The Story of the Blue Carpet

When we first moved into our home our family room looked like this. This was 5 years ago. This was before girls got married and a baby was born. This was when my son was shorter then me. sigh...

This is my picture taking daughter before she took pictures and thought maybe she would take up dance. My other daughter in blue agreeing and my other daughter sitting in the window and my sister thinking that maybe it's not such a good idea.

My nieces joining in the fun.

Then we did this to the family room. Red!!! Now the plan was that we were going to rip out the blue carpet and put in something more neutral soon after we painted and because the blue was not my favourite. Not that I don't like blue, it just wasn't what I wanted.

(This picture the walls look orange)

But as the years went by the blue carpet stayed and stayed and stayed. This past summer I asked my husband (who in a former life laid carpet for a living) what was the condition of this blue carpet. His reply was it was in really good shape. Not what I wanted to hear. So I hung my head and in defeat I knew the blue carpet would stay. I couldn't justify a perfectly good, not to mention large piece of carpet going to the landfill. I would have to work around the blue.

So now it looks like this

Ok. I'm pretty proud of this box cushion I made, complete with piping. Its much nicer then sitting on the cold cement.

Well I generally like my room altogether and I don't even notice the blue carpet anymore. Yippee!!

Now I can bring on the Christmas decorations!!

And five years later this is what we've added on. Two new boys and one sweet little girl! How time flies.

Oh and by the way my picture taking daughter is away for a few days so once again you had to suffer through my lack of picture taking knowledge, but I promise I will learn.

Beast to Beauty

I have a collection of windows. They range in size and shape and they are stacked in the garage and my husband is thrilled when I go to the pile and pick one, to do something with. But there is one window that he has been wanting me to pick for awhile and I finally grabbed it the other day. It was found in a barn on a trip we took for our anniversary back in September. It was covered in straw and the person who owned it didn't really want to part with it. But after some humming and hawing, he reluctantly sold it to me.

Since repainting the family room, I've been adding in new colours to accessorize with. So I grabbed my  Annie Sloan "Louis Blue" and dry brushed the window, but not before I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned the window. A couple of years living in a barn kinda makes you dirty.

Then I headed over to The Graphics Fairy and looked through a bunch of amazing things she has for free!!!  and chose an easy French sign.

Then I printed it off in reverse and taped it to the right side of the window.

Then flipped it over and began painting.

I could have done it on the right side, but this way the lettering is protected by the glass, just as a picture would be.

Once I was finished I took an exacto knife and cleaned up the lines. My hand was a little shaky on the M but the knife cleaned all that up. And I'm pleased with the final result. It's a keeper.

                                               

A Plethora of Pillows

I've been painting. (when am I not painting hehe)

This time I've painted my walls, but before I show you my "befores and afters" of my family room, I've been busy making some new accessories.

I started with some pillows because they are simple, fast and easy to make. If you can sew a straight seam, you can sew a pillow. If you can't sew, you probably can and just don't know it. Unless of coarse you reeaalllyy don't want to sew, and then hopefully you find yourself  reeaallllyy lucky, and someone will sew for you.


                                                                           Taa daaaaaaaa!!!!

The brown ones I already had, so I replaced my other old ones which were..... lets just say past their prime, with the new ones.

The cool thing about making your own pillows is that you can change them up quickly and they will be unique to your home. In a couple of years the owl fabric will probably be a thing of the past and the pillows will be worn and faded, but right now its trendy. So in a couple of years I'll find new fabric, and bam new look!

Same goes with this ever so neat sweater pillow. If you follow pinterest you'll find all kinds of these wonderful cozy looking pillows every where. For this pillow, my daughter went to the local thrift store and found this sweater. She wore it as part of a costume and I knew it would eventually find its way back to the thrift store. But then I thought it would go swimmingly into my new paint scheme for the room, and thus a new pillow was born.

I happen to check on Pottery Barn and they are selling the sweater pillow "covers" for, around $70.00. My complete pillow(pillow form as well) was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $8.00.

For Christmas I'll be making covers for the owl pillows because I realized who wants to store actual Christmas pillows.  They take up to much room, and it only took me 24 years of decorating to grasp this concept. Who knew.:)

Spider Baby Revisited

                                          When last we left our little brute he looked like this

All sad he was.

And then his makeover began. Sanding, staining, painting. He took it all in stride and seemed to enjoy every minute of it.

Today he looks like this

He went home today. I can no longer call him Spider Baby

I do believe he looks happy!!

Spider Baby

A customer brought me this

It reminded me of this

We discussed its weirdness but it has great functionality, so I'm pretty sure I won't offend said customer by comparing the mixed up phonograph shell with the spider baby.

The lid opens and I believe it's going in a family room to hold remotes and other family room stuff.

So let us see what becomes of this fabulous creature.

A Grand Old Boy in Blue

I picked up this Tall boy a couple of weeks ago, and where I had it sitting in my garage you couldn't get the whole thing in the frame. Something I'll need to remember for future shots.

But now its turned into this.

I painted the blue with the chalk paint I talked about in a previous post. It was worth every penny and I've ordered more. My own homemade version will do in a pinch, but the blue painted so beautifully I would slowly like to add more colours to my inventory. It also distresses quite nicely.

 The veneer on the left side was too loose to try and repair so I peeled it off and sanded it down. These poor pieces of furniture are the ones that get forgotten because of things like this, but there is so much more life left in them. The drawers all slide nicely and would hold ALOT.

Half of the hardware was broken or replaced by something that was serviceable but mismatched. So when I found a bunch of matching ones I bought up them up and used a few for the larger bottom drawers.

I think they work well together. 

I sealed the whole thing with another new favourite..beeswax. It just adds something I can't explain to a piece. It brings out such a warmth on the wood that doesn't happen with polyurethane.

This boy is for sale, as are a couple of other things that I will be posting soon.

The lost is FOUND!!

I have this great on-line fabric store that I like to frequent quite often in virtual world and do my shopping.
It's Tonic Living . It's a Canadian Company and I'm thrilled I found them.
Usually when I put my order in, my package shows up in a couple of days. But when my package didn't show up for a week I got a little concerned. I e-mailed them to find that for some strange reason my fabric made a trip to Calgary. So the lovely people there sent me a whole new package of fabric! And it came today!!!

You may remember this little chair.

It went from this, to this

(I apologize for the grainy picture but its one I took.)

This is a Tonic Living fabric.

Now for my new stuff, I'm going to sew up a storm this afternoon and hopefully next week I can show you what became of my little traveling fabric.