My name is Cheryl and I would like to apologize in advance for the disorganization and eclecticness (eclectnicity?) of the coming week.
As usual I have a slew of excuses and reasons for my behaviour and here they are:
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It's Spring! In addition to real life, project making and blogging I have begun the arduous task of spring cleaning. In my house spring cleaning is also known as “dump everything in the middle of the room, start chucking stuff out then move to another room to put something away and repeat, THEN when all rooms have large piles, panic a little, drink a lot of coffee and eventually get back to it”. This process usually takes me at least a couple of weeks and usually causes my husband to quietly consider a trial two week separation.
(*interesting factoid #1: I am the only member of my family that considers spring cleaning to be quality family time.) -
That's it. Usually my excuse for things is I'm cheap and lazy (and/or easy), which only half fits here, so I'm going with “it's Spring!”
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I realize that one and one half excuses could not really be considered a slew, so I added this one. Plus I like when my Word program adds the indented numbers for me. Slick.
I'm going to try not to be too wordy, but I'm also smart enough to not make any promises on that front.
I will include lots of pictures and I will hope that most of them will be relevant. In a way, I guess I'm just suggesting that you buckle up, grab a coffee and hang on for the ride.
Two weeks ago I had an itemized list of things that I was going to write about and share.
It was a lovely list.
Written with purple pen (not that I'm partial to purple pens, but it was the closest pen and in retrospect seems slightly more fancy than your standard blue or black).
Little flower doodles in the corners.
Tiny hearts separating each thought (I'm totally lying about the hearts, but I wish I had of done that).
And then I lost the list.
So like I said:
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coffee (or your beverage of choice)
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buckle up
I know this is primarily a scrapbooking site, but I find as my kids get older, I seem to scrapbook less and do more home decor type projects. And since it's been almost 2 years since I hosted here I thought I would more or less redo the theme I did last time which was making stuff from junk I find at thrift stores.
Or if you're in a purple pen kind of mood we can call it “Scrapbooking in Today's Green World: ReUse, ReInvent, ReCreate”.
I hope that's okay.
Okay, time for slightly less talk and a little more action.
The last time I hosted I had started a photo wall in our basement.
I'm almost finished.
I know that was almost two years ago, but sometimes I get distracted. Plus, our basement is where our boys hang out. It smells like pre-teen boys (which is similar to feet, but worse) and sounds like angry drumming, electric guitar and nerf gun-wars, so I'm sure you can understand why I don't make it habit of going down there.
One of the things that I did before starting on my photo wall was hit the internets. I googled my way through a plethora of images before settling on the first one I saw (hello, Pottery Barn, my pretty)
These were the two that I finally printed off:
Then I took these sheets shopping with me and picked out a couple of frames with oval mats (to go with the 393 square and rectangular frames that I have unused and hidden around my house).
I decided that the photo ledge was the way to go, because, frankly, having to hang two things levelly sounded much better than a) trying to hang a bunch of photos myself, all those excess nail holes are hard to hide or b) spending an afternoon with my husband hanging them, (see above: 2 week trial separation - after many years together we know which sports not to participate as a team in).
This is what our downstairs photo wall looks like so far:
I used a little piece on the ledge that I shared during the last time I hosted the blog:
I think I will add another ledge underneath the middle one - it looks weirdly empty to me.
Here is more of the room:
And here is a close-up of the top of the trunk that my mom painted for me.
(the trunk was my mom and dad's when they were first married):
Then, as I am accustomed to doing, I began to binge a bit on photo ledges.
I purchased them at a store here called Jysk (pronounced Yisk for some strange Scandanavian reason, I think I heard that it's the same reason that we Canadians feel the need to add the letter u to many words). But I'm pretty sure you can pick them up just about anywhere shelves are sold.
I did these ones in our bedroom:
(somewhat interesting factoid #2: the distressed frames were found at the dollar store a few years ago for $5 each, no spraypaint was harmed in the making of this photo wall)
And here is a close up of the little digital art I made to break up all the black frames:
And here is a 5x7 PDF download of the pieces shown above for you to use if you like:
And I used a couple in our living room here:
The vase was a shiny beige flower vase I've had kicking around for about 20 years, I painted it with black spraypaint and cut the four out of dollar store vinyl with my Cricut and then when the black paint was dry, put the vinyl on and used a matte white spraypaint overtop. When I peeled the vinyl off, the edges of the number 4 weren't super clean so when it dried I just sanded it a bit in a "I totally meant to do that" sort of way.
Funny, a lot of my projects seem to end that way.
The two framed pieces are digital art that I made in PSE using lyrics from a Maroon 5 song and printed on canvas paper that I purchased last year at the art store (it comes in rolls and when it works it looks really cool, but when it doesn't it makes me say bad words to my printer and canvas paper in general).
Do you want to know the one thing that I haven't been able to find at the second hand stores?
Is the suspense killing you?
Printer trays.
I long for a printer tray.
But mostly I long for finding a printer tray in a thrift store for $1.99.
It could happen.
But while I long and wait patiently for that day, please peruse some of my fellow WCS girls' gorgeous printer trays, which to me seem like a condensed version of a photo/art wall.
Lisa & Keshet sent me these to share:
So, now, not only do I want to find a printer tray real cheap, but I want to get married again and hire a proper photographer for GORGEOUS wedding photos, and I might as well throw some time travel in there (you know, where I know what I know NOW but get to go back in time to have a do-over of some sort with all this knowledge).
Thanks ladies.
Lisa made two more that she graciously shared as well:
(*note to self: take self portrait with family lying on our backs)
Thanks again, Ladies. I have just mentally doubled my efforts to find a cheap printer tray.
So that's today.
I hope it wasn't too long.
I'm sure it was so I hope that many of you are skimmers and stayed with me to get to the photos.
Stick around after the break, coming up next, I've Got Wood! Paint, Stamping and Other Applications.