moroccan painted stencil wall

i am so in love with our bedroom wall. our bedroom walls were originally a light pink/taupe. we painted them gray. i purchased a wall stencil from cutting edge stencils and painted the fill-in of the stencil a lighter shade of gray. makes such a big difference! now i want to paint more walls in the house. the edges were the hardest part to do and since it wasn't straight up and down it took me about 6 hours to complete. plus i'm a perfectionist so i cleaned up any rough edges with a wet q-tip. i know the walls are a bit bare but that's because there is another diy project in the works. i don't even mind the bare walls because this wall easily steals the show.

here it is up close.

wall of framed photos

i'm sure many of you have seen all the blogs and diy's on walls of framed photos. if not switcheroom blog has a great article on all the different kinds of varieties you can make. it took me a while to decide if i wanted mismatched frames or same color frames in different sizes, there were just sooo many options. i'm more of a clean line, traditional, symmetry person. i narrowed it down to wanting the frames to be in a perfect rectangle. so it came down to, same color, different size frames, to fit a perfect rectangle or same size frames all around. different sizes was a challenge but doable although more expensive. i went to michaels of course and saw the floating frames. i hadn't seen too many examples of floating frames on the internet. i loved the idea immediately. now purchasing the frames, that's another story. i needed 16 frames. the first michaels i went to had about 6 frames. i ended up going to 3 michaels. but that's not all, it was multiple trips over about a month. the frames were 11 x 14 at $14.99. I used coupons from the michaels website. then for the last half all their frames went on sale 40% off. good enough for me! so here it is:

bathroom makeover

i know i have been mia but that doesn't mean i haven't been doing anything. prepare for multiple blog posts... i'll start with the bathroom. we weren't planning to makeover our bathroom for a while but the previous owner's wonderful tiling job left us no choice. in case it didn't read right, i'm being sarcastic. talk about quick fix. the previous owner staged the house nicely. but looking closer, there were definitely corners that were cut. the grout from the floor tiles started to crack and making a mess. so we thought ok, let's re-grout. but christian thought because we don't even really like the tile, why not just re-tile the bathroom? oh boy did he regret that. when we went to pull the tiles we could clearly see why the grout was cracking. the floor was uneven because there was linoleum flooring underneath! this was done in two bathrooms! the other one was so bad that it had raised the tile flooring causing the bathroom door to not be able to open and close properly. the second bathroom was also remodeled but more on that later. back to this bathroom. we also found another surprise when pulling up the tiles. because the flooring wasn't done properly the base area around the toilet was leaking water. it must have been leaking for a while because there was mold on the boards around the toilet bowl. when we looked downstairs in the closet there was a big wet spot on the ceiling. i guess it was a good thing the grout was coming up because who knows how long it would have leaked until we would have noticed it. poor christian had to cut the wood around the toilet and replace it. re-tiling the floor led to doing the shower walls, adding a new bathtub, new vanity, and some sort of storage.

one of my favorite relaxing things to do is to soak in water that's too hot with a good read. there was no way i was going to do that with the plastic bathtub/wall insert. i don't even know what it's called i had never seen it before i started look at homes. but it had to go for so many reason. one of them being it just never looked clean. i don't care if you use straight up bleach, it was a pain to clean and it never looked white. so this grouting turned into an entire bathroom makeover, over time. this did not happen in a month or two, or three. actually christian just finish putting the trim a week ago. this is also because there are always multiple projects going on at once. oh how fun it is being a home owner :)

one day we will replace the lights above the mirror. we patched up the hole that had the medicine cabinet. we haven't put it up yet but a mirror with an extended arm will go there. the bathroom is small so i didn't want to put a closed storage cabinet. instead i liked the idea of having glass shelves and storing stuff in wicker baskets. baskets were a steal at michaels. they were having a deal and i got all three for $7! vanity from home depot. mirror from home goods.

i wish i had a before photo of the tub area. there are no words to describe how awful it was. i guess plastic tub insert is enough said. we got pretty tiles and accents from home depot. and i can't take credit for a lot of this work, not even half. but i don't mind because i couldn't have done it better. thanks christian!! i did the fun stuff. You know, like paint, pick out colors, and the decor of course. there are a couple of minor things we have to finish up but overall we are happy with the makeover.

diy christmas ornaments with the family!

i love family time. and everyone knows i love doing crafty things too. so why not combine the two!? i invited my sister and all the cousins over to have a christmas craft day. we stuck with silver and white which is the color theme on our christmas tree. i have yet to post photos of it (i will soon). my sister made a purple ornament that was too pretty to not include even if it didn't match the color theme. there was a lot of glitter involved. here is what they came up with...

so talented, right?! we also tried to make a gingerbread house. this is how it ended up

and this is what really happened

yep, his mouth is full and yep, that's icing on his face :) we had so much fun. here is the gang getting their craft on.

the wine is for the big kids (my sister and i), makes us create better ;)

diy vintage painted wall sign and butterflies

i finished this project a while ago and here it is! i wanted to make a sign to put in the foyer with a meaningful quote that everyone could see when they walked in and out of the house. and i had already planned to have the butterflies next to the sign.

here are the original butterflies that inspired me. the ones i did aren't exactly the same but i'm happy with the way they turned out.

since i explained how i made the butterflies in the previous post i figure i would explain how i did the sign. first, i used a piece of wood i purchased at home depot. you would think with new stuff being remodeled in the house i would just have a piece of scrap wood but i kept forgetting and instead threw it away. but it wasn't much to purchase. i used white trim paint that we already had to cover it. i put little paint on the brush and did layers of dry brushing so that some of the original wood showed through. it looks better when it's not perfect. i even peeled some of the edges of the wood to give it more of an aged look.

  

then i used acrylic paint i bought from michael's called sage. i also dry brushed this and did a thin layer so the white showed though.

I picked the font i wanted to use on the computer, printed it out on two sheets of 8.5x11 and taped it together. then took tracing paper and traced the letters. once they were on tracing paper i taped the tracing paper to the board and transferred the traced letters to the board. painted the letters and a border.

lastly I had my guy put hanging hooks on the back of it. in case you are wondering this is what the piece of wood originally looked like.

here it is in the foyer with abby in the picture of course.

diy clay butterfly wall decor

i love etsy and get so much inspiration from there. it's also easy to get distracted with all their unique items, next thing i knew, 2 hour later and i wasn't even looking for what i originally went on there for. i don't mind though because i always find something interesting. i was looking up wall decor and came across these butterflies. side note; take a look at this persons shop they have a ton of beautiful ceramic items.

this is not what i had in mind at all for the wall but i really liked it. i couldn't bring myself to pay $28 for one butterfly and of course i wanted more than one. so i thought about the clay i used to make the minature figurines of taz and abby and wondered if i could use that. it worked! i'm sure it's not of the quality of the ones on etsy but it conveyed the same idea. i used bake shop, sculpey clay ($1.29, 2oz package). each package makes 2.5 butterflies. butterfly cookie cutter form world market ($1). and i used white hemp cord ($1.29) wrapped around the middle a couple of times to hang it.

 

the clay is really easy to work with. i cut out the shape using the cookie cutter. made four holes using a needle wiggling it around to make the hole bigger. i tried to put detail into them using lace so they looked like the ones on etsy but decided i like them better plain. then i placed each of them on a glass baking sheet. to get the variation in wings being opened i laid them down like a tent each at a different height. be aware that at whatever height you set it, it will fall a little due to the heat in the oven. placed in the oven for 15 minutes. they cool really fast.

on some of them i had to make the holes a bit bigger and took my exacto knife tip and twirled it around gently to scrape the hole a bit bigger. and because i'm a stickler for details i took a small piece of sand paper and smoothed the edges out. these are so easy to make and can be painted as well. for where these are going and because i like the natural feel it has as it is, i'm going to keep it in it's natural state.

for the final part I wrapped the hemp around the front in an x shape like the ones on etsy and wrapped it around to the back into a knot. i painted thumbtacks white so if you are able to see them they blend in with the butterfly. i pushed the needle through the knot and stuck them on the wall. i already have in mind how they will be on the wall so the final photo will be posted shortly.

here is my little helper, making sure work gets done.

and of course there is taz, umm gaurding the door, kind of :)

... and here is how they turned out.

alexis and brett's wedding invitations

this is the follow up wedding invitations from these save the dates. alexis and brett wanted to keep their invites simple and elegant. she is having a destination wedding and the theme colors of her wedding are white and creams. even her bridesmaids are wearing white. i love this idea. white looks so clean. love, love everything about white when it comes to design. i wish more people would let design breath with white space. anyhow the paper on the invites is absolutely gorgeous. it is a metallic pearl that gives it a beautiful sheen. she also didn't want to have any sort of design and instead wanted to use typography for the design element. i loved doing these because they were so different then any of the other invites i have done. i was able to step out of tradition for bit. the client allowed me to truly keep it simple. i have always believed less is more.

the invitations consisted of an enclosure that contained the main invitation and three separate pieces in the pocket of the enclosure. the pocket held the rsvp, rsvp envelope, in the know and an itinerary. all these were cut at different heights so when stacked each header could be seen. the enclosure was held together with brown hemp to still have the 'feel' of the beach theme wedding. additionally a tag was tied along with the hemp that had the couples names and date of the wedding.