It was time for a little New Year Blog refresh! Clean, crisp, and a little turquoise. (I kinda love that color right now.) It’s a time of new beginnings where everything is possible and we are all motivated by the drive of another unknown year! So yeah, I revamped the blog, see you tomorrow!
Here is the Halloween House! I think I went pretty simple this year, simple touches of
scary! But I included some classics, my hear, see and speak no evil skeletons, Boo letters, mercury pumpkins & owls, and of course my crows (but I didn’t put up as many as usual), and Jars I love jars filled 
of stuff (thanks to Taylor and Stina for the beakers, perks to being friends with a chemist) and the silhouettes! This year I added the green apples, kinda fun right? Adding a little poison apple feel to it! The word art is something new, and this fun skull print with a mustache, which I did myself! My Mr., as I said yesterday he isn’t a huge fan of Halloween; he could take it or leave it. But he
doesn’t like skulls and creepy stuff, so this was my compromise, a funny skull! He gave it his approval. Lastly I finally have a place to hang this vintage-y banner my sweet sister in-law Linnell, it says Happy Hunting! So there is our Hallow House ready for haunting season, nice to have some of the old stuff up here at our new place! First Halloween in Washington!
With my health finally on the mend what better way to celebrate than setting up for Halloween!! First while sitting in the Dr’s office I saw this new idea by Martha of course. You can see info on hers here. But she basically got a branch and hung it in front of a window then strung paper bats from it, I loved this idea. But I couldn’t find the right branch, yes even with all the trees in our area I couldn’t find one up to my crazy standards! I did walk through a cob web though and found a very creepy one, it was perfect but not for the window for the squiggly light fixture in the middle of our main room. My Mr, who every year reminds me that I told him last year that I wouldn’t do anything crazy, kindly and patiently helped me to string it up. And it looks fantastic, I don’t think the photos really do it justice your just going to have to trust me that is looks very cool, if I do say so myself! Even My Mr liked it and he’s not such s fan of Halloween. I like it so much I might keep it up for the next couple holidays and hang different things from it. So there’s you little taste of my Halloween decor. The rest coming tomorrow!!
With St. Patties being in my birth month it’s one of my favorite holidays. No not for the alcohol subtext, which actually if you read here you will see that St Patties is more of a religious holiday focused on church attendance. So because of the sparse pickings for good St Patties decor I set out to make my own and this is what I came up with. I have
loved the yarn wrapped letters that we are seeing everywhere now, look here for instructions, it just adds a little texture to some otherwise plain letters. Yes, the wrapping can be a little time consuming and you might occasionally burn a finger or two, if you tack the yarn with hot glue. But the end result is great! Tips, think out the direction you are wanting to wrap before you start and also glue the edges first as well, it makes it look a lot nicer! Wrapping tighter will help with slacking especially with curved letters like C and O. Then I do love the sleek, clean look of the spray painted letters as well so I threw in 2 of those! So this is my St Patties addition!
In recent weeks I have been glued to my sewing machine making a few things here or there, resizing clothes and mending. But I thought I would share just a few of the projects I have been working on. Tomorrows post will give the details on each item and the little extra hint I have if you want to make them! Happy Monday!
There’s a compromise that goes on when you share a bedroom with a guy. Especially if you are married to My Mr. So when I put our room together he really didn’t want any flowery prints or ruffles. He wanted it to be a combination of both of us and not just a flowery, frilly, drape’y mess. This can be hard because girls tend to like those things. But he put his foot down and said I can’t take myself seriously in a paisley pink room. So I set out and found the basic stuff show below. The grey sheers aren’t what we had, I made ours from some home decor fabric at JoAnnes. The comforter was just a basic white duvet. But the image below is the general idea, kinda boring right?! But this is what we went with for a while.
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Now I was getting a little tired of the dreary colors in our room. But My Mr loves the gray wall color and really didn’t want to repaint. So I had to think what color I could incorporate into the room while still keeping it manly for him and feminine for me. So below is what I came up with!
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Green is a great accent color for our already gray and white room! I found this fun geometric, lattice’ie comforter for cheap on Amazon, it’s brighter in reality that in the photo. (Also side note; if you really want the look of it hanging over the edges of the bed buy the next side up from you current bed if possible.) I thought it went with our current geometric Ikea sheer drapes really well (sadly I don’t think these drapes are available anymore). Then I found some matching green black out drapes at Target and a matching bedside lap. And WALLA . . . our room was updated with the extra color I wanted and kept the manly stuff My Mr wanted too! I had to fix the drapes a bit, I didn’t like the gather at the top so I added the strips on the back like the ikea ones and now they gather great! I love how it’s still really light and airy and something that will look great year round! I’m still looking for green accents but that will take some time, which is part of creating a room! Anyway I’m happy with the bedroom makeover!
Recently I was up in SLC walking about
these Temple grounds. And I got the chance to see the installation of the bubble lights that adorn the pools on the grounds. You can see these lights in 
action in this previous post. The people were outfitted in the water gear, kinda reminded me of the ocean spray commercials (see here). It was pretty cool to see them getting the pool ready, chilly for them I’m sure!
We got together with the girlie’s for a girls night!
And of course we crafted it up! Thanks to the organizing of the event to gal pals Megan and Christina, they got all the supplies and organized the whole event. It was so nice to get together and just talk, get to know some new gals and catch up with others. It was a blast!
So if I do this blog style I should tell you what you need;
1 – foam, covered wreath (something that you can put stuff on)
2-3 packages of brown or white coffee filters (this depends on how full you are going to do you wreath)
glue gun
pencil
finger tip ointment ( we all burned our fingers making these)
And then scrunch the filers around a pencil, putting the end of the pencil in the circular center of the filter. Add a little glue and stick it on your wreath! I wanted mine not to be quite so full so I tore off the end of the filter and then clued it on. I didn’t pack them in quite as tight either, but my gal
pals packed em’ in and they look really good too, so you decided what you like and go for it. The brown filters I think make it perfect for fall and I was just thinking I don’t have a fall wreath, Done!! Give it a try!
So with me finally getting over this nasty cold I have been
battling for the last week and a half I am back and ready to talk about Halloween prep. This year I worked on a couple of things. First was to add more patterns and textures to my decor. This I did by getting some small stripe fabric and 
adding a little orange piping (I like orange to be an accent color in my decor). Then I sewed a mantel cover and covers for my shelves, I think they added just a little something to the overall look. Then it was on to fillers. I love to fill my jars and containers full 
of all likes of Halloween’ish things. But
I have yet to find some small bones to stuff my jars with. So I took the white model magic by crayola and made my own, they turned out pretty good if you ask me! But let me recommend that if you really want these to last make them out of a polymer clay or some kind of baking clay so that they will last for a long time. I’m not sure the crayola is going 
to last for very long, so next year I’ll make them in clay. Next up some skulls made from an ice cube mold provided by my friend Christina, and some plaster. We got the plaster to the right consistency and let them harden for about 30 minutes and they were ready to go. We gave them
another day to fully harden, I painted mine white and Christina did a really cool black and metallic look on hers. So there are lots of options when painting plaster. Lastly the crawling spiders! These I found of course on pinterest, check here for the tutorial. I made a dozen or 
so for the front door and a few more for the fridge. My change to the tutorial was to leave a little bit of the ring on to make it a little more 3D. My spiders are also the old fashioned kind (I bought them a couple years ago) that stand up a bit more anyway so it worked. They look like
they are actually crawling up my doors, I love it! I have to admit that I love how the house came out this year, even with my cold slowing the decorating up! So those are the few additions to Halloween this year. Photos of the whole house coming later!
I spent a day this week working on a rather daunting project, re-covering my brown kitchen chairs. 
They were in need of a bit of a makeover. I was a little nervous on how I was going to make this happen, having never done a project of this scope before. I mean I wanted these to look good, they were going to be in my house after all. So I called in the expert. My ever amazing mother in-law Peggy! She is a sewing genius! And I was in desperate need of some genius. So we looked up online how we could make these, thank you Internet! And got this 
tutorial and this tutorial. Both really great! So we based it off of those and started on the prototype. Prototype turned out great and felt more confident to cut the real fabric. As we began the cutting process my Sister in-law Tanya happened to come over, yay. With her help in coordinating patterns on the final fabric we were able to get the cutting done. We decided I was the idea/creator person, Peggy was the sewing/labor, Tanya was the foreman, and without one of us this would have taken A LOT longer. We were a GREAT TEAM! With the cutting done, Peggy and I got
to sewing the covers together, which was time consuming for me, I mean these were a little complicated you know! Peggy was so quick, thank heavens for her, it’s like she’s had a few years experience or something, she was done with her covers in a flash! I was just grateful to get through my 2 of the 4 that we did. It was such a great day, we got to chat and just spend some time together, which was really nice as Peggy will be heading off on one of these sometime in the near future. I was so grateful that she had the time to help me and that we were able to get all 4 chair slip covers done in one day! It was quite a day, I felt so fulfilled and like my chairs were going to look so cute, and yes they do! I love em’! 
One project down now on to the Halloween prep, yes you know that’s a comin!
Rounding up quality phone backgrounds can be pretty difficult now days. I mean you really have to sort through the SMUT of nude women and slasher photos to find something unique and classic to fit the ordinary kinda gals choice! I have searched, and am constantly searching for vintagie wallpapers and or even just fun backgrounds for my phone. So finally I have pulled together a collection of fun backgrounds for my iphone that incorporate lot of my favorite things, including Star Wars of course! And I thought I would share them with you! Take and look here and feel free to use any of them that you like, there are quite a few pages worth! They are all available free online, if you take the time to search, but this way I have done all that for you and now you can just enjoy!
Recently we have been getting some LATE NIGHT solicitors, not very cool. Imagine, we are in bed reading our books slowing down for the evening when we hear a knock at the door. It’s dark out (it summer so it’s lighter for longer), 10:30 PMish the puppy races to the door giving the occasional whoof. My Mr and I look at each other and think no way, the house lights are off we are not getting the door. A minute later another loud knock at the door, My Mr reluctantly gets up and heads to the door. I’m thinking it must be a neighbor with an emergency, or family member, or lost person trying to find the right condo to be coming by at this time. BUT NO, No and no. It’s a solicitor, someone selling something, grrrrr! Now I don’t mind this so much but lately we have been inundated with solicitors and
well My Mr and I just aren’t interested to be honest. We are kind and courteous to the door to door sellers but we don’t enjoy being pressured at our own home, just not cool! So I broke down and decided that we would have to create a NO SOLICITING sign. I don’t like just the plain old NO SOLICITING signs, they seem kinda harsh to me. So when I remembered this gals polite creation I thought that would be perfect. I didn’t have a place put a paper sign that would be easily visible and not look a mess in a matter of weeks. So instead I pulled her lovely design into my cutting software and did it in vinyl lettering. I think the outcome was perfect (image right), and yes, polite! So check out the blog post here for the sign (in a few different colors) if you are interested in a polite way to say NO Thanks!