Doug and Gary the Happy Pirates at Ontario Beach Park

Lampy-lamps and shelfy-shelfs!

So, for the love of before and afters....though these before and afters only required a paint job, I thought I would share. I bought two candle-stick lamps at the Christmas Tree shop, this is a chain in the northeast that is full of cheap stuff that is not exactly what you want but on the way there. So I got these for $10 and $12, with some really awful, trying to be shabby chic but just plain shabby, lamp shades. So instead of using the shades that came with, I bought two more lamps for $8 each and used the black shades on them, and created new lamp shades for the other lamps(not shown).

After a sand, prime and coat of awesomely magenta paint they look perfect!

Here is an other fun project that used the same awesomely pink paint. I also found these shelves at the Christmas Tree Shop. I was looking for a plain flat shelf, but these are just soooo much cooler! However, I thought they needed something to bright them up. Instead of painting the entire shelf pink, which I was tempted to do, I went for the more subtle, but still uber chic, painting of only the inside. So you can still see the pink, but its not over-powering or too pink(though, is anything ever too pink? maybe a zit or a blushing face, but not really).

Above is a picture of the awesome tape job I did to make sure I got the pink only on the inside. I LOVE painter's tape, except when it sticks to the electric cords of the lamps you're painting.

And these are the shelves on the wall! So far, I have decided not to put anything too extreme in them yet, just little things people have given me. Notice the paper sculpture of the White House my boss gave me, and the little and awesomely-pink Russian doll in the smallest shelf, the "L" is from when a friend went to El Salvador for a working spring break trip!

Genesee Country Museum

By far, the best living history museum I have ever been to is Genesee Country Museum! It's just a couple minutes from my parents's house, so I always make it a point to go there. 2 weeks ago, it happened to be Laura Ingles Wilder day and they had lots of fun events!

Meredith spitting watermelon seeds. She almost beat all the little kids, but then some dad participated and kicked ass.
Kaitie also tried the contest.

And myself as well. I don't really know anything about spitting, so I did horribly! Apparently you need to roll your tongue as you spit and then it will go farther...

Mer Bear loved that oxen, she took a million and three pictures of it, while the rest of us ran away. I think Meredith should just marry the oxen...he could make her life much more fulfilling.
Finally, one of the main reasons we came, to see "Ma" from the "Little House on the Prairie" TV show. She is behind us somewhere, but you can't really see her. I probably would have better appreciated seeing her if I had watched the show. Next year I hope they get Jason Bateman, he was on the show too and probably much more interesting!!

Finally

So its been about a million years since I posted...oops. But I've been super busy preparing to move and crying about leaving my wonderful job!

Now I am finally moved in, all my Ikea furniture is put together, the internet works, and my artwork is hanging on the walls! I will post pictures soon, I just need to complete a few more details before I can show the finished project which has taken me MONTHS to put together.

However, I do have some awesome before and afters, though really all they are are paint jobs, of some of the accessories in my bedroom.




This is a kind of crappy before shot. But it was a creme colored mirror. I don't think it actually has the mirror part in this picture. But either way it was kind of ugly and only $4 at the Christmas Tree Shops.


So I primed it! and then painted it my favorite color!
Pink! Yeah! I feel like I'm giving away little details of what is to come with the rest of the room!!!

I also need to discuss the comings and goings of my short time in Rochester.

Ummmm....my dreams just came true

So in looking for comforters, I have found tons of stuff I like, but nothing that is perfect....and now I can design my own!!!

OOOH SOOOO EXCITED...

Bookmooch

Trade your books at BookMooch.com

Jammi got patio funiture!!!!

So Jammi bought some new and super awesome patio furniture and some palm plants. I also bought some flowers that I will nurture into colorful goodness! We put it all together out there, and soon we will have dinner on the patio. The picture above is from the corner right in front of the door.
This is the table. Note the cute green pillow rolls. Jammi and I tried to make beaded napkin rings...but we kind of gave up.
This is the lounging corner. We aren't completely sure where everything is going to go, so a lot of stuff is just sitting around waiting to be moved.

This is one of the two plants I bought! I almost got the pink Gerbera daisy, but this one looked livelier. I also got bright pink geranium. There is something I weirdly love about the absurd metallic smell of a geranium.
Yeah! I can't want to spend all my weekends sitting outside and reading a book on our patio!!

Book Mooch Journals!!!

So Book Mooch has an option to make journals! Basically, someone starts a journal, gives it a theme, the one I had was "H is for...", and then posts it on book mooch just like posting any book. Then when you get it, you fill in a journal entry on what the topic is, and send it on its way through book mooch. BUT when the journal is all the way filled, it goes back to whoever started it!

Someone wrote about hedgehogs...pretty cool


I wrote about H st. NW, Washington DC. Note Schenley Hall right there!

Thinking of future decorating...

This would be super cute! It would be cute to get a canvas, paint it burnt-orange or brown, and then use bright pink for the flowers and bright green for the stem! Ooooh I can't wait to give it a try!

My class ring came today!!

So my ring was supposed to come before graduation. It officially made it 32 days late!
This is my favorite part. Note it says "BS 2009" that's exactly what GW was...and I'm glad my bachelor's of science did double duty!
This is what took the extra time and sold me on wanting a class ring! Go STAT!

Really, I haven't blogged in more than a month?

Its weird how fast time flies when you start working everyday! I barely have time to craft, but my new roommate Jammi and I are thinking about potential decorating schemes so hopefully I can talk about that soon.
But today Mer Bear sent me a really cute idea for napkin rings! I never use napkins, I stick to the conveniently available paper towels, but now I might need to use napkins!

OOhh I can't wait to make them!

Hair

Maybe I should do mine like this.

Can you say eye-candy

I'm getting tons of decorating inspiration from this site! It makes me want to buy one of those ikea shelves that is all cubes and put lights in some of them! How cute! I can't wait to decorate in Chicago!!!!!!!!

An other new and awesome blog

I like this blog. Its about fashion and sewing and such. Suuuuweeeet.

Cool Crochet jewelry

I really need to buy some yarn so I can whip up a ton of these bracelets...and then make a necklace...and then a belt...and then a strap for a bag...

OMGZ

Knitted/Crocheted Graffiti...I have never wanted to vandalize public property so much in my life.

Um...YES

I DOwant to crochet a monster shake. I need to go buy yarn.

Because who doesn't need a hamburger dress?

I want Meredith to do this.

I think I have a new hero

And a new blog to constantly visit. She does a lot with crocheting and buttons...COOL.
And theres a picture with her and a friend on her blog, her friend is pregnant and her t-shirt has a jar of tomato sauce that says "Preggo" teehehe

Tree pedistal cake stand

I am totally trying to get my Dad to make this for me. It would be a super cute way to display cupcakes, or a cake....

I also need to start knitting

I was reminded about how I sent this link to Miss C. Corday. I need to check the library to see if they have this book!

I need to stop looking at blogs

and start crocheting!

Felt buttons!

I also want to do this with felt!!

Button Flowers

This looks uber-cute!!! I can't wait until I'm done with finals and have time to do it!!!

weird

This is freaky and cool. I kind of want to have some of this artwork, but where would you put it?

Meredith is awesome

So I was looking at my Mer Bear's blog and found this awesome site! It builds your vocabulary and feeds people! How cool!!!!!!

So I have no idea how this got to be sideways, and I don't know how to fix it...it just won't work.
But anyway, I made a cute wall decoration for my friend who is preggers. She doesn't know the gender of the baby so I thought this project would be cute and gender neutral.
I did do it a little differently. Instead of painting on the animals, I cut them out of scrap book paper, and I put them in crappy frames because I'm cheap. But I think they will look nice on the wall, though I found out she wants to decorate in bright colors :( Maybe if I make her a quilt I will do it in bright colors, though I may have just lost her in my roommate divorce(she is better friends with my roommate and I don't know if sides are going to be drawn, we will see soon).

It was fun to make and relatively easy, though only one of them I fit the entire writing section on there, the other two i just kind of trailed off...whoops!

quilting future

So in my obsession to begin the new hobby of quilting, I've been thinking about making a quilt for Alexis's baby. Maybe this one would be good. And it would be super easy. She mentioned the colors of the caterpillar book for the nursery. I can totally do blue, red and green(and yellow? I can't remember)

I totally want to make coasters!!! I don't know what colors I would do, but I do always love pink, orange and green together.....


If only I had brought some ribbon to class, I might be able to pay attention to my astronomy professor and make ribbon coasters at the same time.

My new life goal

So I've recently stumbled onto a couple of short stories involving babysitting. One from fiftytwostories.com and one by Raymond Carver in Cathedral. But the Raymond Carver one got me to thinking about how to seduce a single father...which might be fun, as long as the kids behave well.
Just a thought for my future. I need to start babysitting more.

Potential quilt

So I really want to make a quilt! I think I will have time as soon as classes are over, and then I can bring it with me to Chicago!
Amy Butler has some ridiculously cute quilt patterns. I especially like this one.
With some cute Jessica Jones fabric, it could be super cute! Also, Amy Butler makes some cute fabric too. However, I have no money to purchase fabric with :( especially since I won't be making it for a while.
I also need quilting tools...or at least some of them.
Then I will be ready to go!

Book List Challenge

So for the past 8ish months I have been working on reading a booklist I found in Entertainment Weekly. I don't read strictly the books from the list, but have a general time frame to finish the list in the next 5 year(hopefully I don't give up!). I have found that it has forced me to read some really freakin' good books by author's that I had either never heard of, or never thought about reading.
For example, "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood. It was written the year of my birth, so always seemed old. But it was an amazing, beautifully feminist, and a little reminiscent of "1984" and "The Giver," so of course I loved it.
When I started the list, I think I had read 10 books...I'm not sure how many I have read now, but heres the list with stars next to the ones I have read.
1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006) *
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)*
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)*
4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995)*
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)*
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)*
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)*
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)*
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)*
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)*
16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)*
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
21. On Writing, Stephen King (2000)*
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)*
23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)
25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)*
26. Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
27. Possession, A.S. Byatt (1990)
28. Naked, David Sedaris (1997)
29. Bel Canto, Anne Patchett (2001)*
30. Case Histories, Kate Atkinson (2004)
31. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (1990)
32. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch (1988)
33. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)
34. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (2002)*
35. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
36. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt (1996)*
37. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003)
38. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore (1998)
39. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)*
40. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
41. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)
42. LaBrava, Elmore Leonard (1983)
43. Borrowed Time, Paul Monette (1988)
44. Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene (1991)
45. Eva Luna, Isabel Allende (1988)*
46. Sandman, Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)
47. World's Fair, E.L. Doctorow (1985)
48. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1998)*
49. Clockers, Richard Price (1992)
50. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
51. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom (1990)
52. Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan (1992)
53. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
54. Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware (2000)
55. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (2006)
56. The Night Manager, John le Carré (1993)
57. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1987)
58. Drop City, TC Boyle (2003)
59. Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat (1995)
60. Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)*
61. Money, Martin Amis (1985)
62. Last Train To Memphis, Peter Guralnick (1994)
63. Pastoralia, George Saunders (2000)
64. Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997)
65. The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993)*
66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
67. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)
68. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006)
69. Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992)
70. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
71. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman (1997)
72. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)*
73. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989)
74. Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990)
75. Cathedral, Raymond Carver (1983)
76. A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell (1998)
77. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
78. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)*
79. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000)
80. Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney (1984)
81. Backlash, Susan Faludi (1991)
82. Atonement, Ian McEwan (2002)*
83. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1994)
84. Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)*
85. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
86. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts (1987)
87. The Ruins, Scott Smith (2006)
88. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (1995)
89. Close Range, Annie Proulx (1999)
90. Comfort Me With Apples, Ruth Reichl (2001)
91. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003)
92. Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow (1987)
93. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1991)
94. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser (2001)
95. Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman (1998)
96. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003)*
97. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson (1992)
98. The Predators' Ball, Connie Bruck (1988)
99. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman (1995)
100. America (the Book), Jon Stewart/Daily Show (2004)

Reading through the list again reminded me of how reading "Interpreter of Maladies" made me get over my hatred of and fall completely in love with short stories.
So according to my count I have read 27, so I'm 27% done! I'm almost finished with "Mystic River" so really, I'm almost 28% done!
There are also a lot of famous books on here that I don't think I would have ever picked up if I didn't force myself to read this list!
Now I'm getting excited to read more. I have to put all these books on my BookMooch list!

I can't stop talking about Book Mooch

So in my excitement about moving to Chicago in a couple of months I was able to get a travel guide to Chicago on my favorite website ever! The book I got is called "The Newcomer's Handbook to moving to Chicago" I can't wait until it comes in the mail.

Book mooch is a free website designed to help people share and recycle books! It's great, because all I pay for is sending books to other people, and then I get books for free!
Currently I'm reading "Mystic River" which I got on book mooch, and plan to get rid of it on book mooch too!
The only down side is they typically don't have any brand new books or old classics that people want to hold on to.
But its a great way to be green and not waste paper, as well as lessen book clutter. Apparently, there are also websites like this for CD's and DVD's too, but that's something I'm less excited about.

Cherry Blossom Festival

I went to the Cherry Blossom festival yesterday, and got a chance to play with my camera and take pretty pictures! It was really windy and incredibly crowded, but worth it to see the cherry blossoms in peak bloom. Someday I'll print out all the pretty pictures I have from DC and hang them up, until then I will just look at them on my computer and hope that I don't loose my harddrive.

Cheap and awesome wall decal

So I found a cool trick to decorate without destroying the walls. If only I had learned this when I was a freshman in college instead of a senior, then maybe I could have done some more interesting stuff. Though I really enjoyed my plain white wall before, this is much more interesting and was fun to do. Also, its way cheaper, and more unique than those wall decals you can buy online and in stores and stuff.
Here's how:

materials:
fabric
scissors
cornstarch
water
paintbrush or foam brush
Steps:
1. Cut the material out in the shape you want on the wall, or if you feel like wallpapering the wall with fabric, leave it as it is.
2. Combine 4 tablespoons of cornstarch with half a cup of cold water. Then pour in 2 cups of hot water and mix. It should thicken up really quickly.
3. Apply the cornstarch mixture to the wall and both sides of the fabric and then glue it on the wall. I had to put a push pin in the stump of the tree for a couple minutes until the mixture got a little more tacky and it stopped falling off the wall.
4. Wipe away whats left of the mixture on the wall that is around the fabric and admire your awesomeness at creating a wall decal!

The cornstarch mixture can drip, so be careful what is below your awesome new wall decal.
It looks great on my dorm wall, and was an easy way to fix up the space. Plus it made me feel like a teen from the 50's(I can totally picture my mom having done this at my age if she was crafty). Meredith says her mother used to do this to the walls when they were young and lived on an army base.