As excited as I was to soak up as much bloggy business and brand-collaborating knowledge as I could at Haven, I was also looking forward to some of the more “hands on” design sessions. While I’m wishing I’d checked out some of the cool painting sessions, I did attend “Let’s Case This Joint” with Brittany from Pretty Handy Girl and Sandra from Sawdust Girl and “Hands On Design Advice: Layer by Layer, Step by Step” with Emily A. Clark from Emily A. Clark, Kristin Jackson from The Hunted Interior, and Sarah Macklem from The Yellow Cape Cod. So I thought I’d share some of the useful tips I picked up, along with my most exciting Haven moment.
Category Archives: Made It Myself
Royal Progress
I think I forgot to post an update on the crown moulding progress. And progress we do have.
You may have noticed this photo appear on Instagram a few weeks ago. After weeks (months?) of “acclimating” to our home, the crown we purchased was moved back into the garage to be painted. Huzzah!
Then, with the help of our awesome new pneumatic brad nailer and air compressor, we actually affixed pieces of moulding to our dining room walls.
Seriously. See, I have photo evidence!
It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it? At this point, I will explain why it looks like we nailed a baseboard to our wall. Because we did. We’re getting all fancy up in here with our moulding project. I should clarify that for once, this wasn’t (100%) my idea. Tom & I were admiring multi-piece moulding examples at Home Depot a while back, and then I could see the wheels turning in his head: one piece would no longer fit the bill; we were going to create our own crown concoction.
The original vision included three separate pieces of wood. To be nailed to the wall by a man who has never attempted this before.
Well, reason came into a play, reality set in (because we want to do most of our first floor rooms this same way) and the final crown product will have two pieces put together, and should look something like this:
The bottom piece is the baseboard; the top is a crown piece.
There is a bit of reason behind this madness. After doing some research on crown types, room sizes, etc, I discovered that there are recommended moulding widths based on the height of your ceiling. So, a standard 8ft ceiling would take a smaller piece of moulding, where higher ceilings can take larger pieces. We have 9ft ceilings in most of our first floor; our family room has a 10ft ceiling. The same goes for your baseboards. We upgraded to 5″ baseboards throughout our first floor; and the bottom piece that we’re using for the crown matches our baseboards.
I can’t wait to see and share how the finished product looks in our dining room. And then it’s on to the rest of the house! Or maybe just a few other rooms, hahaha!
DIY Art: Black Dress Painting
I’ve been wanting to try my own hand at painting lately, i.e. without the instruction and guidance of local paint-your-own establishments.
<gulp>
I finally got up the courage a couple of weeks ago.
My intent was to create a series (if two can really constitute a series) of paintings to hang in our first floor half-bath. I already had the first completed from a Cheers to Art trip earlier this year.
Here’s how my solo attempt turned out:
Not too bad! It looks like a dress, so I’d call it a win! The only thing I’m not super-pleased with is the background. It doesn’t match the background of the shoe painting:
But I have no idea how I could have gotten them to match, seeing as they were painted months apart with different brands and shades of paint. So, I guess I’ll just go with it, right? My Laziness overcomes my OCD-like desire to re-do it until a perfect match is met. Plus, how crazy would I look if I had a bunch of discarded dress paintings hanging around my house? Answer: pretty crazy.
Does your Lazy battle your OCD? Which one usually wins?
DIY Wedding Gift: Lyrics on Canvas
Back in April, Tom’s best friend Kevin got married. His bride Katie has made a few appearances around here, for craft nights, painting sessions, and sunflower-field frolicking.
They are our best friends. And I wanted to make a gift for them. Something that would be special and meaningful.
I landed on painting a canvas with lyrics from their first-dance song.
I sketched it out a bunch of times, debated over canvas sizes (I went with a 20″x24″), horizontal versus vertical, and what sorts of colors to use (purple was their wedding color; and can be found in several rooms in their home).
The how: I painted the purple background first, and let it dry for several days (ahem) weeks. Then I got up the courage to add the letters. I measured four evenly-spaced lines horizontally across the canvas, lightly wrote out some of the words in pencil, and then busted out a super small paintbrush and some white acrylic paint. So really, I free-handed the whole thing. I actually find this easier than trying to trace out letters or stencils. I don’t have that kind of patience 😉
Once all of the words were up, I selected some special words to “highlight” and added the extra lines and accents. I also added the date of their wedding at the bottom.
I’m really happy with how it turned out. I want to do one for our bedroom some day.
And Kevin and Katie loved it 🙂 Yay! (cue huge sigh of relief!)
Have you hand-made wedding gifts before? How did they turn out?
Washi Tape Cards & Gift Wrap
I often find myself in a bind when it comes to occasions that require (maybe not require, but look more favorably upon) greeting cards: I frequently forget to buy one. So recently I took inspiration from this pin to create my own card using washi tape. (Side note: washi tape is probably one of the greatest inventions of our time. Right up there with mobile phones and home espresso machines).
It’s simple. Just grab a piece of cardstock and cut it to your preferred size/shape. Then grab some rolls of tape and go nuts! Layer different tapes on top of each other to create unique patterns and color combos. Or just keep it simple, if that’s more your style. I added a paper flower and brad to my little handwritten birthday banner for some extra pizzaz.
As I was digging through my wrapper paper and gift bag options, nothing was really jumping out at me. So… back to the tape! A bit of craft paper, a few pieces of tape, and there you go = A nice little coordinating set 🙂
