So I had a baby..... almost 6 months ago. I just want to confirm that not much gets done when you have a baby. Okay, let me clarify. Not much gets done except for feeding the baby, taking care of the baby, playing with the baby, and loving the baby. You know... taking care of another human being. In my spare time now I'm generally running around the house like a mad woman trying to pick stuff up, throw in a load of laundry, or cook some sort of meal. I'm not complaining though. Really! But it's true what they say, that your life really changes after the baby comes. And it's really hard to comprehend until it actually happens! Before Baby G arrived I really worried that I wouldn't have the patience to take care of someone else. I really enjoyed my free time. But honestly, giving up most of my free time has been easy. Totally worth it :)
I do occasionally find some time for a little project. That painting I planned for the nursery? It's still a blank canvas. I might finish before Baby G is 18. But smaller projects happen here and there.
One of the first projects I did after Baby G's birth was create a memory box with all of his birth items. I got the idea from Pinterest. I obviously wanted to hold on to all of these things, so why not display them? I started by ordering a shadow box off of Amazon. (So much easier than taking a 2-month old to the store.)
The shadow box arrived. It sat for awhile. And then one day during nap time I gathered everything I wanted to use. I am most proud that I managed to hold on to all 3 of our hospital bands. Go me.
Ugh. I just realized I misspelled "hospital" not once, but twice. Ignore, please! I'm not fixing it.
Then came assembly. Basically I used the hospital blanket as a backdrop for everything else. This was my first go at it.
It looks a little cramped, doesn't it? It hung on the wall like this for awhile until finally one day I cut the blanket up. Why I tried to stuff an entire blanket in that frame, I don't know. Here's how it ended up.
I've been consumed by baby things recently. Well baby things and kitchen things. Still finishing up the kitchen renovation! Going on three months now. I work on baby things to get my mind off of kitchen things.
Back when I was setting up my registry I discovered the Amazon registry system. I love the idea because in addition to registering for items on Amazon you can add items from pretty much any other website. This includes Etsy. I loved this.
So of course I browsed Etsy and found all sorts of cute baby items that were adorable but yet not exactly necessary. Things like baby moccasins. Who doesn't need a pair? The other things I really liked was this paper mobile. It's cute and simple. But at $40 it is also a bit pricey. And being simple I thought, "Hey I could do that." Probably not as well, but could certainly give it a whirl.
So I did.
My supplies included:
Colored cardstock paper
X-Acto knife
Illusion Wire (a.k.a. clear string) from the jewelry section
Clear craft glue
I started out by buying some colored cardstock paper. Fade-RESISTANT cardstock paper! If I remember correctly the paper was $3-4 a sheet. So I was already coming out ahead in my investment.
For just about every piece of the mobile I used the same process. I'd make a stencil. Then trace onto the colored paper.
Stencil
Trace
I kinda quit taking pictures around this point. Things got a little more hairy when I started the clouds. The clouds each consist of 3 identical pieces of paper, each in the shape of the cloud. I would then fold two of the clouds in half, and glue one to each side of the flat cloud. Make sense? The tricky part was getting everything to hold together until the glue could dry.
Since I'm being honest, this mobile ended up taking me longer than I anticipated. I worked on it in pieces. Cutting little pieces of paper out with the X-acto knife gets old after awhile. And then there was the aforementioned frustration of gluing the pieces together. So $40.00? Perhaps it was fair price after all.
However I finally got it done. And it is good enough for me. And good enough for future baby. I'll just never show him the Etsy version.
I was asked to paint some doors for a local charity gala. I wish I could say that my contribution for this event would directly be raising money. But it's not. This is more of an aesthetic donation... a sitting-in-the-background-and-being-pretty donation. Decorations are important too :)
The doors I was working with were these old closet doors. Their purpose is to hide some unsightly items.
I was asked to paint them in a Japanese theme. Things that come to mind are: bamboo, cherry trees, and other nature-like things. Like this:
Selfishly, I didn't want to spend more than a few hours on this project, so I went with a simple cherry tree theme. Here's the little sketch I drafted up. Yes, there are all sorts of copyrighted images. I get it. But this is for charity. It's cool.
First step was to paint the doors black. Luckily we had plenty of black paint left over from the garage project. And it was glossy. It was pretty much made for this project.
Before starting I debated with myself if it would be easier to start with a black canvas, or sketch out my image and then paint around it in black. The black canvas won. However, I knew I was going to be in for a couple layers of the white paint. Luckily they make paint for that purpose. It's called primer. And we have lots of that too!
And so i started painting away. It's actually quite fun to paint on such a large canvas. I need to do this more often. After one coat, my painting was looking as expected: streaky.
But a few coats later: success.
Step two was to add a bit of color. I rummaged through my paint box and found some paints to do the job.
Oh, wait. Backup. I did go back and prime out some flowers. This helped the red color pop more than it was doing directly on the black. And here we have it. All done.
It's a fun day when you get to go to Lowe's and buy a new door lock. Then ask the key guy to make you eight new keys. He then makes a comment about how you must have a big family.
After a solid five minutes of key making you feel bad and scale back your order. You also realize your new lock already comes with two keys! It's like you won the lottery.
Did I mention we moved?
Naturally new houses call for new door locks. Among the chaos of packing, keeping the house super tidy, etc. I forced a crafty project on myself. Why buy those generic key covers when you can spray paint? Enter Oil Rubbed Bronze spray paint.
At the time the color choice seemed like a good idea. Afterall, they would match the metal of the new door hardware.
Of course hindsight is always 20/20 and I probably could have gone with a bolder color. These are sleek though. Classy and sleek.
As for our old keys, I decided to make a keepsake out of one of them... because I'm attached and emotional like that. I had seen this idea awhile back on Pinterest. (Here is the link to the actual blog.)
Sure, a map could have been cute too.
And here is my little creation.
That purple image/sketch-looking thing in the background is our house. I played around with a photo in Photoshop then applied my favorite filter: Poster Edges. It was meant to blend in to the background a bit. But also be... well... relevant.
I should also clarify that this is clearly the husband's key as I am not a die-hard Ravens fan. Shame, I know.
My humble little everything room. When we first moved in we called this the fun house room because most of the walls were not straight. They were bowed. Or slanted. But definitely not straight. But that issue was remedied by Mr. Colorful Engineer. He's so handy.
Now there are a lot of possibilities in this little basement space. If nothing else it keeps all my arts and crafts junk from being scattered around the house!
I've got a good corner set up for painting.
I've got my computer corner for those digital projects. Also good for killing time on Facebook. There's a sewing nook for those random sewing projects. (Meatball's vampire costume reins as my greatest sewing success to date.) And then there's room for everything in between.
Temporarily my Everything Room has been packed up. I know. It's really a sad state of affairs. Every time I feel like whipping out a paint brush my plans are quickly derailed.
It's okay though. My room is only being relocated. And soon I will be back in business!
Since I've gotten home from New Mexico, all I have wanted to do is do nothing. Nothing. Just hang out. In between life, sometimes it's hard to find time to do anything else. Usually I use my Friday's off to catch up on cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, and if time allows, some painting. Today was one of my Friday's off. And today I did none (or not much) of that. Instead, I had visitors! I had visitors and photo subjects. They let me document our day...
V and N came to visit Mike and I last night. They stayed for about 24 hours. Since it had been awhile since I had watched them, I planned. I planned activities so they would not be bored.
Of course, of all days, today my car had to be in the shop. So I had to barter with my brother for his car. We settled on strawberries. More on that later...
We started the day with breakfast, the most important meal of the day. V and N wanted cereal. Since we only have rice milk in the house, they changed their minds quickly. Instead they decided on oatmeal. What they did not know was that the oatmeal was made with rice milk. Shh.
After breakfast we hung around until shortly before 10am. We planned to leave around then to go strawberry picking at Gorman Farm. We get our CSA share from them in the summer. So since I follow them on Twitter I also know that they've been selling out of strawberries around 2pm on most days. We weren't going to miss out.
With two free laborers, we got to picking.
We were probably only there picking for about 30 minutes. But we really made out.
Had I only known how much those three buckets of strawberries were going to cost me...
Seriously, I don't want to talk about it. But they were delicious.
After lunch I had this project lined up for them. Anybody else do Sun Art as a kid?? I actually found this at the Nuclear Science Museum gift shop and brought it home with me. I was that excited.
I made V and N go hunting for objects they wanted to use. Then we got to creating.
I meant to take a picture of their final product but I must have gotten sidetrack. Then they left, prints in tow.
So here is my print. I was slightly lazier and did not leave the house to find my objects. That's right. A burnt out light bulb and objects from our junk drawer.
So it wasn't until after all of this that V and N started settling down. V entertained himself with Wii. And N entertained herself with coloring.
I am so proud.
Meatball, of course, was by our side the whole time. He was also worn out by this point. He sat by N's feet and slowly drifted off to sleep...
