Welcome home!

I brought her home on Tuesday!

Welcome home, lovely!

I bought her on Cl for $425. That's quite a chunk of change for me, but since she was originally close to $2500 at Ethan Allen (Hancock & Moore is the manufacturer), and she's in perfect condition, I thought she was a steal.

I'd show you more pics of this room, but I still have so much work to do!

I still have to find a replacement for this guy:




and do some reorganizing, give the fireplace a makeover, and the list goes on and on!



Love,

Bloggy Get Together and Thrifty Treasures

Bloggy Get Together
Our VA/MD/DC bloggy get together is coming together! We will meet in the Olde Towne area of Fredericksburg, VA, Saturday May 1st for lunch, shopping and some local fun!



If you think you may be interested in joining us please leave me a comment with an email address so that I can contact you!


Thrifty Treasures with Rhoda!


Thrifty Treasures is back, ya'll!

I've been searching for a nice pair of lamps for my bedroom for quite a while. Finding a nice pair of lamps without spending a fortune proved to be quite a tall order! I would occasionally find a nice pair of bases, but after buying new shades it was still going to cost a good bit. Then I found a pair of these great lamps on craigslist last week! They are a really nice size and they look fab in my bedroom! They were originally from Bombay Co. (sniff, I miss Bombay)


They have a damask lining in the shades so when you turn them on you get a nice little surprise...


I think these shades are currently available at Target for $19.99 each, so I know that $40 for the pair of lamps including the shades was a good deal!


Please keep your fingers crossed for me on this thrifty treasure!


I'm hopefully picking her up tomorrow if everything comes together!




Did I tell you guys that I won a copy of the new Flea Market Style Magazine from Rhoda's giveaway? I've never won a blog giveaway before, so I was really excited. It arrived in the mail on Saturday and I got to pour through it yesterday! Thanks, Rhoda!!

The magazine is great and I'm thinking I'll share a few of my favorite ideas from the magazine with you this week!

Love,

Bedtime Prayer Wall

I'm participating in:








I'm in love with this shape which seems to be everywhere lately:

It's called a quatrefoil. I've had this idea in my head for a while that I wanted to do some artwork in my little girls' shared room incorporating the bedtime prayer we say at night. I wanted the project to be inexpensive, kid friendly (I intend this to hang over my nearly 2-year-old's bed, so nothing too heavy and no glass!) and super cute.

After this project I decided to use my diy stretched canvas idea again to save money, and I knew I wanted to incorporate the quatrefoil shape, so here's what I came up with:



It was really cloudy outside when I took these photos, and I just couldn't capture the colors accurately. The greens all look way to dark and olivey and the pink isn't showing up very well. You'll just have to take my word for it that the colors are really cute in person!



Materials:
3 sheets of 20" x 30" foam board from dollar tree, (this was exactly enough to make 9 finished 10"squares)
18 sheets of Scrapbook Paper (already had this in my stash, but FYI I recently saw 8 sheet packs of SBP in the dollar section at Michaels for 50 cents per pack!)
Glue stick (already had this on hand)
Matte Spray Sealer (already had this on hand)


Here's how I did it:

First I made the "stretched canvas" forms just like I detailed here. The only change I made was that this time I used two layers of "spacers" to make the finished canvases a little thicker. Making the canvases myself saved so much money! I made all 9 for $3. I couldn't buy one plain canvas in craft store for that much!

Then I wrapped each "canvas" in one sheet of 12x12 scrapbook paper. To make it a little smoother and easier I used the pointy end of a letter opener to score the paper along the folds as I wrapped.

Then I made a quatrefoile template. It's essentially a square with a semi-circle centered on each side. I started by figuring out how big I wanted the square part, then I traced half of my coffee cup along each side and cut it out.

Then I used my template to trace and cut out one SBP quatrefoile shape for each canvas.

Since I don't own a cricut, it was a little tricky to figure out how to handle the lettering without having to cut each letter out by hand. My hubby helped me figure out that reverse printing in white on a colored circle looked nice and crisp. I believe the font I used was Clarendon Bold.

Once all my pieces were cut out, I assembled the canvases with a glue stick and used two coats of spray sealer on top.

Then I hung them with some command adhesive strips ( I stocked up on these a while ago when they were BOGO at my drug store). This way when my 2-year-old inevitably gets into shenanigans during naptime and tries to pull them off the wall, there aren't any nails to contend with and I can stick them right back up!


The prayer reads:
Father in heaven
Hear my prayer.
Keep me in
thy loving care.
Be my guide
in all I do
and bless all those
who love me too.
Amen.

The "now I lay me down to sleep" prayer would also work on 9 canvases!






Love,

Bedtime Prayer Wall

I'm guest posting at Tatertots and Jello Today!

Hop on over...

to find out the details of this project!

Love,

I'm linking to Amanda's Show me the Progress Party

Way back in September I posted about this:


My big, pink, 3-sided fireplace.

I got lots of great suggestions and I think I have a plan in place.
Here's the plan:

1. my dad is going to build me a mantel running all the way to the wall
2. I'll paint the brass trim
   
3. and paint the tile
4. If I can get over my fear of saws, I'm hoping to also add a board and batten treatment to the wall below the mantle, covering the niche.

I'm thinking that will just about solve my dilemma. Once the mantle is in place, I'll treat the space above as one large mantle, centering the artwork over the center of the mantle, not the fireplace. The first step will be for me to paint the trim and tile. I'm a little nervous about painting the tile, but I figure pretty much anything is better than what I've got! I purchased two cans of this to get the job done:


What do you think of the color? Do you think the texture will be okay? I recall seeing someone else recently who used this or something similar to paint a fireplace surround, but now I can't remember who it was. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about?

BTW- in case anyone was wondering about my "Daddy Chair" dilemma, I must have missed the boat on the leather recliner because I never heard back from the seller. I'm stalking CL regularly for another!

Don't forget to stop by Amanda's to see more progress!

Love,

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

I've been hitting all kinds of unexpected stumbling blocks while working on my little girls' bathroom. I was going to wait until everything was perfect to show you, but in the interest of keeping it real, I've decided to go ahead and show you everything, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Here's the before:


poof- kinda-sorta

And the current state of things:



First, let me say that I have spent zero dollars thus far. Ca-ching. My goal here was to pretty up this bathroom for my two little girls using materials I had on hand and to do something to make the fixtures in here (namely the light fixture, the medicine cabinet and the cabinetry) more attractive without buying new ones and without permanently changing the existing fixtures. I originally planned to paint all the wood white, but thought for resale the wood might be better as is.
Okay, let's start with the good, shall we?

Last summer I bought a box of fabric remnants on Craigslist for $10. All three of the fabrics here were in that box. There were also all kinds of other goodies in that box that you can now see in the throw pillows on my sofa and in various other projects around my home. Since I've already used more than $10 worth of fabric from the box I'm not counting that towards my bottom line of zero. BTW- this green houndstooth is available on fabricguru.com for $3.95! Does anyone know the name/manufacturer of the floral? I've used every scrap and would love a little more.

The first project I tackled was to skirt the sink, covering the cabinetry. This has worked out really well because it's been keeping my almost 2-year-old out of the drawers.



and there's the little stool I showed you the other day. Oh, and I don't know if you can tell in the photo above, but I hung a pretty little mirror at just the right height for someone standing on the stool to see her sweet little face within the frame.

Next I used some more of the fabric from the magical box to adorn my plain white shower curtain. I also added some ribbon that I've had for a while and some pink ball fringe that I've also had (purchased when a local craft store went out of business- 20 yds for $1!)


Next I used more of the same to make a pelmet box using LGN's instructions which I hot-glued (just a little dab on each side so I can pop it off later) to the existing oak light cover.


I used more of the houndstooth to cover the frame of the medicine cabinet.

I just unscrewed the backing, popped out the mirror, wrapped 4 strips of fabric around the frame and hot-glued it in place on the back side of the frame so that I can pull it off down the road.


and I embroidered and adorned my plain white towels.


Now, on to the bad. I wanted to add a little something for visual interest to the wall above the towel bar. I saw these on PB kids and thought "those are cute, but $39 for stickers?! I can make those!"


Oh, yes. So confident was I in my crafting prowess. I was certain that armed with some contact paper and scrapbook paper I could create the next internet crafting craze by the sheer power of my mad skeells. That's when God decided to serve me up a heaping helping of humble pie. Yum.
Without further ado, here's my version:

might be cute on an elementary school bulletin board, but I don't want it in my house. My plan was to put the flowers up and then add the stems, but once I saw how the flowers looked I decided not to add insult to injury.

To make them I cut out flower shapes from SBP (I traced the outlines from the actual pottery barn photo 'cuz I have no fine art talent!) modge-podged the cutouts to contact paper, brushed two coats of modge-podge over the top, let them dry and cut them out. Then I used a sharpie to add in the little dashed lines.
After all that they're weirdly shiny, kinda bumpy and just plain weird. Oh, well. At least I didn't spend anything on them. On to plan B...

And now for the ugly- the school-chalk yellow walls. This color combo looks to me like something Blanche Devereaux would have chosen for the florida room. I thought if I added enough pretty fabric to this room, enough ball fringe (I just can't get enough!) maybe the walls would sort of fade away. But they haven't faded. Not one iota. It's even worse with the main light fixture turned on. The light sorta bounces off the color and makes it glow. Ugh. I told you the other day that I was going to have a painter come to aid this damsel in distress. I just hate not being able to do something myself, but the ceilings in here are vaulted and high. Very, very high.

I found a guy who would do the room for $120 if I supplied the paint. I made an appointment. Then he called me a few hours before he was supposed to show up. He had to reschedule. Strangely I was relieved. I realized that even though $120 is pretty cheap considering the job and hubby's fine with it, I set out to do this room for free (or close to free) and it's killing me to have to pay someone to do something I should be able to handle. Crazy, right?!

After talking to my sister, I think I might be able to do this myself afterall with the help of a roller extension and the oh-so-sophisticated paintbrush-duct-taped-to-a-stick. Then again, if I hadn't listened to my sister I never would have wound up in the driver seat of my mom's mini-van while it stood stuck in the mud and hanging over the retaining wall in my parents backyard. Wish me luck...

I'm linking to:
Trash to Treasure at Reinvented
DIY day at ASPTL


Love,

Footstool Makeover and Winners!

The winners of the apron giveaway are:

Vee of Wild West Home
and
Tami of a Girls Gotta Nest

Congratulations! Please contact me to confirm your color choice and personalization!

My little girls bathroom isn't quite finished yet. I was really hoping that I'd be able to work with the wall color, but I think the room really needs to be painted white. This wouldn't ordinarily be a problem except that the room has vaulted ceilings which I can't reach even standing on the top rung of our tallest ladder (which is a big no-no, but I've done before). Now worries- I've found a guy on craigslist who is coming to paint the room tomorrow afternoon. I'm kind of annoyed about having to pay someone to paint, especially since I didn't spend a single penny on the rest of the room, but I'm not willing to sacrifice safety.

I've finished almost all of the other little projects going into this room. I'll share one of them with you to tide you over! I found this little stool for $3 at goodwill last spring. It sat on my porch holding a couple of plants. It was already chippy when I bought it, but then I accidentally left it outside all winter. Oops!

Before:




POOF!



I painted the legs white and upholstered the top with some padding (I cut up an old mattress pad which I replaced recently) and I made a little slipcover (I know you're just shocked about that!) for the top.




Jellybean asked me if the F stood for fancy (we just read "Fancy Nancy" for the first time recently!)

I'm participating in:
Before and After Party at Thrifty Decor Chick
DIY Day at ASPTL
Trash to Treasure at Reinvented


Love,