Father's Day Mandala- Shirts and Ties

I hope you enjoy this mandala inspired by the very traditional shirt and tie Father's Day designs. It will print out at 8x8 inches, leaving room for a personalized note.

Click on the images for larger versions.
Small JPG version:

Large transparent PNG version:

Wood burn effect boxes

My son wood burned a box for his grandfather for Father's Day. This is the pattern he used. Feel free to use it for craft applications or just for coloring!

I played around with a wood burning effect, and these are the two printable boxes I made. Click on the images for the full sized 100 ppi versions.

Well, this last week has been a little overwhelming. I'm getting to my email now. It started with my husband's b-day on Saturday. He prefers no celebration at all. That's not an option but we do keep it very low key, and I make him one of his favorites for dinner. This year it was chicken and dumplings with 2 kinds of dumplings, the first kind, his favorite, is a basic egg noodle recipe which I roll in walnut sized balls then flatten with my hand to about 3/8th of an inch thick to make flat round thick noodle dumplings. The second kind is the more traditional sort. Big fluffy dumplings using your choice of biscuit recipe basically. For those, I used baking soda and baking powder, combining leavening almost gets rid of the baking powder flavor. I also put in a tablespoon of vinegar with the buttermilk. That much acid wound up making the fluffiest dumplings I've ever made (it actually looked really disgusting boiling and fluffing up in the pot). Flour for both was a whole wheat pastry flour. Lots of veggies in the soup as well. Mike was a very happy man. Dad was happy because we got chocolate cake and let him take most of it home. 

Well.. actually it started Friday with Mike taking me to the mid fair feast. But that's a whole 'nother post I need to get pictures for.

Sunday we had errands to run, picking up some hair sticks from the blacksmith (photos with the post about the fair feast when I write it) and to pick up damaged inner tubes from the bicycle shop. The teens and I are making jewelry and other things with them. Look for a tutorial soon. The bicycle shop has been nice enough to be saving them for me for a while and wound up giving me 37 inner tubes. That's a LOT of free black rubber for bracelets and such!

So this week we've done wood burning, cleaned cut sections of bicycle inner tubes, it's been raining off and on all week. Tuesday it pretty much did in my arthritis and so I spent the day reading and trying to distract myself. Wednesday went to pick up snaps for the bracelets. Tomorrow, going to pick up more. I don't like the snaps I got even a little bit.  Today was working with those very bad snaps and getting frustrated and making pretty wood burn effect boxes. Tonight we are going to watch a show we picked up on DVD a couple weeks ago and I'll finish my crocheted clock face which I had to frog because I messed it up the first time.

I really seriously need to start following some of Rachel's excellent organizational tips. She gets so much done and never seems to feel as though time is running her over like a steamroller.

There are some new reviews up on MyCraftReview.com