at that exact moment.  It ROCKS.  We can see if we have money to spend on going out, if we have enough to pay our insurance, etc.

We also have spreadsheets further tracking our spending for certain categories, like groceries, baby, and crafts.  These are mostly for tracking purposes, not planning, so we can see where we need to cut back or where we are doing well.  A lot of our money goes into these categories, and it is easier to control our spending if we know what is going on.  I used our baby budget to plan what I would buy for the baby, going from most to least important so we didn't end up with a jogging stroller but no car seat.  So far, we have come in way under on most of our items, but it was indispensable during my pregnancy so I could see what we needed and what was a convenience (we still don't have a jogging stroller by the way haha).

So, I am sure this is about as clear as mud, but its our way of making things work, and I LOVE it.  Every dime we spend is accounted for, and we plan by the year so we can plan for long term expenses and goals more easily.  We even have a plan for buying a new house, although it is a few years off.  But we will be able to do it because we can see our progress and we remember that it is there, needing some income allocated to it.  Without a plan, it is so easy to forget to save for things, and thus, they never happen.  Someday we will add vacations to the list when we can afford it, but for now, this is it!

Making a baby girl headband

There are zillions of blog posts out on the interwebs about how to make these, so I figured one more wouldn't hurt. :)

I am in the process of making (yes making, not throwing) a baby shower for a somewhat-relative-more-like-a-friend of mine in about 2 weeks. So I am scrambling to get stuff together, being a procrastinator, a perfectionist, a mom of an infant, and a baby shower hostess virgin. I'm super excited, but anything new makes me panic because I am out of my comfort zone. (I made that revelation with my husband at target the other night and he responded "good. You need to get out of your comfort zone." eek. Am I really that bad?) but I am determined for it not to suck, so I am handcrafting a lot of the stuff :). We know it's a girl and the mommy to be LOVES girly stuff so I'm excited!

As aforementioned, I was at target, and of course I hit up the dollar spot.  What thrifty hostess/crafter wouldn't? And I hit pay dirt. I got an idea and supplies. Hooray. I picked up a cloth headband like I used to wear in the 80's to school which apparently isn't taboo anymore. And I thought, why not make a cute baby flower headband with it?! No more "is it a girl or a boy" with a hot pink flower strapped to baby's head! (at least not in Wisconsin. Too traditional haha)!

So here is the DIY: bonus!!! No sewing machine needed!!

Supplies:
Adult sized headband
Large, flat-ish silk flower like a peony or daisy
Thread
Needle
Scissors

1) Measure the head of the baby you are making the headband for.  I used my son as a stand in for the new baby, and made it just a little snug on him so it ought to fit her.  He has a small head, after all.  I didn't actually measure, but if you are looking for a specific size for a baby, there are lots of growth charts out there that give average head circumference for babies of different ages on the internet.  I have used those growth charts for other things, like sizing clothes when I didn't have the baby's measurements.  They aren't perfect, but they should get you in the ballpark.

2) Cut the headband at the seam and lay it out.  Measure the length you want, add half an inch or so for a seam, and cut off the extra on the side that has the seam so you don't have the bulky part to deal with on your finished product.

3) Overlap the ends by about 1/4" (or more if you left enough for your seam allowance) and pin them together.  You can just set one end on top of the other.  Jersey knits do not fray like other fabrics so you don't have to worry about finishing the edges. Easy, right?

4) Using a needle and thread, stitch the two ends closed to make a loop again. If you aren't great at hand sewing, don't worry.  This part will be covered up by the flower.  If you really want, you can use a machine to sew this, but since knits have a bit of stretch to them, it can distort the fabric unless you use a stretch stitch, which I found too much of a pain for 1" of sewing.

5) Trim the excess fabric around the stitching if there is any.  This is not a necessary step, but my edges were a  little jagged and I cleaned them up some.

6) Take your flower.  Remove the stem by gently pulling the flower head off.  There will probably be a plastic piece holding the flower together at the base - do NOT remove it or the flower will fall apart.  You can trim it if you need to, but not so much that it compromises the stability of the flower pieces.  Lift the top layer of petals up and gently move them to the side.  Knot your thread and poke the needle through the bottom layers of petals from top to bottom, so the knot is hidden under the top layer of petals. 

 7) Once through the flower, center the flower over the seam and poke through the headband.  Stitch 4 or 5 times, using small tucks, until the flower is secure in that spot.

8) With the needle and thread on TOP of the flower, wrap the thread closely to the center of the flower, and go back down through the flower on the opposite side, tacking it to the headband in the same way you did for the first spot.  

Wrap your thread close to the center of the flower so it doesn't show.

Center the flower on the other side as well so it doesn't get lopsided.

My flower had 5 spokes on it, so I tacked it in 3 places since directly opposite wasn't an option.  You may want to pick 3 spots or even more depending on the age of the child - a newborn will be a little kinder to it than a 3 year old!  Make it as secure as you think you will need. 

9) End your thread and you are done!  I had my son model for photos... It even makes him look pretty :-)  Try not to torture him when he is 16... 

Bottom Line:

This is a really easy and really quick project.  I think it took me about 15 minutes to slap together and cost only about $2 between the headband and the flower.  Rock on... :-)  These go online on Etsy or Amazon for $15 easy... So you can thank me later.  

Oh, and Tina, if you read this... Ignore how little I spent and how easy it was.  It was super complex and cost a small fortune, but I would do anything for you haha. :-)

Easter photos... Finally!!

So I had to wait on my father in law to get these photos so I swear it's not my fault they are a month tardy... I swear. I mean, I've only had them for a week and didn't post. He had them like three! :). So anyway, lesson learned: don't forget your own camera on major crafting holidays :)

I did actually finish most of my Easter crafting stuff. I didn't have little man with me while sewing so the tie and pants were too small (I may make the tie a clip on as it is plenty long for that and I don't relish the idea of strangling my baby anyway...), I didn't have time to make an Easter hat for him, and I selfishly made one for myself (a hat) that I didn't have the energy to decorate. But it was still fun and I think a great success. I learned a lot and drafted some new patterns I will share over time.

I did some pretty major alterations to the men's dress shirt onesie since the first thing I did was screw up, and I created 2 patterns I will share, but for now just the visuals will do.

Btw, the ONLY photo of my Easter bonnet was awful so I'll have to take one later to share...