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Here's a mini makeover that I think anyone could do in a day and create a pretty way to organize your ribbons in your craft room. I figure if things are handy (and easy to find) you're more likely to use them.
I found this spice rack at a local yard sale for 50 cents. The wood wasn't great, but I imagined it primed and painted white.

At first I wasn't sure what I would put on it, and when I tried some ribbon spools they looked like they would fall out. Then I realized, duh, that once the rack was on the wall it would prevent things from falling out the back. I placed the rack just above my thread rack, which is the next thing to get painted white. I don't want to be boring, but I just love how colours look against a white background.
I managed to fit almost all of my ribbon, except the yellow ones and my lace. I need another spice rack! As I've mentioned before (you can click on the "ribbons" label to see other posts on the subject) I usually wind the ribbons onto bits of cardboard rolls until I have a wooden spool free. It's a great way to use your old wooden spools once the thread is gone.

So I've taken to calling it my studio, but it's really a combination of crafts room and art studio. It feels like an incredible luxury to have my own workroom for sewing and painting. And it's pretty much done, I just need a new light fixture!

I bought a desk from craigslist to have a practical working surface. It's a really big heavy desk with lots of storage for only $20. Well it quickly became covered with a mish-mash of crafts supplies. You know how it is! So I decided I needed some open shelves.
Yesterday I finished making the shelves. There was lots of lumber left in our garage when we moved in and I asked Bradley to cut one big plank into three pieces. They were a bit rough, but after a quick sand to avoid the really splintery bits, I primed and painted and they were fine. The brackets are from IKEA.The shades for the window are also from IKEA. They're patterned panel curtains that I like for their lacy look. (inspired by Fieldguided's beautiful room with lace covered window) I had bought them for our old house bedroom but they didn't really work out there. So it was great to find the perfect spot in our new house.

So, the south wall has the desk and open shelves with a little bench under the window.The east wall has my two secretary desks. The desk on the right has crafts supplies and the one on the left has art supplies. It helps keep things organized so that I can actually find things.The north wall has my fabric cabinet with vintage tins on top with extra sewing notions.This room has a pretty decorative vent cover and lovely dark hardwood floors. So painting was the only thing I needed to do (again because of holes in the walls after electrical work). The walls are painted in CIL Wedding White, which I think is similar to Benjamin Moore's Swiss Coffee. It's a nice bright white. The shelves were painted to match the trim in Cloud White. Just for fun, I searched under "craft room" on Flickr and found lots of inspiring pictures. You can see my favourites here. I love the fact that I'm not the only one with boxes and baskets and jars and cabinets and shelves bursting with supplies. There's a comfortable solidarity in it.

So today I've been doing the messy jobs that come before decorating. We have nice old grates that cover our vents, but the one in the bedroom had peeling paint and looked a bit grim. So I decided to strip it so I could repaint it and make it look nice and smooth.

I always regretting stripping anything. It always looks much much worse after you start stripping. And of course the bottle (this kind is meant to be environmentally friendly) confidently tells you that this stripper can take away layers of paint and it will do all the work for you. But in truth it's usually a smelly, messy, tedious job.

Afterwards I'm usually very happy with the results and feel it was worth it. Sort of. But in this case after a few rounds of gooey paint scraping I decided to call it a day and clean up, do a little sanding and leave it at that.
In this case the results weren't great. Probably not much better than a bit of scraping and sanding would have been, but I'm done and have remembered why I probably won't do this again.
We've also made new baseboards, since we removed the wainscotting. I primed those earlier this week, and today they got their 1st coat of paint. The nice old style of baseboards in our house are plain with a bevelled edge at the top. We couldn't find them pre-made so we (ie. Bradley) made our own with planks of wood cut with a matching bevelled edge.

This grate will tidy up our bedroom, along with the baseboards. Taking out the wainscotting turned out to create a whole lot of work. Also, as I just discovered, my post was used on Apartment Therapy.

This time I didn't get asked and they really hated this one! In my defense I think it's one of those cases where a photo is a bit misleading. The wainscotting really wasn't nice, and everyone who visited the house agreed. The room still has nice character with the old trim and aforementioned pretty old grate. And you guys know I do appreciate old things...

So lately we've been doing lots of work on the house, mainly painting, and I've been trying out some new colours. When it came to the kitchen I wanted something very light. Our old kitchen had sliding doors out to the garden, as well as a large window and it was very bright. The new kitchen has a large window but only a single back door with a small window in it.

you can see the colour here, pretty subtle...

Before and After

Phew! It's been a very busy few weeks. We've unpacked most of our boxes and are finding that luckily our furniture fits very nicely into the house. My favourite room so far is the living room which is practically all decorated.
Before we moved in I painted the walls. The original colour was a designer favourite Manchester Tan but I wanted something lighter. I chose a pretty pale blue colour called Green Tint. It looks like a bluish grey on the chip - very pale - but I found once I had painted all the walls you really start to see the blue. A very grey, soft, pale blue that I feel makes the room seem larger and brighter. It's hard to pick light subtle colours like this from the chip, in this case I actually relied on a description of the colour by a designer in House Beautiful magazine.

Then I added sheer voile curtains combined with blue linen drapes with a branch pattern. For the cushions I sewed two new blue and brown floral cushions and bought a velvet and grosgrain ribbon embellished cushion. Finally I hung my favourite picture on the wall, an original antique pen & ink piece that illustrates the Aesop fable The Fox and the Crow.
But the big project right now (being undertaken by my resourceful and talented husband) is updating our wiring. During the inspection we found out that there was a lot of knob and tube wiring in the house. In case you don't know, it's an old style of wiring that everyone used to have.

But nowadays any knob and tube wiring is going to be very old, and a bit the worse for wear. Mainly it becomes dry and a little brittle and can be a fire hazard. Insurance companies require that you replace it, and because you need insurance to get a mortgage we really have no choice in the matter.
Now that we're doing it, I'm glad because the old wiring that's coming out of the walls certainly doesn't look very wholesome.

Next up, the bedroom!

Hello There:

Today is the beginning of a new week and the end of the Easter week. A perfect time to share a few photos of my family's Easter eggs. Each year, we like to try a new application for decorating eggs. This year we came up with the clever idea to use bubble wrap as part of our decorating process. The results were fabulous.....





Throughout the years, we have learned to use rubberbands, painters tape, scotch tape, paper towels and lots of other household items. This mosaic egg was created by cutting lots of triangular shapes from blue painter's tape and applying them to the egg before dying....



This "mummy" egg was created by weaving tape over and under itself....



There hasn't been a single year since my first son was born that we haven't decorated eggs. As a child, my mom and I would decorate eggs using the pre-packaged egg decorating kits, but Gary and I found that we had better results mixing our own colors using food dye.

The kids are all too old for hiding and finding the eggs, but we still have fun decorating. I suppose that when my husband and I become "empty nesters" we'll still take a couple of hours on the Saturday night before Easter to decorate eggs, just the two of us.

Until Next Time:
Kim
Garden Painter Art

Sometimes I post something and then I think it needs a little follow-up. In this case it's the IKEA Fusion dining set. I loved it when we bought it and it did fit perfectly into our kitchen eat-in area. But I was never really happy with the cushions.

The set comes with the seats covered in a black matte vinyl? fabric. I really didn't like it. So I used an aqua and white striped fabric I had on hand to recover them. But I made some mistakes. First of all I didn't pre-wash the fabric and I had bought it 2nd hand so it turns out that there were dusty marks on it. I didn't notice until later.

Also I didn't remove the black fabric that was already there since it was attached with about 1000 staples. This isn't a good idea because it doesn't feel right and there was a subtle dark shadow from having the black underneath the white and blue striped fabric.

So this time I was determined to do it right. (if something is worth doing, etc...) For some reason I was picturing a green and white print and finally found the perfect one at a fabric store on Queen West. The best part is that it was a fabric that was usually $19/yard but I found an end piece that was around 1.5 yards for only $10! The green colour was exactly what I was looking for, and it was a nice upholstery weight with a lovely smooth feel to it.

Bradley helped remove the 1000 staples and I attached the new fabric and now I re-love the IKEA dining set. Yay!

So our big news is that we've just put the house up for sale. AND given that it's up for sale I can say that we're pretty much done renovating! So coming up soon I'll be showing all the final before and afters for the house.

If you've ever sold your place before you know it involves a bit of staging. In our case it meant moving a few things out to make things as spacious-looking as possible. I don't think it's very misleading in our case as most people probably don't have a couple of china cabinets filled with yarn and fabric respectively.

So now the house is very clean and tidy and the lack of clutter is a bit weird. But I'm finding it very relaxing now that most of the work is done. There's been a lot of finishing loose ends, such as finally putting in the finishing panels in our kitchen. I'll be posting that and doing a final assessment of puttting in an IKEA kitchen.. thanks for asking James!

Um, I know, I'm falling a bit behind with the daily advent stuff. Well, maybe I'll catch up with some double posts soon...

Anyway, today's idea is a cheaper, greener - and I think more beautiful - alternative to running up your electric bill with a zillion strands of outdoor lights. Ice luminaria. They do work best in cold weather, but we've largely had that in spades this year in Pittsburgh (not today though - 50 degrees! And all my lanterns melted shortly after I took the photo below. Oh well, I can make them again. Back to snow tomorrow.)
You can find even more details about these in this month's issue of Nick Jr Magazine - I wrote up a bunch of the activities in the parenting pull-out, and there's lots more to like there (like a recipe for figgy pudding, plus the customs that go with it. Yes, that figgy pudding from the song. Turns out it's tasty, and even kind of good for you. Who knew?). As usual with Nick Jr, all the activities are super easy, super good, mostly "green" and fun to do with kids.

Okay, so not only are ice lanterns pretty to look at, they're a blast to make - kind of a cross between a water balloon adventure and a science experiment. All you do is fill up heavy duty latex balloons with water, let them freeze outdoors or in your freezer (but if you have room in your freezer for a bunch of BIG water balloons I am mega impressed), crack a hole in the top, pour out the unfrozen water, put a candle in the middle and light it. Voila!

Is this cat waiting for a huge spider?

Mums, lots and lots of beautiful mums!

The colors of this front porch are just delicious, don't you agree?

This home is a favorite for both my husband and I. Unfortunately I didn't get the photo I wanted but will try again when the lighting is better.


Some ghoulish twists...freakish!


More posts later on in the week, feel free to check back...

This is a fun project I finally finished. I've been meaning to do this for ages, because I'm always inspired by pretty painted boxes I see on Flickr. As you may have guessed it started out life as an IKEA box, that has five smaller boxes for drawers.All I did was prime the box, paint it white and then add decorative paper covers for the drawers. I used some vintage wallpaper I bought from this shop on etsy (it was a gorgeous collage pack - so much fun to get and sort through the bits of fabric, ribbon and paper) and glued the paper on using PVA glue from an art shop.Also in the picture is a little quilted coaster I made from bits of fabric from the workroom fabric swap. I really do use the little bits of fabric I find here and there!

I'm not sure where I'll put the box, as I had originally planned to mount it to the wall beside the bed. That way I can have a book and my water bottle next to me since we only have room for one bedside table (and it's not on my side). But then I took the picture here on our white cabinet that has the t.v. and I really like the way it looks there. I just wish the boxes were big enough for the remotes, that would be really useful.
But practical or not it brightens up the spot so I think it's staying.

p.s. the water bottle is from The Japanese Paper Place, I bought it because it the design was so pretty but it turns out it's so great, because it's the thermos version and it really keeps my water cold, and tea hot!

The weekend before last I finally did a whole bunch of craiglisting and swapped all kinds of furniture. I sold two storage ottomans(men?) and threw in the cushions I'd made for the top because the person who came for them seemed to like them so much. I sold an IKEA bureau that just had camping gear - all that went into the shed. I sold a sideboard and a bedside table, also from IKEA, neither of which had a place to go anymore. And finally our very tall IKEA hutch. Oh, and my old camping backpack. I can't tell you how good it was to clear all those things out!!

Before: this corner of the kitchen used to be a workshop, with all the tools and supplies for the renovation.

It's basically done, but someday we'd like to replace the sliding doors (that don't slide very well), the ceiling fan and the dusty old stucco on the ceiling. The Fusion set is great because the chairs curve around the table and it doesn't take up much room. I didn't care for the black seat covers, so I replaced those with a striped aqua and white fabric that I bought at the Textile Museum Yardage sale.

I was trying to pick a fabric then noticed this one matches the curtains perfectly, hurray!

Thank you for the shelf comments, they really cheered me up! This weekend we finally put up the fan back up over the stove, and I can't tell you how happy I am about it. When I say "we" I mean Bradley because I did very little aside from finding screws and washers, picking them up when they fell, and holding the fan for a few minutes. Also saying things like "wow, it looks so good", "do you want me to leave you alone now?" and "I can't believe you finished that bit already". The latter because it was much more difficult than expected.

The problem in the first place is that given the height of the cabinets and the hole in the wall where the fan used to be, there was a new gap between the two. Otherwise the cabinets would have been too low on the wall and too close to the countertop. This is the kind of thing that makes installing your IKEA kitchen tricky.

So first Bradley used finishing panels to construct a box that would be the shelf. Finishing panels are just big flat pieces from IKEA that have the same finish as the door fronts so that you can attach them to the sides of your cupboards so that they match. So dad-in-law helped cut pieces to size with his table saw. That was a few weeks ago.

Then after assembling the box, Bradley had to move the entire row of cabinets (they hang on a rail) a tiny bit to the left to fit the box in, then back again so that it was snug. This involved taking everything out of all the cabinets. Then finally an extra hole was needed in the wall for the fan to fit in place and then the fan was attached onto the new shelf.

This is sort of what it looked like before (I took this picture before the countertop was installed). The fan was sitting between the stove and countertop since it was still attached by a power cord. It was in the way, was accidentally scorched when I turned the wrong burner on one day, and was generally driving me nuts.And this is the fan finally back in place! With an extra little shelf that I've decided to put our Denby Blue Linen baking dishes on. I just need to do a little caulking and paint touch-ups. And in case you're wondering we don't usually have a blue jug of peonies on the countertop, I went out and picked them specially for the photo shoot. ( I guess without the fan there the countertop was looking kind of bare). I love peonies and was thrilled to see two bushes grow up this spring, one in our front and one in the backyard. Such a luxury after condo living.