End Table Makeover

I mentioned in my last post that decorating in an apartment can be tricky.  The main piece of furniture in our living room is a red futon.  Red isn't my favorite color on the spectrum, but I still like it.  This futon is comfy, adds a nice pop of color, and doubles as a guest bed. 

As you can see, the color scheme in the living room of our old apartment was red, black, and gray with awkward bits of brown.  I know, I know, brown and black... nooooo.  But sometimes it happens.  The black couch at the bottom of the above picture was inherited from an old roommate who inherited it from a relative.  It was originally a greenish plaid, but my roommate did a mock-slipcover job with a couple black sheets.  After I inherited it, I kept the black, as it worked pretty well with the red couch.  But when we moved into our new apartment we definitely couldn't fit two couches in our living room, so we passed the black couch on to someone else.  Our new apartment living room did require an end table, however.

Enter the yellow end table.  I believe my mom picked up this up from a thrift store back when I was a teenager and we were redecorating my bedroom.  The colors in my room were lavender and a soft yellow, so my mom painted the table yellow and white to match my room.  Somehow this end table followed me to college, and up until recently remained yellow and white.  However, as you may recall, my futon is red.  And this table is yellow.  Ewwww.  Just not a great color combination.  I didn't even want to take a picture of them together because it was so awfully ugly.  Thus, I knew a fresh coat of paint was absolutely necessary.  I wasn't sure what color to paint it until I remembered this picture I'd pinned on Pinterest a few months ago.

Normally I would shy away from red, blue, and white since it just seems too patriotically cliche, but red and white with powder blue is a totally different look.  I liked it, so I decided to go with a powder blue for the end table.  Then there was the paint issue.  Spray paint is easy and cheap, but I have no appropriate location to spray said paint.  So that leaves brush-applied paint.  I knew I wouldn't need a whole gallon of paint.  So I perused the Home Depot and Lowe's websites for paint in a smaller size.  I saw on the Lowe's website that Valspar does pre-mixed color samples in half-pints for $3.  It appeared that the color selection kind of depended on the store and the day, so I went to Lowe's crossing my fingers for a powder blue.

 

Cha ching!  Valspar also does a half-pint of paint that you can get in any color, but I think it was closer to $5.  So if you've got a small project that won't take much paint, check out the samples first because they cost less.  I also picked up a three-pack of paint brushes from the dollar store.  So it cost me about $4 total to paint this table.

Tadaa!  Much more red-futon-friendly.  And I hardly made a dent in that jar of paint.  And I painted two coats!  I'm trying to decide what else I want to paint blue.  I've been wanting to paint our kitchen chairs, but I also have a little table that I'm keeping our microwave on that could use some tender love, but I also want to get a bench to put by the door to create a launch/landing pad and maybe that will need some paint.  Decisions, decisions.

I had a Bob Ross moment while I was painting.  I initially planned to paint the entire table blue, but then I happened to casually run the paint brush along the white circle trim and fell in love with the effect, so I didn't bother filling in the white between the circles.  It adds a little bit of interest to the table and makes the unique trim stand out.  As Bob Ross always said, "We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents."  It wasn't exactly a mistake to paint the trim, but I'd definitely call it a happy little accident.

The Spirit of Change

The other day I got the itch to give my blog a face lift.  You see, having lived only in apartments for all of my adult life thus far, there's only so much decorative change you can do.  Changing up furniture, picture frames, etc. is just about all you can do to add some color and character to the white blah-ness of apartments.  Sadly, changing up furniture is expensive.  Soooo expensive.  It's just not too doable on a recent college grad budget.  Plus, adding more furniture to an already cramped space can make it way too busy.  Also, I'm not a huge fan of making picture frames colors that aren't pretty neutral because I want them to jive with just about any paint color when that blessed day comes that I can paint the walls.  I might change my mind in the future when I actually have a location conducive to spray paint application.  It's just not an option right now.

Anyway, the face of my blog is something I can change as often as I desire.  And for free.  It's great.  As I don't have a job right now, I've had plenty of opportunity to crank out a new look that I'm pretty satisfied with.  And it didn't even take me that long!  Here are a few things I did:

1. I found a color scheme on Pinterest that I liked and used it as a springboard.  Here is my inspiration:
   
2. From there I created a background using GIMP.  Let me tell you about GIMP.  A while ago I was reading a post about creating blog backgrounds from the Kevin & Amanda blog, and she highly recommended GIMP.  It's moderately similar to Photoshop, but it's free.  Score!  If you're interested in GIMP, the link to the download is on the K&A post I mentioned earlier.  It's taken some time to get a feel for how to work GIMP (and it helps that my husband is a graphic designer and knows Photoshop well), but I've finally got some basics down solidly enough to create a simple background from scratch.  The hardest part was figuring out which colors to use.  I originally wanted the green to be the main color, but I fell in love with the dark blue with the brown.  But I'm getting a little ahead of myself!  How did I get the exact colors from my inspiration picture to my blog?  This beautiful little browser app for Firefox and Chrome called Colorzilla.  It allows you to pinpoint any color on the internet and it automatically copies the color code to your clipboard so you can paste it into whatever program you're using.  It's so magical.
3. I also made a banner, but not quite from scratch.  I found these free shapes on Pinterest.  They're for Photoshop, but my husband opened them up on his computer and converted them to a different format that works with GIMP.  Then I found the swirls and went with a symmetric placement.  I added my blog name and voila!
4. Of course, I went into my blog template and adjusted the colors to work with my color scheme.  I also had to do a little extra work to change the color of my post title and gadget title, as I have something kind of special going on there.  When I started my blog, there weren't very many font options and they were boring.  So I found this tutorial from Kevin & Amanda to put a custom font for the post title, gadget title, and post date.  Plus Kevin & Amanda have tons of super cute free fonts that are easy to put on your computer.  There are a lot more font options now for blogger, but it's kind of fun to have the option of doing any font.  So I've kept my custom font on there, since changing the color and size aren't very hard--just an extra step.
5. Lastly, I finally caved and got the pages bar.  I didn't really know what to put on there, so I looked at a lot of different blogs to see what other people did with their bars.  A lot of people had post categories on their bars, so I decided to go in that direction.  At first I felt like I my writing was too random to categorize, but as I started tagging my previous posts I found they all fit pretty neatly into a handful of categories.  It's nice to see that after two years my blog actually has some persisting themes!  This gives me a little more direction for the future.

 Even though I always like the outcome of my facelifts, I do get a little sad when I'm done.  Being done and having a good end product means I should wait a while before making any more drastic changes.  So I just anxiously wait around until I get tired of how my blog looks.  While I wait I think I'll make a small repertoire of backgrounds and I think I've got a way to share them on here.  We'll see when that happens, but it's in the future.

Easter Eggs

I was on Pinterest (of course) and came across this tutorial for some super cute Easter eggs. I'm slowly but surely building up my repertoire of holiday decor, and when it comes to Easter I've got nothing. So I attacked this project. Her tutorial is helpful, but I think I came up with a pretty efficient way of assembling them. Also, I made my eggs a little different than she did. You can adapt it however you want, but this is how I did it.

Cute, right? My photography is a little lacking, so I apologize for that. The pictures are good enough to figure out what I'm doing, though, and that's what is important.

First of all, buy some paper mache eggs from the lobby of hobbies (Hobby Lobby). These are not found in the Easter section--they're with the rest of the paper mache stuff. That's right, they have a paper mache section. I had no idea. It's by the wood craft stuff. There are three sizes of eggs. I got only the big and middle size, and that's what is shown above. I put the paint bottle in there so you can sort of gauge how big they are. They're pretty cheap. The big ones were $1.59 and the middle size was $.67. You could use the small ones too, but I didn't want to. All paper mache was 30% off when I got it, so that was a bonus.

First of all, paint the eggs with a color that goes with the paper you've chosen. I only painted one coat because I planned to pin the flowers on pretty tightly, but if you want to do it less tightly I'd paint two coats. I don't have a huge collection of acrylic paint, so I had to buy the colors I needed at Hobby Lobby. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Anita brand is only about 70 cents. Every other kind I've seen around seemed to be $1.30 or so. Win!

Oh yes, while you're at Hobby Lobby you can get paper too. Unless you're the sort that keeps a stash of scrapbook paper. Scrapbook paper was 40% off when I bought it at Hobby Lobby. Win again! I used two different paper patterns per egg and it took a total of two 12x12 scrapbook papers to do a big egg (one page of each pattern). It took about half that much to make the medium sized egg. I did it really tight, though, so it would take less if you space it further apart. Keep in mind that both solids and patterns look cute (although I'd pair a busy pattern with something more solid). I used the striped paper on top of the above paper pile along with hot pink for the complete egg at the beginning of this post, and I love how it turned out. I was nervous that the stripes would look weird, but definitely not. Be bold.

I suppose you could cut out the flowers by hand... but that would take sooooooooo long. Get a flower shaped paper punch. It's worth it, especially if you want to make a bunch. Mine is the medium size. I bought mine at Joanne's for $6.99 (it was 40% off! I'm just a winner all around!). You can get it at Hobby Lobby for $9.99 and Michaels for $7.99 (or maybe $8.99... they were all sold out so I didn't pay too close attention to the price). I didn't see any at Walmart. Yes, I looked at all of these stores before purchasing one. I'm thrifty like that.

My punch came with a little compartment to catch the flowers in. However, I wanted to punch my flowers as tightly as possible on my paper, so I chose to hold the punch like so. Thus, I could see exactly what I was punching.

I caught my flowers in a tupperware container instead. You can see how tightly I tried to punch it. If you choose to pack your flowers on your egg tightly like I did, it really doesn't matter if you have the occasional oddly shaped flower. If you have slightly not enough paper to make a perfect flower, punch it anyway. It's not noticeable. If all of your flowers are weird looking it might be noticeable, but the occasional ugly one isn't going to ruin it.

After you punch a whole row of flowers it's necessary to trim the extra off like so. These odd edges make getting the punch on the paper a little difficult, but you can do it. I believe in you.

The way the other tutorial carried out this part seemed kind of inefficient. I lost my patience very quickly with her method. First of all, find some cardboard. I used the box from my husband's diploma frame. We love this box. We do puzzles on this box, play cards on this box, and now I've made eggs on this box. You don't have to find a diploma frame box. You just need something cardboard that you can hammer pins into. I'll explain the method later, but just keep this in mind. The beautiful thing about my box is that it's really big and only about 2 inches thick. It's also very sturdy. Sturdiness is important. If you don't have a box as ideal as mine, you can just layer some cardboard thick enough so that you don't hammer pins into your kitchen table. Anyway, on your cardboard place some bottom flowers color-side-up. I chose a light blue. You can do as many at a time as you'd like; it doesn't really matter. I started out doing only 10 or so at a time, but by the end I was laying out 30 flowers to pin at a time.

After that, place your other flavor of flower on top of your bottom petal like so. This is a good time to mention that you need some pins. Now, the other tutorial says to use the pearl topped pins. This makes it pretty dang adorable. However, at Walmart, these only come in a box of 100 for $2.97. And she said it took a whole box to make one egg. That seems $$$ to me. I opted for something more economic: a 450 count box of normal satin pins for $2.37. Yes. 60 cents cheaper, but 350 more pins. Perfect. They aren't quite as cute as the pearls... but still cute. It's shiny. What more could you ask for? One box got me through 2 big eggs and 1 and 1/4 medium eggs. Not bad!

Hammer a pin into each flower. You only have to hammer them in a little bit, as you can see from the picture. You could try to just push them in... but it's really ouchy on your fingers. Use the hammer. The beauty of this method is that when you pull the pin out of the cardboard, it takes the flowers with them. That way you're ready and rearing to put them on your egg.

Now hammer them in there. You can see how tightly I arranged them. There's really no wrong way to put your flowers on your egg, but I'd suggest doing the ends last (especially the smallest end very last). I worried my plain Jane pins would look slightly tacky, but I ended up really liking the result. I like the simplicity of the little silver dots. And if you cross your eyes a little bit, my eggs almost look diamond studded. Haha. Ok, not really.

With how tightly I've got the flowers you'd think this took forever. Not really. It took me maybe 10 minutes to punch and pin this many flowers on the blue egg. If you want, you can punch all the flowers at once before starting any pinning, or you can punch 20 or so flowers, pin them, then punch some more. I tried it both ways and I think they're equally fast.

That's how it's done!