Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

Earlier this month, we spent a week at Backbone State Park . We had a great time. It's probably one of the largest and most interesting Iowa State Parks that we've stayed at so far. It has rocky outcroppings, a river, a lake, a freshwater spring, a cave, lots of hiking, historical buildings, and even rock climbing and trout fishing. I look forward to staying there again. Our camping excursion gave me the perfect excuse to test out our new campfire starters  that I made a couple weeks ago. We had three types of fire starters (all made by filling cardboard egg carton s and then pouring wax over): colored pencil shavings (top left), pistachio shells (bottom left), and dryer lint (bottom right). We set them up on some flat-ish logs and set about time testing them. We had already used all three fire starters with success during our camping trip. They all work great! So we had to test them...you know...for science! All three lit easily and created large flames tha...

So, a couple weeks ago we started our deck refresh project . Then after it dried for a day...it rained for like 5 days straight. So we couldn't do the recommended second coat of the DeckOver we used to paint our deck (click the link above to read all about our first coat). Well this week it was nice again, and I just finished submitting grades at school, so we figured it would be a good time to get another coat on. Deck after one coat of DeckOver On Saturday we cleared the deck off, swept and hosed it down. Then we went to Home Depot to get more paint and brushes . Note about the quantity of paint to buy: We used way more of the DeckOver than we expected. Our deck isn't that big and we figured we'd be able to use one gallon to cover the whole deck--but we were way wrong. We barely got a single coat on the deck with the two gallons we bought. So back we went. The DeckOver is the consistency of pudding and fills in cracks and gouges, so if your deck is in kinda rough s...

I teach at a local community college, so it's crunch time grade wise....and we had a lightning in a bottle kind of weekend where it was sunny with no rain forecasted, low humidity, and with warm but not hot temperatures for both days of the weekend. So, we had to do yard work. After our mowing and trimming on Saturday, we decided to refresh our deck. Between the deck and grading....I didn't get much else done, so instead of a craft tutorial, you get to see our deck painting project. Our deck was beyond beginning to get ragged. It hadn't been sealed since before we bought our house and there was a lot of mildew, cracking, and even some lichen on it. So we opted for a deck filler type product at our local Home Depot (because it was the closest hardware store). We bought Behr Wood Cleaner and followed the instructions (wear gloves, mix with an equal part water, wet deck, scrub or swab on solution, rinse off).   We scrubbed it on as we knew there were some...