Holly's New House

It all started with the aqua chair in my gallery. Holly, my friend from work, saw the chair, loved the color, and wondered if something could be done with her dining room set (which she was not in love with). We agreed that I could do a make over on the dining room set and.....that led to a whole line-up of projects! Holly is getting married to her fiance, Akilah, this July 9th and wanted to "make over" their house before all the family comes to town.

So, I've been working hard this month finishing the dining set, sewing pillows, sewing curtains, sewing tea towel hangers, creating a centerpiece, and redoing an old chalkboard. I should say "we" have been busy. My wonderful husband is actually the one who did most of the work on the dining set, without his help I think I would have sat down and cried more than once. Thank you Theron!

The following is a line up of before and after pictures. Holly did an great job of picking fun fabrics and I think the end result turned out great!

Holly's dining room "before". We agreed it need some color to mitigate all that brown.

Chairs in progress

Table in progress (Theron did all that sanding!)

Old chalkboard Holly rescued out of her friend's shed! I had a hard time painting over all the "oldness" of this. Holly thought I was nuts for wanting to keep it the way it was.




Voila! Here's the finished dining room, new curtains, redone dining set, new centerpiece. You can't see the centerpiece very well and I forgot to take an upclose shot, but the sticks are painted silver and paired with white flowers.

You can see the colors better in this shot. We did the chairs in "Blindfold" and the table in "Backstroke". Both colors are Valspar paint from Lowes. By the way, if you like a Valspar Signature Color, instead of the Signature paint formula ask for it in the Premium paint formula. The Signature paint is more expensive and too thick to work well in a paint sprayer.

We learned the hard way!

Here is another shot with Holly and Akilah's engagement picture. Our handy men hung the new picture while we girls decorated. :)

And the details....

Please excuse the sideways photograph. I downloaded this picture four times and it wouldn't stay rotated! If anyone knows a trick for this I would love to have it!

Holly found an easy tutorial for making these darling tea towel toppers on a blog she reads, TreyandLucy. They were really easy to make and turned out cute. I might need some for my kitchen.


And the old/new message board


Whew! This project was a big one, but I love the way everything turned out. Holly's style is more "modern" than my usual country-shabby-chic look, so the whole project was a challege. Thank you to Holly for being brave and choosing such fun fabrics and colors!

100 lbs. of Crumbles

This is what I've learned: once people realize how excited I get about half broken windows, rusty hinges, rickety pieces of furniture, old stained burlap sacks, door knobs (you get the picture) they start bringing me stuff! Treasures long forgotten in dusty corners of attics, basements, and garages are starting to find their way to me. I love it when that happens. :)

Here are the "treasures" I came into possession of recently.

Feed sacks left over from a farm. Yes, that does say "100 lbs of Crumbles."

People keep asking me what I am going to do with these sacks....you'll have to wait and see!

From an auction a friend of mine went to, old cake tins.

I love the patina on these, however, so far I haven't had an ephiphany about what I'll use them for...any ideas?

From the same auction...I can ALWAYS use rusty hinges. :)

Kitchen Chairs Upgrade

When I got married I inherited this set of chairs. My husband grew up with these chairs, moved them to college with him, and we've been using them since we got married 6 years ago. They are actually very comfortable, sturdy chairs, but they needed up little "upgrade" to fit in with the farm house table my husband recently built for me.

I roughed them up a little with some hand sanding and then painted them white. Well, actually, it was "December Starlight." Good grief...who knew there were so may different colors of white in the paint store! Lukily it was nice outside and I was able to paint in the yard. Here's how they looked without any distressing, just dry white paint.

After the paint dried I hand sanded them again. This shot is before glaze, after sanding.

Here are some "after" pictures of them in the house.

I do like how they turned out, but I think next time I might go a little harder on the "pre" sanding and a little easier on the distressing. It's hard to paint on a surface that already has been treated, the paint slides off easier and I had to do more than one coat. Lesson learned. :)

Easter Table and Business Cards

I invited some friends and family for Easter dinner today. Last night I put together this center piece from some "stuff" I had lying around the house. Aren't the little white cups darling? Recognize them Lorraine? :)

In other (completely unrelated) news...

Here's a shot of the business cards I designed for Rusty Sparrow. The paper is "kraft paper" card stock. I do like the way they turned out, AND I got them printed for .49 a page at STAPLES. However, I realized when I brought them home what a royal pain they are to cut! I am straight line cutting challenged (yes, even with a paper cutter). And to make matters worse, I designed them in Microsoft Publisher so there is a margin that has to be cut off. Arg. I need to come up with a better sizing design for the next printing.

The tags I cut with a tag cutter, a big hole punch like thingy I got at Michael's crafts. Again, I had an issue with the page sizing, so I'll need to modify that so I don't end up wasting a row of tags on every sheet. Can't I just hire someone to do this stuff for me. :)

Craft Fair Day!

A little over a month ago I saw a sign near my house adverstising a Craft Fair at a local elementary school. Apparently, in my area there are a whole batch of PTO sponsored craft fairs being run as fundraisers for the schools. The vendors pay an "booth" fee and that money goes to support the PTO. I've been looking for an opportunity try out my creations on the public, so I contacted the school and they still needed vendors! Since then, every weekend and nights after work I've been frantically painting, sanding, and creating all the projects I've gatherd the materials for, but hadn't started yet.

On Saturday the day I've been preparing for for over a month finally arrived! The morning of the fair was a little rocky as a few "not ideal" situations cropped up. First, I forgot all the boxes I was planning to pack things into and transport them to the school at work the night before. So, things were kind of hodge-podged into the back of the truck and I hope-hope-hoped it didn't rain on the way to the fair.

Luckily the school was only about a mile and a half down the road and it didn't rain. However, when I got to the school gym and finally located the person who was going to assign me to my booth space I was met by an unpleasant surprise. I knew my booth size was 8x5, and I had requested wall space to lean some ladders against to display my signs (my husand's genius idea). I had "practiced" my booth in the basement by taping off the space. So, going in, I thought I had a good idea of how I was going to set up. The unpleasant surprise was....my booth was not five feet deep and eight feet wide as I had envisioned. Instead, it was a long skinny column of five feet wide and eight feet deep! The lighting wasn't good in the gym, but you can see in this picture how cramped up everything was.

After a lot of juggling (and an epoisode involving a falling sign, a ladder, and a clock knocked off the wall) I got everything set up as well as I could. This was the first time this particular school had a craft fair, so it wasn't well attended overall. However, I did sell enough of my wares (mostly to my fabulous friends) to at least break even on the booth space. I had so many of my friends visit me and support me that the lady in the booth next to me commented on it! Thank you to everyone who took the time to come see me and support me in my first effort

Although the fair overall wasn't very successful, I did make contact with a woman who has a small, part-time shop in a neighboring town. She invited me to bring my stuff there for the upcoming weekends because she will be open for Mother's Day shopping. I'll be headed to her shop, Greystone Gallery, after work tomorrow to drop off everything that didn't sell at the fair. I'll post pictures of her after I've visted it. Wish me luck!

Spring Debut & Thank You

Hello everyone, At long last I'm finally posting for the first time! I've been encouraged, cajoled, tutored, and baby-stepped by good friends to get me to this point, and I'm happy to be finally going forward with the plan! Thank you for your help--you know who you are. I saw this poem on a piece of art and jotted it down for future inspiration

First a howling blizzard woke us,

Then the rain came down to soak us,

And now before the eye can focus - crocus!

-Lilja Rogers

However, I have to admit, here in E. Idaho I think we're still stuck on the "howling blizzard" first line. I awoke to two inches of snow earlier this week. It all melted before noon, but still, it was a major psychological spring set-back! I decided that no matter what the weather, at my house I'm pretending we're at the "crocus" part of the the poem.

My "Spring" inspired entryway...

My everchanging mantle decor...dressed for Spring

Other Spring inspirations...

Can you tell I like birds?

And.....REAL GREEN GRASS (and one dead bug)

There's hope after all.