prints are ready

I just listed the first of my new prints in my Etsy shop this morning.  It took forever to find time to calculate the shipping, test the packaging, etc.  I can't repeat enough how much I missed the straightforwardness of printing on paper!  After some of the marathon sewing sessions I've been through over the years, it it so refreshing to print and be done.  Plus, not being limited on how many colors I can use, like with greeting cards (because otherwise I'd have to charge too much) is very liberating. 

I should have more new additions over the coming weeks, including a few select mash-ups of some of my old designs, and another colorway of the design above (those are actually ready to go, I just need a bright day to take good pics).

Hopefully with all my ideas for future prints, they'll keep getting better as I go along.  I've got some 3+ color prints with lots of cool layering in the works now.  I'm really excited to get them finished.  It's always such a struggle to find the time to do any work that's production related during the week, but I at least got a bit of sketching done last night while Dad had the Peanut running laps around the house to wear him out (this was at 9 pm, mind you).  Despite our best efforts we are stuck with a little night owl, at least for now.  There's only so much you can do to manipulate the sleep patterns of a one year old.  But who knows?  In a few months maybe, hopefully, that will change.  Just got to find those workable moments when I can.

first fall prints

I finally finished the first set of new prints last week.  Today I'm ordering protective sleeves and rigid mailers so I can officially start selling them in my shop, but I figured I'd offer up a sneak peek.

They all measure 11" x 14" and are printed on a heavyweight cardstock from French Paper Company.   More colorways are in the works.  Some of these will also be repeated on pillows too...slightly larger though.  Still deciding if I want to make some or all of these as pillows, what colors and fabrics to print on, etc., but I hope to get those started by next weekend.

I had planned to work on the new print colorways this weekend, but a scuffle with a mini tree stump on Saturday morning put me out of commission.  This evil tree and I have been battling for years and I needed to dig out the stump so I could transplant a shrub there.  Normally I love trees, but this is a super invasive Mimosa tree that is right next to our fence.  I swear it grows a foot a day and makes babies everywhere. So, in a moment of laziness I decided I would stand on it and use my weight to knock it over instead of hacking through the last large uncut root.  I'll save you the nasty details, but basically a piece of the stump broke off and my foot hit the ground at the wrong angle wrenching my knee.

I triumphed over the stump in the end though, thanks to my husband agreeing to finish the job.  I'm almost better today, so maybe tomorrow I can handle standing awhile to finish those prints.  Otherwise I'll be announcing their arrival in my shop as soon as the mailers arrive.

thrifty makeover: storage bench

Yay for getting more things done!  Here's the recently finished bench / play table / storage by the front door.  The front door opens up right into the livingroom, so we needed to do something that would not only keep our son's (a.k.a.-the Peanut) toys tidy, but hold shoes, create additional seating, and be something that looked good with the rest of the room.  Originally it was going to be a solid color and have a tie-on type cushion spanning the bench, but when the Peanut started rolling his toys around on it I realized it would also make a great area for playing too.  

The table was leftover from a preschool that was getting new furniture.  It had about ten layers of paint and years of chips and wear, but it is really well made and sturdy so I took the time to strip the paint.  I was hoping the wood underneath would be good enough to leave as-is, but unfortunately there were huge chips in the veneer and lots of wood filler.  I decided to use paint the same color brown that we have the "library" corner of the livingroom.  Not sure it was the best choice at first, but once I came up with the idea for the stripes I was 100x happier with it...and ecstatic not to have to repaint the whole thing over. 

It will be used as a play table most of the time, so I added the stripes to complement the other turquiose accents in the room and make it less boring.  I also make the two smaller cushions that can be easily added and removed when needed.  The bins underneath hold toys and shoes (which the Peanut seems to find indistiguishable from one another).  

To the left of the bench is the "closet", made from another cast off item from the preschool.  The shelf was originally unfinished, hookless, and the backboard was shorter and wavy along the bottom edge.  Oh, and it was much longer too.  To gussy it up I removed one of the brackets, took off the wavy backboard, trimmed the shelf, and reattached the bracket along with a more substantial and less whimsical backboard.  The backer was a spare piece of pine I had left over from another project which I topped with some oak veneer I scored awhile back.  The hooks were the most expensive part of the project and picked up at Target for about $12.  The paint and acrylic polyurethane were leftovers from the tv console. 

I still want to put something to the right of the bench, but I'm not sure what.  Here's the "in progress" shot of that area. 

I miss the console table we used to have along this wall a bit, but the bench is far more functional in the long run....and I've heard it's great for rolling toys around on.

a splash of pattern

I went all crazy last weekend and decided to fancy up the backsplash in our kitchen.  

I know, I know...the chevron trend in home dec is really starting to wear out it's welcome.  Up until now I have skirted around my hidden desires to use it somewhere in my house.  I couldn't help but finally give in for this particular project.  Someday I would like to give our kitchen a full h-to-t makeover, but in the meantime I figured maybe paint could take the place of tile and brighten up the room a bit.

BEFORE

So out came the leftover paints again and I quickly rolled the cream color on the wall.  When I got to this point I started having second thoughts. Anything too close to white on the walls makes me feel really sad (maybe it was from my years of renting and being desperate to paint?) and I was getting that uh-oh feeling.  Soldiering on I decided to at least mock up a portion of the wall with the full design just to make sure.  That did the trick.  Just needed to lighten the beige a bit and I had it finished in a day or so.

If this is something you might consider doing somewhere in your house, and you have a steady hand, I suggest creating a template of about three zig zag 'peaks' and using that to lay out the design with pencil.  Then instead of taping your lines, buy a couple foam brushes and use the flat front edge to cozy up to your pencil lines with the paint.  This worked really well for me and saved me from all the taping and touch ups.  I find even with fancy Frog Tape, paint bleeding under the tape can be hit or miss on certain surfaces and I figured I'd spend more time taping and rolling on the paint anyway.

AFTER

All in all I am loving with the way it turned out.  Our kitchen is soooo dark (due to an addition we are down to one tiny north facing window) and this brightens up the prep area immensly.  Now I'm wondering if the whole room needs to be lighter.  I am partial to the turquoise though, so it will be staying for now.  If anything I need to repaint the cabinets after a recent botched attempt with Olympic low-VOC paint.  Perfectly decent and affordable product for walls, not durable enough for cabinets (unless maybe you are painting bare wood and not going over paint layer like we were).  It's been a year and they look almost worse than they did before I repainted them.  Our cabinets are sans-handles so we've got tons of peeling in the "high traffic" areas.  Plus the Peanut loves to scoot our black chairs around the room and their paint leaves pretty scuff marks all over the cabinets and the walls.  Yay...guess we might be needing new chairs too.  Maybe I should go with a semi-gloss white on the cabinets next time?  I liked the beige that the previous owner had used, but again, more white would really brighten this room.  Hmmmm....

for real this time

I've been so wrapped up in working on my new pillows and prints, I forgot to actually post the new merchandise in my shop on Monday.   Go me!   The listings were even ready to go last week, but I didn't get a chance publish them at the time and completely forgot.  Sigh.  I try and keep a meticulous "to do" list these days, but unless it is an order I need to fill, other things occassionally slip through the cracks if I don't have a pen handy to jot it down when I think of it.  Well, at least no one emailed asking where they were.  They are now officially on sale as of a few hours ago.  Phew!

Today's "to do" list is pretty packed.  I'm finally about to order supplies for building new screens, as soon as I can test my chemicals and check whether they have gone bad or not (they are light/age sensitive and it would be a waste to shell out all that money if I can use up what I have first).  There was also a lot of measuring and calculating involved this time around, so I don't buy too little or too much screen mesh.  Basically, it took forever.  I should receive everything late next week and hopefully (fingers crossed) have some in progress stuff to share soon.  Until then I'll be putting together more posts on home dec projects I've been doing.  The cushions for our new bench/storage/play table should get done this evening, and I have more on the agenda for the weekend.  O.k., the baby's finally napping...time to get to work!

notebooks for sale

The new notebooks are now for sale in my Etsy store.  I'm keeping them exclusive to this shop for now, since there are only a few of each, but I'll be whipping up more for the holidays, gift fairs, etc.

I'm also all excited about some new pillows and prints I have in the works.  Up until this point I've had lukewarm feelings for the pillows I've done, but a little spurt of creativity last week yielded some designs I am really proud of.  Now I am just waiting on materials to build the screens and get going so I can show you samples.  The art prints will be smaller versions of the pillow designs.  I have also been doing some quick experiments, using some of my current designs and freezer paper stencils (a simple one-time use way to block out sections of a screen to print simple shapes) to work out an additional series of abstract prints.

This one is my favorite of the first experiments.  The colors look didn't photograph quite right, but the top arches are actually a yellow and the bottom is orange (they look almost the same on my laptop screen).  It has been so long since I have felt free to play with printing, and I had no idea how much I missed it.  Printing greeting cards was pretty limiting since I had to make sure I could still sell them at a reasonable price (about two colors is the limit).  Larger artwork allows me to use as many colors as I want and still create an affordable product.  I really hope the prints sell well, because it would be so fun to work on paper more often! 

thrify makeover - tv console

I grabbed this mid-century style bureau at the thrift store a few months back for $20, hoping to use it as a landing pad for the front door and a place to park our newly purchased smaller television.

I could tell right away it was nothing special or fancy, so I didn't feel bad giving it a makeover with some paint and fabric.  I went ahead and removed the finish from the drawer fronts with a hand sander (since I would be painting over the wood I wans't too concerned with preserving the thin wood veneer).  I decided to add a hint of sunny yellow to match the livingroom palette, then painted the bottom drawers the same hue as the walls to help the bulkiness of it recede a bit.  Finally, I removed the cane lattice from the top drawer insets and lined them with a fancy gold fabric sample I had been saving for the perfect project. 

My only disappointment so far is that the bottom drawers are slightly difficult to open because there is no separation between them in the middle.  It is one of those issues that gets worse when you fill the drawers, which is why I didn't notice it in the store.   I mainly use the bottom ones to hold some of my fabric stash anyway, so they don't need to be opened too often. The top drawers are great for winter gear (hats, gloves, etc.) and storing our DVD player, which we hardly ever use these days.

  I figure, it was a $20 bureau in a sea of uglier $80+ ones, and it was an attractive and mostly functional solution to my problem.  Now I just need to figure out the space on the wall above it!