Guest Post @ Active Fingers

Today is a special day - I have the privilege of guest posting on my friend Anna's blog Active Fingers! Why "active fingers?" Well let me tell you.... Anna crochets, draws, cooks, plays piano, and pretty much does all things crafty and awesome. And she teaches music! I can always count on her blog to put a smile on my face. And make me hungry. Did I mention she cooks? I did? Well did I mention that she is amazingly good
at it? Well now you know.

I digress. You should definitely head over to Active Fingers and check out my guest post about How to Yard Sale. I'm offering up 10 tips for successfully shopping at yard sales and saving yourself tons of money in the process. And say "hi" to Anna while you're there!

Thanks Anna for having me as a guest on Active Fingers!

Sneak Peek

We bought paint for the office back in July and it has sat around since then waiting to make it onto the walls. (our master bedroom painting escapade put us off of painting for awhile...we had to work up to it) :) But when my dad came to town for the weekend, I decided to dive in while I had some help. Fortunately painting the office turned out to be a much easier job than the master bedroom. We still have everything pulled out to the middle of the room, so this is just a sneak peek of the color. I love it!

And this is how I usually decide on color, just in case you are curious. I go to Lowe's and pick up a whole pile of paint chips in the color family/ies I like. Then I start by comparing the samples to anything in the room the color will need to go with. In this case I put them on the bedspread and then pulled out any that didn't go well with the colors of the bedspread. Once I've narrowed the selection down a little, I tape the remaining samples up in the room. (usually against the trim to see what works with it) I leave them up and "live with them" for a while until I finally decide which one I like best.

I chose the top one, Valspar's "Elegance," and had it color matched to my favorite paint, Olymic Premium. I love the gray with a hint of brown, and it turned out very rich and warm. Now to get the rest of the room feeling that way.... :)

Shedding Some Light

Is this a problem lots of places, or only in my town? Both houses we've lived in (first a rental, now our purchased home) haven't had a ceiling light in the living room. I'd never heard of such a thing before we lived here! Our first place at least had an outlet connected to a switch, but here we have nothing which has led to an abundance of lamps scattered about the room. Don't get me wrong, I love a good lamp, but sometimes they just aren't enough. The biggest problem in our current house is the dining table in the corner of our the living room.

 
We had a floor lamp next to the table that gave a decent amount of light (the black pole in the top right of the pic), but wasn't pretty or very functional for a dining space. I've been looking for other options for awhile because I wanted a ceiling light over the table. Enter a few yard sale grabs from earlier this summer:

A plug-in light kit from a dollar/bag sale. (they're like $5 at IKEA if you need one!)

 $0.50 drum shade (made to fit a lamp)

I picked up both of these items hoping I could throw together some kind of light for just over $0.50. I started with a little work on the drum shade. It had a tiny hole at the top to attach to a lamp, but I needed a bigger hole to fit on the light kit. So my husband got to work with some heavy duty tin snips to remove the small middle ring. He said it was super hard, so make sure you have a strong pair of hands if you plan to give this a try. :)

Then he bent the metal bars at the end to make them just the right size for the light kit and the little bent edges should give the light kit something to hold on to. (You can see I broke out all the glues & tapes in preparation for this project. I keep them in a box labeled "Things that are Sticky." No joke. You can also see Baby B's train blanket minus Baby B. He's turned into quite the scooter. He wiggles around all over the floor. Now what were we talking about?)

 I picked up some 1 1/4" screw-in cup hooks to hang the light. These are from Target because we had a gift card to use, but you can probably get them just about anywhere.

I used 3 hooks to run the cord (I may add a fourth). The first is centered above the table for the light to hang from. The second is where cord runs straight back to the wall. The third is in the top right corner of the wall behind the curtains so the rest of the cord hangs down behind the curtains out of sight. 

 It worked out perfectly because the switch landed at just the right height. I slid the curtains in so you could see the switch. When the curtains are all the way open (against the wall) you can't see the switch or cord at all. We had to add a 6' extension cord to reach the outlet directly under the window. I may add a hook in the bottom corner to corral a little bit of slack from the extension cord.

Can you tell in the pic below that the drum shade is a little warped? I think someone used a too-hot light bulb with the poor little guy. It's not enough to deter my determined self, though! I just had to find something to cover it with. I really like it white, so I wanted to find something white or off white to use to keep it light & airy. When my husband & I were purging for the big yard sale, some of his old viola books went into the pile. Then one came back out of the pile to help with my project. What a brave, brave book. I thought the white-with-black-music-notes paper would be the perfect answer. And it would be a nice memorial to my husbands viola days of yore.

Before I made any commitments I wanted to give it a test run, so I taped a sheet to the shade... 

Ummm....that seems nice....but it's not quite getting the point across. So I upgraded my tape job. I wrapped a page around the shade and taped it on the back to get more of a finished-product look. Hmmm, I like that better already.

Then back up she goes! I like it, but since I only have one $0.50 shade to work with, I decided to let it sit a couple days to make sure I really really like it. Did I mention I sometimes have a problem with commitment? And decision making? Well now you know my secrets. Anyway...this is what it looks like now. It's still just taped on because I haven't decided for sure if it's what I want. It is starting to grow on me, though!

Especially once I light it up. I love how the notes show up and (an unexpected surprise) I like the two tone stripes that resulted from the paper being folded over to the back. 

So it will probably stay this way...but I'm not committing yet. :)

Baby B's Feet

I still have an empty wall in the nursery and when my sister found this picture on Pinterest, I knew it was the perfect thing to fill the space!

My sister (Baby B's Auntie B) happens to be an artist so she even had a blank canvas we could use for the job! I think it was 24 x 36" which is a perfect fit for the nursery. Here's a little before shot:

Before we did any foot prints, Aunt B and I went hunting in the basement to see what kind of paints we had to work with. We found a nice flat blue that would do the job and I put a quick coat on the canvas. A second coat would have a made a more evenly colored canvas, but I like the look of the brush strokes that were left after only one coat, so I went with it! I thought it looked nice and artsy. :)

Once it dried, I painted a little white acrylic paint on Baby B's feet while daddy held him and made his prints on the canvas. He did wiggle a little, but we were happy with how it turned out. We placed them in a spot that we thought would leave room for more prints, but also had space before it for another set. I am going to try to make a stencil of his footprints from the hospital to put before it so we can have a more complete record. (we don't have any pictures of making the prints because it took all four of our hands and we wanted to get the paint off his feet ASAP!) I do wish we had started sooner so we could have prints from every month. Next time.

Underneath the prints I used a fine tip sharpie to write how old he was. I think I'll probably go back and add the date, too. I wrote small because I didn't want to draw attention to it, but still wanted to be able to look back and see when we made each set. (yes, he does have 5 toes on his right foot. you just can't tell because he wiggled.)

And, for the grandparents, here are Baby B's close-ups with his first work of art. We are so proud! :)

Such a sweetie pie. :)

You can see how long it's been since I took those first pictures. :) We have a second set of prints now and just finally got it on the wall! We're thinking about doing prints about every month or every two months. So far we have 12 and 20 weeks and I think his feet are perfectly bigger in the second one. :) My dad just gave me the idea to take a picture of him with the canvas each time we do prints, so we can compare how much bigger he looks at each age.

We can't believe how fast he's growing. It will be great to have this to look back and see how tiny he was and how much he's grown!

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