Recipe for Organization

Organized Sewing Patterns (serves 1)

1 file cabinet with broken wheels and lock, free from friend

1 package legal-size hanging file folders

1 package letter-size hanging file folders

1 box of sewing patterns, already organized into manila folders

1 box homemade costume patterns, on various bits of paper and fabric

leftover adhesive-backed door insulation strip

screwdriver

1.   Remove wheels and lock from cabinet.  Use insulation stripping to pad the bottom of the file cabinet edges so it won't scratch the floor. 

2.  Carefully fold and sort costume patterns into folders in top drawer. 

3.  Adjust lower drawer file rack to fit letter-sized folders sideways, and insert regular patterns already in manila folders. 

4.  Recycle empty cardboard boxes, and enjoy your new organized pattern cabinet AND the extra space in the craft room closet! 

And because someone is always curious about this, here's what I do with my store-bought patterns: 

Slice open the pattern jacket, and glue the front to the outside of a folder, and the back to the inside. Label the folder tab, unfold the pattern pieces to fit inside the folder. Done.  Much easier to store and locate them, I feel.  

Random Pictures from the Thanksgiving Break

While Kress and his mother and I celebrated Thanksgiving, a few small things around the house happened:

This crowded Peace Lily from my desk at work (which I brought home to divide months ago and never did) got cleaned up and separated into two pots:

The two new plants are very happy;  the smaller one in the center is a Chinese Evergreen that was in a pot with no drainage hole, and was NOT liking it.

Because I pretty much detest holidays, I completely neglected to plan any sort of table spread for dinner on Thursday, aside from the food.

This is simple and thrown-together (mostly from our basket of SCA feast gear, hehe), but it worked, and the food was awesome, which was the point. :)

Most of the cats, on the coffee table, scoping out someone's ice cream.  From the white-and-red one on the left, clockwise, that's
Sweet Pea
Rabi
Evie, and
Gypsy

Only Sasha is missing from this picture.

Kress' mom decided that she and I each needed a "little black apron" from Bloodbath & Beyond while we were out shopping Friday.  Lace trim and plastic pearls stitched around the neckline.  LOL!  Adorbs.



Hope everyone had a happy, safe holiday.

Hooked on Using Unused Space

This one's fairly simple:

This is the empty corner of the master bathroom before.  It's empty, unused wall space that kinda always irritated me, because if it was recessed even just a little, I could have put some small, cute bathroom furniture here.  But nooooo.  Empty wall space.  Right there between the room entry and my closet, and directly across from the toilet cave.

Meanwhile, (a) there's not nearly enough towel storage in this bathroom. The house came with a rinky-dink little towel rack that was IN the toilet cave (because that's useful), which I promptly removed and replaced with a double-hook on the wall-end next to the shower, which is much more useful.  

And (b) everybody's bathrobes ended up in my closet, which, no.

And so... 

Here's that same wall between the doors, after having installed a simple 1/2x4" board (very securely, with wall anchors, and caulked in place, just to be sure), and three silver hooks I had sitting around in the garage.

Now that empty wall has a function and we have a space for our bathrooms and extra towels.  Let's hear it for less crap in my poor cramped closet!


♥ ¸. • * ¨ `* •.♫. • °☆ * ♥ confetti and stuff ♥ •*• * ¨ `*~♫♪☼ ¸.☆























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Refurbishing a Tacky Old Statue

Yes, yes I am refurbishing a tacky, old statute.  Because I LOVE my tacky cat statue.  Long ago and far away, when I was 17 years old and living in my very first apartment, I was friends with the girl who lived across the courtyard from me, in the facing building.  Her roomates were horrible, left her high and dry, and she had to abandon the apartment (which her roomates trashed before leaving, by the way. Horrible).  She left it standing open, and told me to go in and salvage whatever I wanted to before the apartment people came to clean it out.  We exchanged numbers, but I never heard from her again.  I hope she ended up being okay.

So I went over to her place.  Cleaned it up a bit.  Snagged a little patio table for a friend who was looking for one, a laundry hamper, which I desperately needed, and this cat statue:

This cat has sat in my entry way in every place I've ever lived, since that day when I was 17, and I love her to the moon and back.  She's been nearly every color of the rainbow (when I got her, she was red), and she has, unfortunately, been knocked over and broken more times than I could count.  So many times, in fact, that the last time I glued her back together, she wouldn't go back together properly.  I did as good a job as I could, but there was just so much glue and paint built up in the cracks, it wasn't working anymore.  So I decided to fix her for real this time. 

Horrifyingly enough, the first step was to knock her back apart along the established cracks.  Fortunately the five major pieces the cat always breaks into came apart cleanly.  Some of the more minor cracks held together stubbornly, and I only created one new break, in the process.  I chipped and sanded old, dried clumps of glue from around the edges, and then soaked off the rest with acetone. I also used the acetone to clean up the whole surface of each piece, removing built-up paint in the crevices, blobs and drips from old spray-paint jobs, brush hairs caught in the paint, etc.  YOU probably can't tell from these pictures, but I can see the last four paint jobs here, thanks to the acetone.

After gluing the cat back together more firmly with a strong, all-purpose adhesive (and waiting over 24 hours for it to cure), the next step was to fill all those cracks, chips, and holes where tiny pieces have been broken off of corners and edges over the years.  Some of the pieces still won't fit back together exactly, as they once did, and so those open joints needed to be patched, too.  

After much research into ceramic repair, and good advice from a friend, I decided to do this with unsanded tile grout.  I mixed a thick paste of it with water and troweled it on with a small, plastic paint scraper, then smoothed it out and wiped off the excess with a wet paper towel.  You can see some of the major cracks in this picture, including the worst of the joints that don't fit back together, near the top, somewhat horizontally. Once this coat dries I'll sand it down smooth and do it all over again, until the largest cracks are just as invisible as the tiny ones that have already been filled and smoothed over.  As many times as is necessary, until this cat is smooth and solid and strong.

To be continued... 

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Bit More Fireplace, and Then We're Done

After taking the mirror down from the fireplace wall, there was one more thing that needed to happen.

Before

Notice anything about the fireplace screen?

...

...wait, do you NOTICE the fireplace screen?  You don't, do you?  That's right.

BAZINGA


That's better.  Nothing a little silver metallic spray paint couldn't take care of.  Now the screen not only shows, it stands out, and it's exactly the right kind of understated "bling" that the fireplace needed to keep it from being just a big, black block,

I have to say, I LOVE this metallic stuff.  I'd never used the new kind before.  Silver-colored paint, sure; but this is the stuff with itty tiny metal particles in it to give it shine and texture when it's dry, and I loooooove the way it comes out.  It really does look like metal.  And it's beautiful.

I sprayed some wall hooks, too, and the outside handle of my storm door, hehe.  Show you later.








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October In Review!

It's late again, but I made it before the 15th this time!  :D

October in Review: 

• little red side table re-do (two of them, actually)
• working on the Day Sofa:  frame assembled (thank you World Market, for shipping me a replacement assembly hardware kit for free!), and working on creating a new cushion for it 
• roadside salvage ex-cabinet turned bedside bookshelf nighstand
• cuttin' up more t-shirts

That list looks awfully short, but then, I usually do 2+ months at a time, LOL.  

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One More Fireplace Tweak + A New Toy

I know I'm like, the LAST person on the planet to find Olioboard (okay, actually, I found it like a year ago, signed up, and then never used it), but I am obsessed with it the last two weeks!  Rather than designing boards from scratch, I've started by uploading pics of my own furniture, and creating boards based around my existing rooms, so that I can tweak them in the design board to see what's working together, what's not, how the colors are functioning, etc.  It's so much fun!




Pared down to basic elements, that's my living room.  Aside from the blue chair, which I COVET.  But anyway.   It seems so simple, but it took me like three days to get this to where I wanted it, and it's full of soooo many ideas - ideas for additions, subtractions, and little fixes...

• I'd been thinking about changing the wooden DVD shelves, but I wasn't sure whether to go with black, or larger shelves, or some other color scheme.  Black and gold has been on my mind a lot lately, but I hadn't even considered it.  Now I know exactly what to do with those shelves.  (And no, I'm not telling. Read the blog. :D )
• Part of my decor is now and always has been about the houseplants.  Every so often, between new acquisitions and deaths, things planticular get out of whack.  At the moment, I have almost no small plants to tuck into places.  I have several large ones, but none are HUGE and fluffy like I want, they're very vertical and stick-like (mostly by nature of the habit of the particular plant, though a couple of them are pretty near dead).  
• I haven't changed my mind about the fabric for the Day Sofa, but I DID decide to do something really cool to it that I hadn't considered before.  
• I'd taken the rug out of the living room to clean it, and then didn't put it back in, because it'd been raining, and the dogs, and the mud, etc.  I've decided to stop obsessing about a rug altogther.  I like how things work together without one.  I'm just a bare floor person.  
• While I didn't change the art over the fireplace, I did change the art over the fireplace. Wait...

Before:

Note the painting in the lower right corner, leaning behind the Buddha .  ("The Soul of a Rose" or "My Sweet Rose" by JW Waterhouse, which is one of my very favorite paintings ever).  

Other issues:  too much BS on the mantel (that wasn't intentional, I just stashed it all there when I painted that gold frame around the sheet mirror a few weeks ago).  

Also the mirror itself.  While I do like a darker, aged-bronze-i-er gold against these gray walls, this soft, champagne-gold is nooooot the right gold at ALL.  And while I love a mirror up here, this one is just too big. 

After: 

Muuuuch better.  Even for a night-time pic, which I keep swearing I'll stop doing.  (Not a photographer, you guys).  

"Rose" is now not only up off the floor and hanging on the wall, but twice the size it was, thanks to one of my other favorite websites, BlockPosters.com.   

I'm a big fan of leaning large art on top of things, but I opted to hang this one, to keep the fireplace separate from the wall above it.  It makes the fireplace look a bit squatty (it IS squatty), but I feel like now it's a more balanced wall, and less of a giant rectangle of stuff.  

(Again, the accessories on the mantel are just kinda shoved there until I have time to work on it; ditto the stuff on the floor, of which there is far too much in this shot).  

(Nope. Still haven't painted the living room ceilings. Or done anything about that random cord on the floor. Dont' look at those. WIP). 

All hail the internet:

    This post brought to you by: 

Olioboard, my newest favorite toy

Pinterest, my source for inspiration, beauty, and LULZ

                                     and

BlockPosters.com, without which there would be no art in my house.  

SEE I TOLD YOU

One last dining room chair - an Ikea KAUSTBY.  This is the one I use at my computer desk at home.  I'd say I got tired of sitting on an un-cushioned seat, but I pretty much never did.  I got tired of stealing couch pillows to put on the seat, and then having them all butt-shaped after a couple of weeks.

While I was upholstering the dining room chairs (for the actual dining room), I went ahead and did this one, too, with a scrap of heavy drapery fabric I got from a friend in a de-stash:

Tr-drrr. 

The end.

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Four Hundredth Verse: Same As the First

Well, I spent the middle of the week sick.  Again.  Food poisoning this time.  Did I break a mirror and forget or something?  Not throw spilled salt over my left shoulder?  SHEESH.  This year can die in a fire.

No, wait - no fires.  *knocks wood*

And now you all think I'm superstitious, lol.

I DO actually have another chair to show you, not that I have pictures yet.  But soon.  And after this weekend, a few more small projects around the house, too.

In the meantime, let me share with you some of the fuzzier aspects of my morning routine:

This is how I wake up every morning.   Daisy's very polite, quiet, and gentle;
and she waits for the alarm to go off first.  (Her brother, on the other hand,
has, at this point, been jumping up and down and panting as loud as he can
for like half an hour.  I ignore him).  

Evie (our smartest cat, I say with great sarcasm), gets stuck in the sheers...
again...while trying to get from the windowsill to the nightstand to walk on
my hair, first thing in the morning...

...and then gives up and sits down, to wait for me to help her.  She's an awfully
sweet cat.  Not too bright, though. 

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Dining Room Chairs - Paint Job and Upholstered Seats

The sack cloth upholstery thing has been going on for a while now.  I've always loved the look, but didn't really think much about it because where do you even get sack cloth, anyway? Turns out the answer to that is "from your friend's late grandmother fabric stash that she left behind."  Muchas gracias to said friend for the metric buttload of fabric she sent me home with a few weeks ago.  :)

That stack of fabric included several pieces of both cotton and linen sackcloth, some of which was still printed with lettering and logos - they were landscaping product sacks of some kind, once upon a time.

And so....

Before

Seat removed, frame cleaned, then deglossed with Liquid Sander, and finally painted with a plain black semi-gloss latex paint, with a 1.5" china brush with ragged tips, for that streaky wood-grain look I adore painting with.

The overall effect looks black at a glance, but up close it's a deep, deep espresso-brown and black "stain."

Covering the seats with the cotton sackcloth and eggcrate foam (which I happened to have a bunch of sitting around, left over from old projects).

One chair finished!

I did three of the set of four today.  I actually can't find the rest of my foam!  I know it's around here somewhere.  Soon as I find it I'll get the fourth chair done, lol.

I think when I do find the rest of my foam I'll put a seat cushion on the little Ikea dining room chair that I use at my computer desk, as well.  I'm tired of sitting on a throw pillow to blog.

Before & after comparison.

The dining room table is black, and I keep a rough, white, linen tablecloth on it.  These will coordinate much better.











All of the sackcloths I had were different prints.  So what?  I think it's cute that they're mismatched.  The third one, not pictured, has a simple print of black text;  the fabric for the fourth chair is the same, but the text is different, and placed differently on the cushion.

After