Sewing Scrap Bag

I have been enjoying very much doing little sewing projects on my new sewing machine. This combination scrap bag/pincushion/tool holder should have been the first thing I made. Instead of having strings and clipped corner pieces everywhere, they could have all been neatly collected in this nice little removable bag.

I got the directions from a website called Sew, Mama, Sew!

Handy dandy hanging scrap bag. The bottom of the pincushion is weighted with rice so it can stay on the edge of a table, chair, etc.

And of course, I couldn't have done it without my "helper".

Homemade Beach Chair

You may have noticed from some previous posts that we take our camp chairs to the beach. This is not ideal because they are a little hard to get balanced on the sand, the feet get sand in them that doesn't easily brush off and if the fabric is moist when you put them in the storage bags, they can get moldy. For years I have been looking for just the right beach chair at just the right price. I have been eyeing one on Amazon that can sit up or lie flat and has a face hole so that you can lay on your back or your stomach and read. However, the cheapest I could find a chair like this is about $80 and the reviews weren't even that good.

Sooooo, I recently came across directions for making a folding sling beach chair on Ana White's blog (she designs make-it-yourself furniture plans and posts them on her blog here). When I saw the chair, I loved it and wanted to make one for myself. So I did. And here is the result:

It's not actually finished - the wood needs to be sanded and stained or painted, but it's still comfy. It is adjustable to three levels of recliney-ness, and even though it doesn't lay completely flat, I think it will be lightyears better than a camp chair for the beach.

The fabric sling is reversible which is awesome, and that also made it funner to choose out the fabric. The pillow is my own design... Jeran said it needed a pillow so voila! Goodbye leftover scraps!

Tick Tock

I have recently been working on a fun project. It is a large wall clock (22"), designed and created by myself. I should have documented the process better but I didn't.

I bought my piece of wood and decided on paint colors. I watched YouTube videos and practiced a parchment-looking painting technique. I ordered an oversized high-torque clock movement on eBay. Jeran helped make a router jig to cut a circle and helped me cut the circle shape. After I sanded and primed it, I painted it with my new technique. It didn't work out quite as good as my practice piece, but it looks decent.

I debated for a long time on how I was going to paint the numbers because I knew I could never freehand them and make it look good. I finally decided upon using a Cricut scrapbooking machine to cut out number stencils (thanks, Lindy, that was fun!). Then I positioned them and painted them on and they worked pretty good! Last, I installed the movement, which involved chiseling out a section in the back because the shaft wasn't long enough to go through the entire thing.

Now, I think the clock looks all right, but a little plain. I've been debating if I should add something to it in the middle. I could use any advice or ideas anyone has! Some ideas I already have are to stencil: our last name, a flourish, an interior circle, or some other word/phrase (but what?). Any opinions out there?

Our Kitchen

So the kitchen is still not 100% finished. It will happen someday, but I figured I ought to just put some pictures up anyways.

There may be a few finishing touches that need to happen, but it is 100% nicer than it was before! The floor is marvelous and the walls are so pretty!

There is some decor that needs to go on the wall above the table there but I'm hesitant to put it up because it would mean putting nail holes in our nice paint job... ugh!

We didn't do anything with the cabinets or appliances but I think I'll get some knobs for the drawers and cupboards. They don't really bother me now but I remember when we first moved here always thinking, "How do they expect you to open these drawers!?"

Still a little short on storage space...

The light fixture over the sink is one of my favorite new additions. Before there was a fluorescent tube light that would turn on only if it felt like it and you asked really nicely. This new light is much brighter, happier and more compliant.

Hooray for tile!

The things we still need to do are:

• hang the wall art,
• put knobs on cupboards and drawers,
• put up the edgers that go along the small gap between cupboards and wall by the stove.
• put one piece of the door trim up and caulk and paint all the trim (including doors and windows), stain and nail in cabinet base quarter-round.

I am so grateful that we have a nice kitchen to use now! Took us long enough!

Kitchen Sneak Preview

I've been trying hard to wait until the kitchen is finished and cleaned up before I post pictures of it. BUT a) it is taking a long time, b) I'm getting impatient, and c) it is such a wonderful improvement I can hardly wait to share it (and use it).

We are now so close! We are working on baseboards and trim right now. After that, we need to do some caulking and touch-up painting and a little ceiling repair. Then once we've cleaned everything up and put stuff back where it goes, it will be ready! It sounds like a lot but I think it is just a week or two away, if we stick with it.

So for now we'll have to settle for this before and after sneak preview. I promise I'll get a picture of the whole kitchen when it's done.

Before:

After:

One Project Down (mostly)

Yesterday, Jeran worked and got our garden area mostly finished. It looks awesome. It was a pretty fun project. I always like the ones where we dig in the dirt and work with plants.

A before picture. This is how it looked when we moved here (for a while we had our motorcycle on the back patio under a tarp). There were some very nice flowers that died and didn't come back after a year of neglect so I dug them up to plant tomatoes.

I have wanted to do something with this garden area for a long time. When our home owner's association got a few bundles of landscape timbers and gave some to each homeowner, we decided it was time to make the change in our back garden.

We decided to use square pavers to extend the patio area a bit to give ourselves just a little more room between our patio and our new raised garden bed and somewhere to set the grill so it isn't in front of our window doors. For the garden itself, to maximize space and the short light we get due to the proximity to the house and trees, we decided to make it an L shaped bed off the corner of the patio.

Anyways, after weeks of planning and digging and waiting and working, it is mostly done!

There is still a little work and cleanup to do. This is before the excavated dirt from the pavers was filled in. We still need a little more dirt, but not as much as we expected, and the dirt we ended up with turned out to be slightly better quality that I expected. A lot of it was clay but we used as much of the solid clay to level under the paver base.

"After"

But that's not really the final product. The hardest part may yet to come, as we decide what to plant and make it something that is both pretty and functional. I'm thinking some flowers and some vegetables... but I'm totally undecided. Also, we plan to get something to sit on and probably bring our grill home from it's summer vacation in a little while. So it might look something more like this professional artist's rendition:

Next on the docket are more kitchen projects. Like that tile! It will happen someday soon and we won't be living with a bare concrete kitchen floor!

La Cocina

More kitchen updates. Sometimes it seems like that is all we do these days. Oh wait, it kind of has been. I have been getting really anxious to make some good progress on the kitchen because we haven't been able to really use it since we started sanding and mudding, and even very much during wallpaper removal. So from about mid-March until now, although the last week or two it has been even worse because we took the stove and microwave out. We've been eating PB & J and cereal and those get old pretty fast.

Jeran has quite a bit of painting and paint prep experience and knows what he is doing when it comes to walls. However, on Saturday, after a few days of prep, I was certain that we were never going to paint and that we would be doing mud-sand-mud-sand-mud-sand for the rest of our lives.

The mudding and sanding went on and on.

And on and on and on!

But finally we got to prime. Although priming is not generally a very exciting step, I was giddy about it because it meant the end of the prep work.

And paint! Now, for the record, Jeran wanted yellow and I wanted green and I gave in. I can't say I love the paint color, but I don't hate it and it is better than white or wallpaper. I expect it will grow on me over time - these things usually do.

And as a sneak peak of the next phase of the project, see the concrete floor in the last picture. We have tile to lay some time, but I'm ready for a little break. I didn't intend to tear up all the linoleum right away, but I started with the under the stove part (so we could put that back for now) and got carried away. I guess it will just be more motivation to get the tile done soon.

Woohoo! Now we can move most of the stuff back in and use the kitchen again! I keep thinking of all the wonderful things that I'm going to bake and cook! Cookies! Casserole! Grilled Cheese!

Last night as we were getting the stove put back in, it occurred to me that I should have made food in the crock pot. Dash it all! Why didn't I think of that sooner!

Kitchen Progress

We have made quite a lot of progress on the kitchen. The wallpaper is basically all gone and we have removed the baseboards and the soffits above the cupboards.

We started the next phase of the project - wall prep. We have done a lot of mudding so far but still have a little more to do. After that we need to sand and then touch up the rough spots again and sand again.

We still haven't decided a paint color. We are torn between tans, creams, yellows, and light greens. Any opinions?

Wallpaper update

After working on the wallpaper twice (a total of about 5-6 hours probably), here is where I am at:

One sizable section done. The PaperTiger works pretty well, but the wallpaper remover stuff is indispensable. It still doesn't just jump right off the wall (I wish), but at least it comes off in slightly larger pieces.

Another thing that I did the other day was make this wreath. It was pretty fun and will brighten up our front door for spring.

I think it would be fun to take a flower arranging class.

Kitchen Wallpaper

Well, I am about to embark on a big task: Taking down all the wallpaper in the kitchen. There is A LOT of it. There aren't too many cupboards in our kitchen but it is a big room, which leaves lots of area for wallpaper. Also, annoyingly, it goes behind the splash guard on the countertops for quite a ways.

Isn't it just too cute?

No. it is coming off - all of it - and I'm starting today. I did some test peeling on one edge a while ago and it is going to be more stubborn than the wallpaper we took off from the bathroom. I have done a little reading online to decide what is the best way to go about this.

I purchased a Paper Tiger, which will poke a lot of shallow little holes in the wallpaper (and if used right, not in the drywall) to allow liquid to get behind more than just the edges. You gently roll it around in an area, then spray/wipe/roll it with wallpaper adhesive remover and wait for a while with fingers crossed. Then, I think you are supposed to be able to just peel and scrape the loosened wallpaper off. I am just really really really hoping it is that simple.

Well, I've got my supplies, my iPod, and Toby for company, and I've delayed starting by writing this, so here goes nothing! I'll keep y'all posted!

I finally finished my cross stitch!

I did it! After over a year working on it, I finished my biggest ever cross-stitch project. It is a tropical underwater scene with lots of colorful fish. Being finished came very abruptly- I was working on this and that hole in the design and suddenly -wallah - there were no more holes! I did the finish work which went very quickly and now here it is:


The dimensions are 12" x 16" and it has about 30 colors in it. I plan on framing it but after that I am not sure what to do with it. Probably it will go in either the bathroom or spare bedroom if it doesn't go well in the bathroom.