new wedding board page

Check out the wedding board link above or here.  With a little jQuery and Pinterest feed love, I can now see all my wedding inspiration in one place.  I have a feeling I'll be reusing this little experiment for other boards in the future. Enjoy! 

spray painted chandelier and bowl

I have a few items in my house that I wish all matched.  Thanks for a Pinterest find, I found a nice way to make that happen.  The Country Chic Cottage posted a nice tutorial on painting chandeliers.

I fell in love with the idea immediately, and decided to do my dining room chandelier and fruit bowl Rustoleum Hammered Brown.  It brought a brass chandelier and silver fruit bowl onto the same playing field.

I think it made my fiancé a little nervous at first since I painted the chandelier while hanging with just cardboard behind it as my spray shield.



To make sure you don't ruin anything if you take this route, you should wrap up anything you don't want to paint with plastic, only spray towards the shield, tarp the floor, and open the closest window.

It only took a few coats to get everything evenly covered.  I would wait about thirty minutes between coats to reapply and then a few hours to completely dry before removing any plastic.  Below are the before and after photos of both items.

freezer paper stencils

In 2010, I ran across a great tutorial for freezer paper stencils.  Since then, I have done a few stencil projects, and every time they turn out amazing.  Dana, tutorial queen from danamadeit.com, has amazing DIY walk-throughs and her posts in general are great reads as well.

Here are a few that I thought came out perfectly or just the ones I have photos of).  The first photo is fleece scarves. With fleece's ability to pill and shed, I was not expecting a fabulous outcome, but they came out great.  The key was ironing the edges well to make the adhesive firmly attach to the fabric.

The second photo is a group of onesies I made for my friend's little girl.  I wanted to make something that reflected her mother's personality, and there is also one for her dad (Hello Kitty zombie).  The black paint turned out the best since the high contrast catches your eye.

The last photo is a set Nick and I made for our friends' little boy.  They love The Big Lebowski, so it seemed fitting that their little dude should have onesies that showed it.  The manatee is an inside joke that did not turn out as well.  I found that sharp straight lines work better; the rounded edges loose their shape no matter how well you iron the stencil.

internet browser costumes

This year for Halloween there was a costume contest at my work.  My team agreed to do a joint effort costume... as internet browsers!  This must excite the inner geek in you, but if not it still turned out great and everyone loved the costumes.  They loved them so much that we ended up taking first prize in the contest.

What do you think? (left to right: IE, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Netscape, Chrome)

upcycled sweater hats

It is that time of year to start thinking about the cold mornings and ramping up your fall wardrobe.  When trying to figure out what sweaters are still good for the upcoming season, hold on to the old ratty/pilly/worn sweaters for this fun and quick project.   Cost: free Time: 30 mintues Needed: old sweater (owned) hat (owned) rotary cutter (owned) cutting board (owned) sewing machine (owned) fabric flower (optional) 1.  Cut it.  Take your sweater inside out and lay flat on a table.  Take your owned hat and line it up so the sweater's torso bottom ends and the hat's band are flush.  Trace and cut with your rotary cutter on your cutting board.  You should end up with two pseudo-half circle pieces.     2.  Stitch it.  With the exteriors of the two pieces lined up together, straight stitch  around the dome of the hat making sure to adjust your stitch/length appropriately for the thickness of the knit.  3.  Embellish it.  Turn your hat right-side out, and add your accessories if you would like.  I made some quick fabric flowers and stitched into place.  You could also use hot glue, or use a safety-pin for temporary embellishments.