Craftiness

I am not a very creative, crafty person. I really wish that I was, but this is just not something that comes naturally to me. Ever since becoming a homeowner a year or so ago, I have become slightly obsessed with HGTV, and thumbing through the pages of Better Homes and Gardens magazine, Pottery Barn and Ikea catalogs has become a favorite of mine. I see rooms and houses that I love, I know exactly what I like and don't like, but have come to accept the fact that creatively decorating does not come naturally to me, as much as I wish that it did. This being said, I sometimes get into crafty moods where I really have a vision and I just want to sit around and make something. This does not always end in a product as beautifully as I had imagined, but I try anyways. Last week/weekend, I was in one of these such moods, and I must admit, I am pretty happy with the results. First off, I have been begging husband to let me paint the office for a while now. Our whole house was the standard builder's tan when we moved in, and slowly but surely I have been making each room feel like ours by adding color. We hired painters to paint the living room, kitchen and hallway last summer, and it really makes a world of difference in making our house feel like home! Well, hubs finally agreed -- actually, he brought it up out of the blue and offered to help me one night, which was quite the pleasant surprise :) -- so I hurriedly rushed out and bought a color. I get so excited when it's time to paint that I don't really do my due-diligence like I should. I grabbed a paint chip, held it up to a pillow and bought the first color that looked like it somewhat matched. Hmm..perhaps this was where I went wrong. I was looking for a grayish-purple color, mainly gray with just a slight slight hint of purple. This was just what the paint chip looked like, but I know from past experience that there are often undertones and shades in paint colors that make the color look different on a large scale than on the little chip sample. I asked the paint salesman if this was the case with the "glistening gray" that I selected, and the ever-so-friendly associate (I say sarcastically) informed me that the color would be the same on large scale as it was on the chip. I told him that I understood that the color would indeed be the same, but would different tones show through that make it look different? I really feel like I was asking reasonable questions here, but again he replied with, "The color will be the same on the wall as it looks on the chip." Well, thank you. So I went ahead and purchased my glistening gray, only to go home and paint a big stripe on the wall that turns out not to be glistening gray, but more of a lilac. Really. In fact, hubs refers to the color as "Easter egg purple." Grr. Another home decorating fail that just reminds me of my lack of design sense. We ended up finishing the room in glistening gray, and while it certainly isn't the grayish-purple that I had initially hoped for, it actually doesn't look too terrible once we moved all of our stuff back in, so maybe I'll mark this down as more of a half-fail :) You be the judge for yourself:

  

Before

Before

After

After

After

I also have been pining to make some "EAT" letters for my kitchen. I saw some in a Better Homes and Gardens and thought it looked pretty cute. We have a whole wall above our kitchen table with absolutely no decorations, so I thought that it would look perfect there. I decided that I wanted colorful, cutesy letters instead of just plain ones and thought that scrapbook paper would do just the trick. When I googled this, I realized that Courtney Cox's kitchen on the show "Cougar Town" on ABC has "EAT" letters exactly like what I wanted! Maybe my idea wasn't so original after all, but I decided to give it a go anyhow! :) I bought cheap chip decor letters from Hobby Lobby for $1.77 each. They are slightly different than the ones on the show, but I thought they would work nonetheless. I then picked out 3 different pages of scrapbook paper that I thought would look cute with the tealish-blue that our kitchen is. I got 3 pages for a $1.00. A little Mod Podge and some scissors and I was ready-to-go. 

All my supplies laid out - Mod Podge, scissors, pencil, letters, brush and scrapbook pages.

I just traced around the letters on the scrapbook paper and then cut about a half-an-inch wider than that. Then I wrapped each letter like a present and glued down with the Mod Podge.

It was definitely trickier than I thought, but I am quite pleased with the finished product. And all-in-all, it only cost about $10 and an hour of my time...you can't beat that! :)

So, if that's not enough, I also had a hankering to make a wreath for my front door. I still had my one up from Christmas, which I couldn't make myself throw away because it still looked so daggone-good! But I figured the time had come and I need to replace it with a more seasonal wreath. My mom was in town this past weekend, and she is a bow-making genius. Seriously, she makes the prettiest bows for wreaths that I have ever seen, and I didn't know how to do it, so I asked her to share her knowledge with me! I had an old grapevine wreath, and decided I just wanted a simple Valentine's wreath. We went to Hobby Lobby and bought a cheap ($2 "LOVE" sign) and a roll of red ribbon. Ta-da! So simple and so cheap. Nothing fancy for me here...and the best part is I can just replace the bow with one that I make with my newly-acquired knowledge and I can have a different wreath for every season for the rest of year! How great! :)