Jewelry Box :Letters to Juliet.

Hello Blog world. 

If liked my Facebook page...and I know all of you have ;) I was teasing you with a little bit of information that I was baking paper. Did any one have any good guesses? If so I would like to hear about them. 

Before I reveal the project (This is what happens when Casey gets power muhaha) I wanted to tell you the back story. 

We went to the I-75 flea market in Ocala Florida. This was the first time my boyfriend and I have been there. It was ok. But the dealers have overtaken the flea. Too many tables per one person and couldn't find the one person who was in charge. So that might have been a good thing for me on spending.

On one of the few tables I found a wine crate. I don't know why it caught my eye but it did. It was one of the few tables where the owner was present. The front had Mirassou which I assumed was french. Which doesn't really fit my "Italian" themed room. So that bothered me. I knew it was going to be slightly fixed but I still needed to know where it originated. Here's your history lesson. Pierre and Henrietta Mirassou came from France in 1854 and moved to California. They started a wine company making their wine the old french way. The company has been in the Mirassou family since then. They even survived during the prohibition era. Now being on their fifth generation.  

Point of history lesson: Even though its a french wine, the wine has been made in California since 1854...In my opinon the fact that I turned it into an Italian Jewelry box isn't offensive. Its cultural diffusion. (Hey Cobleskillians remember that word!) 

Now that I have bored you to tears.... Let me just get on with it and show you my project. 

But first let me explain the title.... Ahaha you still have to wait!

Did any one see the movie Letters to Juliet? Good movie for those who haven't seen it. Its about a place in Verona courtyard where they have sort of a tribute to Juliet (yes Romeo and Juliet) Where people leave letters to Juliet asking her about love. Although my opinion she isn't the person I would ask since...she well is dead because of her "love". But I am also a hopeless romantic and I think I like the concept of people writing to a fictional character.  

Back on track I loved the concept of using actual letters in my project but since I had none I settled for postcard scrapbook paper. So that's where you get the Letters to Juliet reference.

Now that I exhausted both of my references and knowledge I suppose I will show you my project now.  

What is it? Well its a wine crate transformed into a Jewelry box. Still confused? 

Yea... I get that a lot. 

If you go back to my first blog post you will see that I already made my own Jewelry box. This idea was to good to pass up and I needed to redo it anyways. 

And I am sure you are asking why don't I just buy one. 

Silly mortals don't you know? That would be too easy!

Besides....They don't make them right. I hate having a tangled mess of necklaces. This makes it no tangles. 

See? Nice and neat. 

Ok so here is the step by step of how I transformed

This:

Into:

This:

I know I know you are all so curious as to why I baked paper.

Because This...Didn't look old enough

So I aged it. 

I cut out the little post cards to un-collage them.

I crumbled them up to give them a more wrinkle look to them. To give them a stained look I "dyed" them with tea. All I did was take the tea bag and rub it on the pages...This caused it to loose its wrinkle effect so I had to crumble them again. I also added a dash of cinnamon to give it age spots. I know I know when I get older I am going to want to avoid age spots but for now I put them on paper.

I am glad I found a use for my oven by the way. 

Set your oven to the lowest setting possible. I only left mine in for about five minutes at first but that didn't seem like enough time so I put them in longer. But keep an eye on them...I will not be responsible for you burning your house down trying to age paper. 

Basically you want to wait until the paper is dry. It will start to curl up once its dried. 

I don't know if the aluminum foil was necessary, But I didn't want the paper to stick to my cookie sheet. Which was a good idea because they did stick a little bit... Maybe I should have used pam cooking spray? Do they make one for paper (That is a joke people...Don't use pam)

Once they came out they looked like this:

Nice and old looking. I also feel like doing this made them look less scrapbook-ey. 

Now wait for them to cool...Just kidding. 

But seriously I don't bake this is the only time I get to use my baking phrases. 

Now I needed to make the wine crate look less new and more old. So my mom told me to just get golden oak stain. Which I found with no problems. But I started comparing the colors....When some lady very rudely starting getting in my personal bubble. I ended up buying a completely different color. Thankfully it worked out well. I wanted a darker color anyways. 

 I realize now that I didn't take any pictures of staining the crate. I am telling you once I get going I either get covered in glue, paint or paper that I forget to take pictures.(Mike keeps telling me to do a video...that would be a mess) But here is the side hopefully you can sort of tell that I changed the color from yucky modern crate tan to a pretty wood finish cherry 235. (Why is the number there?)

Staining was actually pretty easy to do. Its just like paint only easier to work with. I was even a smart little crafter and wore gloves...I should do that more often but If I am too excited to take pictures you should know that I am to excited for gloves. 

I stained front as well just in-case my paper didn't cover it all the way I had a matching door. 

Once the stain was dry I Mod Podged my paper to what is now the door of my jewelry box. 

I remembered to take this picture during because I wanted to show you what this stuff looks like before its dried. This freaked me out the first time I used Mod Podge. But as you can tell in the picture above it dries pretty well. 

This is a close up of it dried. You can sort of notice on the bottom where I had the cinnamon. 

Now to make it a jewlery box and not just a wine crate with letters on it I added cup hooks. 

This is a better picture of the stain work as well. 

Now I only added 8 of them because...That was the cheaper box. If you need more get more they have lots of choices. 

Also when installing these its easier if you tap them in a little with a hammer...Don't be stubborn like me and wait until the last few to try that. 

The rope thing was also driving me crazy it kept slipping down interfering with the hooks. I just took some hot glue and glued them to the box. 

While I had the glue out.. I decided to give my door a door knob. 

I am sure that this door knob will fall off but luckily its not really required. 

I glued a bead to the door and glued a little decorative brad in side the bead. That little rose thing was just a college keeper. Whatever that is. It was cute. I had it. I used it. 

Also while at Michaels I bought a Jewelry stand to put inside the box to give it more hanging options than just the hooks. 

There you have it. 

My new Jewelry box.

 Total cost:

Box: $2.00

Paper: 10.00 (For a whole book)

Stand: 7.00 (I had a gift card muhaha)

Hooks: .97

Stain: 5.00 8oz

My total cost: 7.97

Gift cards are awesome (Thank's Wendy!)

This project was of course:

I hope you enjoyed this project even though I teased you with details and tortured you with history. I just wanted you to know that I actually put thought in this and it wasn't just a pinterest find. 

See you next time

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Hall Table

Hey Bloggers! How is it going? 

Its almost the end of my first week back at work. Do I miss vacation? Yes I do. But good news is I have a three day weekend coming up. Happy Memorial day Since I wont see any of ya! 

I am currently addicted to HG TV's Flea Market Flip. Go figure. So I am chomping at the bit wanting to go to the flea market and see if there is something I can fix up and sell. I did do that with the cabinet and as soon as it gets finished hopefully I can get it a good home. So as soon as I find a decent flea market that will be my mission. I will keep you posted. 

Now on to today's project. I use to work for Bealls Outlet....its a southern based store. But its basically like TJ Max but cheaper. The only thing they had that I never understood the price for was the furniture. It was so pretty but never very reasonable. When we moved into our house I decided I wanted a hall table. Just something decorative but some what function-able. The prices were from 250.00- 350.00. I don't need to remind you how frugal I can be. I was not going to spend that on a basically useless piece of furniture. So of course on pinterest I found a DIY hall table. The ones I saw were a little more complicated than I wanted to do. This project was a 'wing it' type of deal. With the help of my boyfriend I was able to accomplish this. 

I had visions of painting a really bright color or something cool but the boyfriend decided he liked the idea of it looking like part of the wall. Its all about picking your battles. :D

Plus...He did most of the work. 

So all we used:

A floating shelf, some dowels, and stair banister spindles. 

All found at Lowes. 

The floating shelf was its own kit so that helped. It even came with instructions before we even looked at those we added our touch to it. 

The bottom of the shelf had a hole in it for its own purpose. Where that hole is you see in the picture that is the back of the shelf that goes to the wall. We made two marks directly under each hole that was already there. That's what we attached the stair spindles to. 

This part was the boyfriends job. He added a double sided metal dowel In one end of the spindle. One side already had a hole in it but it was to big so we just used the other side. 

Lets see if I get yelled at for taking pictures of him and posting on my blog. MUHAHAHA.

Here you can sort of see what I was talking about with the already made hole and the back. Remember this is upside down you will not see the holes when you are done. 

Once the new holes are drilled in we attached the spindles. 

Carefully. Don't get to crazy or you will break the wood...fake wood. 

Now for the difficult part. Installing the actually shelf. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of all the pieces in the kit. But it does have instructions. I will just sort of go over them with you so you know what I did but don't quote me on them!

We first installed the bracket that would hold the shelf up. Its a floating shelf so you don't see any of the actual hardware when its up. This required marking, measure, and leveling. 

The anchors in this kit by the way...are dumb. 

I am not a contractor or even an expert on walls. But I do know that anchors are required in lots of hanging projects. But I was confused by the type of anchors that we received. 

Yes the shelf had instructions. No it did not tell me how to use this. I had to go on youtube and try to figure this out. Along with googling what kind of anchor this was. Typing "Anchor thingy" was just not going to work in a youtube search bar. 

Finally figured out that you had to push the ends in and make it look like a regular anchor. Some of these I guess fold into themselves this one however did not. 

Like I said before this was sort of a "wing it" kind of project. 

This part was the part that took the longest. We tried everything we could think of before googling it but it was not working. I am sure some of you are laughing hysterically at us for not knowing what to do with this foreign piece of thing. But we figured it out and that's all that matters. 

I had a black shelf above it that I thought looked silly with the white so I threw a scarf on it and called it good. 

This project was fairly simple as long as you have the right tools...like a drill. 

Which I am still not allowed to play with might I add. 

Cost was reasonable. 

Spindle: 4.50 each. (They do have cheaper.)

Dowel-1.24( 2inch 1/4 )

Hidden shelf-16.98 (23.6 inches)

If you don't like this specific design, you can still do so much with this concept. 

They have a lot of different kinds of spindles to customize your project. 

Yes I realize this is more of a fancy shelf than a hall table but it looks about the same and you can add four legs instead of just the two. 

This project was 

......

Even though my boyfriend did most of the work. :D

Thanks for visiting guys. I do appreciate seeing those page views go up. 

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See ya next Thursday!

DIY Lamp Makeover

Hello Blog world. 

SHINE ON!

I have been on vacation for two lovely weeks. While on that vacation I have not been sitting around watching tv...Ok I lied I totally did that. But I have also got a lot of stuff done. Painted my bedroom, had a party, went out of town, had a new member of the family grace us <3 and caught up on some crafting. I know you are so proud. I know I am! 

Anyways I suppose you are all here for the project not about me. By the way if you feel I failed you last week I did not. I did post a blog I just didn't broadcast it on Facebook. So if you didn't see that I suppose you should go back and look at that if you must. If not that's ok to. Thanks for the ones who did look though. Nice to know I have some people through the good times and bad. 

So on to this weeks project. SHINE ON. My sister told me that I was shiny I will take that as a complement. 

As you know I was painting my room and giving it a makeover. When we moved here it was a blue...picture a baby boy's room blue. I was trying to work with that but I couldn't so now its Green Glass. Its not enough to paint the room, I guess you have to decorate it. While on a budget that can get tricky. The first thing I did was get some pictures. My dad had some so he was nice enough to give them to me. I went with an Italian town theme. (More about that later.) They had a some brown and greens in the pictures so I was able to match them with my bed spread. Its funny how you get going on one thing and everything ties into it. 

Which leads me to tonight's post, here by popular demand by the way. My Lamps!

I know what you are thinking...Oh she bought them that way. Nope you are wrong. But I am flattered. Really!

My parents had these two lamps that they were trying to sell but of course no one wanted them because they were UGLY. and they were about to be donated. So they donated them to me. 

Ok so they weren't that bad. But they weren't very pretty. The shades were stained up and needed to be replaced. 

Of course...That was the original goal, change the lamps and just buy new lamp shades. Then I thought what kind of crafter would I be if I just took the easy way out...ok so that's kind of a lie. I didn't want to buy new lamp shades because they are too expensive! Will some one please tell me why a lampshade with out a lamp is $15.00 to me that's insane. I know I know I am frugal. You don't have to remind me. So I decided with some pinterest research that I could probably just fix it myself. 

My first idea was to cover it with fabric. 

That idea was not my brightest...Ha-ha brightest get it? Because its lamps...Oh boy tough crowd. 

I started to do it with fabric but with the first few steps I lost patience. I knew it wasn't going to turn out right, I then turned to an old friend. My spray paint. I had a brown paint laying around and I figured that would work fine. 

Wrong. 

See a lot of pinners tell you that you can use spray paint to paint lampshades. Well they must have a secret because both my mom and I tried this task and failed. 

It comes out all weird and blotchy looking on the outside. When you turn a light on...HA you can see every little spray spot. That was not going to work. 

I looked further in my research and found that some people used regular paint. 

Now what I am about to tell you is important. 

I have no idea how safe painting lamp shades is. I looked and saw no harm in it. Some people said to use certain kinds of paints but others said it didn't matter. Use your judgement. 

These lamps are served more as a decoration purpose and will have limited use. 

Now with that out of the way I found some brown paint that they used in my house. The owners before were nice enough to leave all the paint they used when they painted the house. So waste not. It was brown it worked. I used it. 

They turned out great!

It doesn't effect the brightness too badly and very minimal on the streaks. 

Now I also painted the base. I saved the best part for last. And by best I mean worst. 

I decided I wanted it to match the buildings in the pictures. I have seen the textured spray paint and decided that's what I needed to make this perfect. 

I have never experimented with the textured spray paint...And I hope to never experiment with it again. 

It looks great. But its not the easiest to work with. When I told my mom and my sister how much trouble I was having they both chuckled and said "Well I could have told you that." 

Sure. 

Thanks guys. 

It comes out thick and slow. and clumpy and yes I know that's the point but one doesn't think of these things right away. 

The clumpyness didn't seem to bother the project any. I tried to even it out in some areas with a paper towel. Which is why it looks kind of drippy on the bottom. For these two lamps which stand about 24 inches high took two cans of spray paint. I wouldn't have thought that. That's something to consider when buying the texture spray paint. 

Also shake the can through the whole process. Or you will get a watery grainy substance come out and try to ruin your project. 

Overall this project was easy once you got past the obstacles. 

So lets review. 

Don't use spray paint on shades. No matter what anyone else tells you. They obviously sold their souls the craft devil and that's why they have the ability to do it and not you. 

Think twice before you buy texture spray paint. 

and last..Painters tape can be your friend or your enemy. 

This is the part of the blog where I will show you my oops moment. I don't like to share all my flaws with you but this one I figured I should so you don't make the same mistake I did. 

Tehehe Looks like the lamp is wearing a hair net. 

Before spray painting I knew I had to cover up the light part of the lamp. Instead of wrapping it with painters tape I just put a plastic bag over top and taped the bottom. It doesn't show up to well in this picture but I do have painters tape around the end of the bag holding it down. 

When I took the tape off this is what happened. 

Unfortunately it happened with both of them. This one was a little worse. I left it for now and will probably just touch it up with an acrylic paint. 

So Instead of paying close to 60.00 dollars on lamps (yes that is the average if you want two nice looking lamps.) I paid closer to $13.00

Ending supplies:

Painters tape: 2.00

Rustoleum Textured paint: 5.00 per can (2)

Lamps: Free

Paint: Free. 

Go to the thrift store you can get some lamps and the shades there probably cheaper. Just go in with Imagination. 

Check the Clearance section in your local hardware store or where ever you get paint. You would be surprised!

Just to give you a sneak peak of what they lamps look like in my room...

More about my piece of little Italy in the next blog to come!

This project was:

See you next Thursday!

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DIY...Village make over. Dont: Wind-chime

Hey Blog world.

How is every one doing?

Me well I have had a failure craft day. It was just one of those days where nothing worked. 

I started out doing one craft but after three attempts I gave up. Also trying to paint our bedroom. Between moving furniture and taping the room I didn't have a lot of time to do anything productive. I did how ever have a lovely time on our vacation. Thanks for asking! :) We went to St Augustine and brushed up on some history. I also got some inspiration for my books. If you didn't know I like to write. Ironically being the biggest wimp when it comes to all things horror I write about ghosts. Its a mixture of romance and paranormal. So going to a haunted city was just what the doctor ordered. Of course now I need to sit my butt down and get writing. But back to tonight's projects. Yes projects as in plural because I started one. I was going to redo my wind-chimes 

First, I hate wind chimes. I can not stand the clangy noise they make. I do not find it soothing. To me it sounds like nails on a chalk board. But I like wooden ones. The thunking is a lot better to me instead of the clanging. 

Well my wind chime started to fall apart so I wanted to try to fix it. 

Try. 

Fail. 

Before. 

After.

Basically what happened...Well I have no patience. 

Needed about eight hands to do this project. I wanted to do pretty beads and repaint some of the wood. 

But I couldn't get it to work. I honestly could tell you all sorts of things I had tried to do but I am so annoyed with this project I want to forget it ever happened. 

So I have been working on something else so I didn't completely fail you.

A few years ago I turned a little Christmas village into a Halloween village. So since then I have received lots of houses to redo. Some of them I can use for my Halloween village others are to big. But again back to the stories I write (ghosts remember?) I usually get my inspiration from creepy houses. Well I came across these two houses that reminded me of some of the houses that became my inspiration. 

 

Before. Gave it a bath. Kicked out all local spider residents. Get ready to paint. 

Just used acrylic paints. 

Not my best work but I was rushed. 

When Halloween comes around remind me to show you my Halloween village. It is awesome!

Anyways. So these projects don't require a break down in price. I don't expect people to try and attempt these projects. I just wanted to share a failure and a some what success. :D

Hope you enjoyed tonight's blog. I will see you next week. 

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See ya Thursday!