Bat Snacks

     It was Kai's snack day today.  With it being so close to Halloween, I decided to embrace the Halloween spirit and make... BAT SNACKS!

     I made 17 bat snack boxes with googly eyes.

     Had Kai help me mix together some animal crackers and bag them.

     Then we stuffed them...

     And the kids went to bed.  After they'd left for school in the morning, I decided to take the whole "bat" theme and just go with it.  I ripped the labels off the water bottles, designed some of my own (the goofy-eyed bats were a "cut" file from the Silhouette store that I filled the color in with in the design software and removed the "cut" feature)... and transformed them into bat juice.

     I dropped it off at his school for today's snack, and I'm waiting for him to come home to hear the verdict.

DIY Photography Light Box

    So a few days ago, I was killing time on Etsy, looking at all the nifty things that I could pin or just drool over when it really hit me that I wanted some nice, white backdrop photos to showcase my stuff. 

     I started doing a bit of looking and found that pop-up light tents or boxes were going for $45-$100!  Me being me, I wanted to try doing it myself.  Praise Google!  This tutorial popped up.  So I wrote down the materials I would need and headed out to Michael's.  I already had most of the stuff, and some stuff, I replaced with other items.

    Finished it about an hour ago.  It's not the prettiest in the world, but it works.... and that's all that matters.

I didn't use glue sticks for the inside Bristol edging, instead I used glue dots (my glue stick was just not up to par), I also glued the muslin on with E-6000.  Unfortunately, my white lightbulb blew when I took it out of the box and turned on the lamp (the wattage was within what the lamp could handle... it was just a bum bulb), so I had to use a regular one which makes the tint more yellow than white.  Will definitely pick up a new bulb tomorrow.

    Even with the yellow bulb, though, the results on the test shot weren't bad for my first snap!

   With a white bulb, the tint should go away, and I'm thinking about adding two more smaller lamps to reduce shadows even more.  We'll see. 

     If you're looking for a light box, give this a shot.  It's not hard and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than shelling out the money for one from a company.