In light of a few recent bathroom visits, it seems as though some public bathroom patrons may be unaware of acceptable public bathroom etiquette. Or all bathroom etiquette, for that matter. So, I've put together a Flow Chart. No pun intended. Read it. Learn it. Use it.
Seriously. It's not stinkin' funny.
It may be hard to believe, but last weekend while I was at my parents' house, I actually did more than just play with crayons. I know, shocking. I'm happy to report that I was able to check a couple of projects off the ol' to-do list. The first is a bench that someone had "ordered." (It feels weird calling it that since I don't actually have a store, but they requested it, I made it, they paid for it, so that means they ordered it, right?) The bench is an Ana White plan that I'd done last fall and this particular "customer" (that's weird too) had seen it in its new home and wanted one too. Well by all means, let me jump right on that for you.
I didn't take an in-process shots, so here it is in its finished state. My customer chose the paint color; it's Nifty Turquoise by Sherwin Williams.
The top is hinged and has a little storage compartment.
I won't lie, I was pretty nervous when I opened the can of paint and saw how bright it was. Nifty? More like Welcome To Preschool, Let's Learn Our Colors Turquoise. Thankfully a dark chocolate undercoat toned things down a bit, especially after I went at it with the sander.
I haven't heard back yet if my customer is pleased or not. Doesn't matter, though, cause this store doesn't take returns. Mwahaha.
Project Numero Dos is one that my parents started a couple of weeks ago and I just helped finish it up. The inspiration was this piece of wall art that my mom and I saw at an antique store.
What you see there is a whole bunch of strips of colorful beaded board framed together and hanging on the wall. Fun, easy, genius. I mean, who doesn't love beaded board? It's cheap and super easy to get your hands on. The antique store had some of these same colored slats in longer pieces for sale. Aaaaand it just got even easier to get our hands on - we didn't even have to drive to Home Depot or Lowes.
I can't remember the price but it wasn't much. Mom went ahead and bought one long slat in each color.
I think they may have called these antique beaded board but it really isn't much different than what you can buy in the store today. These are tongue and groove pieces, not just strips from a big sheet of beaded board like we normally buy. I think the main difference is that it's a little bit thicker.
Well, it's thicker and it's already painted and distressed. Gotta love it when you can cut out a step from the get-go.
Now, these were mostly purchased so we could make some generic wall art for the beach house, but you know my mom needed something for her house too. She cut off 15 inches from each slat, and then cut those down into 3 five-inch pieces. She had a total of 21 pieces and went to town arranging them. My dad built her a frame to go around them.
Mom has a long skinny place in her den where she wanted to hang this so she couldn't follow the pattern from the inspiration photo. Instead, this is what she came up with.
It reads a little checker board-ish in this picture, but it's actually really, really cute in person. The dark colors that look kinda black in the photo are actually a darker green and brown, and you can see a lot more of the imperfections in the wood in real life.
She even managed to line up all the "beads" in the beaded board. (The slats didn't automatically line up, she had to shave a little off here and there.)
Dad and I put the hanging wires on the back and took inside to see how it'd look in it's new home. I think it looks good by the polka dot chair!
Maybe one day I'll remember to take my real camera with me so I can take some better quality pictures (these are from the iPhone). This would be really easy to recreate, and you could make it any size and color you wanted.
We also worked on another really cute, really fun project this weekend, but I can't reveal it yet because it's a birthday present. It's so hard to resist posting pics because I think it has turned out so well. I love it! Here's a hint: it involves a tree, a door, and a mailbox. Any guesses??
Just for fun, here's a picture of Lolli. This is how she spends her mornings when she thinks it's close to time for her to get in her kennel. If I even think about coming near her, she darts under the bed where I can't reach her. She's a mess, I tell ya.
I had totally accepted my Pinterest Challenge FAIL yesterday when I wrote my post about it. Really, I had. I knew there were some things that I could change before setting my crayons out in the sun to bake again and I had every intention of trying out some of those changes. I felt like my first attempt hadn't been all that bad. Heck, some of you even thought it looked good enough to frame. Even still, I knew I could do better. But then...sigh.
Then I started clicking links and looking around and reading comments and I started seeing all these other melted crayon masterpieces and they looked good. Like, really good. And way better than mine. But from what I could tell, no one else went with the sit-it-out-in-the-sun-to-bake method like I did. Or actually I guess I should say no one stuck it out all day like I did. Well, I'm sure someone did, just not anyone whose blog I read.
If using something other than the sun to melt the crayons could be called cheating, then I read about quite a bit of cheating going on! There was a lot of hair dryer usage to get a nice drippy effect. I knew that wouldn't work for me, though, because I recently sweet-talked Doc into cleaning out the little lent tray thingy on my hair dryer and now it doesn't get as hot as it used to. Then, later in the afternoon, I read one blog post that showed the crayons dripping in the oven. Hmmmm...
Doc is still out of town so after work I drove over to my parents house for dinner. I know I just spent the whole weekend over there, but I'm not one to pass up on a free meal. Especially lasagna. (That meal almost got really expensive for me since I got pulled over on my way to their house. Luckily I got off with just a warning. Phew!) There's a Fred's located just around the corner from their house and I have to pass it to get there and this time I just had to swing my car into the parking lot to pick up another pack of crayons. This time I sprung for the 64 pack!
So while my mom finished preparing dinner, I dug around in her cabinets to find some baking tools and ignored her comments of "You are NOT cooking crayons in my oven." I promised her I'd be real careful.
I was originally going to use the big center piece from my tri-fold foam board since I had so many more crayons, but it wouldn't fit into my mom's oven. And then, since I had to cut it down anyway, I went ahead and made it an even 11x14 so it'd easily fit into a standard sized frame.
The rest of the prep work was all the same as the first time: line drawn at the top for straightness, colors arranged according to Roy G Biv, crayons glued down with Crayola logo on top. When my board was all ready to go, I placed it on a cookie sheet and leaned it up against a cooking dish.
I made a little tray out of aluminum foil to catch any crazy crayon drippage.
I had no idea what temperature to set the oven to. 250 seemed like a good number to me, so that's what I went with. Into the oven it went.
Did I mention I left my camera at home? Yea, these awesome photos are comin' atcha from my iPhone.
I may or may not have squealed when I saw these two drips.
It's working! And it's working fast! The crayons started dripping just seconds after being in the oven.
It's hard not to be a cheater when it feels looks this good!
I don't know why, but this was so fascinating to me. Especially after my first failed attempt. The crayons that baked in the sun melted inside the wrapper first and most of the tips never really melted, they stayed hard. But now, in the oven, it's the tips of the crayons that were melting away. And they were all melting at what seemed to be an equal pace, regardless of their colors. So freaking awesome.
After about a minute of good dripping, I turned the oven off so it could start to cool down and the wax could harden back up. I felt like I had reached a good level of drippage.
Here's my masterpiece fresh out tha oven! It smelled delicious like wax.
I've got these pretty sweet blended smears at the top of my crayon row. This might be from me getting uber creative and putting my own twist on it, or it might be from the foam board being top heavy and flipping over backwards. Only my mom and I will know for sure.
It's a good thing I put the aluminum foil tray down at the bottom because my drips definitely made it that far and pooled up at the bottom. Truth be told, I kinda like the way it looks on the bottom, even though that will probably get covered up by the frame.
Like last time, I took a picture from the top. This time, the wrappers still had a lot of wax left in them.
I think this photo is my favorite. I love how the melted wax and blended colors look!
So there you have it. When making melted crayon art, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again just cheat and stick it in the oven. You won't regret it.
Last Tuesday, the lovely ladies of both Young House Love and Bower Power announced that they were holding a little Pinterest Challenge. In short, the challenge was to take inspiration from something you found on Pinterest, put your own spin on it, and then post about it today (Tuesday). After writing the post, you could then add a link to one of their sites so that others could come visit and get inspired. Simple, no? They explained the challenge on their blogs using a lot more words than that, and even created a fun little video that included an HGTV celebrity whom I do not know, so feel free to click on those links to get more details. Pinterest, for those of you not in the know, is a fun site where you can pin things that interest you. Get it? Pin + Interest = Pinterest. And by "pin" I mean it's a place where you can create your own folders to place things you find online that you like and don't want to forget. Similar to saving things in your Favorites Folder, only you can see pictures instead of just names of websites. Oh, and just like every other social media platform, people can follow your pins and you can follow others. Or you can just search for things on the main page and look at things that people you don't know have pinned. What I'm saying is that there's lots of cool stuff on there to look at, and it's really, really easy to get sucked in and then realize you've blown a few hours on the site. I've noticed that when I log on my productivity levels majorly plummet, so I save it for a little treat for myself when I know I've got some time to kill.
So, back to the challenge. I follow both Sherry and Katie on a regular basis and I have my own account on Pinterest, so when I read about the challenge I immediately thought it sounded fun. Only problem? I didn't have a project on Pinterest lined up to do. They both announced the kind of projects they would be working on - Sherry's would be a light fixture for her laundry room, Katie's something for above the bed in her guest bedroom. Those types of projects called for a lot of supplies I didn't already have on hand, like light kits. Since I didn't already have a project in mind, nor did I have time to shop for a whole bunch of supplies, I figured this would be a challenge that I'd just have to watch from afar. No participating for me.
Fast forward to late Wednesday afternoon when I found this fun piece of artwork on Pinterest.
(via)
Pretty awesome, right? And no, I wasn't on there looking for a project to do so I could participate in the challenge. I quickly logged on to pull up something I had pinned a few days earlier, and this immediately caught my attention on the home page. Super cute, super creative, and super easy.
Did I mention that the supply list would be a cinch to get my hands on? I mean, I can grab a foam board and a pack of crayons practically anywhere. And that's just what I did.
What is it about a brand new pack of crayons that makes me so giddy? It's gotta be their perfectly sharp tips and the newness of them. They're just screaming to be colored with!
My foam board was actually one of those tri-fold boards that are used for science fair projects, so my first step was to cut off the two sides. I was originally going to use the bigger center piece for this project, but since I only got the 24 pack of crayons (as opposed to the 64 pack), one of the smaller side pieces was plenty big enough.
While my hot glue gun heated up, I arranged my crayons in the perfect rainbow order. Roy G Biv, y'all!
Now, I tend to err on the side of being a perfectionist, so before slapping on some hot glue and sticking the crayons down, I drew myself a line across the top so that everything would be perfectly straight. Then I could get to gluin'.
I left a little bit of space at the top and the sides so that I could easily frame it after the crayons were melted. What can I say, I'm a thinker.
I debated between having the Crayola logo be on top or the names of the colors, but in the end, the logo won. My OCD came out and I decided I liked it better with them all looking the same. Besides, what's the fun in colors that have practically the same names, like Yellow Green vs Green Yellow and Red Violet vs Violet Red. How are kids ever supposed to learn their colors with names like those?
Approximately, oh I don't know, 48 seconds of hot-gluing later, I had my rainbow completely stuck down.
And all of my perfectly pointed tips were still in tact. I resisted the urge to give them a good scribbling.
Here's the full view of my canvas. Sure, my edges aren't perfectly smooth, but I was banking on a frame covering those up, so I didn't care. See that little dent about midway down on the right? Yea, that's where I rested on my elbow while gluing on the crayons. Lesson learned: my body weight will leave an impression on foam board.
The next day was kinda overcast and rainy so I didn't get to set my board-o-crayons out in the sun. I actually had to wait until Sunday to set them out to bake.
I moved a chair out into the yard where I thought they would get some full-on sun. After a little bit of positioning and re-positioning, I left the board propped up with a slight incline. I figured if it was straight up and down my crayon wax could drip straight down and miss the board all together.
About 30 minutes later I came back out to check on the crayons. They were starting to look a little sweaty and the darker colors were getting melty on top. Aww yeah.
Up close of the melty-ness.
You know what they say - a watched pot never boils - so I went inside and left the crayons to melt on their own. I did sneak a few peeks from out the window and could tell progress was being made. On my next trip out with the camera, the crayons looked like this.
It's like the blue and green were racing down the board and then got stopped by a major crayon wax pile-up.
I was able to make a few observations at this point. First, the darker colors were obviously melting way faster than the lighter colors since they absorb more heat. Second, the purple crayon on the far left was my favorite; it looked like it slid completely out of the paper wrapper all at one time but was still kinda intact. Third, the wax was separating. See the little white spots in between the crayons in the shot two photos up? That's wax that was sweating through the paper. And the lightly smeared purple-y area above the wax pile-up is where all the white wax melted off the purple crayon that's still intact, if that makes any sense. This was shaping up to be quite the science experiment.
Once again, I headed inside so the sun could work its magic without me watching. This time I waited a couple hours before heading back out with my camera. Here's how it looked that time.
Um yea, pretty much the same. The light colors still weren't budging. What the heck? I could tell from barely touching the paper that they were melted inside, they just weren't doing any dripping. I was about to start running out of daylight, so I tried to help speed them along. I grabbed a couple toothpicks and did a little poking and prodding. Then I tapped the board up and down hoping to loosen the wax up a little.
Oh, I loosened it alright. The pink crayons from the far right fell right off. Crap!
(Yes, that's the instructions on how to put together a piece of furniture. Once the melting got into full swing, I slid into under the edge of the board to protect the chair.)
I was majorly bummed about those two falling off. I guess if the point of the project is for things to start melting, then I probably shouldn't use hot glue as my adhesive of choice. Another lesson learned.
The view from the top was pretty cool. You can see how the crayon wrappers are starting to look hollow. I could see all the way through some of the darker ones that had already dripped out, and I could tell that the reds, oranges, and yellows were melted, they just weren't sliding out.
Then, while I was standing there feeling defeated and disappointed over my failed project, the pile-up of wax started sliding again. More drips came from the dark colors too. Can you tell in the picture below how the purple crayon from the left has started melting and there is more blue and green smeared at the top? The glob at the bottom is moving too.
I can't even tell you how fascinating this was to me. It was so fun to watch the drips and try to predict which way they would go!
It was blazing hot outside so I went back in, leaving the crayons out to melt a little longer just in case the lighter colors decided to get in on the action.
An hour-ish later I came back out and booyah! The oranges and yellows finally let loose!
Here's a zoomed out shot where you can see that the blues/greens/purples made it all the way to the bottom. Good thing I put that paper down.
You can see from the shot above that the shade was creeping in, so that's as far as the melting went. Obviously this is not worth framing, which is why I'm calling this project a FAIL.
But! I think I'm going to attempt it again. Maybe I could get better results if I switch up the variables a bit (like how I'm using my science fair lingo?). For instance, what if I used a piece of plywood or something that wasn't so smooth? Then maybe the initial globs wouldn't slide so fast and would leave more of a color streak on their way down. Or, what if I cut off all the tips before I glued the crayons down? That was one of the fascinating parts to me - even though the wax inside the wrappers was completely melted, the tips on the lighter colors were still hard as a rock. Wonder if the colors would melt at an equal pace if I set it up in a hot car? There are so many things to experiment with!
Of course, my dad insisted all day long that there's no way possible to get it right without using some kind of applied heat. He even suggested putting it in an oven somehow. I shot down his ideas, telling him that would just make my foam board melt. My mom suggested I pull up the tutorial to re-read it, but I reminded her that I didn't read a tutorial, I just saw the one picture.
Turns out the joke's on me. When I went back to pull up the original inspiration picture from Etsy (where it's for sale for $70!), I was able to read in the description that the artist uses a heat gun and applies a controlled heat application to get this outcome. Ugh, maybe I should've done my reading before-hand. I don't know, though. Now that I've seen that it's possible to get them to melt from the sun, using a heat gun just seems like cheating. What do you think?
Updated to add: The results are in! Click here to see Sherry's awesome Clothespin Light Shade, here for Katie's really cool basket weave mirror, here for Emily's swanky nailhead trim on closet doors, and here for Lana's bold chalkboard fridge. Looks like I'm the only one that majorly failed. Crap. Oh well, I'm linking up on their blogs anyway!
Updated again to add: I gave it another try! Check out my much more successful attempt here.
For Mother's Day, I bought my mom a ticket to a guided paint class. You may remember that I recently attended one of these classes with some of my friends. Now, I know Mother's Day was, like, forever ago, but we just attended our class last Thursday. And Beth and Erin joined us too, making it the perfect girls' night out.
Since I had already painted the three trees scene that was being painted that night, I decided to take a stab at freestyle painting. Here I am with my (almost) blank slate.
Mom and Erin followed along with the three trees scene and got right to work painting their backgrounds.
Beth went with the freestyle option too.
She worked on a "drippy" masterpiece. Here it is after the first application of drippy paint.
After taking a step back, was she feeling good about her decision? I think so.
Mom and Erin listened carefully as they were given their next steps.
At this point in the evening, my canvas look like this. Uh, not so good.
I still didn't really know where I was going with it. Beth's drips were making a lot of headway. She went all the way across the top with the yellow, and began adding a little red.
Mom and Erin began layering colors on their background. Erin, the real artist, had all kinds of fancy techniques up her sleeves.
Mom blended different shades of blue.
Beth's painting started getting real drippy.
Finally, I was starting to make a little headway in a good direction. The bottom half of my canvas was taking shape, even though I still wasn't sure what to do with the top.
Mom flipped her canvas upside down to work on the ground of her trees scene.
I must've gotten really into my painting because my step-by-step pictures stop here. When I picked the camera back up, Beth's drippy painting had some new circles. Pretty cool, huh?
My favorite part is the two red circles down in the corner.
Feeling pretty good about it, Beth decided to take a seat and watch the rest of us.
I have zero photos that show the progress of what I did to the top half of my painting. First, I realized that bright teal color had to go and started covering it with more of a sky blue. Then I slapped on some white and tried to blend it in. A dab of yellow and a touch of grey later, and I ended up with this.
Here's the finished product with my camera flash on.
Here I am with my finished masterpiece. It's a little blurry, but when the flash was on the light reflected off the painting.
Mom's and Erin's trees were really beginning to look good. Here's Erin layering on the texture medium.
Mom's finished trees. Her colors look really good with the colors in my painting. I have a feeling our paintings might end up living at the beach house.
Erin's masterpiece. Love how she did her shading.
I guess I didn't take a finished photo of Beth's painting. Beth cracked me up - she "finished" hers about 6 different times during the class. But then she'd find some glaze or a texture medium or something and pick her brush back up and keep going. I guess you can't say your painting's done until you're walking out the door with it!
We took a group photo with our paintings before leaving for the night. I think we're a pretty talented bunch!
