You're about to look 87% more dapper

What's cooler than a bow tie?  Nothing, that's what.  If anyone says otherwise, I'll murder their faces!

The shop is now featuring felt bow tie pins in a variety of colors.  Still don't see what you like in the below picture?

Then just name a color combo. I dare you. I double dog dare you. Pins are only seven dollars.  

C'mon, you know you want one.

Click here and make your bow tie dreams come true.  

Watch out for snakes!

Happy Halloween!  If you get inspired by this post and want to recreate this project you better hurry because Halloween is only four days away!  I say this as someone who just barely finished this project in time for its intended holiday.  It is going to look pretty awesome for these next few days though.

Pretty sure this was originally a Martha Stewart idea but then again, what isn't now a days.  Martha, you wily dame.  This Halloween wreath only requires two things, a plain stick wreath and snakes of various sizes.  If either the wreath or snakes are not black, fix this with matte black spray paint.      

This snake close up is for my friend/nemesis Ed who hates snakes.  Though I don't think he even reads this blog.  Which makes it a lot funnier to me.  These pictures are just out in the world now, waiting to be discovered.

Hi, friend!

Pictured below is the now black wreath along with a package of already black tiny snakes that was also picked up from Dollar tree.  The large snakes are drying in the garage during this picture.

Again, this one's for you Ed.

Let's be BFFs!

Here the large snakes make their grand reappearance sans white stripes.  However, only two survived the spray painting process.  I have no idea why, since the snakes were spray painted at the same time in the exact same manner, but the paint on the third snake would not dry.  It just stayed tacky and gross.  Maybe primer would have helped.  So try that if you try this.

To add the snakes to the wreath, I wove them through the sticks that made up the wreath.  No glue required.

In this picture, you can see how the snakes are woven through the branches of the wreath to hold them in place.

AH!  Spooky snake wreath!  Taken at night to help add to the spookiness.  Or because that's when I took the picture and didn't want to wait till tomorrow since Halloween is already so close.

Close up shot of the wreath.  To hang the wreath, I used a clear 3M hook.  I was skeptical on these hooks only because the last time I used them to hang my belts up in the closet all my belts fell down.  Could be because I never waited the required hour before hanging something on them.  Directions, it turns out, are sometimes there for a reason.

Another closer up.  I hate you Ed.

So this turned out pretty cool, right?  I like the monochromatic look.  From far away, it looks like a regular black wreath.  Unassuming.  Unthreatening.  Then BAM!  Snakes all up in that door decoration.

Watch out for snakes.  

Outdoor pot makeover and then a makeover-makeover

In an effort to clean out the garage because it's a mess and we'll never be able to fit a ping-pong table in there at this point, I dragged out a few pots to utilize on the back porch.  

The current colors on the pots weren't working for me so I decided to spray paint everything so they would match.  First, the pots were sprayed slate gray with a flat finish.  Oh yea, you may have noticed that one of the pots is missing from the below picture.  After I snapped the above photo of the five pots, I discovered the small blue/white pot had a crack in it.  Shortly after this discovery, Norman knocked it over and broke it into a bunch of pieces thus ruining any hope I had of still using it despite the aforementioned crack.  So, there's my story.

Once they were good and gray, I used masking tape and newspaper to block off the top half of each pot.  Next, the lower half of the pots were sprayed neon orange with a glossy finish.

After a few hours, the newspaper and masking tape was removed and my pots looked like this.  In other words, they looked awesome.

After five seconds consideration, I decided to use this guy inside the house so I could add another plant to my kitchen.  I love the pop of orange against the blue walls.  Oh, what's that?  You're wondering what's to the right of the plant?

Oh yea, it's totally a Lego pirate ship.  That's how we decorate.  

For the pots that were remaining outside, I didn't go into this project with an idea of what I would plant in these so after wandering aimlessly through a nursery, I ended up with lavender for the larger pot and lemon balm seeds that I'll attempt to grow in the two smaller pots.  I'd never heard of lemon balm before but it looks like a mint plant and the packaging informs me that the leaves will taste great in tea so I was convinced to try them out.    

Little tip, along with being pretty and smelling nice, lavender is also a natural mosquito repellent.  During the hotter months, I turn into a walking mosquito bite.  It is not pleasant.  Hopefully, having a lavender plant on the porch will help me change that a bit.  At least I'll be safe in my own backyard.  Other plants that repel mosquitos are catmint, lemon grass (also called citronella), and marigolds.         

Remember how I decided to use one of the pots in my kitchen?  It was next to a sweet Lego pirate ship.  Yea, I just wrote about it a few pictures up.  I decided the orange looked so great the entire pot should be orange.  So that's what I did. 

Any outdoor decorating going on in your neck of the woods?  The To Do list at our house just got way longer thanks to the return of the hubs and mine joint birthday BBQ coming in July.  Such as the walls pictured above will be a different color after this coming weekend.  Some gallery shelves will be built.  Planting in the front yard.  The tasks seem endless and I cannot wait!   

How I saved a thrift store mirror...from myself...

This is the story of me saving a mirror.  Albeit, I saved the damn thing from myself and the terrible things I was doing to it in an effort to make it less ugly.  So, let’s rewind to the beginning when I found a mirror with a jacked-up surface (scratches and old paint) but with a great hexagon frame so for only $7 this guy and I became fast friends. 

Yes, the mirror came to my home where it sat around and did nothing except take up space like an unwanted house guest.  Each time I went into the room it was stashed in, awkward small talk occurred and I just kept wondering when this mirror was going to get off my floor and go find a job.  Upon remembering that inanimate objects do not often obtain their own occupations, I gracefully decided to give the little guy some extra help.

Which went terribly wrong.

My original intentions started off so well.  I was inspired by the chalkboard pegboard in our garage where, during my husband’s 30^th Birthday BBQ, several friends wrote and doodled on the board.  For months, the drawings stayed and gave me a happy memory to smile at each time I went into the garage.  Hoping to create a more accessible surface to mark up during parties, I had the idea of adding a framed chalkboard to our guest bathroom.  I had imagined a beautiful deep purple frame with an oil rubbed bronze accent against the black of the chalkboard paint.  In my mind, it looked amazing.     

My plan seemed easy enough.  Paint the frame a better color, put chalkboard paint on the glass, hang in bathroom, and allow for fun i.e. inappropriate drawings to occur.  The frame surface was sanded, primer was added, and then this happened. 

Did I not sand enough?  Not enough primer?  Just a terrible color in the first place?  The answer to all these questions was yes.  Upon this devastating defeat, the mirror was shoved into a corner to be forgotten about temporarily until one magical word came to mind. 

Rope.

If I couldn’t paint the mirror frame (or simply couldn’t bring myself to attempt to paint the frame again because a second defeat would send me down a craft shame spiral), I would find a way to cover it up.  I had originally come across the rope idea on Pinterest, of course.  Although, the inspiration picture and the my final result ended up quite different.

My original plan with this pin was to make what the pin showed.  My bathroom has an octopus/nautical theme so the idea of rope storage accessories seemed like a smart move.  Nautical means ships and ships have rope on them.  Makes perfect sense.   Plus, everything in a bathroom is usually so sleek and smooth so adding the rough, natural texture of the rope seemed like a great way to add a layer to the room.  

Source: thegildedhare.blogspot.com via Megan on Pinterest

After the original chalkboard mirror plan went kaput, I took a few moments to curse my frustrations away and then remembered the above pin.  Realizing that rope solved the problem of my crap paint job amazingly well by simply covering it up made me do a little jig that may or may not have looked glaringly similar to Elaine's "little kicks" dancing.  This also lined up beautifully with Young House Love's quarterly Pinterest Challenge where this adorable couple encourages everyone to stop pinning and actually create something.  A very common ailment of Pinterest is all pins and no action so I was only too happy to join in this challenge!     

On round two with the mirror, I started with the chalkboard section of the project first.  To prep the glass, I roughed up the surface with coarse sandpaper; sprayed it with two layers of primer, and finally painted on two coats of chalkboard paint.  

BAM!  Done.

I didn’t worry too much about getting the chalkboard paint on the frame because, as mentioned previously, the name of game is cover-up.  So, using a glue gun and a $5 ball of rope, I slowly worked my way around the frame placing blobs of glue every couple inches while wrapping the rope around the frame.  A few minutes in and my little friend started looking something like this.  Or exactly like this.  Because that’s how pictures work.  

About halfway through this project, just as I was getting into my glue gun groove, I ran out of glue sticks....  

Such a crafting tragedy.  A tragedy that was quickly remedied two days later when I procured more glue sticks.  One burned finger later and I end up with this. 

Unluckily, this mirror had no hanging apparatus when I purchased it so I can only assume it stayed on someone else’s wall through magic.  Seeing as how I never received my letter to Hogwart’s, I was forced to purchase these picture hangers and nail them to the back of the mirror.

Attaching these things is super easy.  Just figure out the placement and hammer the tiny nails (included in package) into the frame.  The only real hazard is if you have large fingers, you're going to smash them with the hammer.  Can't be avoided.  Sorry.

The next step in this project was to answer the question, "Where will the chalk go?"  One good wander around Lowe's and the answer presented itself.  I picked up two drawer pulls and decided to flip them upside down so they'd essentially turn into a little storage space.

Only one small snag occurred when I got these home and realized that, yea, they're drawer pulls so obviously the hardware for them would go through the drawer and I had no way of attaching these to a wall.

One brilliant MacGyver thought later (hammer nails into the wall, add a dollop of glue, and slip the drawer pull onto the nails) and my chalk storage was ready to go! 

Here is the before picture of my bathroom.  I apologize in advance for these shots.  This bathroom gets ZERO natural light and is narrow like most bathrooms so snapping a decent picture proved irritatingly prickly.  I digress, this is what the bathroom looked like before hanging the chalkboard mirror.  

Here's is what it looked like after the fabulous addition of the chalkboard mirror.

Here's a not mirror reflection shot.  I love how the frame fills up the normally untouched blank space behind the door.

Close up of drawer pulls/chalkboard hangers.

I cannot wait until our next party!  I envision taking pictures of the chalkboard at the end of every shindig and making a coffee table book so when we’re old and wrinkly and gross, the husband and I can look back and remember that at one point in our lives, we threw some kick-ass parties.

**Update**

The husband texted this photo to me this morning so he's obviously already enjoying the new addition. 

It's not bad spelling, it's a love for Gary Larson

For the last couple months, I've been on a major cleaning kick.  Each and every closet, nook, and cranny have been cleaned out, sorted into keep/sell piles, and reorganized.  During this process, several items turned up that I initially planned on discarding but instead decided to give them a new purpose.

For example, how many of these Christmas popcorn tins have you been given, devoured, and thrown away?  At least one a year since you've been alive?  Yea, pretty much.  Found this empty one in the bowels of our garage and realized with a little tweaking, it would make an ideal container for cat food.

Now, as much as I love Christmas, the current mother and baby deer chilling in the snow (ha, see what I did there) print isn't really jiving with the overall look of our kitchen so it needed to be spray painted.  First things first, the whole tin was cleaned up, dried, and the stickers on the lid were removed.  A few coats of white spray paint later and we have this.

We're not done yet faithful readers!  Using some form of wizardry (Photoshop) and his ridiculous collection of fonts, the husband whipped up two stencils for this adventure.

Kitties!

On to the stencil making!  My current method for creating stencils is using sign vinyl.  The hubs picked up a roll for his own project of dying disc golf discs (shameless promotion for MTP Designs) and I've used it for loads of other stenciling projects.

For this approach, a light box is required however you can also MacGyver something together like I did and use a desk lamp with an end table that has a glass top.  Recently, I saw another DIY version where a bare bulb is placed in a large, clear, plastic container which seemed crazy easy/cheap to throw together.

Anyways, to get started, tape the picture to the bottom of the sign vinyl to keep it held in place while it's being cut.  When everything is sitting on the light box, the picture will be clearly visible as pictured below.  Next, cut out the stencil using enough pressure to cut the vinyl  but not so much that the paper backing is cut.  It's easier than it sounds, I promise.



Once the cutting is done, remove the pieces to end up with something like below.  Now, here is my favorite reason for using this vinyl.  No stencil islands.  See how the eyes on Yigs and the facial details on Hobbes are not connected to an outside edge?  Stencil sections like this are called islands and are normally a no-no beacuse it is a pain/near impossible to transfer them onto whatever is being stencilled. 

Not so with sign vinyl.  Apply masking tape to the top of the stencil so when the backing is peeled away, the masking tap holds the islands in place for easy transferring.

Along with the kitties and Cat Fud stencil, I also added a few strips of vinyl for added detail.  It's a bit hard to see in the picture but there are two small strips at the top and a larger one at the bottom.

After the stencils have been applied, spray paint the tin again with the second color of paint. 

Next comes the moment of truth when the stencils are removed to reveal how awesome or possibly how terrible everything turned out.

Success!!

Never ending staring contest.

Here is how the cat feeding corner looked before....

And how it looks now.

Kitten added for extra authenticity.

For safety reasons, whether real or created in my crazy head, I also sprayed the tin with a few coats of clear sealant and let it sit in the sun for a couple days so everything could fully cure and air out.  Once all that nonesense was out of the way, I dumped in the cat food, threw in an old measuring cup to use as a scoop, and we were ready to get this kitten feeding party started.

And the comic that started it all.  Gary Larson, thanks for being so awesome.