A Few of My Favorite Things

My favorite thing about Saltgrass Steak house is the loud music they play in the bathroom, so a lady can do her business and not worry about who's listening. 

My other favorite thing about restaurants in general is having good food and service already coordinated, so us girls can focus on fun stuff, like decorating, talking, and playing with babies!

And my favorite thing about being pregnant is how overly sweet everyone is to you, like telling you how beautiful or good you look, not letting you bend over to pick things up off the floor, and rushing out of the way when you walk through a room like they're making room for royalty.

We are patiently waiting for baby Holden to arrive, so in the mean time we threw a shower to get momma-to-be Cristina all prepared for his arrival! His nursery theme is focused a lot on natural colors with a hint of blue, which was super easy to design around.

Ale constructed these adorable mini diaper cakes for the long table, and I traced and cut out every single one of those scrap book paper stars. 

And per the trend, I crafted another pennant banner, adding a name this time with stencils and acrylic paint. 

I used a different kind of material, experimentation in it's finest, going for the more natural burlap look, and with my amateur skills, ended up breaking 2 needles just trying to figure out how to properly adjust the thread tension!!!

Luckily bread solves all stresses.

I also crafted a jute rope "H" from cardboard lettering (thanks for the idea, Pinterest), which turned out amazing. 

Jessica did a fabulous job on the main diaper cake!

So much greatness was squeezed into a little shower, my favorite probably being the pom pom tree. 

I actually took a limb from a fresh pile of landscaped trees in our neighborhood just days prior and had no idea just how big it was until the night before, when I brought it inside to put in the vase.............the darn thing took up our entire dining room!!! I hadn't taken a limb, I'd taken a whole tree (not really, but DANG it was large and in charge). Patrick helped me tame it, and Ale got to work making her first ever tissue paper poms, which couldn't have turned out more beautiful! 

Everything was under control, until Nicole came rolling into the room with her bus of a stroller, stress us new future mom's out!!! Just the look of that thing was intimidating!  

Thankfully, God only gives multiples to certain types of people....I mean, look at the smile on her face! And it helps that her daughters are gleeful little angels.

And a wiped out baby registry later, we are ready to love on Mr. Holden.......any time now.......

Raincloud and Rainbows Mobile DIY

I wanted to try something new from the ol' scrapbooking paper mobile I've made in the past. After deciding on a theme (rain clouds, raindrops, and rainbows), I committed to creating it with felt and then the experimental mobile project began!

Supplies:

Sheets of Felt, colors your choice

Cotton of some sort (I used cotton balls because I already had lots at home)

Something long and skinny (I used a wooden kabob skewer)

Pin Needles

Material Scissors

Needle and Thread, matching colors to your felt

Fishing String

Jewelry Beads

Jewelry Beading Clamps

Needle Nose Pliers

Old Lamp Shade

First, fold a sheet of felt over and pin in place in several places to ensure nothing slips while cutting (make the fold as wide as you plan on your cloud being).

I free style cut the clouds, making them randomly unique.

Once the cloud is cut out, adjust your pin needles to hold the two pieces of felt in place for sewing. 

Thread a needle with matching thread color and start hand stitching around the edges of the cloud.

When the cloud is about half-way sewn, it's time to start stuffing some edges. Those pesky edges are hard to reach if you sew too much of the cloud closed too soon.

Tug at the cotton balls to fluff them, then stuff into the bubbles and creases of the sewn part of your cloud.

Once all the nooks and crannies are stuffed, continue sewing your cloud around the edges until about 1 inch is left open.

Finish stuffing your cloud to be as poofy as your liking, then close it up completely with the needle and thread. 

Once your clouds are done, you'd better made yourself coffee, or in my case an iced caramel macchiato, because the rainbow is a doozy!!!

I don't think I could ever really adequately explain in words how I made this rainbow, but basically I folded all the felt in half (to make it two layers), and started by cutting the outside color as a huge solid arch (as in, it's not a "strip" of felt, it's a larger version of the purple piece you see). Then I pinned in on the next folded color of felt, orange, traced the red arch onto the orange, removed the red arch, and cut the orange arch about 1/4 inch smaller than the red one. I repeated the process until all the colors were cut, purple being the last. 

Then I separated the two layers of felt, making two rainbows, and individually sewed each color together, starting with the red and orang, and adding an inside color one at a time, using matching thread each time. Once the purple piece was sewed in place, I cut out the middle to make the arch complete. Then I embellished parts of the rainbow with little beads. 

If I was smart, I would have reversed the second rainbow before I sewed, so it could be the back of the first rainbow, but I DIDN'T, so the darn things wouldn't line up because they weren't perfectly symmetrical, so instead, I sewed a grey piece on the back of each rainbow.

And as always, when it was halfway sewn, I stuffed it with cotton, and finished stuffing it before completely sewn, just like the clouds. 

Once that was done, I decided I liked the embellished look, and sewed some beads on a few of the clouds. 

The rest of the project can be finished according to my instructions here, using fishing wire, beads, and metal jewelry making clamps to hold the beads in place. 

Modification #1, I stripped the lampshade using scissors and muscles, leaving only the pretty part on the edges. I wasn't happy with the white glue left on the wire parts, so I just sanded that off and made a huge mess in the living room doing so. 

Modification #2, when it came to the point of the fishing string to hang the clouds or rainbows, I just threaded the fishing string through a regular sewing needle and poked the needle through one side of the cloud/rainbow, and out the other, making sure it hung the way I wanted before I clamped a jewelry clamp in place underneath. If it didn't hang to satisfy me, I just pulled it out and started again. 

Did I mention you should set aside quite a few hours???

It was a little time consuming, but totally worth it, especially taking into account how much they cost at the store!!!!

You See....What Had Happened Was....(DIY Extravaganza)

LAST spring I found this dresser on Craigslist and convinced Patrick to go with me to get it. After that, it roasted in our garage until the hottest month of the summer because I couldn't decided what to do with it. 

Then my mom came to visit and we hit the project department hardcore and got a plethora of stuff done. 

I was determined to make a cool room for the kpLOVE studio where Patrick and I could hang out and play music, and this grey dresser was going to make that happen, along with a spectacular vintage yellow corduroy 70's style couch I thrifted. 

When the dresser was done, I gathered the man power to bring everything upstairs, but ran into some bodda-big issues when the couch wouldn't fit around the curve of the hallway into the room. Patrick and my brother tried every tetris skill that had, and even rubbed some dry wall off the surface of just about every corner up there. 

 My brother then convinced me if I let him cut one of the legs off the couch, he could for sure get it in the room........so that happened.......and yet, we ended up closing the day with a three legged couch sitting in the garage and an empty room with only a huge dresser sitting in it. 

I had ideas, though, and despite being bummed about the couch, I was going to make this retro "House of Blues" inspired room work. Next on my list was taking some boring white curtains we already owned and making them look quilted. I started by cutting out lots of odd material shapes. 

I wasn't even going to think about trying to sew every single mismathcing fabric piece on, so insert tons of fabric glue here and hours of labor later I had my "quilted curtains". 

The "quilted" curtains were trouble enough, but I had no idea what I was in for when I took on the task of entirely covering a vintage lamp shade with buttons. 

I spent $1 on the lamp shade and about a million dollars in buttons and E6000 glue.......and a billion more hours gluing the buttons on. Surface area on a lampshade exponentially expands like spaghetti in your bowl when you're tyring to do something like I did. 

Word of advice....pick a small lamp shade OR space out your buttons instead of trying to prevent any part of the shade from showing. The entire project turned into a headache of a puzzle that could only be completed a little at a time, since E6000 is a very potent but slow drying glue. 

Covering a shade with thrifted ties, on the other hand, was a piece of pie and very fun. 

I started by lining them up in the order I wanted them around the lamp shade, so I knew just how many I needed and how it would look, then cut them down to a more manageable length, but still a little long. 

Then I hot glued the top half of the tie to the shade.

Then I glued down the bottom part of the tie.

The next step was trimming off the excess length, leaving about an inch over the top of the shade

Lastly, I folded the excess length under, to create of cuffed or hemmed look and hot glued it in place. 

To add to my lampshade theme, I completely stripped a shade down to it's frame and tied strips of fabric to the rim, letting everything hang free, to create a whimsical look. 

The adorable birds hanging down the center came from World Market. 

The last shade was the easiest, requiring just a little hot glue and a strip of pom garland around the base. 

I'd got over the couch, found a comfy rocker at the Salvation Army, a roomy storage ottoman at the Antique Mall/Flee Market, dressed them both up, painted and replaced the knobs on an adorable little sewing table I found to coordinate with the dresser, put it all together, and BOOM! 

We now had a functional and cozy corner for chillin' and making music.

Which, of course, has since changed since the the room will now be doubling as a nursery.

The next issue that needed attention was disguising the unsightly black pile of speakers, amps, and instruments in the corner of the room with something a little more cute.....like a room divider. Since I wasn't about to shell out the money for any of the room dividers I actually liked (such as the pretty wooden carved ones at World Market), it looked like I was going to have to create something. 

I bought these shutters for a steal, but they were painted with a cheap, peeling, white latex paint, so I had no choice but to hand scrape 220 slats, front and back. Then I had to paint 220 slats, twice, because for whatever reason, the paint went on streaky. I guess if I had a sprayer, like all the fancy people do, this project would have been less tedious, but I since I don't, I had to get all the nooks and cranny's the hard way.

Once I was satisfied with the second coat of paint, I waxed the tedious 220 slats, twice (once with the antiquing color, then again with the clear). 

To finish the look, I had Patrick hinge the two bi-folds together to make a quad-fold and drill some holes for me to insert the glass knobs. After months of working on these until I was fed up, taking a break, and restarting the cycle, I was finally finished!!! A total beat down, yes, but very cost effective.

So......long story short......it turned out to be a good thing we couldn't fit the couch in the room!!!!!

And in the room next door, we finally have a light fixture!!!

The original chandelier that I'd made-over antique white was just too big for the space, proven by Patrick repeatedly knocking his noggin on it, so he moved it to the dining room, which looks beautiful, but left our guest bedroom without main lighting. 

 It took me a bit of searching, but finally found this smaller dark brass chandy for only $30 at Habitat for Humanity Restore, spray painted the crusty old yellow "melting candle" light bulb holders an antique white, and jazzed up the rest with some pretty beading.

Now it coordinates perfect with the old style fan in our cozy cottage room!