March is over - how did I do?

March is over - hurray! For me the end of March  marks the end of winter, and the beginning of being outside again! :-) Of course, today it was snowing, so I can't say it has necessarily been warmer, but all the little birds and squirrels are going crazy in my yard, so it must be spring. :-) Here's how I did on my goals for this month. :-)

Finish my projects from last month: the Frenchy table and my website.

I finished refinishing (is that good English?) the Frenchy table. FINALLY! Pics to come. We are working on the website, but IE is giving us issues. Gotta love Microsoft. :-)

Finish current sewing projects; a tree skirt and a table runner. I finished the table runner at the beginning of the month. I just need one more spool of ribbon for the tree skirt, which I will pick up next week. The picture at the top of this post is my tree skirt in progress. I really love how it is coming out.

Continue scrapbooking (and decluttering the scrapbooking stuff) Hmm. Nope. Never touched those boxes. :-)

Finish the loveseat we started a while ago. Yes! All done! Pictures to come soon. I love it and it adds so much style to our living room.

Update the castle tour page with new pictures. Yeah.... never happened. This one is carrying over to next month. :-)

Finish editing old pictures. YES! I am all current on all of my personal photos. This is BEYOND exciting. :-)

Continue purging and decluttering. I took a trunkload of stuff to Goodwill. I mostly focused on finishing up projects this month, and not much decluttering. Me thinks April will bring more decluttering. :-)

Finish reading Oliver Twist. Hmm. Nope. But, I did read three other books this month. So that has to count for something. ;-)

Start reading another classic. (Maybe La Alahambra?) See above. :-) I am now two books behind my goal. Maybe saying that will motivate me? I'm not counting on it. :-)

Tomorrow I will post my goals for April. You're at the edge of your seat, aren't you? :-) Don't worry, I am not at all offended if you skip this post and the next one in your reader. :-) These are purely for my benefit. :-)

 

 

Replacing Sepia Pictures with COLOR!

When we redid the dining room, I hung a series of coordinated frames on the wall with sepia prints inside. Those are the pictures up in my header, and I took the majority of them. I liked them a lot, but after a while I realized that there was just too much brown going on in that area.

So, I put it on the backburner of my mind, where I mull over projects until I figure out what to do about them. This was the beginning of last year, when we were incredibly busy traveling. One of those trips was our trip to Spain, where I took many, many pictures.

When we got back, I knew I wanted some of those pictures I had taken hanging in our home. And then it hit me - replace the sepia pictures with color pictures! So I did. Eventually. :-)



And I love them. I love the colors, and the different memories that they hold. I love that they are from Spain, and that they remind me of the years that I lived there. Here are a few closeups.

I loved all the pots this lady had on her balcony. Summer must be beautiful here! :-)

I love old, chippy doors with interesting architectural details. This blue one was one of the first things I took a picture of when we arrived.

I can't tell you how much I love this picture. Something about it just screams Spain to me. The wrought iron, the drastic shadows, the shuttered doors, the balcony. Ah, Spain - I miss you!

Another chippy old door and a very cool lantern on a bright yellow wall. So pretty. :-)

So those are the pictures I selected for this wall grouping. Here's a wider angle of that side of the dining room to show you how the color pictures really warmed up the space.

So pretty. They make me smile every time I walk in the room. And they make me miss Spain. A lot. :-)

 

A Sewing Machine Project: A Cover!

Last month I mentioned that I finally completed a few sewing projects. One of them was a cover for my sewing machine. I figured since I can be a bit... slow about completing my sewing projects, which, in turn, means that ,y machine sits for a long time collecting dust, a cover was in order. This is project I've been meaning to get around to for, oh, well, forever. :-) I had dreams of making the cover all fitted and proportional, with piping along the edges, and smooth, even seams. And so the machine sat there, cover-less, collecting dust. Finally I decided it was more important to just HAVE a cover than to make it all perfect and time consuming. Here's the finished project.



I simply measured the height, depth and length of the machine, and cut two side pieces and one piece long enough to go from one end, over the top, down the other end. Then I ran two long seams, hemmed the bottom, and voila! A sewing machine cover. Easy. Breezy. Covergirl. :-)



I used some leftover linen I had from my lampshade recovering project. The cover was looking a little plain, so I printed out the word "sew" in a font that I liked, and slid it underneath the front of the cover. Then I held it up to a window and traced the font outline with a pencil. Then I just used a fabric marker to fill it in with light strokes.

I'm hoping it works as a sort of subliminal message reminding me to sew. So far it has worked a little. :-) I'm working on my tree skirt, and a few other little projects. And I am psyching myself up to make a few dresses an skirts. I'll let you know how that goes.

The sewing machine was my mom's. She went to school for fashion design, and this was her first machine. So even though it goes all wonky from time to time, I love that it has a history. :-)

Delivering As Promised

As promised, here is a picture of my newest oil painting addition in situ. I decided to hang it on the rather brown wall of the dining room where I did my cheap wall art a while back.

I'm liking how the painting adds a little bling and some more color to this corner. :-) I also like that block of sunshine on the wall. I wish I could make it stay there permanently. :-)

Anyways, I am thinking I will paint that outlet cover (below the thermostat) the same color as the wall so that it blends in a little more. There really isn't anything I can do about the thermostat until we demo the kitchen, and move that whole thing over to a side wall. So until then I will simply embrace the awkwardly placed, glaringly bright thermostat.

Actually, it doesn't bother me that much in real life. I just get mad because it ruins my pretty pictures. "Oh, she hung a paint---- OMG look at that thermostat!!!!" :-) I kinda feel like this wall is like a news reporter - all classy and fancy on the top, all bumming and slumming on the bottom. ;-)

Anyways, enough about the dumb thermostat. In other news, one of my more popular searches that found the old blog this week?

"Am I a Lover or a Friend?"

I feel bad for all these people wanting some solid advice about their obviously complicated relationship - and all they find is my blog - with a rant about a thermostat no less! Ha!

A Stairwell Changeup

Let's play a game, shall we? Remember those pages in the Highlights magazines when we were kids where you had to look at two pictures and point out the differences? See how many differences you can point out below.  (Other than a better camera angle and lighting)



If you guessed a whole bunch, you were right :-)

We replaced the curtain rod, hung curtains and a small roman shade, painted a chest and put it in the little space there, switched out the light, hung up a meaningful canvas, and added a few decorations. I love how the light streams through those cotton voile curtains and the turquoise jar. So pretty.



If you are one of my stalkers followers, you may remember that I "decorated" this little area a while ago. This is what it looked like.



Yeah, I wasn't feeling it either. :-) Luckily I soon found those white curtains and took down most of those pictures on the walls. Instant class. Do you like that turquoise jar with the forsythia branches in it? This is what it looked like when I bought it for fifty cents at an estate sale.



Blech. But I knew I could make it pretty. I painted it with several coats of turquoise glass paint, and at first I thought I had ruined it. It had a funky texture and a terrible color.

But once everything dried, it got much better. :-) Whew!

And yes, the forsythia branches are fake. Sue me. I live in upstate NY and things don't grow for half the year. :-)

I had been looking for the perfect light for the top of the stairs for a while. I even blogged about it two Christmases ago. But I had strict requirements for this light. It had to be small enough to not knock people in the head, it had to be pretty, it had to be cheap, and Lover had to like it. Those last two meant that it took me two years to find something that worked. :-) But then on one fateful day at Home Depot, I saw this baby clearanced out to $29.00. Score!

So I called up my super hot electrician, and he came over and installed it for me. Don't worry, my electrician and Lover are one and the same. :-) Here he is pointing out the less than stellar "boob" light we had up there before.

One of the things I like best about this light is the little arms above the globe. They add just the right amount of pretty.

So now walking up the stairs makes me smile instead of shudder. :-) Me likey.



 

 

 

 

The Guest Room Went Gray

I've been toying with the idea of painting an accent wall in the guest room for a while. Painting the wall behind the bed, in my opinion, would make it pop more, and give the room a little more visual impact. I love the crisp black and white theme we went with, but I felt like all white walls was a little boring.:-)



Back in November before some guests were due in town, I finally broke out my free quart of Glidden paint that I had ordered in Pearl Gray, and painted that wall behind the bed. I don't have a picture, but the color, instead of being a barely there, soft gray, ended up being a barely there, soft LAVENDER! Oops. :-) I made a photoshop mockup of the color so you can see how it was NOT the color I was looking for.



But there was no time to repaint before they arrived because, in classic Jenny style, I had decided to paint that room exactly two days before they arrived. :-) Epic fail. :-)

So it stayed that way until Christmas, when my family was coming to visit. And then, in true Jenny form, I decided to repaint that wall.... you guessed it, two days before my family arrived. Thankfully, this time it was the right color. The color I chose was Urban Sunrise by Valspar, and it's a smoky, smooth gray with blue undertones. Which goes perfectly with the stark white and the blues that we have in the room. And it provides the perfect backdrop for the jet black bed and the white comforter. Much, MUCH better. :-)

So here's what the room looks like now. Of course, painting the wall jumpstarted all my creative juices in this room, and now I have a bunch of other ideas again. :-) Lover's gonna kill me.

Not too shabby when you consider that this is what the room looked like three years ago.

Pretty dramatic before and after, right? I am still so proud of this room. :-) It's so pretty. And the sunlight just streams in through that window, so I curl up like a cat on that bed in the afternoons and get my daily dose of Vitamin D. :-)

Next up on the agenda? This pretty little nightstand. It needs a fresh coat of white paint because the top is oh-so-ugly. :-)

The Glassy Crafty Day :-)

I promised a recap of our crafty, glassy day where I invited a group  of my girlfriends over to play with some crafty stuff with me. There were a bunch of glass projects I have been wanting to try, and this seemed like the perfect time to try out a whole slew of them. And then we also threw in a hair flower craft for good measure, which was a big hit. :-) Here's how it played out:

I went shopping at the Salvation Army and bought up their entire selection of vases, votive holders and pretty glass cups. The lady at the checkout counter HATED me. :-) Although I did help her wrap everything up, which I thought was pretty nice of me.



Then I washed and de-price tagged it all. THAT was fun. :-)

My goal was to experiment with a few different projects - glass painting, glass coating and glass.. enhancing I guess you could call it. For Saturday, I just assembled all of the supplies, as well as a gallery on my laptop of inspiration ideas. Here are some of the crafts we did:

The glass painting (wine glass) was more difficult than I anticipated. The DIY mercury glass (silver votive) was super simple and easy, and the glass coating, (white cup and red vase) was time consuming but simple and fun.

It was a full house, and we had a blast.

I told the girls they could bring their own projects to work on, or do what we had planned. Most elected to do the crafts I had planned.

Not Andrea though. She's a rebel. :)

My sister in law Anna brought her daughter Becca with her. Becca is the sweetest girl I know. My friend Sara brought her daughter Lily, who is definitely the sweetest girl I know. And Andrea (the rebel) brought her daughter Grace, who is for sure the sweetest girl I know. The rest of us gals are daughter-less, so we just brought ourselves. :-) Speaking of sweet, my sis Steph brought these aMAzing cookies, that were scrumptious.

That's not Steph. That's Bekah and Chelsea. They are awesome girls. :-) This is Steph.

(on the right) :-)

Speaking of awesome food, Lover surpassed his usual awesome self and cooked us up an amazing array of treats. This is just a sample of what he made.

SO good. :-)

Gosh, my hair is getting really long. :-)

Grace made an adorable vase with polka dots and her initial on it.

Sara and Lily made mercury vases and hair flowers.

So that's pretty much it. We had a great time and made all sorts of fun stuff. Lover fed us so much we were all stuffed. And Andrea made up for her rebel self by bringing me flowers. :-)

Here are the links to the projects we made.

DIY Mercury Glass

Glass Painting with Markers

Coated Glass Bottles

I couldn't find a link to the type of hair flowers we made, with flannel and tulle, but if you google "hair flowers DIY" you'll get tons of results. All in all it was a super fun time and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Although maybe not right in the middle of a busy weekend with twelve other things on the schedule. My bad. :-)

Heaven is For Real

Heaven is For Real is another audio book that I received from Oasis Audio Books. I enjoyed this book immensely. It was interesting, moving, and challenged my faith, and I don't mean that in a trite way. The book chronicles the story of the Burpo family and the amazing events that surrounded their son's bout with appendicitis. Through a series of medical misdiagnoses, their son Colton nearly died from a ruptured appendix, and then miraculously recovered. Not long after the events, he started talking about his visit to heaven and the things he experienced there. This book challenged me on my beliefs about heaven, and I felt renewed and encouraged after listening to it.

Todd Burpo, Colton's father,  reads the book that he, along with his family,  wrote about the events. It was incredibly touching to  hear a father recount the story of nearly losing his son, and then the amazing world that was opened up to him after Colton recovered. It made the book extremely personal to be able to hear the story read by someone who experienced the events. The chapters are not overly long, and the book is engaging and draws you in.

I highly, highly recommend this book. Read, or purchase it on audio and listen to it. It's one of the best books I've read in a while. :-)

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this audiobook free from Oasis Audio as part of their Review Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.