For the Love of Pinterest

Are you on Pinterest yet? Please say yes, because if you aren't I feel a little sad for you. You're missing out on one of the modern world's greatest inventions. (Ok, maybe not, but grant me a little hyperbole please).

Pinterest is a digital pinboard where you can save links and images to all of those amazing/bizarre/beautiful/inspirational things that you find on the Interwebs. You can save anything -- recipes, project ideas, pictures, whatever. No more emailing yourself a link that will languish forever in you inbox. Instead, you get to save a link and an image. I know that doesn't sound revolutionary, but trust me: It will change your life.

You can have as many different boards as you want with as many pins as you want. And the best part? You get to see what everyone else on Pinterest is pinning. Which means that instead of aimlessly wandering the Internet for the thing you need, you can rely on the good (and sometimes not so good) taste of other pinners for what you need.

You can find things like this, and this, and this. (Psst. You should definitely click on that last link because you will die from the cute.) It has spurred me to do things I probably wouldn't have done otherwise, like that crochet scarf you saw the other day. The only bad part is that it is a complete and utter time-suck. I could spend hours (read: days) just looking at pins. But I don't care. I'm never going back.

I guess what I'm saying is: I love you Pinterest.

My First Wearable Crochet

Look what I did!

It's a crocheted cowl infinity scarf. Did you get all that? Basically it's a big, bulky loop scarf. It's incredibly soft and incredibly warm, and I made it! Can you believe that? I can't.

I know what you're thinking: "Crochet? Who in the world crochets other than 70-year-old women."

Well, I do. And it's making a comeback.

After seeing all of the amazing things that my grandmother had crocheted over the years, I decided to teach myself few years ago using online tutorials. Crocheting definitely hasn't been as trendy as knitting in recent years, but there are a lot of really cute patterns out there. Until now I've mostly stuck to small projects. This is the first actual wearable piece that I've tackled, and I'm really happy with it.

I found the pattern here through Pinterest. (More about my love for/obsession with Pinterest later.) Even though it's a "big" project, it's actually a great beginner's piece to tackle. It just uses basic stitches and is worked in the round, so there's so sewing together. It is really bulky, though. I left off two rows, so you might want to alter the pattern a little if you feel like it's getting too wide.

It alternates rows of single and double crochet. I found the yarn at JoAnn fabrics for just $6 a skein. So it was only about a $13 project. Not too shabby.

Thinking about trying your hand at crochet? It's so simple. You can basically teach yourself through the use of Google and YouTube. Some of my favorite tutorials are here, here and here.

It's not a perfect project. I dropped a stitch in the middle somewhere and my stitches aren't completely even, but I was pretty impressed with myself. It's given me the guts to try my hand at more wearable pieces. And maybe one day I'll even learn to knit.

Pin It

Natural Beauty

A couple of days ago we had our first real winter day. It finally got properly cold and snowed. Because we live in an older house, it's not the most efficient, and we often get condensation on the inside of our storm windows. In the freezing weather, the water froze on the window and created the most beautiful crystal formation.

It was so gorgeous that I couldn't resist snapping a few quick photos.

How pretty is that? It's one of those simple things in life that makes me smile.

A Quick Look Back

We're quickly barreling toward the holiday season, and I have a whole mess of posts planned for the next few weeks. But before I dive headfirst into Christmas crafts and cookie-baking, I wanted to take a quick look back at fall.

In October, my husband and I went with some friends to Beasley's Orchard for their fall apple festival. It was a gorgeous fall day and we got to do all those fall things that I usually let slip through my fingers. We ate caramel apples, went through a corn maze, and picked pumpkins. It was as cliche a fall day as there ever was, and I loved it.

There's something beautiful about all the textures in a corn stalk.

A sea of apples as far as the eye can see.

Pumpkin-picking

Is it just me, or are these pumpkins looking at the ones down the path?

Green and gorgeous

Your '70s trash is my interior decor

It's no secret among my friends that I'm a crafty person. What I am not, particularly, is a DIYer. Maybe it's owed to the fact that I've lived in apartments, where there isn't a lot of room to take on projects. Or maybe it's because I just really didn't have a need to. Either way, I haven't really been that kind of person. But that has changed.

With the new house to decorate and a tighter budget, I started seeing more potential in things we already owned or in things that my family members were trashing. And that's where we start the story of this mirror.

My parents purchased a tiny one bedroom condo on a lake this year that came fully decorated. Trust me when I tell you that it came with no less than a flobbitygillion mirrors hanging on the walls. My mom was trying to pare down but, as she put it, "hates to just throw them away."

One mirror in particular caught our eye. It had potential.

Tacky awesomeness

See the potential? No? How about here?

Gold isn't glamorous?

OK. So it isn't very attractive. It's kind of oddly 1970s traditional. The gold with the "carved" top. It's just weird. But now imagine if it was all one solid gorgeous color. Can't imagine it? Well, lucky for you I did it, so you don't have to. My mom and I thought with a good coat of oil-rubbed bronze spray paint, we might just be able to bring this thing into the 21st century. Never having done this sort of thing before, I kind of just made it up as I went along. Lucky for me, it worked.

The first thing I did was remove the frame from the actual mirror glass itself. It was screwed on, so it was easy to take apart.

All I had to do was pop the back off and then pop the glass out of the frame. Pretty straightforward. I did run into one odd detail.



There was actually cardboard on the glass as a kind of spacer between the glass and the backboard. Not a problem -- I just had to be careful not to lose any of the spacers while I had this thing taken apart.

Next I took the frame outside and set it up on a canvas dropcloth. I propped it up on some old recyclables to keep the frame from sticking to the canvas and to make sure that I could get all of the nooks and crannies around this thing.

Pretty sophisticated rigging

Next: Painting. I went over the entire frame with thin coats of spray paint, allowing it some drying time between each coat. I had to go back over the frame several times to make sure I got it completely covered. Just when I thought I was done, I'd see some awesome '70s gold shining through. But after about four coats it was looking good.

Better already

It's hard to tell from my shoddy outdoor photography, but it was a vast improvement.

Much better

See? Didn't think it would work did you? Granted, I had my doubts too, but I figured a $5 investment in spray paint was worth a shot to see if it would work. And I think it did. After I let it dry (and air out for a few days so my whole house wouldn't smell like spray paint), I put the whole rig back together and was pretty impressed with myself.

Looking good

I hung the mirror in our hallway to brighten it up a bit and to give guests access to a mirror bigger than our tiny bathroom medicine cabinet. I know the picture isn't great, but have you ever tried to take a picture of a mirror? Not easy.

Beauteous

As my sister-in-law said, "It looks like something you would actually buy." With just a little paint, the tacky '70s awesomeness now looks like a "modern-traditional" piece that actually fits in really well with our decor and the overall feel of the house.

For my first DIY project, I was pretty impressed with myself. I've even thought of future possibilities for the same piece. It might look really good in white, but with our cream woodwork we decided to stay away from the clashing-neutrals look. Down the road, though, it's a possibility. Another possibility I've considered is removing the mirror altogether and putting in a piece of wood painted with chalkboard paint. I could hang it in the kitchen and use it to track grocery needs.

What do you think? Love it? Hate it? Wish I had kept the '70s golden glory?

Curb appeal

The biggest difference between the new rental house we've moved into and any place we've lived in before is that we're responsible for the outdoor upkeep as well. Initially I thought, "No big deal." But this house has a lot of outdoor space, so it was intimidating for some first-time home-livers (that sounds oddly anatomical, doesn't it?).

It was no less intimidating because of the -- shall we say -- lack of care the house had before we moved in. The tenant before us wasn't exactly up to the task, so we inherited a jungle. First on my list of projects: Our scary overgrown bushes.

We were "that house" on the street

See what I mean? You could barely see the front porch, and you couldn't see the house numbers at all. And the view from the porch? Well...

Lovely, right?

Mike couldn't wait to get started

Not that we have much to look at (the street), but I'd like to see it without a view of bramble in front of me.

Our landlord offered to loan us her manual hedge trimmers, but we quickly realized that those weren't going to cut it. We needed heavy-duty, but as renters we weren't about to invest in a lot of expensive yard equipment. Enter the local rental place. We called and found we could rent electric trimmers for fours hours for just $15. Sold!

It didn't take very long for us to start to see a vast improvement.

Halfway there!

You can actually start to see our big planters full of impatiens. And after about 90 minutes...

Finished

Ta da!

Ok, so they're not great. The bushes are still super overgrown, but at least they're not completely overtaking the front of our house. Our goal is to keep them up for the rest of the fall just using our manual trimmers and then cut them back more over next spring and summer. I was afraid to cut off too much right away because 1.) The bush on the left looks kind of dead on the inside 2.) I didn't want to kill everything a week after moving into the house.

So for now, at least is looks manicured. Plus, now I get a better view from my porch swing.

Manicured hedges make for a better view -- even if it is a parking lot

No more jungle

It just goes to show that with very little money and very little effort, even renters can improve a home's curb appeal. Now all the outside upkeep seems a lot less intimidating than it did before. I had almost forgotten how satisfying it was to do yard work, but I'm loving spending the time outside in the fresh air and sun, playing in the dirt.

New House

Ok. So here it is. A tour of the new house now that it's all shiny and finished. It took a lot of work to make this house feel like it home, but it really does now. It's a 1925 bungalow, so it has tons of character -- and a few issues. But we just love it. To say the last tenant had slacked on housekeeping is an understatement. We spent two whole days just cleaning. I don't think the tops of the doorways had been cleaned in years (mega-barf). But once we got it sparkling clean, we set about painting every room in the house except the bathroom. It's amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do.

A few other simple fixes, like blinds on the kitchen door rather than and safety-pinned fabric scrap, and putting frosted cling on the window in the shower (yeah, you read that right -- window. in. the. shower.) made a world of difference.

So here it is a quick before-and-after tour of our house. I have plenty of projects stashed to blog about, so I'll be back here a lot more now that we're all settled in.

Living Room (facing front door) Before

Living Room (facing front door) After Paint

Living Room (facing front door) Done

Living Room (from front door) Before

Living Room (from front door) After Paint

Living Room (from front door) Done

Living Room (facing guest room) Before

Living Room (facing guest room) After Paint

Living Room (facing guest room) Done

Guest Room Before

Difference Between Original Paint Color and What It Had Faded To

Guest Room After Paint

Guest Room Done

Guest Room Done

Bathroom Done

Bedroom Before (Yes, it was bright pink)

Bedroom After Paint (it's hard to tell here, but it's grey)

Bedroom After Paint

Bedroom Done (Penny Lane Approves)

Bedroom Done

Kitchen Before (Mint Green)

Kitchen After Paint

Kitchen Done

Kitchen Before

Kitchen After Paint

Kitchen Done

Kitchen Done

My Favorite Part of the Kitchen -- A Glass Built-in Cabinet