Nesting

Goodness, it has been cold in Cleveland this week.  With the wind chill in the teens and the blustery wind rattling the windows, all I feel like doing these days is nesting.  Nothing beats the chill like a cozy spot to call home.  What this really means is a whole lot of baking and decorating, and a fair amount of spontaneous craft projects.  One such random project was inspired by this tutorial and a bathroom with open shelving.  I took a couple cheap glass containers (each about $1 at Wal-Mart) and treated them to my heart's content (and my family's discontent, as the lovely scents of spray paint and vinegar wafted through the house.)  Here are some before and after shots:

It was seemingly impossible to get an "after" shot without my camera-clad self reflected in the shot, although I suppose that's to be expected, when using a spray-on product called "looking glass."  At any rate, this project was quick, easy, and left me with a burning desire to use up the rest of my can of "looking glass" paint on random household objects.  I held off for now, but I'm sure this project will have a reprise sometime soon.

In other news, our (read: Ollie's) new futon arrived yesterday, and my roommate and I dragged it up the barely-lit-and-also-disintegrating staircase to our third-floor apartment.  With only one legitimate near-catastrophe, and considerably tired forearms, we got it up into the apartment and set it all up.  Needless to say, we were pretty proud of ourselves.  Now that our living room is finally furnished, let the pillow-making commence!  My return to Cleveland has been pretty chilly, but it sure is great to be back in the land of productivity (and cannoli.)  Happy Saturday!

Table fancy

Dearest blog world: I promise I haven't forgotten about you. I know you've heard it all before, but I've just been so busy at school. Not only have I been doing lots of musical things, but I'm officially working my post at the library, as well. That's right, folks, I'm a real, honest-to-goodness reference librarian, complete with thick-framed glasses and a wheeled chair in which to pretend I'm doing actual work.  Life is good!

On the home front, I've been dealing with some minor behavioral "incidents" with Oliver. These have mostly involved raucous trash parties, and some presents of the #2 variety in the living room. I usually call them "incidents" or "on-purposes," because I just know they're not "accidents." But who can stay mad at that face?

I also finally got around to re-upholstering the folding table and chairs in our living room.  This card table and chairs was a wedding present to my parents thirty-something years ago.  I took it with me to Boston when I lived there a few years ago, and my mom helped me re-upholster it then.  While I still love the funky prints we found, they were looking a little worse for wear:

 
I took all of the seats and seat-backs out of the chair frames, and spray painted them gold. This part of the process did not go quite as I had planned, largely because of the plummeting temperatures and blustering winds on my back balcony in Cleveland. I wound up almost completely covered in gold spray paint (as did the back balcony) while the chairs are spotty, at best.  As luck would have it, the set was a golden-beige color to begin with, so I'm hoping I can get away with a shoddy paint job.  Fingers crossed! 

For the upholstery, I used navy blue cotton ($2/yard at Wal-mart) and a sheer pink polyester blend ($1.50/yard at Wal-mart.)  I covered all of the chair pads, as well as the table top, in the navy blue cotton.  For the chairs, I covered the navy with the pink, and I left the table navy.  Cutting out the fabric was simple enough (and I used the previous upholstery pieces as general patterns) but getting the new pieces attached with the staple gun was a battle.  Thank goodness for reliable (and strong-armed) help...I just knew Sean wanted to help me with a project when he visited!  I love the combination of the dark navy, this peachy pink, and the gold frames.  It was just what I had in mind!  Overall, this project was pretty simple: just dissemble the table and chairs, cut out the pieces of fabric to cover the pads, staple them on, and re-assemble!   My favorite part of the new setup is this lacy vinyl overlay that my mom found for me at a local craft store in Pennsylvania.  My original intention was to cut it so that it fit on the table top, but I have yet to do so.  I sort of like the way it looks as a table cloth, so I may try this out for a bit before I snip off the ends.  It sits just under the glass top, and the white lace patterns contrast with the navy table top perfectly.  Since it's vinyl, it wipes clean easily when I (inevitably, and quite often) spill food and/or coffee on it.

Happy Holiday Season, everyone!  I hope you're feeling better than I am today (I'm suffering from my annual "the-semester-ended-so-I'm-immediately-sick" cold.)  But this is giving me some much-needed time to do a little bit of catching up, and Ollie is certainly an adorable sick buddy.  Happy Monday, and thanks for stopping by!

Yard sale goodies

Since we moved into our house in May, we've been meaning to pick up a couple of stools for the little breakfast area off of the kitchen.  We struck gold this Saturday when we found two wooden stools at a yard sale for $5 each!  What a steal!  Since the fabric on top was a little worse for wear (and plain white, which just wouldn't do) we made a pit stop at Hobby Lobby and picked up a staple gun and some Ikat-printed canvas.  These days, I'll use any excuse to make a run to Hobby Lobby (I can't believe I had never been to one before this summer!)  It's my new favorite place.

All we did was pop off the seats, staple the new fabric onto the bottom, and they were done!  (I didn't even do any sewing.)  They're just what we needed!

We sure lucked out with this canvas...I love the print!  I certainly haven't gotten the Ikat bug out of my system yet.  Other than a few projects here and there, I've been enjoying my last few weeks of summer before I make the move back to school in August.  But for now...back to a lazy Sunday!
  

(Pink) Covered Couches

Hi friends!  I know I've been a little absent lately, but the past couple of weeks have been crazy busy for me!  Aside from a busy work schedule, I spent some time working on covering the couches in our living room.  We bought them from a nice woman in Orlando who wanted to upgrade her living room set.  While they were in pretty good shape (and we got them for a great price!) I had been dying to cover them since we picked them up.  So without further ado...allow me to introduce our couches!

Since couch covers are so very expensive, I decided to cover the couches with sets of sheets that I found on sale.  Since I wanted to buy the sale sheets (which meant I had to mix and match brands, sizes and colors) I decided to get all white sheets and dye them myself.  Sean and I decided on red, since we have a red fireplace on the opposite end of the room.  Here is where the project got a little complicated: it turns out that it's almost impossible to dye such a large amount of fabric red.  After many runs through the washing machine with boxes and bottles of red dye, my sheets turned out a lovely shade of cotton candy pink.  Oops!  So in an effort to minimize the pink (because it's a whole lot of pink) I added some strips of blue fabric across the arm rests and seat cushions, and I covered the back cushions and pillows in contrasting blue fabrics.  Since I mixed so many fabrics, it distracts from the pink, and it looks so fun and festive!  While the pink is still taking some getting used to, we love our new couches!  

Happy Wednesday!  I hope to be back with more to share soon!

Literature lamp

Happy Monday!  I've been spending all of my spare time trying to get our house put together, and I have a pretty long (and perhaps overly-ambitious) list of things left to do.  First on the list was "living room lamp makeover: take two"  We got these lamps as part of a living room set, and they were a little too "beach hotel" for my taste.

Now that's a lamp, right?  So for my first attempt at a lamp makeover, I tried to do some color-blocking, by dividing the lamp into three sections, and painting one grey, one yellow, and one shiny gold.  I thought this was a genius idea!  Until I realized that the beachy hieroglyphics underneath were really highlighted by the colors, and the finished products lovingly became known as the "cheese lamps."

So my second (and hopefully final) attempt at a lamp makeover involved a book, some scissors, and some Mod Podge.  I wanted to choose a classic book, so I hit the local Good Will, and found the perfect book: James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl (one of my all-time-favorites!)  I cut a bunch of pages into strips, and stuck them on with Mod Podge.

So after this super-easy (and perfect for sitting in front of the tv) project, we have our new "literature lamps!"

I love catching glimpses of this classic book on my end-table, and I just had to include some snippets of the illustrations.  I love our new lamps!

I've been working on some other home projects, which aren't quite ready to be shared yet.  But I had to share this photo of my favorite buddy, and it's a little sneak peek at another project to look out for this week!

Isn't that just the sweetest little face?  Happy Monday and thanks for stopping by!

Old brown shoe

I spent today at home, practicing and taking a bit of a mental health day.  It was another dreary day here in Pennsylvania (complete with a variety of wintry mixtures falling outside) which was the perfect excuse to stay in all day.  It gave me a chance to do a good-old-fashioned Mod Podge project this afternoon, and to work on a pair of my favorite old brown shoes.  My project was inspired by this post, which I loved (and tucked away in the back of my mind) the instant I saw it a few weeks ago.  These were my shoes this morning:

   
They weren't terribly expensive, but they've quickly become one of my favorite pairs.  For some reason (even after they'd started to look a little more crummy than cute) I just can't stop wearing them.  You can imagine my devastation when a snowstorm in Cleveland almost destroyed them a few weeks back (salt works wonders on fake brown leather...and not in a good way!)  So I tried to give them a little more life, and here they are now:

You may recognize the fabric from this project...I've certainly gotten my money's worth out of that yardage!  I didn't do a perfect job of cutting the fabric away from the shoes, but it's certainly an improvement anyway (and no one will see them that close up, right?) I just glued the fabric on to the sections I wanted to cover, sealed it with Mod Podge, and swapped the laces for some brown ribbon.  I can't wait to wear them out on the town tomorrow!  (And by "out on the town" I, of course, mean "rehearsal.")  Happy Leap Day, everybody!

Little time = little projects

I hope you all had a lovely weekend!  As I am heading out of town for my first in a long, long string of auditions, I have been a little short on time for projects.  I'll be gone for the next day or two, but when I return, I'm tackling some of those big projects!  For now, I'm steadily working through my scraps with another little project that I have been meaning to try for quite some time now.  I'm a pony tail kind of girl, and I firmly believe that one is never too old to wear hair baubles.  So, without further ado, I give you: 

Fabric-covered button hair-ties!

They were so quick and easy, I see a lot more of these in my future.  

Thanks for stopping by!