Remembering Your Past Duty Assignments

Sometimes, after all the dust settles from yet another move, I actually have a kind of yearning for what has passed. Yes, I do have photo albums, where I like to remember where we've been as a family...but I wanted to have a way to just glance at something, to remember where our travels have taken us....something we could display proudly...in our home somewhere.

I'll be darned if the next week I wasn't invited to a ladies coffee at my husband's commander's house. His wife had all these cute little houses with the names of all of her husband's duty assignments, neatly written on each house. After I got up the courage to ask her where she found those adorable little houses, she ended up ordering me a set too. Since I am not crafty, I ended up experimenting around and painting and re-painting the little rooftops and finally came up with a white craft marker to write a duty assignment on each roof. That seemed to work just fine and ended up being a nice contrast with the black. The houses ended up becoming a prominent little display right by our front door.

Without delay....every new duty assignment, the houses were pulled out of their boxes, and a new house was christenend...now you know, I ended up buying three sets, because you just don't know really, how many times exactly am I gonna move? I wanted to be safe rather than sorry. The houses make a nice conversation piece, and if you're really crafty, you can add little details to the houses with craft paint...something that might remind you of that duty assignment.

Another nice idea to remember your duty assignments, is to come up with a wall hanging. You can actually make this yourself (see below), and make it as simple or elegant as you want!



Again, get out the craft paints and markers. If you've ever used a wood burning tool to write letters (what do you call that thing?), that would be another option! For me, I'd probably burn the house down with something like that, but for you, that might be something you'd like to consider.

In fact, your husband can probably cut out the shapes of each duty station for you in wood. Make holes to attach craft wire at the top and between each piece, and you can just keep adding names of duty stations as you go along until you decide to quit your nomadic lifestyle.

If you are looking for a nice idea to make money at many of the craft bazaars and fairs, I bet you would get a lot of interest from military wives with either of these ideas. I did look around on the internet for someone who might be selling some of these things online. So far, I wasn't able to find anyone! Perhaps this is something that you could capitalize on? How about it?

If anyone has any other interesting ideas, please do share! I would love to hear them!

This article has been featured on Blog Carnival #22 "Make it from Scratch". Be sure to stop by there for some more great articles!