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.

Half-Bath, Part 2: Paint, Paint, and more Paint

Part 1

Sorry for the lack of updates on the bathroom. It's because we're the slowest remodelers ever. My first post about this was on the 14th and here we are, two weeks later and the room is maybe halfway done. All we're doing is painting! Heaven help us if we ever get into demo remodels... Anyway, here are some pictures:

color palette, sorry the black is on black, but you know what black looks like

removed hardware/spackled

There were FOUR anchors for the screws holding the tp on the wall. I tried to pull them out and the drywall started bowing. PAINTED OVER.

first coat of white

second coat of white

so pretty and clean...

first coat of black

No pictures of second coat, but these are bad enough you can't see the red coming through, I don't think. If you can, just know we added a 2nd coat so it isn't there now.

Installing the light. Makes the room even darker, but not as dark as these pictures make it seem.

So, yeah...that's where we are. Well, I've splotched on the off-white over the white, but those pictures look like crap, due to the lighting and lack of a decent camera. They're also not easily accessible right now. So I guess you're get TWO painting posts. At the rate we're going, the next one will be go up around December. 8P

Mr. T started working on the stencils for the picture frames. I'm working up the courage to begin trying to stencil in the birch trees on the white area. We're...I'd say halfway done with painting. We got a lot of surface area covered, but the details are going to be more tedious.

Oh, and that art? We just had our silent auction at the gallery (you should really come out to one sometime!) and I bid $75 on them, plus another $20 on a smaller piece of art from the same artist. She turned me down. I knew it would be a possibility, but it was worth a shot! The worst part about it was when Mr. T asked her how much she would be willing to take - open the floor up for some negotiation, you know? - and she said "I don't know."

.........

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you don't sell your art. Thank you, and have a good day. Hopefully there will be some cool stuff coming in this month that I can bid on.

Half Bath, Part 1: The Idea Machine

Oy! We bought this house waaaaaay back in September. 9 months! It could be our baby...

We've done nothing to it, except lower the value of it. For real. It's in worse shape now than when we moved in. The carpet's all stained from various animals and toddlers. 99% of our furniture was given to us, so it's all junky and mis-matched. When one of our old roommates moved out, the walls in the stairwell got pretty dinged up.

I've been reading all these blogs by people who have freaking amazing design skills. I've finally come to realize that no, their houses aren't always as magical as their pictures make them out to be. But you know what? At their worst, those houses would look better than our house at its best.

Mr. T and I haven't ever really done the whole remodeling thing. He's fairly handy with tools, we just don't own any. And it takes him about a decade to finish a project. I, of course, am next to useless. I've painted walls, but that's about it. I don't sew, I don't...carpent. I don't design. I can barely dress myself. But! We're going to start! Dressing ourselves, that is. And then maybe move on to some renovations.

We're starting out small. Suuuuper small. Think half-bath small. PICTURE TIME:

I'm a foot or two back from the door here. You can see they went for something more...adventurous...in the painting of this room. I'm not sure what you call that style, but they painted it with the darker color and then blotched on the lighter color. The painting above the toilet was done by Mr. T's mom. We've only hung art up where nails were already in the walls. Or where Mr. T threw in a thumbtack. How long have we lived here now?

Now I'm wedged in the corner where the trash can was. You see how the wall cuts in? We're under the stairs here, so the ceiling is really bizarre, too. There isn't a lot of room for anything other than the toilet, sink, and a trash can.

Tried to get a picture of the light. People seem to do that. We'll probably replace it with...something different? 

And here's the super janky ceiling action. I don't understand why this room was built this way. The walls  are uneven. The ceiling is even more uneven than the walls. I've never really paid any attention to ceilings, but it has gotten pretty popular to paint them at least. And you can't do that with the weird speckley ceilings like what we have. I'm not sure how you change them? But that's like...the lowest priority ever. We'll be about 90 when we start changing ceilings around.

So that's what our bathroom has looked like since we moved in. Lovely, isn't it? Alright, so I have a Pinterest board. It doesn't have that many pins in it, I swear! The first thing I ever saw that I wanted to do with our bathroom is this pin:

http://pinterest.com/pin/485755509778554219/

I pretty much wanted to copy her bathroom exactly. I was thinking bright colors to make the smaller room brighter, and I loved the stencil and how she framed the mirror. Even the light is super cool. I even hunted the Web to find the stencil!

But then I saw this bathroom:

http://pinterest.com/pin/485755509779082486/

The entire thing was done in chalkboard paint. And that is just super cool to me. SUPA COOL. Which, I mean, is exactly the opposite of what I was trying to do in the bathroom - make it brighter. It's going to turn it into a cave. But! Here are my thoughts:

1. We still do the birch stencil on the three walls surrounding the sink.
2. We still frame the mirror.
3. Instead of just blank black walls, I want to add picture frame outlines in white paint. I know I've seen this done before, but the closest I can find is this thing I pinned. Which, now that I think about it...having games and stuff in there would be fun, too. lol! We shall see...

I think adding enough white back into the room with the toilet, sink, trim, framed mirror, stencil, and random picture frame outlines on the walls will keep it from turning into a cave. Eventually the floors are going to be hardwood - when we finally get around to putting hardwood in downstairs. At least I think they will. Until then, maybe we can just get a nice rug?

The only other things I have in mind for this room are:

I want to get this little guy up in there somewhere, maybe in a frame on the wall to the right of the sink.

http://pinterest.com/pin/485755509778897803/

This is just too cute! We must recreate it!

http://pinterest.com/pin/485755509778412514/

Also, there are these paintings up in Mr. T's gallery right now. Wait - you haven't heard about Two-Tone Art Gallery?! It's the newest and only art gallery in Murfreesboro, TN! We're open 5:00-9:00 Thursday through Sunday. Except today. Those hours kick in tomorrow. 8}

Anyway, one of the artists has these three paintings up at the gallery right now that I just love. I really want to buy them to hang above the toilet. I'm going to say that I'm not revealing them right now because I want some mystery leading up to a big reveal of the finished space, but in reality...I just don't have a picture of them. Don't let anyone know, though. I'd rather be mysterious. 

You know I can't keep anything from you guys! Ran by the gallery a little after publishing this post and snagged a picture of one of the paintings. The design continues to the left and the right. Sorry for the poor quality. I used my phone, was pretty far away from it, didn't turn the lights on, and then cropped down to focus only on this one painting instead of the entire wall o' art in the actual picture.

Even after all this, our house still isn't going to win any awards. But we will have finally put some personalization into at least one room! Even if it is the tiniest room. :) You've got to start somewhere, right?!

Cutting Glass Bottles with FIRE

Or: Someone help us all, Mrs. Wilson is lighting acetone on fire in the kitchen.

Alright - I'm attempting to participate in "The Pintester Movement" (round two). Cutting it close (ahahahaha - "cutting" because glass and fire and cutting with them, and then also cutting it close on time - ahahahaha)

I'm cutting it close on time, since this is due just a few hours from now, but I'm gonna try to get it posted and sent to her before the deadline. I think it's around 8:00 or 9:00 tonight.

So, yeah... You basically take some sort of yarn or thread or whatever, soak it in acetone, wrap it around a cylinder of glass, set it on fire, don't die, then dump it in ice water. The glass snaps in half and you suddenly have a strange, tiny drinking device that really serves no purpose, but hey - you got to play with fire.

In Madam Pintester's attempt she made a vlog. And also failed pretty hard. But it's okay, because she had pretty hair. Man I miss dying my hair!! So...I attempted to also shoot some videos. They're still on my phone as of right now, but maybe by the end of this post they'll be on YouTube and I'll embed them. WE'LL SEE.

She doesn't link back to the original pin in her post, but I know I've pinned something like this before...let me see if I can find it. Hmmm...this one will work! They cut the bottom off of them, but CLOSE ENOUGH. That's the one I've been wanting to do, but I don't drink wine. And I don't pay extra for the fancy bottles of liquor. But I think I just might...because it would be so pretty!

Okay, here are my glass bottles and my bowl of ice. Everything's gonna be going down over the nice, fire-proof sink. We haven't lived in our house long enough for me to be okay with burning it down in the name of DIY. Maybe in a few months...

And waaaaaay over in the corner is my bowl with acetone in it. (It's the little dish in front of the crock pot.) I apologize for the mess. Truth be known, I passed out on the couch around 8:30 and Mr. T woke me up at 9:00 to do this. I was grumpy and just wanted to go back to bed. So I wasn't motivated to clean. SORRY.

Alright, here I am tying some yarn (it was 100% acrylic, Madam Pintester) around the bottle. I only wrapped it twice.

And here I am setting it on FIRE. FIIIIIRE!! Well, about to set it on fire, because the actual process is...ON VIDEO!!!! (Going to upload to YouTube, brb.)

Viiiiiiiiideo!

So, yeah...it kind of worked! Except it didn't. And then Mr. T pointed the camera at my boobs for awhile. At least YouTube rotated the video. It was sideways when I watched it on my computer pre-YouTube. omg, guys - I'm on YouTube!

Alright, Mr. T tried to use hemp. SPOILER ALERT - didn't work. I'm not gonna post the video, because it didn't even catch on fire a little bit.

So on my 2nd try we did a LOT of yarn!! It burned longer and hotter (maybe?) so we were hoping it'd work better. Oh, wait, no - on my 2nd try we did a lot of yarn, but didn't burn it for too long, so I'm thinking the heat didn't make it all the way to the glass.

The third time I tried it we let it burn for a long long time and it got super hot and...IT WORKED!! I mean, kind of. It's a little sharp and uneven, but Mr. T is going to try to smooth it out with a dremel. And then I'll probably take the wrapper off and spray paint it, because it's all charred and gross.

And now for some saaaaaad news! Midway through filming my 3rd attempt, my phone crapped out. Hard. I had about 9GB of images and videos on there. 9GB, you guys! So my phone ran out of memory, stuttered to a stop, spazzed out SUPER HARD and I almost never got into my galleries to purge all my images. They went all the way back to when I almost burned our rental down with a faulty toaster!! Luckily, I've been backing up all my images/videos to Dropbox since February, so I could delete from my phone without fear. Well, I did lose everything prior to February, so you missed out on a picture of some charred frozen waffles that got wedged in a toaster and caught on fire, but I didn't notice it until the entire house was full of smoke because the firefighters were all "We're not going to put a smoke detector in the kitchen, because you'll take the batteries out the first time you burn dinner, right? *heyuck" So the smoke had to get all the way into our hallway before any alarms went off. BY THEN I COULD HAVE BEEN DEAD. You know, we still don't have a new toaster? And now I really want some waffles...

What was the point of all this? Oh, right - cutting glass. Yeah, I did it. Go me.

Crayon Art

So. I told you last week about how I was going to make the crayon rain thingy I had pinned forever ago. Well, here are (almost) the results!

First, I had to sort all the blue crayons out of the packaging. Soooo much fun. Let me tell YOU. I figured while I was at it, I'd sort ALL the crayons, so if I ever decided I wanted to make some crayon art again, I'd be good to go. Hopefully Future Mrs. Wilson will appreciate that. Because it sucked. 8P Oh, I included silver because I thought it'd be snazzy and shiny and fun. IT WAS.

Do you know what WASN'T fun? Getting the friggin paper off all the crayons. I finally thought of soaking them in water first. It took two soaks, because it was GLUED. I mean....GLUED. I don't know if it's easier to get paper off Crayola crayons, or if other bloggers don't complain as much as I do, but no one mentioned how much this step sucks.

I traced our wedding picture onto some tracing paper (ignore the red bit, it was previously-used tracing paper), then used a piece of foam from the crayon boxes wrapped in aluminum foil to outline the umbrella, and more aluminum foil to protect the area where our future bodies will be. Mr. T painted us in after I finished melting the crayons. It might've been easier to do the painting first, but then I'd have to wait and...I'm impatient. Plus, our former roommate was here, so they played Borderlands 2 all weekend. 8P

Alright, here is my setup. I taped plastic bags to the wall, in case I got any wax behind the canvas (I did). I used some sketch pad of Mr. T's (don't tell him) to protect the floor, and then more plastic bags because it was the same width as the canvas (smart move - got wax on them). I still got wax on the floor, but whatevs. I originally had the canvas too vertical, so the wax ran down too quickly and was super delicate. It curled up off of the canvas and was no bueno. I horizontal'd it a bit more, but couldn't go down too far because my plastic bags were up too high. It was partially due to laziness, but also I couldn't really stop once I got started because the crayons in the glue gun were fickle, fickle things.

Here it is after the first crayon. This made me very sad. I was like...oh-em-gee, this is going to take FOREVER. I was very glad I had decided to unwrap all the crayons. Things did get a little better once I tilted the canvas more, but it still took way more crayons that I was anticipating. Hindsight...if I do it again, I'll have it down almost flat to do this. LEARN FROM ME, CHILDREN.

And here it is with all the wax on it! Once I got in the groove things sped up. The trails are still too thin, and sometimes raise up a bit at the bottom. We're going to try to polyurethane it once we're all done. And then frame it so it stays nice and safe. This is the first piece of art for our gallery of looooove that's going in our bedroom!

And here it is after Mr. T painted us in!! Aren't we just precious? SO PRECIOUS. 8}

(image missing due to husband's extreme procrastination skills)

After looking back at the original...I have a lot more white in my canvas. I didn't look at theirs while I did mine. Again, mostly because once the wax started melting I didn't really have time to think. It's not like glue, that stays kind of thick. It pours out like...well, like melted wax. 8P I think it has to be the RoseArt crayons, though. I just double-checked their post and their canvas was pretty vertical, and their wax streaks were a lot thicker. Crayola must melt more slowly than RoseArt. Stupid cheap crayons.... But I like that I made it my own (totally on purpose, I swear), and it's not just a duplication of theirs.

DIY Art!

Alright, I disappeared for a bit, but none of you noticed so shaddup.

I'm going to do it! I'm taking something I pinned forEVer ago, and I'm going to attempt it! Here are my supplies. See if you can figure it out:

Crayons, hot glue gun, and canvas. Hmmm.... WHAT COULD IT BE?! ;)

source

8} *squee!! Yeah, it's gotten super popular, but suck it. I'll be that weird woman with the "That's SO 2010's" art hanging in my house, like the people that still have the crazy 70s flower wallpaper. But I! Don't! Care! I LOVE IT! Sorry, I also really like that song.

Anyway - put crayons IN a hot glue gun! Brilliant! I'm not super clever/crafty myself, but I will darn sure steal other people's clever ideas. So, yeah - got the supplies above. The people with the pretty rain one said they bought three boxes and used all the shades of blue. They had a coupon for Crayola, but I did not, so RoseArt it is. They said it they used less than 20 crayons for the whole thing. Here are all my blues:

So pretty! I'm going to use this picture:

So....wish me luck! I have no clue how this is going to work, but I bought a cheap-o glue gun at Hobby Lobby so I wouldn't ruin our current cheap-o glue gun we bought at Walmart forever ago. 8}

I mean, hey - this kids did it:

source

Although, the girls' kind of suck, and I'm guessing the boy had help from his mom...it's too perfect. Oh, oh, oh - if it goes well, I might try to get FANCY with it!!!

source

DIY Update - Giving Up Shampoo

So, according to my schedule, this is where I post an update about my DIY adventures. Or home improvements. Eventually I need to link all of them in some fashion. But too lazy today.

I know I've mentioned going 'poo-less on here. I'm not sure how much detail I went into, or if it was even mentioned in its own post, or just in passing during other DIY stuff. There was some recipe I linked to that recommended 1 Tbs. of baking soda per 1 cup water for shampoo and 1 Tbs. apple cider vinegar for 1 cup water as conditioner. So I tried that. My hair got...greasy. They say it takes time to acclimate, but... 1 Tbs. for 1 CUP is...not a lot. I posted about it on Facebook (I have a DIY album) and one of my friends said she used way more than that, and that she felt like as long as you rinsed thoroughly you couldn't really use too much. After more online research, I had to agree with her. I had read some posts where people were creating a paste with the baking soda, so...I was like "MOAR!" And now my hair has really cleared up! It's at least as healthy-looking/feeling as it was with shampoo/conditioner - if not more. I don't really pay attention. My face did break out while my hair was in the super oily stage there at the beginning, so THAT was super lame. But it's clearing up now, so huzzah!

As far as my "recipe".... *shrug - I just dump some baking soda into a ketchup container, then fill it up the rest of the way with water. And I do the same with the apple cider vinegar. Except I put that into a little spray bottle. So, as far as my showering routine goes (so glad you asked about that, by the way) - 1) I put baking soda in my hair, against my scalp. Only where my hair is long - I don't do anything with the sides. Start on my forehead and go down to my neck, then back up. Rub it in real nice - it's kind of gritty with the baking soda. Then rinse it. Whatever you do, don't get it in your mouth/eyes. Blech. 2) Then I take care of my body - soap, shaving, body scrub, whatever. 3) I finish by rinsing my hair one more time, to make sure I get all the baking soda out, and then I spray the tips with the vinegar. I do one side of my mohawk, and then the other. I'm not sure how you'd do this with normal hair. I don't care. I'm not sure it matters all that much.

Anyway - another DIY success! Hooray me! Picture below because I can.