DIY Vase

Hello! I found the inspiration for this project via Pinterest. Of course!

S bought me a bottle of this delicious Pinot Noir that has this fantastic rooster label. He knows that I enjoy roosters & Pinot Noir. He is such a great guy! I really love roosters so I really didn't want to just drink the wine and recycle the bottle. I wanted to keep the bottle forever because it makes me smile!

First I painted a layer of polycrylic over the cute label. I let that dry for a day, then painted a second coat, and let that coat dry for two days. I used painters tape to carefully cover the label where I did not want to get any paint.

I used puffy paint to make a million little dots all over the bottle. I let the puffy paint dry for a day.

(Lots of waiting with this project!)

After the puffy paint was dry, I spray painted the entire bottle. I let the spray paint dry for about ten minutes, then carefully pulled the painters tape off the label.

Then I let the bottle dry for another full day.

Then I put it on my mantle, next to my fish bottles, and it was pretty!

I have been keeping my cupcake flags in my new rooster vase & fish bottles.

I think my new vase looks so cute up on my mantle with all my other bottles!

Happy President's Day!

How To Turn a Bookshelf Into a Bar

S and I love to entertain & hang out with our friends. We also have a newly-discovered interest in fine cocktails & martinis. (We used to be mostly craft beer kind of people). 

A consequence of our new mixology interest is that we now have too many liquor bottles. Our kitchen is super tiny, with about zero room for liquor bottles. 

Whenever the occasional bottle of tequila or bourbon made it into our home we would keep it in the cabinet above the stove, but I don't think fine liquor should be stored so close to a major heat source.  

So, the idea for a dry bar in our home was born!

We have these beautiful built-ins on one wall of our living room. The bookshelves are stuffed with...books...among other decorative items. It was a struggle to find new homes for the items on the one shelf we were rehabbing into the bar.

But, I did not let the struggle deter me from my goal!
It took about an hour to move all the stuff on the bookshelf, adhere the paper to the wall (we used industrial strength double sided tape), and arrange the liquid deliciousness.
(Then it took nearly an hour for me to take about a million pictures of our new space!)

I bought the fun blue & gold paper from an awesome store here in Baltimore, Trohv. I think the paper was intended to be used as wrapping paper, but I thought it made the perfect faux wall-paper.
Trohv is packed full of quirky home goods & gifts. Every time I visit the neghborhood of Hampdon I always make a point to visit Trohv. Just walking through the store is enough to put a smile on my face, although I seldom leave empty-handed!

I know what you're thinking..."just show me the Before & After already!"
Ok, ok, here you go!

I hope you have been inspired to go off & create your own dry bar for entertaining this weekend! 

New Rug for the Living Room

One of the very first purchases S and I made for our new apartment was a fancy, shaggy rug. The living room is tiled, instead of hardwood like the rest of the apartment, so I wanted a rug as soon as possible to make the space more warm & inviting. We both searched for days online for a rug, but to no avail. One day we found ourselves in Home Depot looking for paint, and I saw the rug display. I convinced S to spend a few minutes with me looking at the Home Depot rugs, and what do you know, S found one that was perfect! Some pics after the jump!

5' x 8' Rug....almost as tall as I am!

Enjoying the shag.

Waves of blues and browns. See that tan wave? I've decided that this will be the first, and last, bit of tan/beige/bleh that makes it into our apartment!

DIY Big Bow Pillow

I love to create. I cook, I sew, I scrapbook, I decoupage, I paint, I transform ordinary things to extraordinary pieces of art! I love it all. So when I stumbled across this tutorial in the blogosphere, I knew I had to try it!

A few years back I "inherited" the old Brother sewing machine that my little brother, sister, and I learned how to sew on...20 years ago! Its red and white, has 2 stitches (straight and zig zaggy) and best of all, it still works! I mostly use it for making my 2 kitties new nip toys. I have been harboring an idea for a few years though that I will open an Etsy store with my awesome purse and pillow designs. One day...one day! 

Today though, I made this big bow pillow to share the sofa space with the 2 patchwork pillows I made earlier this year. 

Here's how I did it!

When S and I combined our households, all the way back in 2009 when we moved in together, we both brought pillows, so many pillow, to the party. Somehow between the two of us we ended up with 10 bed pillows! Ten! So this October (2011) S made me a deal that if I could re-purpose some of the more beat-up and uncomfortable-to-sleep-on pillows, then we could keep them. And all the old pillows I did not use, he would get to throw away on November 1st.

So, me being me, I thought about pillows for about three weeks, and finally got around to making one! It is now November 10th, and S has not thrown away any of the old pillows (yet!) but that is probably because he put them all in my closet, so he doesn't have to look at them!

Now on to the tutorial!

I cut one old pillow in half, because I didn't want my decorative Bow Pillow to be too big. 

Even though this pillow was so flat to sleep on, and not comfortable in any way, it still had SO MUCH STUFFING! 

It was difficult sewing it up again, but I persevered. I used a slip stitch, and did not worry that the stitching was wonky, because the pretty cover was going on top of it. 

Close up of the stitching.

Check our the rest of the Big Bow Pillow, after the break!

Our New Apartment - Before

So, S and I moved to Baltimore City in April 2011. I had this great idea to create a blog to document all the projects, changes, and DIY revelations we did to our new place. Well, its November now, and we have done a TON of work. All the awesomeness of our DIY projects are documented via photographs on my hard drive. The time has come for me to unearth the pictures from the black hole, and catalog the transformation of our home. 

See some pictures of our new apartment...after the break!

Living Room

S picked out that awesome rug from Home Depot. Its shag, and its delicious to walk on.

Hand me down leather sofa. 

TV stand, coffee table, and recycling system (back left) are all from IKEA.

Awesome built-in shelves. Beautiful stone fireplace, with 2 gargoyles. The apartment even came with a working chandelier! 

In the beginning we set up a very fancy folding card table to act as our dining room table. 

On the right side of the picture is my unfinished IKEA Rast dresser that S bought for me. I had plans to refinish it...and the sad dresser sat for 6 months before I actually did anything to it! Pictures of that exciting transformation to come. On top of the sad Rast is Supper, our goldfish.

And of course, the last thing to explain about our new living room. Can you see it? The ghastly, horrible, scary color that is covering every square inch of these lovely, paneled walls? Its......beige. I almost don't want to type the letters. This color is horrible. It is even worse in person that you can tell in the pictures. S and I picked out a beautiful light blue color to repaint...before we even moved in! We fell in love with the apartment, but knew, without a doubt, that this weird tan/beige/bleh color had got to go! My goal is to have the painting finished by X-mas. We actually painted our bedroom first...pictures of that mess to come. I am very confident that we will be able to brighten up our living room by the end of December...even with the advent of Skyrim looming ahead of us!

The Kitchen
I am loving the striped faux-wood flooring. So funky! We don't have a microwave or a dishwasher (yet), but we have a gas stove, and a sweet sink disposal system.

 The windows on the one side of the kitchen let in so much light during the day. It helps a lot because there are no windows in our living room, due to the fact that our living room is in the middle of the row house.
Those long heaters are everywhere in our apartment, even in the sunroom. Well, we have heaters everywhere but our bathroom. There are no outlets in the bathroom either. Now that winter is nearly upon us, S and I are thinking hard about what to do about our super-cold bathroom.

Check out the rest of our new apartment, after the break!