I believe the last time I actually showed y'all something I made was the diaper cake. And I just saw that baby last weekend, and she is now two.

However, I tweeted a picture of the little angel's new handband holder and someone wanted to know where I bought it, which was hilarious to me. 

First: The Hair. My daughter has really, really long hair. That she hates to have brushed. But yet, every day it must be brushed, because I have a thing about her going out looking like a member of 1989 Bon Jovi. She screams, even when I use a Blondie-approved amount of conditioner when I wash it.

I've been trying to come up with a way to get her to take more ownership of her own hair. I've also been trying to come up with a way to get the drawers in her bathroom open. They are (were) crammed with hair accessories that she never ever wears.

Then on Sunday it rained.

The culimination of the rain and the hair accessory issue led to the creation of a few items.

First! The headband holder of Twitter fame.

I made mine out of a roll of paper towels covered in scrapbooking paper. I have tons and tons of scrapbooking paper even though I have never scrapped in my life. It's pretty and my girl loves it and it comes in big, yummy books. I love paper, all kinds of paper, I'm sorry, trees. 

The problem was how to get the pretty paper to stick to the paper towels. I tried taping, no luck. Then (and trust me, it made total sense at the time), I tried stapling, with the staple open up like elementary teachers do with their bulletin boards (they do still have those, right?). It looked AWESOME! And then I took the pressure off and all the staples went shooting out. But then I realized I had a hot glue gun! So I hot glued the paper to the paper towel roll and that worked and there was great rejoicing. Unfortunately, I had no cover for the part on top, so I stuck that flower in there and glued the petals down. Then that looked like shit, so I hot glued a pink ribbon around the top. Now, if you are in my house and you look closely at this thing, you will see it looks like a second-grader made it. However, once you load it up with all the headbands, no big. CRAFTS!

Next, I took all the combs and brushes and soft head bands and put them in a box that used to hold greeting cards. I buy a lot of greeting cards in bulk, because I always forget people's birthdays or events until the day of, and then I have to run downstairs and search for something appropriate. I also love the boxes they come in, which are super sturdy and usually pretty, too. This green one was a little blah so the little angel stuck another one of those pretty pieces of scrapping paper to it, and then I hot glued some more junk on the front to bedazzle it.

Finally, I made two of these hairband holders out of paper towel rolls. Since the little angel requires hair bands not only to put in ponytails but also to tie back her tshirts so they look correct with her skinny jeans (don't ask), she needs two a day and we can never find them. Now we have one of these hair band holders upstairs and one downstairs and please stop asking me where you can find a ponytail holder, child.

Of course it is covered with more pretty scrappy paper. Just because!

So this morning, my girl was almost late for the school bus because she was messing with her hair. And when she came down, her hair looked like Marcia Brady had brushed it 100 strokes on each side. She had used two different hair brushes to get out all the tangles. And she was wearing a headband that hadn't seen the light of day in months.

I WIN!

We just can't stop messing with the closets.

This time I remembered to take a before photo.

It wasn't horrible, but the shelves were so deep we hadn't seen some of the items on the top shelf in two years and kept buying the same cleaning products over and over again.

 

A hodge-podge of extra supplies and who-knows-what.

I can't believe all this stuff was on the top and bottom shelves. Doesn't that seem impossible? But it was.

 

I put the towels in the piles they would go back into the shelves so I could, like, measure them and stuff.

Here's what the closet looked like with the shelves pulled out.

 

The shelves were two of these deep each. No wonder we couldn't ever reach anything.

 

Somebody Little reapportioned the boards for mixed media projects that I've assured her she can sell for great profit.

 

This time we used a different brand of shelves, but it was the same basic idea: Buy them as long as you can and cut them with bolt cutters down to size. This shelving is expensive (at least to me), and it's cheaper if you buy it longer and cut it down than buy the right size.

The stripes on the wall (which we still totally installed over without painting) represent the old shelves. I actually measured the piles of towels and stuff so the shelves would be based on what we were going to put on them rather than the other way around. We ended up with one fewer shelf as a result.

Beloved's idea to install mini shelves on the sides (note the feather duster at convenient Little Angel level) worked out great because the new shelves were at least five inches shallower than the old ones.

 

I did manage to get everything back into the closet without eliminating anything, even though the shelves are so much shallower. We weren't actually using the back five or so inches of each shelf because it was too hard to reach.

I can't figure out why every closet in our house is so deep. You can kind of see what I'm talking about from this photo. That white drawer thing is about two feet deep. I could stand inside this closet and brace myself against the back wall with my leg half-extended.

It'll be a lot easier now to tell the babysitter or the grandparents that all of the little angel's medicines are "in the linen closet on the second shelf on the door" rather than "buried eighteen bottles deep and maybe lost forever." Also, that rod at the top was my idea. I found it in the back of the old closet. I used it to hang the most frequently used cleaning products, and yes, I am fucking proud of that idea. Ahem.

 

We decided to celebrate by inviting over the neighbor girl and painting their faces with what was supposed to be glow-in-the-dark face paint. Those face-paint people are LYING LIARS FROM LIARSVILLE. It so doesn't glow. I even shown flashlights in their faces for a while to charge it up.

 

A young fairy off to save the world from evildoers.

 

This outfit was totally styled by the little angel herself, including the wings and the Home Depot apron. And the matching socks.

And so, another Sunday wrapped up at Chateau Travolta. Only 1,000 home improvement projects left to go.