Craft Cabinet

This year has been all about change and making new friends.  I've managed to make a few friends in the past few weeks.  Instead of walking up to a strange kid and saying "Hi, my name is Lisa, wanna play?" (that would be weird, since I'm about thirty years older than the kids) I walk up to the kid's mom and say "Hi, I'm Greg's mom, my name is Lisa, wanna have a playdate?"  Its working out ok, for the most part.  Greg has made friends, I have a friend or two, and now I need to work on playdates for Peter and Princess.  Lots of girding my loins and talking to strangers.

I have also decided that I need to meet more friends who I currently know only in the computer.  So I signed up for the Craft Cabinet, a craft party thrown by Jules and Andrea.  The party was on Friday night, about a half hour from my home, and it was a great time.  I met other local bloggers, including some who actually live in my town or right next door.

I even made a craft. I am not all that crafty--I can paint furniture and wield an iron and hemming tape, but smaller stuff always seems to turn out like crap.  I went for a very low-stress, simple ingredient project:  coasters, from this tutorial over at Hi Sugarplum!  I figured it involved glue, pompoms and stiff fabric, it couldn't be that difficult.  It was pretty easy to do, although I was cursing myself for leaving my good scissors at home--the cheapo scissors I brought frayed the fabric and pompoms a bit.  

I used a placemat I had stashed in the fabric cabinet that was doubleside. I bought some pretty green pompoms, and voila, coasters.

I loved the idea of a craft party--its great for introverts!  You can always ask your neighbor questions about their craft, or put your head down and pretend to work on your own craft if the effort of talking to people is overwhelming.  You could also visit the cupcake bar.

All of the food was excellent.  Yum, cupcakes.  Even the swag bags had cupcakes!  I am all over parties that involve cupcakes.  Also, the party was held at Salvage Life, which had great vintage stuff.  I tried on some clothes but they were too small, boohoo.  (This might have something to do with the cupcakes.)

So! Project Make New Friends Yet Again is going along allright.   Are there other blogger meetups I should know about? How does one find out about these things?

William Morris: the fabric cabinet

When we moved all the books from the garage to the living room, the cabinet in the garage that held all the books was left empty.

This is super exciting, because it means that I now have a free-standing cabinet to store fabric in.  I have a number of fabrics left over from various projects over the years, and fabrics I've bought a yard or two of just because I like them.  For years the fabrics have lived in a plastic rubbermaid bin, stashed in the bottom of a closet or the attic or the garage.  The drawback to keeping all the fabric in a bin is that I can't see the fabric at a glance, and usually have to unload the bin any time I want to use a particular fabric.

I've posted before about how I would love to have a closet or cabinet for fabric storage.  This cabinet is a plastic shelf unit from Home Depot that we have used for storage in our previous garages and basements, and it is not the glass-fronted cabinet of my dreams, but it is free, and we have room for it in the garage, and its plastic functionality makes me supremely happy.

I've organized all my craft and fabric supplies in small plastic bins we already own.  My collection of ribbons and trim were corralled in two bins, and the third bin holds glue-type items, such as the hot glue guns, glue sticks, hemming tape, spray adhesive, fabric glue and fun-tac.  My paint decks also live on the top shelf.

The bottom row also holds more project supplies, like wooden letters from a previous project, silk flowers, and a wooden tray I will get around to painting someday.

I did not ROYGBIV the fabrics, but they are mostly grouped by colors.

I seem to have a lot of blues and browns.  And cut-up duvets.  Sharp eyes might spot two yards of the never-ending mistake Gullan Blom fabric.

This free, ugly plastic cabinet is one of my happiest projects to date.  I can see all of my fabrics, they are easily accessible, all of the trims and crafting supplies are organized and in one place.

I have high hopes that the house we are currently shopping for will have a space that will be mine, with a table for creating stuff and my glass fronted fabric cabinet, but until then, I'm enjoying my creative stuff being in one place and organized.

I am linking up to Pancakes and French Fries William Morris Project.  

design paralysis, and the new art print

One of the reasons I haven't been blogging much, aside from my contemplative navel-gazing, is my decor budget.  You might recall my sticker shock upon finding that preschool here is ONE MILLION DOLLARS.  Since Princess and Peter both started preschool last week, that is TWO MILLION DOLLARS.  A month.  As my father once told me, "if you have the money, you won't have the time. And if you have the time, you probably won't have the money."  So true! I have lots of free time to accomplish projects now, but my project budget has been severely curtailed.

Another reason I haven't been decorating?  I have hit design paralysis for the upstairs.  The boys' room is nearly done, and just needs two large scale photos I have yet to take.  Princess's bedroom has barely been touched. It is functional, and half-assed-ly decorated with all the stuff from the previous house, but nothing exciting.  My bedroom is at a standstill; I can't figure out what to do in there at all.

This design paralysis is a side effect of the fact that we've started house-shopping, and thus this house seems a bit impermanent to me.  We aren't buying till next spring, but we've started looking seriously at different towns in the area, and trying to figure out where we want to live.

The town we are currently in is a top contender.  The kids have made friends, *I* have made some friends (woohoo!  Yay me!  Not the kind of friends who you can ask to help to bury the bodies--that takes more time--but the kind of friend that you can talk to about the latest episode of The League and say hey lets go to the Outlet Mall!  So that is Progress. And I haven't died of anxiety yet, although Greg's birthday party may accomplish that soon.)

I leave you with a new art print I ordered from Etsy.  I have been giving myself many, many, many pep talks over the last few weeks, and this print seemed like a good reminder that it doesn't matter where we live as long as we are together.

Please excuse the lamp on the floor.  That lamp is on the floor for this picture because it partially blocks my pep talk picture, and it is on my to do list to move all of the right hand pictures over to the left a few inches (that "use newspaper to make a template" method is baloney, I tell you).

new pillows in my living room

You might have noticed these pillows in the One Room Challenge reveal.  While strolling through Ikea the other day, I came across this lovely Natvide pillow cover for $7.99.  (I can't find a link to the product on Ikea's website).

It had the right colors for my living room, and it was the right size for the big pillows that we like to recline on, so it came home with me.

My mother also made a fantastic pillow out of the fabric and trim that we had left over from the shoe cubby and Expedit slipcovers:

a numbered list of random thoughts

1. Since a number of people have expressed interesting in reading my midlife crisis birthday musings, I have rewritten that post four times.  Its lovely therapy, but still, it is a morass of self-doubt that seems too naked and needy to put on the interwebs.  However, I do greatly appreciate the comments on my birthday post from the 40+ crowd, assuring me that life will be fantastic.  

2.  Five years ago we had a flood in our basement.  Unfortunately, we lost about eight banker boxes full of books, mostly my collection of young adult literature.  I've been devouring YA at the library lately in an attempt to bring my book spending under control.  However, all this YA reading has made me think I should look into replacing some of my favorites, like the Laura Ingalls and L.M. Montgomery series that were lost in the flood.  

The Mister and I reminisced about our favorite books when we were kids, and discovered that we both had read the Moby Books Illustrated Classics series (which unfortunately does not have a website of its own). This series is abridged and simplified versions of the classics  (Moby Dick, A Christmas Carol, etc) for children, with illustrations on each page, and they were some of our favorite books.  So the Mister found a set on Ebay, and now Greg is the proud owner of a few good books.  We will be searching for more Ebay sets over the coming years.

The Mister is currently reading the Hounds of the Baskervilles to the kids as I write this.

Note to self, in library room of next house, an entire bookshelf (or more!) dedicated to YA books I loved as a kid.

Do you have a favorite Young Adult book?

3. Last week I met Jules of Pancakes and French Fries, and Andrea of Four Flights of Fancy.  I saw Jules on Facebook asking if anyone was going to a Mom 2.0 meetup nearby that evening, and decided, in a very-unlike-my-hermit-self whim, that yes, I would go to a blogging event where I knew absolutely no one to meet someone whose blog I thoroughly enjoy. Personal growth!

I was a little nervous--a lot nervous--of feeling like an idiot with nothing to talk about.  However, Jules and Andrea were fabulous and I had a great time.  Can't wait to see them again at the Craft Party!

4.  My children have invited me to have a bey blade battle with them. (If you don't have a boy between the ages of 5 and 8, Bey Blades are a  Japanese anime cartoon where the characters battle using spinning tops constructed of multiple parts, which have different characteristics, and you can buy the spinning tops (and don't forget the plastic stadium!) for a ridiculous amount of money in Target.) However, I'm only allowed to use the "weak bey" that no one else wants to use.

Greg has taken to challenging me to a bey blade battle whenever I send him to his room.

5.  I hoisted up my big girl panties and scheduled two playdates for Greg.  (More talking to people I don't know!)  I will make sure this kid a social life, even if I die of nervous agita.

6.  Peter and Princess start school next week.  As of next Monday, all of my children will be in school all day. I am really looking forward to having 5 hours a day all to myself.  I'm also having a bit of a mental breakdown about it (refer to above list item #1, the Who Am I and What Am I Doing With My Life post that I haven't posted).

7. Have a lovely weekend, invisible internet friends.

One Room Challenge, Week 6, Part 2: the grand finale

Its been six weeks of nonstop decorating, and I'm about done.  You can see previous weeks here: Week 1 (moodboard), Week 2 (curtains), Week 3 Part 1 (art options), and Week 3, Part 2 (splatter painting), Week Four (bookshelves), Week 5 (tv wall and ottoman), and Week 6, Part 1 (furniture arrangement).  

We started with this empty room:

and finished with this:

I will put together a source list for the living room tomorrow.

I can't wait to see what everyone else has done to their rooms!

Beth - Chinoiserie Chic

Lauren - The Cottage Mix

Sherry - Design Indulgence

Lindsay - Everything LEB

Barbara - Hodge:Podge

Kim - Kim Macumber Interiors

LisA - Lisa Mende Design

Tiffany - Living Savvy

Jessie - Mix & Chic

Linda - My Crafty Home Life 

Alison - My Little Happy Place

Danylle - Nana Moon

Nicole - Nicole Scott Designs

Julia - Pawleys Island Posh

Jennifer - The Pink Pagoda

Nancy - Powell Brower Home

Lindsay - The Pursuit of Style

Emily - Rue de Emily

Lindsay - Sadie + Stella

One Room Challenge, Week 6, Part 1: furniture arrangments

Week six of the One Room Challenge  is here, if you can believe it.  You can see previous weeks here: Week 1 (moodboard), Week 2 (curtains), Week 3 Part 1 (art options), and Week 3, Part 2 (splatter painting), Week Four (bookshelves), and Week 5 (tv wall and ottoman).  

Our living room is 12 x 11.  It is not tiny, but it is not very big either.  In the past few weeks I've tried a few funiture arrangements.  I'm not very excited about any of them, but some of them work better than others.

The original furniture arrangment was to have the tv and bookshelves on one wall, the sofa on the opposite wall, and two chairs in front of either bookshelf.

This is the most workable arrangement. It allows for easy access to the sofa, there are places for guests to sit, and the bottom cupboards can be accessed, although not easily.

Things I don't like about this particular arrangement:  it is a bit tight.  To access the bottom cupboards one has to push the chairs up a bit.  The bottom two shelves of the bookshelf behind the sofa are blocked by the sofa.

In option number two, I considered putting all of the bookshelves along the far wall, and putting the tv in the corner.  Then I would swing the sofa around to face the tv.

As much as I love the thought of having a full wall of bookshelves behind the sofa, this arrangement didn't work because that essentially put the sofa in the middle of the room, blocking the fireplace.

Option three: move the two chairs to the wall of windows, and put the sofa with its back to the door.  I could still move the bookshelves to all one wall, and mount the tv over the fireplace.

This set-up created a narrow alleyway from the front door to the dining room. The room felt very boxed in with the back of the sofa created a hard demarcation in the room. Also, the two chairs were jammed into the corner, with the blue chair nearly touching the fireplace and the red chair touching the sofa.

Option four:  move the chairs to the back of the room, facing the fireplace.  This was almost a contender; I lived with it for a few days.  I liked that it gave the room a bit more space by the tv and the bookshelves were easily accessible.  The chairs gave the room definition without being a solid line blocking off the space, unlike the sofa in that spot.

However, there was still an alleyway of space between the front door and the dining room, behind the chairs.

The biggest problem, however, is that the room is only 12 x 11, and that there just isn't enough room to put furniture in that spot and still access the living room.

See that 12 inches or so to the left of the blue chair?  That's how you enter the room.  The red chair nearly touches the sofa.  There's not enough room to walk between the chairs.

So, we are back to option number one: the chairs layered in front of the bookshelves.  Note to self: buy bigger house.

Go on over to Week Six, Part 2, where I show the entire room in its (mostly) finished state.

You can also see what everyone else has done:

Beth - Chinoiserie Chic

Lauren - The Cottage Mix

Sherry - Design Indulgence

Lindsay - Everything LEB

Barbara - Hodge:Podge

Kim - Kim Macumber Interiors

LisA - Lisa Mende Design

Tiffany - Living Savvy

Jessie - Mix & Chic

Linda - My Crafty Home Life 

Alison - My Little Happy Place

Danylle - Nana Moon

Nicole - Nicole Scott Designs

Julia - Pawleys Island Posh

Jennifer - The Pink Pagoda

Nancy - Powell Brower Home

Lindsay - The Pursuit of Style

Emily - Rue de Emily

Lindsay - Sadie + Stella