Our Home's Cool

Reading Corner

Even though we are more than half-way through our school year here, many on the other side of the world are just getting started. This means that there have been plenty of pictures of homeschool classrooms popping up all over the internet – which I love! I like to see how others set up their classrooms, I get some good ideas for our own classroom from them. One thing most of these rooms have in common is a comfy reading corner. Something our classroom is lacking.

Our classroom isn’t very big, but there is a small unused corner in the room that would work reasonably well as a reading corner.

I don’t think it’ll fit a big comfy armchair that you can sink into…sigh…so what I’m thinking will work is maybe a bean bag. I saw one recently in a children’s shop, it was really pretty. It was made out of beautiful, bright fabric. It would’ve looked great in our classroom – the only problem was, it cost over $100…for a beanbag! So, needless to say, I didn’t buy it. But it did get me thinking. Surely I could make one. I’ve looked for some online tutorials and found a couple of nice ones. Now don’t get too excited, I haven’t made it yet, but I thought if I commit to it in writing, then it would make me more likely to actually go ahead and make it.

I whipped up a mood board for some inspiration.

Reading Nook Inspiration

1. Scrappy Lampshade – already in our classroom
2. Shaggy Bean Bag – looks so comfortable!
3. Ikea Rug – also something we already own
4. Ikea Kitchen Trolley – for book storage
5. DIY Bean Bags – from Creative Mommas

My other problem is that because our classroom is at the top of our stairs the reading corner will have no solid walls, just the stair rails, so I’m not really sure what kind of book storage/display unit will look good. I like the look of the Ikea kitchen trolley but I’ll keep my options open for now…anyway, I’m sure anything will be better than this:

I’m kinda excited to get this project underway. I’ll be sure to let you know when I’m done.

Tags: bean bag, Homeschool, homeschool classroom, homeschool room, reading corner, reading nook

Comments 7 Comments
Categories Homeschooling

Learning to Make Sushi

8 Aug

Candy loves sushi! Loves it!

No one else in our family is too keen on it, so she rarely gets to eat it. A friend of mine offered to come and give us a lesson on how she makes her version of sushi. And she was so cute, she went all out and came dressed up in Japanese-style clothing and brought along cute chopsticks and Japanese-themed decorations…she even bought the girls their very own sushi mats!

This is the recipe we used (which is from a friend of a friend):

2 cups Arborio rice (you can use sushi rice, but I’m told this is as good and it’s cheaper)
3 cups water

Rinse your rice well, until the water runs clear. Then put your rice in the pot of water, bring to boil and then simmer the rice for about 10-12 minutes with the lid on, you’ll need to keep an eye on it, so it doesn’t stick. Remove from heat and stand covered for 10 minutes so that all the liquid absorbs. Then stir through the rice vinegar substitute (recipe below) and allow to cool.

Rice vinegar substitute:
1 teaspoon citric acid
3 teaspoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup warm water

Of course you can use rice vinegar, but this is easy if you don’t have any.

My friend likes to line her sushi mat with cling film so that the rice doesn’t get stuck in the bamboo.

Now for the fun part…I always thought this part would be trickier than it was. It really was quite simple once you got the hang of it and when we didn’t overfill our sushi.

Place a nori sheet on your bamboo mat and press down some rice onto it, and then add your other ingredients and roll up your sushi. Oh, and make sure to dip your hands in some water to prevent the rice sticking to them. You also need to make sure you don’t overfill your sushi. Some of the fillings we used were: carrots, cucumber, tuna, avocado and chicken. Carefully roll up your sushi using the mat. Once they are all made, refrigerate them so they can firm up before you cut them.

This recipe makes quite a few, I would probably halve the quantities for our family

We all had a great time learning to make sushi. Some of us have even discovered a love for sushi that we never knew existed.

We still haven’t attempted to make some on our own, but we will soon.

Tags: cooking, cooking lesson, Homeschool, Homeschooling, sushi

Comments 10 Comments
Categories Homeschooling, Tasty Morsels

The Bedside Table Search is Over!

26 Jul

Another room in our house which has been crying out for some love is our master bedroom. It’s been a slow process. We found a bed probably about a year ago and I thought that would spark a major bedroom makeover frenzy but the decorating bug fizzled when I tried to find bedside tables for our room and came up with…nothing!

I had almost given up hope, when a couple of weeks ago we had gone to Bowral for our anniversary and I thought I’d try to look again for some bedside tables. I looked in all the furniture shops with no success. Then we made our way to an antique store and were looking around for nothing in particular, when I noticed one lonely bedside table which was perfect for our room…perfect I tell you! Why I didn’t snap a photo of this bedside table at this point I don’t really know…it might’ve been that the G-Man was bored/cold and he had ventured outside to stand in the sun and I was busily searching in my bag for my phone to tell him to come back and have a look…anyway the problem was that there was just one. So I thought I’d do another lap of the store and see if I could see anything that would somehow look good with it. That’s when I saw this:

It wasn’t perfect, but it had potential. I said to the G-Man, if they are the same height then we should get them…and they were almost exactly the same height, so they became ours!

So here is the before…I thought I had a better photo of the before, sorry, in my excitement to replace the ugly bedside table with the new I didn’t take any photos of the room before (I’m full of excuses today, aren’t I?).

And after:

The first bedside table didn’t need anything done to it, other than a clean, so that was pretty straightforward. The other one, however, needed a bit of TLC.

The orange and black reminds me of Tigger, you know from Winnie the Pooh?

I thought I’d paint the inside a nice blue colour and the outside a dark chocolatey colour to match our bed and the dressing table which I made-over earlier.

I actually like that they are mismatched, and that they are not new.

There is still plenty to be done in this room, I need to update our tallboy, which is the same style (is that even a style?) as the old bedside tables, and I also need to do something about our lighting…check out our lovely lightbulb!

Linking to:
A bowl full of lemons
Miss Mustard Seed

Live Love Laugh

Tags: bedside table makeover, bedside tables, featured, furniture, furniture makeover, nightstands

Comments 9 Comments
Categories Everything Else

Our Family Room Gets Some Love

17 Jul

We’ve been living in this house for some time (I think it’s been four years), yet we still have many unfinished rooms. Our family room was one such room. We had a HUGE blank wall crying out for some love and attention.

I’ve been planning for a while to make my own art, since I’ve looked around and haven’t been able to find anything I really loved to fill that space. Although, I did come close to buying something a couple of months ago. I saw this in a shop window and thought it was my favourite colour – duck egg blue – got the lady to take it out of the window display, got out my wallet ready to pay when I noticed that it was WHITE! The lighting in the window had made it appear blue. I thought white would be too washed out, so I didn’t buy it.

I had recently finished another project with a small sample pot of duck egg blue paint and thought now that I had some leftover paint this would be my opportunity to get started on my wall art. I went out while I was still in a creative mood and bought myself a canvas. I had seen some art some time ago with those cute American red barns and really liked the look of them, they were simple, which was perfect since I can’t actually draw or paint. They were also perfect because of the colour, we have small amounts of red in our downstairs, so it would tie in well with what we already had. I painted the background blue and while I waited for it to dry, I googled red barn art and found a few which I liked and used as inspiration.

Okay, so I’m no Michelangelo, but I like it and I think it has made the room look and feel more loved.

Tags: art, canvas, duck egg blue, painting, red barn, wall art

Comments 7 Comments
Categories Craft, Everything Else

Borax Snowflakes

20 Jun

It’s been getting colder and colder…this might have something to do with the fact that it’s winter…anyway, we thought we’d make some winter craft. And what is more wintry than a snowflake?

We made ours using borax and pipe cleaners using the instructions found here. What you need to do is to twist some pipe cleaners to form a snowflake shape and then tie a string to one point of the snowflake, this is then attached to a pencil and hung in a jar. The jar is first filled with boiling water and borax (3 tablespoons of borax per cup of water) which is mixed until all borax is dissolved, add food colouring if you want. Then lower your snowflake shape into the jar and let the borax do its thing! Let this sit overnight and you should be left with a pretty snowflake. I say “should” because our first attempt didn’t result in a snowflake, just some wet pipe cleaners. The problem may have been the pipe cleaners we used:

This was actually the photo I took after they’d been in the solution overnight. See what I mean?

sure, they were pretty, but the borax slid right off them because they were glossy (at least that’s what I think the problem was), it might also have been that some small child was moving the jars. So the borax solution ended up being used as a toilet cleaner – not necessarily a bad thing – it does say on the pack that it can be used as a toilet cleaner. Interestingly, no mention of snowflakes on the pack!

Okay, attempt two with new pipe cleaners – the fluffy kind:

We prepared our borax solution and snowflakes and hung them and went off and enjoyed a rather yummy breakfast at a local café.

Fast forward a little over one hour later and we return home to find this:

aaaaghhhh!!! This was not what we wanted to see. Thankfully, it didn’t get any worse. The good news was that the borax was starting to attach itself to the pipe cleaners.