July 31, 2013

Oh, Mr. Darcy

It took me a good many years to jump on the Pride and Prejudice bandwagon. I think I even saw the movie first. And not even the Colin Firth one. The Matthew Macfadyen one. I've never seen the Colin Firth one, actually. Actually, the only other film I've seen is Bride & Prejudice, the Bollywood interpretation. That one is fabulous, for the record. I love Bollywood!!

But, yeah. I got the Barnes & Noble "leatherbound classics" edition of seven Jane Austen novels (link) for Christmas a couple years ago. First - can we all rejoice in the beauty that is B&N leatherbound classics? We own at least 10-20 of those bad boys, and I want them all. All of them! They're gorgeous books. GORGEOUS. That was the first time I ever read P&P but I loved it! I also read Sense and Sensibility and enjoyed it. I started on Mansfield Park and it was too much for me. That style of writing is difficult, the family is awful, and it's obvious the cousins are going to fall in love which is just...ew. And it's much longer than the other two. So I've taken a break from Jane Austen until I decide if I'm just going to skip over that one or suffer through it. Oh, side note - don't waste your time with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That book is just dreadful. Brilliant concept, terrible execution. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, on the other hand is glorious.

Holy smokes, I'm off topic. Are you surprised? THEN YOU DON'T KNOW ME AT ALL.

The ladies from our small group at church had a "Pinterest Party" last weekend. We all brought recipes we'd found on Pinterest (I made frozen hot chocolate and peanut butter fruit dip and they were delicious.) and attempted to recreate this pin:

source

I've gone to Facebook and stolen all their pictures of their completed stuff. I got ones without faces in them, at least. Anyway, here are the final results:

She is an art teacher.

She prays this verse over her daughter every night.

Her husband got fancy in a word editor. 8P
This was everyone's favorite by far.

This is going into a Dr. Seuss-themed nursery.

I'm  saving mine for last because everyone loves me the most. Anyway, the art teacher's husband has a printer-type thing that creates vinyl stickers, so we gave her the text we wanted and she had him print it off. Everyone did it kind of differently, but basically you set it up how you want the letters to look, put stickers over it, then set it up how you want everything around the letters to look, and then peel the stickers off.

Everyone did basic painting, except for me. I MOD PODGED! Going back to my weird Pride and Prejudice rant that up until this point has made no sense in the context of this post... I made a Mr. Darcy quote. If you've read P&P, you'll probably know exactly the one I used. Also, if you remember me mentioning P&P&Z...well, we had a copy of that book, which sucks. And the only copy of P&P we have is in my super sexy B&N leatherbound edition...so the pages I Mod Podged were from Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. 8} I didn't look too closely at which pages I pulled - I just got ones that had full text from top to bottom and no chapter numbers or blank space at the end of a chapter in them. I also used the picture where Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy are standing in the middle of a cabbage patch full of zombies that are eating cabbage because they thought it was brains. That book is so weird. And don't let those last two sentences make you think you want to read it, because - trust me - it sucks.

So, yeah. I Mod Podged the paper down, put stickers on it, painted over it yellow, and pulled the stickers off. Some things to do differently:

  1. Make sure you cover the paper completely with Mod Podge before putting the stickers down. They peel off super easy, as long as they're not on non-Mod-Podged paper. There were a few that were directly on the paper, and it just peeled off with the sticker. Super lame.
  2. If you use a light color - like yellow - the letters are not going to show up once you peel the stickers off and expose the white paper. So then you'll have to go back in with a tiny paintbrush and fill in the letters with black, cursing the day you were born.
  3. If you ignore #1 and #2, make sure you at least start early in the day. I started around 8:00. Left my friend's house around 11:00 and it took me...maybe 30 min to get home? I was up until about 3:00 filling in the letters and doing my final layer of Mod Podge. Granted, I was also watching Orange is the New Black, so I might not have been super speedy.
ANYWAY, here is the final result:

pre-yellow
Some might think I should've left it like this.
I don't disagree...

with the yellow
There is an Instagram filter on this bad boy, but you get the idea.


It was fun. 8/10 - I would do it again. Only I'd be smarter about it.

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