So Blessed.

Last week I had a 6 hour training day at work. We do this a couple of times a year. Considering that I've been working at the same place since 2007, this was my 7th repeat of this same training (with minor tweaks). Needless to say, my favorite coworker and I were bored out of our minds and at some point ended up playing with our phones. That's when she stumbled upon this:

Unfortunately, I have no idea where she found it. It links to the url she sent me, but if anyone knows where it's originally from, PLEASE lemme know. I was instantly obsessed. I dragged E to Michael's that afternoon (which is like an hour-long subway ride, mind you. We're in the heart of Brooklyn and Michael's is on like 98th and Lexington in Manhattan). But... when we got there, my big plans sort of came crashing down around me when I saw how expensive the faux flowers were. Not to mention the price of wooden letters. Feeling defeated, I moped around the store for about a half an hour before stumbling on some glittery gold paper/card stock in the scrap booking department and fell in love. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I bought three sheets.

When I got home, I decided that I was going to cut out letters from it. I debated between a bunch of words... "Home", "Hello", "Breathe", "Howdy", "Sweet", "Lucky", "Adore", etc. I even texte the options to E on multiple occasions while he was at work, but he never responded. Oh well. Eventually I decided on "Blessed"- because, really, we are. I get caught up in the kids things that we don't have, but aside from that, we really do have it good and I could really use a reminder of that.

Here's the finished product, followed by the process:

After selecting a word, I needed to figure out a font. I browsed Pinterest a couple of times before narrowing it down to two: "You Found Me" and one called "LSTK Clarendon" (bold).

 

vs.

Honestly, I normally would've gone with the 2nd option, but I was really craving a hand-written look and ended up going with the 1st. I do want to use the 2nd one for another project though....

Now, there might be a quicker, more efficient way of doing this, but this was my method. First, I blew up the font to size 450 and printed it out lengthwise on paper, like so:

Then I cut out each letter with scissors:

Next, I traced it all, backwards, onto the back of my glitter paper:

And cut it all out with an exacto knife:

Here it is looking a bit like Arabic, haha:

Once it was all cut out and flipped over, it made a lot more sense:

Then I just taped each letter in place, and voila!

 Let's just agree to ignore how badly I need a second coat of paint on those poor walls. I'm really pleased with the results though! As for that first project, should I check eBay for faux flowers? Craigslist? Anyone know of somewhere to buy fake flowers on the cheap? I want to maybe create one for the guest room...

Procrastination Station

Here we are, less than 20 hours until Rosh Hashanah here in NYC, and I haven't started baking. We're going to friends for all of the festive meals, but we're in charge of dessert and a green bean side (I haven't even BOUGHT the green beans!) and I have this big plan in my head to also bake cookies for all of our hosts. Deciding whether to sleep now and bake in the AM or to bake now and catch a nap tomorrow. Either way, the one thing I do have prepped is this:

I drew this guy while working an overnight the other night and I took a photo with my iPhone. Tonight I got it onto the computer, googled "photo editor" and ended up on Pixlr.com. On there I colored it in like in old school Microsoft paint (Does that still exist?? I've had an Apple since like 2003.) Slapped on a little textual Thank You note, and baddabingbaddabang, there we have it. Graphic design is clearly not my specialty, but I'm kind of impressed with myself. Unlike yesterday when I realized the rod I bought for our closet is the wrong size. Womp womp womp.

Anyway, have a great Rosh Hashana!!!

A Fine Establishment

Welllll look who decided to show up. TWO days in a row!

IDK if you happened to notice, but in the last post I started using a real camera. That's right. No iPhone there, friends. You see, my trusty Canon (see what I did there) had been MIA (zing!) for over a year. I started making photo yearbooks a few weeks ago, and I have NO IDEA what I'm going to do when I (eventually) get to 2013. It's going to be an entire yearbook of Instagrammed pictures. No joke. I'm like having anxiety over it already.

But enough about that. For awhile now (like years) I've REALLY been wanting to get one of those framed signs that people make of your last name (or kid's first name) made up of random black and white photos of letters. But those things are EXPENSIVE. I almost sucked it up and bought a Groupon for one on like 8 different occasions. But my cheapness kept getting the best of me.

So then I decided to make my own.

I even bought a nice frame for it on a trip to Ikea! And I actually found a website with free printable photos of letters AND I sorted through 100s of each letter, and narrowed it down to a few of each, and finally picked ONE of each of the 7 letters in "Sherman". I did it! But then it was like 4am and I needed to go to bed.

And then, suddenly, it was like 5+ months later. Oops. So now I don't remember what that awesome free letters website was, but I'd be willing to bet that I found it on Pinterest. :)

But tonight was the night. I found that Ikea Ribba frame and I whipped out my iPhoto album of the 7 photos that I'd already turned black and white, and I did a little bit of math and figured out that each one needed to be 2.6"x2.6" to fit (errr after a few miscalculations and wasted printouts. Math was never my specialty). I'm not sure if I'd recommend this particular frame, btw. I would have preferred it to be a bit shorter and wider so that the photos fit better but that's what you get when you do things on the fly. DO NOT tell my husband that I just admitted that I make rash decisions. Umm... Hi honey! ;)

Here's how that came out:

Next step was to pull my signature lazy person move and flip over the piece of paper inside the frame to get a white background. Except... wait for it... here's my Oh Sh*t! moment:

There were INSTRUCTIONS printed all over the back of that paper! What?! Thinking fast (also not my specialty, but this time that brain of mine *almost* pulled through), I grabbed my bag of scrap fabric and a few rolls of wrapping paper. Chaos ensued:

...Nothing worked. My vision had been for the letters to be against plain white. I actually sat down on the floor at this point, feeling defeated (and overdramatic). That's when I saw it: The pile of my husband's scrubs. At first, I was like:

But thennnn I was like: 

Because guess what color they were, and guess what I'd thrown a pair of into my designated cleaning cloth pile earlier this week (and hadn't used yet)?! That's right. WHITE. SCRUBS:

Now, of course, that added a whole ironing-and-taping step. But hey, sometimes life throws us curve balls. Look, Mom, I ironed!!! ....Yeah, it's really kind of a big deal. I honestly don't know why we even own an iron and ironing board. MAYBE for this exact moment?? ;)

 Aaaand to end a very long story almost-awkwardly quickly, here's the finished product:

Ta-daaa! I threw in a printout of "Established 2009" for a little extra kitsch and because it looked a little weird when it was just the letters centered in the frame all alone. Yeah, that "R" is a little bit higher than the rest of the letters, and therefore driving the OCD in me CRAY-ZAY, but it honestly might be another 5 months before I fix it. True story.

Guess Who's Back, Back Again...

Shady's back, tell your friends!

Okay, okay, I have no idea where Eminem is, but I'm back... please contain your excitement.

What is exciting (for me, at least!) is that I've got my first project for the "Furbishing" category here! And it's only 4 years in the making. Relax, it's about as low-key as imaginable. We bought these bright blue Ikea Nyttja frames back in 2009. I loved the color in the store, and maybe for a hot second once we got them home, but almost immediately decided to paint them black. Maybe because I was so annoyed that they come in black and I could have just bought them that way, I never got around to doing it.

Flash forward 4+ years and 3 apartments later, and I've finally done it. Except that instead of black I used Martha Stewart Crafts Multi-Surface Metallic Acrylic Craft Paint in Brushed Bronze.

Here's the before. (Ignore the unpainted area around the electric socket... we're about to paint the guest room... Again. It's currently Benjamin Moore's Stone 2112-40 with Shakespeare Tan 228 around the sockets- never got around to finishing up!):

 Much to my chagrin, I had to do 3 coats. Not super impressed, but I also didn't sand it down at all so I guess I can't complain... too much. ;) Here it is after one coat:

And here's the after:

I think I love it. I have the same frame hanging in the bathroom and I think I'm going to do the same thing. That print is from the same Ikea trip 4 years ago, btw. Jazzing it up all around the town!

Meanwhile, we're STILL in the process of picking a paint color for the living room... I know I want it to be gray, but all of the samples we've tried so far just aren't quite right. Too blue, too green, too dark, too purple, too light... you get the idea. We LOVE the color that it is now (Studio Taupe by Behr), but we painted before we moved in (two years ago!) and it doesn't look right with our tan couches. Lucky for us, we still have an extra gallon of it, so I'll be using that to paint the guest room... at some point.

Next up for the guest room? I'm thinking of painting some kind of pattern on top of that nightstand (chevron, maybe?) and replacing the knobs. The nightstand is a Craigslist find, and we've been using it as an entryway table until this week. The knobs are from Anthropologie and were bought to match our hallway decor, but they'll actually work really well on our bedroom nightstand. I'd like to get some branch-like handles for this one. I was thinking of something along the lines of this, but a quick Pinterest search just came up with this, which I might like even better, so we'll see!