Project: Bunting

Another confession: I love bunting (not baseball, not baby), but bunting banners. To me, they are eye candy. And for no reason at all, other than the shear pleasure of getting to look at one every day, my bunting project was born.

Before this bunting, though, there was wedding bunting. When Louis and I got married this summer, our lovely colleagues (shoutout to DMV, Elana, and Mattie!) decorated our desks! I adore my bikes/bride and groom bunting so much that it also decorated the cake table at our wedding and is now hanging in our home "office".

I especially love the wedding dresses on the plastic Dora toy and the kangaroo another colleague brought me back from Australia. :) Anyway, on to my bunting...

It was as simple as picking up a pack of fabric quarters for a mere $4.99. The best part about this was that I didn't have to find my own scrap fabric in corresponding patterns/colors.

The process here was pretty simple: cut out as many triangles from the fabric as possible (using my homemade snapfish cardboard stencil, of course). I confess that before it became a cardboard stencil. I cheated and printed a paper offline after googling "bunting template". I'm too much of a perfectionist to free-hand something like this.


And a quick iron of the 36 new triangles.

From there, I had purchased a 1-inch wide sheer yellow ribbon, which I folded in half at the top over my evenly-spaced out triangles and simply began to sew a quick running stitch across the top.

And that was it! The bunting is now living on the porch. It's fun to see the bright colors in the foreground as the leaves on the trees out front begin to change. I'm currently enjoying said bunting from my perch on the porch on this lovely near-70s last day of September. :)

I heart upcycling.

Upcycling: the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

After last week's upcycled patio chairs, I was really eager for more. Except I didn't have anything to re-do. Our adventure to Hastings was great fun, but I did not find the captain's chair I have been longing for. Well, technically I did, but someone else had already upcycled it by painting it orange, throwing a black/orange Halloween fabric on the chair pad and tried to sell it to me for $54. Nope.

Louis was bound and determined to help me find this chair (I love my husband). A captain's chair is what you would commonly see at the head of a dining room table--a basic chair, but with arms. I also required that mine have some kind of chair pad I could reupholster. Given that for every set of dining room chairs out there, only one was a captain's, I realized my odds. And struck out at our tried and true antique stores in the Mall of St. Paul.

Until this past Thursday. Our colleague, Fawn, was having a garage sale. She's the only person I know to hold a pre-sale with cocktails, so we were in. And lo and behold, among a dining room set was a captain's chair! Victory! I convinced her to split it up from it's sibling chairs and couldn't wait to get it home.

This chair is going in our bedroom. Right there in the corner. Do I plan to sit on it? Maybe. Do I plan to pile clothes and other things on it. All the time.

Still, it doesn't match. Okay, for you painting wood naysayers, look at that--natural wood is fine for the dining room, but the trim is already painted white upstairs!

Something had to be done about this.

So we picked up some paint in Cottage White (that's pretty much screaming out, "buy me!" with a name like that!). Should I have primed it? Yes. But three coats of paint and one terrible Netflix rental (not to be named) later...





I still had to recover the chair pad. Surprise! Here's what I found when I took the old fabric off (which I have to admit, I really liked, but it was worn and dirty): old foam covering a duct-taped chair. I'm wondering if the tan vinyl were the original coverings and more recently the green fabric and foam had been added. Anyhow, I replaced it with new blue paisley fabric and a new piece of foam, thanks to my trusty staple gun. :)




And here it is--the big reveal! C'mon, doesn't that white just make the blue paisley cover pop? And it fits in so nicely with the already-painted trim (AND those lovely new bedroom curtains I made!).


In case you need a side-by-side review: the debate of painting wood versus not painting wood will rage on. You know where I stand.

Before and After: Patio Chairs!

Here's a little fun fact about me: I love before and after shots. I don't know why. As a kid I was always fascinated by infomercials selling anything related to cleaning and watching the carpet, fabric, etc. magically become clean again!

Today's DIY all started like this:

Fabric! Check out all these options just for fabric that is specially treated to withstand sun/outdoors.

Technically, the project started here:

Louis and I picked up this patio table and set of chairs while we were in Iowa last weekend. My mom told me the chairs were from my grandparent's house--they were the kitchen set from the 70s!

See? Straight-up 70s.

Awesome. Thank you for saving this old stuff!

Back to fabrics. Lucky for Louis, he got spared a trip to the fabric store. He was at work, I was taking a vacation day. But I couldn't decide between these two lovely swatches:

Circle bursts or stripes?! After texting the photos to him and looking like a big weirdo at the fabric store, he had no opinion. Later he told me he thought I was making outdoor curtains. Umm...?

After purchasing Summer Squash Rustoleum spray paint and a staple gun (!), I was homeward bound to get to work on my project.

Well, hello, sunshine chair! Oh, look how green that grass still is, too. We might not have seen the sun for the last 4 days, but we still have green grass!

Okay, onto "reupholstering"... Cut once, measure twice?

Oh yes, this is good. "Under penalty of law, this tag not be removed except by the consumer." Fun fact: you could reorder new vinyl for these chairs, and the company was in Wadena, MN!

So glad Louis was now home. He ripped off his cover in the time I got 1/4 through mine.

Ready, set...

Staple!

In case you forgot what we were dealing with:

And here she is! Sunny yellow, brown-sunburst fabric chair! 1970, meet 2010.

Remember this? Okay, I know, I need a better before and after, but I have to wait until the sun shows it's face tomorrow. Ooh, and we're off to Hastings tomorrow for antiquing with Derek and Leona. Derek says he loves antiquing. What I foresee happening is Derek and I going antique gaga while our spouses pretend they don't know us. Updates later!

American Pickers and LeClaire, Iowa

Have you ever wondered where antique dealers get their goods? I do. A lot. :)

This past weekend Louis and I were down in Iowa, visiting my family and picking up some more furniture for our place. My parents were asking me about antiquing and mentioned how there are several antique stores in LeClaire. LeClaire is a small town located along the Mississippi. It also happens to be where 3 out of 4 sets of aunts/uncles live and where my grandparents lived. I spent years and years in the car headed east bound on I-80 from Davenport to LeClaire for holidays and family gatherings.

Growing up, I associated LeClaire with Buffalo Bill Cody (this was his birthplace) and the extensive 4th grade history project. Beyond that, I saw it as a small, boring town. Nowadays, there are many little shops and even more antique stores that I can now appreciate.

But getting back to where all those antiques come from. We didn't have any time for antiquing during this trip, but I can't wait to check out these stores next time. My parents also told me about the American Pickers. As I learned, LeClaire has been put on the map by the History Channel! American Pickers is a show that documents the "picking" or "junk-collecting" escapades of Mike Wolfe and his buddy Frank Fritz on the road as they seek out leads or just freestyle, as they call it, when they drive through rural areas and pull off in places that seem like they would house a lot of old stuff. And then they bargain or finally break the ice with collectors willing to sell.

Mike and Frank are good ol' Quad City boys and their shop (Antique Archaeology) is right inside LeClaire. We didn't make it in, but had to pass by while we were in town over the weekend. I wish I had cable so I could watch the History channel, but good news: season 1 is available on Netflix (if you aren't one of the already 3.8 million viewers)! After just one episode, I'm hooked. It covers everything I love about hunting through an antique store--that feeling of victory over a great find, meeting interesting folks along the way, and maybe even learning the history behind a good find or pick.

The show is now in its second season. I think everyone likes to see the familiar, and watching the show gave me this sense of pride. Images flashing on the screen of places I've seen since I was a kid, recognizing the small towns they visited, or even the commonality of driving down I-80.

So now I know where some of the world's antiques are found. Off the beaten path, stored in old houses and barns, and just waiting to be picked.

DIY: My Making it Lovely kitchen curtains

One of my immediate projects after moving in: kitchen curtains. I can't complain. We have nearly new windows and coverings on most windows. But lacking in others--and I'm sure the neighbors are great, but our houses are about 20 feet apart on either side. So I needed to make these curtains!

We have a lovely two-tone kitchen: buttercup yellow on the top and a grassy green on the bottom, separated by white trim. Louis and I settled for yellow curtains, bought the necessary supplies: fabric, ribbon, and thread.

And then I dug out my Singer. The Singer that was stuck in a zig-zag position since I last used it. In 2005. I tried, I really tried to make friends with it again, but I deemed it best to give up lest pushing the machine off the table.

So I went old-school. I sewed them by hand and they aren't perfectly straight, but they got done. I copied these curtains here, which is why I refer to them as my Making it Lovely curtains!

I basically cut two panels of fabric slightly larger than my windows (in hindsight, because my curtain rod makes the curtains hang out from the window itself, I would have made them wider to extend across the panes, too. oh well.). I did a basic running stich and left a large amount of fabric at the top to create the pole pocket.

Louis drilled and hung the curtain rod, which we scored for about $4 off because it was a repacked return (luckily nothing was missing--I checked carefully before leaving the store). Once the curtains were hanging, I followed Nicole's method to create soft folds, held mine in place with clothespins and looped the fabric from the top to bottom and tied large bows. Note: it took me an entire spool of ribbon for each loop.

And here they are--I love them! They still give us the light from the bottom, but block out enough at the top so it doesn't feel like we're cooking at the zoo. :) And I must retake a photo in better lighting.

State Fair time!

The Minnesota State Fair is how I cope with the end of summer. Dubbed, the Great MN Get-Together, it runs 12 days through Labor Day. My first year in MN I didn't attend (I had only lived here a few weeks and was a year-long volunteer with little State Fair cash to spend). I was teased mercilessly about this. I've since made up for my absence: in the past four years I have attended the fair nine times.

I fell in love with the fair and at the fair. Louis and I decided to start dating on a late-night stroll through the fairgrounds two years ago, we had our engagement photos taken there, and we can't think of a reason why we'd miss it.

This year was pretty exceptional. It included a trip with our friends Joe and Krista who were moving to Boston only a day later, taking our friends Derek and Leona for their first time (and surprising his 7 year-old daughter there), our 2nd staff meeting on a stick (yes, staff development can look like deep fried pickles and 4-H shows), and the Trampled by Turtles concert.

For all the fair lore and the now many trips I've made, I decided my ultimate favorites at the fair have to be Heritage Square where you can learn the history of the fair and Creative Activities, showcasing the talents of Minnesotans.

The State Fair Museum! This helps explain why we saw TWO Fairbornes in costume last year. In my State Fair studying, I've learned that Fairchild was the first official mascot, followed by Fairborne, his nephew, in 1986.

I can't forget the crop art! These beauties can be found in the Horticulture Building. Here were some of my favorites from this year: gardening and for Louis-Calvin and Hobbes.

Definitely my favorite "scarecrow" in the Horticulture Building.

Onto Creative Activities! This is amazing. An attempt to create the largest hand-knitted fish hat! Seriously, I would never attempt a project like this. I don't last more than a few days on any given project and I can't imagine the number of times I would mess up and throw my knitting needles (not that I've ever done that before).

A little odd for my taste, but beautiful, nonetheless.

Ribbon-winning breads! I HAVE to enter one of these categories next year. I have an entire year to practice.
And that's all for State Fair 2010...so many more photos to share, but tethering internet via my phone makes for slow uploading and a frustrated blogger. :)