As I have been a little distant from my craft blog as of late, I decided some changes were in order. I have decided to include a new author to my blog! I would like to introduce you to my wonderfully talented, incredibly witty, thrifty, stay at home mom, wife, and more importantly my sister-in-law, Alyssa! She is the Dollar Store Queen and makes all kinds of fun projects on a very tight budget, just like me. So I shall now pass the bar over to Alyssa with her very first post ever!
Bonjour, je m'apelle Alyssa! And thats it for the high school French that I remember, and I cant even guarantee that its spelled correctly. If its not, please don't tell me :) So as Kelsee has said, I am in fact a stay at home mom and wife, and because of this my craft budget is tiny to almost non-existent. I "shop" my home all the time, seeing what can be moved and better used in a different room. Heck, sometimes I even shop Kelsee's house or my mom's. Thankfully we all have a somewhat similar taste in some things. Ahhh family..what a wonderful thing to have. Anywho, on to the crafts!!!
My husband, son and I recently moved into a new, very large apartment. Its technically a 4 bedroom place, with an additional loft space which is my craft room; or as Neil, my husband, likes to call it, "That Place where she throws all the junk she picks up at Goodwill, and the Dollar Store til she decides what to do with it". I tell him thats too much to say, lets just call it a craft room and move on. But I digress yet again. The super bonus to this large apartment is that we now have a bona fide guest room. So exciting! And I already know for sure of my first guest who will be using it for a couple of weeks in June. So with this in mind I have been a busy little bee trying to make it a relaxing and somewhat decoratively neutral space. If I let myself go nuts then it would be an explosion of pink and oranges and paper lanterns dangling from the ceiling and since its a rather small room it may make my first guest, my grandpa, a bit nauseous. So I thought to myself one day that it should be classic, tasteful, still have my own personal stamp on it, but open enough that anyone would feel comfortable relaxing in there. I cant change the wall color (plain old white) since its a rental, so I am incorporating it into the color palette, which I decided should be black, white, silvers and grays, with touches of silvery blue. If you've been in the Post Falls Thomas Hammer, just think of their wall color, and there you go. If not, well then I am sorry.
My first thought on this guest room was wall art. I have a few challenges in here: stark white walls, very small room, and weird short walls. I did not want to overwhelm the space at all. So I was meandering through the Dollar Tree one day and spotted these sweet little square frames. They had a 3x3 inch opening, made of real wood, and had real glass. Score! Five of them in my hot little hands, and out the door we went. Now I love words, and fonts, and languages in general. So I thought of a bedroom appropriate word, "SLEEP", and typed it up on a new Word document. I goofed around with spacing, fonts, and the size until I thought I had the right size to fit one letter per frame. Disclaimer: I did not know this was going to be a project I would someday tell the world about so I dont have all the specifics of font names or sizes. Im sorry. You will just have to eyeball it. Trust me, it will be okay!
Next, once the letters were printed, I scrunched up my face and thought "Hmmm...these need to look older, not be on bright shiny white printer paper!" Enter the mighty powers of tea! 3 tea bags, 2 cups of hot water, and 10 minutes later, and I had a spray bottle full of strong tea. I simply turned my oven to Warm, laid the pages on my oven racks, and sprayed the pages with tea until they looked old enough to me. It wasnt a uniform look, but I love them. Let the pages dry, then simply traced the glass from the frame centered over the letters, and popped them into their frames. However, I wanted the frames to have an older look to them, so out came the glass and paper. I grabbed a bottle of metallic silver craft paint that I had on hand and applied 3-4 coats of silver paint to each frame, letting them dry several hours between coats. Since the paint was so thin, more like a glaze, and the wood so porous, this was unfortunately necessary. Normally I want projects to be DONE the second I think of them, if we are being honest here.
So there you have it, my SLEEP wall art. I plan to hang them an inch or two apart above the headboard. And that headboard is going to be a whole other adventure, so stay tuned!
So there you have it! Alyssa's very first post! I hope you will all welcome her and I hope you enjoy some of the new posts that we both will be having on here soon. I figure between the two of us we should have a pretty active blog and you will have a plethora of ideas to inspire you!
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