Mala Beads

Do you need a bit of calm in your life? Ya... I know you do. Try meditation.

No. I mean it. Seriously, give it a try.

At times being a mother, wife, nurse, friend, sister, and everything else can feel overwhelming. Sometimes a quite moment of reflection is needed to bring you back to your best self.

These mala bead necklaces can be used to guide you through a simple meditation. And the making of your own mala necklace is a meditation practice in itself.

You will need 108 beads of your choice in any sort of combination you wish. Pick colours and shapes that you enjoy. These can be made of wood, seeds, stones, semi-precious stones, glass, whatever you find that seems to speak to you.

And choose one special bead, or series of beads, this is the intention or guru bead that acts like a pendant, centering your mala bead necklace.

To string it all together I used embroidery floss, but you could use any kind of thread, yarn, or string.

Tie a knot (or two) at the end of the string, leaving about 4 inches of a "tail" so you'll have lots to work with when tying the two ends together.

I found it useful to lay out the beads in place and see the result before I strung them together. This way you can see the pattern and it's easy to adjust or change as you like. Then, once you are satisfied with your design, start stringing them together.  

When all the beads are on the string, tie a knot (or 2 again) to secure them. Now tie the two "tails" together creating a circle necklace. Thread both tails through the special bead(s) and tie a knot to secure it onto the necklace.

I added a tassel to the end, this is a pretty addition and serves as a gentle reminder of the infinite connections in the universe. It helps to keep you grounded!

You can use your mala bead necklace as a piece of jewelry, as an ornament, or as an aid to your meditation practice. 

~Jess

Open Kitchen Shelves

Back before Christmas, I was hanging out with my sister and was snooping on her Pinterest page. Which I recommend you do sometime, just have a look at someone else's page because it's interesting to see what they follow and what might catch your eye. Anywho, I saw some open kitchen shelves and thought they looked really good and figured they'd be a nice way to display all the glass jars I have, but didn't know where I would put them because my house really isn't that big. So imagine my surprise when I took down the 2014 calendar in January and discovered a section of open wall in my kitchen that would be the perfect spot! :)

I originally thought I'd try to use some more leftover barn wood, but Dad said there probably wasn't the right size (a shelf is actually quite wide) and would likely be warped, so not good for shelving, and buying pine panels would probably be a better idea.

The total cost for the four shelves was about $110.
- two solid pine panels from Home Hardware, 12"x 60", $25 each
- eight brackets from Lowe's, $6 each
- new stain, about $8 from Lowe's
- small brush and plastic tablecloth, $1 each from Dollarama (so I could just throw them out instead of having to clean)
Home Hardware had a larger selection of the solid pine panels and Lowe's had much better choices for the brackets and that's the reason for choosing each store. And it took me a bit to find the stain. I was looking for "Early American" to match my kitchen table but all I could find was "American Colonial", which is actually just the French side facing out, but caused me to spend several minutes looking at every stain colour trying to find what I wanted.

There is quite a variety of sizes of panels, but the shelf ones are either 8" or 12". A foot wide seemed to big, but 8" not wide enough, and I had to laugh at myself when Dad suggested I could just trim them down because it never actually crossed my mind to do that. I was planning to cut the long boards in half to get the width I need, but just never thought about trimming the depth. And considering how much time I spent with the table saw when I built the table you'd think I'd be familiar with the all the options. I ended up trimming them to 10.5" so they were deep enough to hold some cookbooks without the edge of the book hanging off.

I just cut the boards quickly one day when I was out at my parents and I forgot to take pictures of that process, but I'm sure you can imagine what it looked like. The only thing to mention with these pine panels is to consider where the knots are in the wood and what you're doing with them. You might be alright with having some notches in the wood if a piece of a knot falls out, but I wanted a smooth edge for the shelves. So on one panel I trimmed 1.5" off one side, and one the other panel I cut 0.75" off each side to avoid the knots. Then I cut each panel in half to end up with four shelves that are each 10.5" x 30".

I gave them a quick sanding on all the edges to get rid of any slivers and smooth out the cut marks from the table saw.

Then I took them into the basement to stain the boards. I just covered my old kitchen table with a plastic table cloth from the dollar store to protect it. I also put down the newspaper to absorb any stain that might get dropped instead of having it sit on the plastic and probably get on my clothes.

I did two coats of stain and it's probably good that I had purchased more because it actually took most of that small can. I did the first coat after work one day and let them dry for 6 hours and did the second coat right before going to bed.

Top: First coat of stain, Bottom: Plain board

Left side: One coat of stain, Right side: Two coats of stain

Then I left them to dry for a few days in the basement. Not that they needed to be left that long necessarily, just that it took me that long to get around to actually putting them up.

I first started by marking with masking tape where I thought I wanted the shelves. It's kind of hard to see the tape on the wall in the picture, but the biggest thing I wanted to make sure was that the shelves wouldn't be in the same spot as either the top or bottom of the cabinets.

I used a stud finder, a tape measure, a level, and a piece of 2x4 mark the spots where I would drill the holes for the screws. The cordless drill I bought a couple months ago sure came in handy here. This would have killed my arm to do this manually!

Here's one side of the brackets put up. The bottom one is 24" from the floor and they are spaced 14.5" apart. Kind of a funny number I know, but they needed to be far apart enough to hold the big jars, but I couldn't have the top shelf end up so high that I couldn't reach it. That's a serious consideration for us shorter persons.

At this point I haven't installed the bottom left bracket because I was still using it to mark the spots to put in the screws on the shelves.

Here's the test to see if I've actually got the shelf level as planned.

Success!

All four shelves up and now time to decorate.

I played with moving things around on the shelves and had to put some things on the floor as it just looked too empty underneath. Maybe it's the spot to build some bins for potatoes and onions or something.

But now it's a lot of different woods in my kitchen area, so maybe the next thing to tackle is painting the cabinets. That'll be a big project but I'm not painting the table or my great-grandmother's antique baking hutch!
~Lisa