Place Mat Window Treatment

I bought these 6 bamboo placemats at World Market for next to nothing.

First I made 2 wall hangings with them for our previous house.

Then, I used them as placemats (imagine that :)

THEN... I repurposed them yet again to make a window treatment for my back door!

First, I hot glued ea. set of 2 side by side, then glued them on top of each other... (over lapping each one evenly to make it the length I wanted.)

Then, I played around with tiering them up, and added velcro in the correct spots so I could "open" these "blinds" of mine. (tip: I place the velcro in the overlapped sections so they wouldn't show thru when the sun was shining.)

Oh, and I hot glued the top around my magnetic curtain rod.

 Here is what it looks like all the way down.

(See what I mean about the sun shining thru? The overlapped sections have to be measured the same so it doesn't look funny, and it does a good job of hiding the velcro.)

Here is the "half-way open" look:

And, here is all the way open:

It looks SO much better than the black valances I had hanging there,

AND it added a pop of color!

What we did in July

We went to the Ringling Bros. Circus...

Benjamin was a little "stinker" that night, but he sat, mesmerized,

through the ENTIRE thing!

(3 hours, people!)

We played at the Woodlands Mall...

Adalynn and Daddy surfed the web...

Benjamin colored at his desk...

 Benjamin held "baby Addy"...

We watched a really pretty sunset from our backyard...

Baby Addy stayed super cute!

We had a work day at church to get ready for VBS!!

We had a blast all week and dressed in our matching shirts with everyone else

for program night...

When VBS week was over, we SLEPT!!!

Bye July!

A tip for Tuesday

Making bows is a fun past-time of mine ever since I had a baby GIRL! :)

On the last trip we went on, Adalynn's bows ended up being

a smashed mess in the zipper pocket of a suitcase.

While complaining about that, my brilliant mother came to the rescue (AGAIN!)

She suggested packing hair bows (or any other accessories you don't want smashed,) in a plastic shoe box or food container like Tupperware.

This pic is for blogging purposes only- I didn't actually pack this many hair bows for my weekend trip.

But I wanted to.

I will SO be using this tip the rest of my life.

Thanks again Mom!