The Story of a Chair

My husband would say I have some sort of a love affair with chairs, though he would probably phrase it as "a sick love affair with chairs". I prefer to be less derogatory of my seating.

Our house is on the small side. I totally thought I would be fine with this because kids have the most stuff when they're babies and then it gets better right???? Yes, I was the idiot that actually thought that. Regardless of the fact that I am an organizer and purger by birth, I married into a family that has quite a few pack rats...and it's apparently genetic! Who knew? But even though the house is wee, I didn't see the big deal with trying to put nice seating spaces into all the rooms, including the children's.

My friend Merideth scored this chair for me while I was on the road to Oklahoma in August.

Oh so hideous! The only thing I actually liked about this chair was the fact that it was faux bamboo and the size was perfect for my purposes.

It was to be for my son's room and even before I had the chair I knew what  I was going to do with it. I was going to paint it red and I had a gorgeous antique grain sack for the upholstery.

Then I finished Dylan's Cabinet and decided that might be too much red for his tiny room. So I went with blue instead.

This is the same ASCP that I used on Dylan's Chest: Napoleonic Blue 

I was completely and totally in love with this grain sack from the second I saw it. I didn't know what it would eventually be used for but I bought it immediately!

I had to make the piping myself and try my hardest to sew the new cushion cover and make it look good. I'm still relatively new to sewing so I had to enlist my mother for a little bit of this. But, I am very proud to say I did most of it myself!

Putting it all together

I had to use auto primer on the chair. The yellow was insane to cover!

Until this chair was in his room this is how my son would read or play his games. This is also how his room looks the majority of the time as well...STUFF everywhere! He's also extremely stubborn about being photographed so I have to sneak the pictures in quickly or I don't get them!

Here it is all finished.

I dig the blue faux bamboo...it makes me happy :)

I love that all of his bedroom colors are in this grain sack!

I also love that he sat down in his chair and said that I was "the best most awesome mama ever!"

He's pretty fantastic too!

Burlap and Muslin Christmas - Tree Skirt

Last year was an extremely busy winter for me. Starting in the late Fall, I was booked solid through the end of January. That was such a blessing and a crazy awesome experience for me as well. In the midst of all of that I decided I needed to get all Pinterest crafty and make new Christmas decor. Pinterest was full of tutorials on 'fast and easy' and 'no sew' options. However, my children are little demons when it comes to destruction and I knew that none of those easier options would hold up for our household. So I merged a few of those tutorials into one and came up with my own version.

I had never had a tree skirt and I decided the old blanket just wasn't good enough anymore and that regardless of my busyness I was going to have a tree skirt!!!

This is what I put together:

Burlap and Muslin

Cut them into strips. By the way, don't you love the vintage yard stick...sigh, they just don't make them like that anymore!

Used the muslin for the base and serged the edges. Next came the tedious part, the pinning.

After once around I was feeling super excited! This was going to be awesome!

Five hours later, with burlap burn and arms aching from holding the weight of the skirt while sewing, I was not thinking awesome...I was thinking 'idiot'

Then, when all was finished, I was in awesome-land again. It turned out perfect! I had to cram it into one night because I had planned a Christmas Brunch for my ladies and I wanted everything to look great! This is such a lousy picture of my tree with the skirt under it, but I honestly couldn't find the one I had originally taken.

Here it is all spread out - I still just love it!

It suits my house and I am so happy that I did it. I'm even more glad that I took the time and sewed it rather than hot glued it. This is something I want to last for a long time!

Closet Locks and a Headband Organizer

It always seems to me, that there are little projects that just pile up. They stack up in your mind, on a list, or physically in your home until you just want to scream. However, life seems to just keep getting in the way. You always have the best of intentions for getting the projects finished but you never seem to find the time. I have about 7 million of those! My brain never turns off...NEVER! I'm always thinking about what I could do with this or that and I have lists like crazy. Organization of our home is a HUGE priority for me - absolutely my biggest project to work on. I'm one of those that likes to go through things about twice a year and just purge, my husband on the other hand is not one of those. He's a 'what if we need this later' kind of guy that comes from a long line of people just the same. He's also passed that along to our children. So now, I'm going through our home and organizing room by room - for my sanity!

My daughters room is crazy. Seriously nuts! The child is obsessed with clothes and pulls them out of her closet to pick what she wants to wear. So clothing both clean and dirty ends up on the floor and then is trampled on and therefore the clean becomes becomes dirty. All of this ends up in the laundry room and I wash it and put it back away only for the vicious cycle to continue...

So in desperation I did this:

Yes! I put surface bolts on my daughters closet. I had a slight twinge of guilt and then I got over it. 

While doing this project, another one was brought back to my attention. My daughters headbands are all over the place. She doesn't have a good place to store them so they just end up everywhere. I had seen an organizer on pinterest a while back but didn't pin it myself. I just stored it away in the never ending lists in my head and then forgot about it. Well, it was time to whip it back out and get it done!

This was so easy! I had about 10 minutes and I was really trying to avoid doing dishes so I grabbed my supplies and got started. 

You will need:

1 roll of paper towels

Fabric that is at least 17"x20"

Hot glue gun

I chose white paper towels because my fabric has a white background and I didn't want to have designs showing through. I also had left over fabric from Jade's room and I knew it was what I wanted to use.

I cut my fabric down to size and got busy with the hot glue. I folded the edges over so as not to have a raw edge. then I just lined it up and glued it down.

I wrapped it like a present and fold/pleated the ends, gluing everything down as I went.

I think the finished product is pretty cute, and it only took 7 minutes! That's right, seven. Thank goodness there is now a place to put all of these things. One more tiny organizational step is complete. Now on to the 6,999,999 left to go!

Dylan's Cabinet

This is the story of a gun cabinet. 

A gun cabinet that I saw as something else entirely...

My husband's Grandfather built this cabinet many years ago, well he built two almost identical gun cabinets. We chose one, and Brandon's cousin took the other. I love free things, especially free things with GREAT sentimental value.

This is probably the driest piece of furniture I have ever worked on. I didn't ask Grandaddy, but I'm pretty sure it never had a protective coat on it. It took some sanding because it was rough but I was able to apply stain without stripping it. I did a test patch to make sure:

Soaked the stain right up!

 I took out the center piece because I wasn't going to put the doors back on. You can also really see how dry it was. I mean wow!

Drilled holes for shelves, I won't go into all the detail of this because frankly it haunts me and would also make this the longest post in history. But I finally got it to work.

Then I made shelves

Yea for level shelves!

I think this turned out beautifully in my sons room. I still have a few baskets to get, but it's serving it's purpose and it's pretty stinking cute I think.

In this picture you can see just a tiny bit of Dylan's new window as well. We are so happy to have finally gotten him a new one. You can all ignore the hideous backyard beyond - we're working on that this Spring/Summer.

And of course I love the little toys as bookends with the vintage children's books

One more project down for my Dylan's room. I'm loving it!

Kerri's Cabinet

I've said this before and I'll say it again...probably a lot since I have such an obsession with furniture, but every once in a while you work on a piece that you want to keep. It's happened to me now on five different occasions. Yep, FIVE! This piece was one of those "Oh I wish I could keep this!" type pieces.

My friend Kerri had this piece that her father had built. The lines of the piece were great, but it had seen its share of wear and tear. She was wanting to update it and make it shine. I need to let you all know that Kerri is SUPER talented and probably could have done this herself if she wasn't so busy being an awesome mother of three, a fabulous jewelry maker, and gorgeous wife! Her jewelry is one of my little addictions, I simply adore it and have enough pieces now that I wear something she has made almost daily.

This is what the piece looked like before

I would apologize for the mess in our garage, because we were cleaning it out at the time, but it's always messy because I'm always working on about 20 million things at a time. It is what it is.

These were the upper doors (sans glass) and the shelves

It was pretty straight forward really. She wanted Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in French Linen (which is a personal favorite of mine) and some dark wax. So I got to work. I loved how it lightened up the piece so much. I fell in love hard and fast with this one!

Detail when I started the dark wax

In this picture you can see how scarred the lower shelves were, they took quite a bit of sanding before I could begin the painting.

This is the finished piece in my garage.

Kerri lives a good distance from me and so I didn't get to take the final pictures of this piece myself. She gladly provided the finished product pictures with the cabinet in place in her home.

She was very pleased and so was I. I can't wait to take a trip out there and see it in person...and have a little fun with a great lady too!

Pennie's Barstools

There comes  a point, every once in a while, where you don't listen to your instincts. The instincts that tell you that you should really NOT try a certain paint color or do something a certain way...and you really should've listened to your little inner voice because you end up doing the same pieces twice. But then, this amazing thing happens and when you finish that project up for the last time it is so incredible that people want to purchase the project and are really sad when you tell them that they can't because it's for a client. Well, this was that project for me.

My daughter just had to model her first day of school outfit while on the barstool. She was obsessed with these stools, and Pennie's house, and Pennie's grandkids playroom. She still talks about it all the time.

Pennie's house is pretty fabulous from top to bottom, but these barstools were so dark and they really needed to pop. Let's make'em pop! She has a very large island in her kitchen that was painted a red and then dry brushed with turquoise. 

This was the first look:

Looks good against the island, but I was never thrilled with the brown seats against the red and Pennie felt the same

You can really see the major problem here...the stools totally fade into the brick wall. No pop at all!

So I shared my original instincts for color options with Pennie and this is exactly what she wanted. YAY!

So this one may have taken a detour, but wow what an ending! Pennie was very happy and so was I. My sweet daughter still misses the stools being in our house ;)