Rainy Sunday

We had a glorious Sunday last weekend. The kind where it rained all day long. I love those kinds of days in the middle of summer because I don't feel a bit of guilt about not being outside to enjoy the sunshine. Instead, Jesse and I just laid around the house and rested. We loved it.

The Saturday before I had gone thrift store shopping with my sister-in-law, and it was the really successful kind too! We both came home with a variety of different odds and ends. So good! We also came up with a quilt idea for her home and we searched high and low for fabrics to go in it. But, that's a different story. Hopefully I'll be able to post a completed quilt by the end of the year. That would be fun! But, in the middle of our shopping trip I picked up some t-shirts at the dollar store.

I've been in need of a few more good t-shirts to wear for lounging in the evenings and on weekends. So, I used my wonderful, rainy Sunday to put some designs on my new dollar store t-shirts. I used the same freezer paper technique that I have used here, here and here.

Here they are:

a shout out to the homeland

the bike I don't even own

and, a bird for good measure.

Such an easy and fun project. I highly recommend it.

Festivities

I've been thinking about this project for a little while. I've run across the idea on several blogs, and thought it was cute, so it's been on my list to create. It's perfect party decor that I can pull out for any casual party. Last week, I finished it just in time to use it for my mother-in-law's retirement party that I hosted at my home.

Here it is: a really long flag garland . . .






I was able to use fabrics that I already had on hand, which made this project cheap. Love that. I also made binding for the first time (using a tutorial here to figure out how to connect my strips together) for the "string". Hopefully I can put that knowledge to further use with a quilt down the road.

Someday when I have kids I think it would be fun to make a garland like this (although probably shorter as this one took me a lot more time that I expected) for each child. Wouldn't it be fun to bring it out each year to decorate for their birthdays? Seems like it could be a fun tradition.

All in the Family

I've been working on a new project in our living room over the last couple of weeks. Jesse and I were inspired by a Designed to Sell (love that show!) episode on HGTV where they needed to cover a large amount of a wall space on a budget. I include Jesse in the sentence above only because he happened to be sitting next to me and he actually responded when I commented on how much I liked the idea in the show, but I can't be sure he was nearly as "inspired" as I was. Just want to make sure the record is straight. He has a reputation to uphold after all.

For the last couple of years we have hung a collage frame that we received as a wedding gift and a couple of sconces above our couch in the living room. It's been fun for me to replace the pictures in the collage each year. I do this routine in January where I pick out all of my favorite pictures from the previous year and put them in the frame. It's kinda funny how something so simple (and free!) makes the space feel fresh. At least to me.


Anyway, the inspired idea was to replace the collage and sconces with a large compilation of frames. It's a simple idea, and I'm not the first person to do this obviously, but I must say the result is giving me a nice, easy and cheap solution for something new and large enough to cover my wall space.

I have to admit I was also itching to take down the collage and sconces because I had hung them too high in the first place. It had irritated me just enough each time I looked at it that now, 2 1/2 years later, I can't handle it anymore. I hear that hanging pictures too high is a common problem for people, so thankfully I don't feel alone in my mistake. But, it's annoying nonetheless.

I had several frames in storage, so I pulled those out and then made a quick trip to Goodwill to complete my set. We decided on painting the frames a very dark brown. Now that it's done I think it looks black, but oh well. Black will do too. I spray painted all of the frames and then added photo mattes that I had found pretty cheap at Hobby Lobby. I had to spray paint the mattes too because they didn't sell very many in plain white. That surprised me.

Anyway, here's the fun part (and pure genius if you ask me), I pulled a Martha Stewart trick out of the bag for this . . . I traced around each frame onto paper. Then, numbered the papers and laid out my frames on the dining room table in numerical order.


Then, I taped all of my papers to the wall to determine where I wanted each frame to hang. Once the papers were on the wall I was also able to measure out where each frames' hangy bobber was and mark the spot on each paper so that I would know exactly where to place my nail in order for my frames to hang straight.

Once the nails were in I just tore off my papers and hung my frames.

All in all, I'm happy with the way it turned out. I think I'll keep my annual January routine of switching out the pictures. Jesse did notice the other day that the compilation is a little heavy with my family . . . apparently, I can't help it, but I might have to work on that.