I Am Officially Addicted

Seriously. I am head over heels in LOVE with DIY/crafting/repurposing/decorating blogs. Let's face it, the Parnells are on a budget. My love for decorating has been on a multi-year hiatus. OK so I got to decorate two nurseries and a scrapbook room but my creative juices had no outlet and had sort of dried up. Enter my cousin Megan. She is AH-mazing. I had read her blog off and on as it showed up in my facebook news feed but really started following her to prepare for her visit last month. You know, get a peek into her life, what she liked (hazlenut creamer, good coffee, oatmeal) and get a glimpse as to what I could do to get ready for her (and her sweet family) to visit. Enter her love of crafting, a glue gun, and a budget. My kind of girl. She had a post on her blog about adding tin foil to an end table and it turned out so cool! Check her out here. So my gears started turning. She linked to another blogger who knocks off Anthropologie stuff and posts her transformations to her cool thriftstore finds and I was hooked. That blog led to another which led to another and those creative juices that I thought had dried up? Well, they appeared from whatever corner of my mind they had retreated to and are BACK in full force. If I am honest, I will confess that I spent today's naptime (the kids naptime, not mine!) googling DIY blogs and cataloguing my ideas. So. Many. To. Choose. From. I have ideas for Emma's room, my kitchen, and my bedroom. AH! There are not enough hours in the day anymore.
So, I am sort of a "gotta have it now" kind of girl. I really want to try the tinfoil treatment on my bedroom armoire (that Jeff HATES by the way. He has tried all sorts of ideas to get it out of our bedroom but I stubbornly hold on because while it is not really my style anymore, I H-A-T-E having a television visible. So ugly and dated or not, those doors close and it looks clean and tidy and NO television in sight.) Boy, I am getting sidetracked here. So, I have two rolls of tin foil but no mod podge so I cannot get started. And those sweet babies of mine? Yeah, still sleeping so I can't run to Michaels and pick up some mod podge. Hmm...so I get an idea for my laundry room. We've just finished replacing the hideous pink tile in the laundry room (and I've been working on replacing the quarter round and repainting and that room is finally finished) so that room has been in a state of upheaval. We just got the washer and dryer back in Sunday night and I needed to start getting the other things back in the room. The wall above the white wire shelves has always been bare and I've always hated it.

I remembered some things I had stashed around the house (most of this stuff I had squirreled away in drawers) and started my treasure hunt. I found an old vintage mirror that my grandma gave me which I LOVED but could never find the perfect home for. The giddiness started to build. In the same drawer, I also had a framed picture of Godey's Fashions for November 1866 my other grandmother had given to me. Her mother had it framed decades ago and while I hated the black and gold frame, I couldn't bear to reframe it. It still has the label from the store that framed it for her. Very old. But hidden in a drawer. I also found (in same said drawer) a silver picture frame with my favorite picture of my family in it. Not really going to be a picture kind of wall but it had potential. My friend Tracy had given me a Texas A&M cross and to put it up, I pulled down another cross I had on my Wall O' Crosses and that cross had just been on top of the dresser in my dining room since December. OK, what else. While scavenging that cross from my dining room, I spied a box on a shelving unit. Now I have awesome grandparents for so many reasons, but my father's mother saved everything. And I mean everything. In the box were a pair of what look like hand crocheted baby booties. I think they were my dad's. So cute. And SO in line with my vintage inspired wall I was putting together.
Some may question my decision to spray paint that vintage frame with the Godey's fashion page in it, and I did some serious thinking before I committed to it. That picture, while I loved it, had been tucked in a drawer since I married Jeff because he didn't love it. Do I keep it entirely original and tucked in a drawer to just have? Or do I do what I want to make it mine while still keeping the integrity of the piece and *actually* use it? Easy. I taped up every square inch of that frame and the backing and once the silver spray paint was dry, I sanded it in some places to distress it.
I took the family picture out of the picture frame and cut a piece of scrapbook paper I had left over from making some thank you notes for my sister in law and put that in the frame. Then I pulled the stand thing (whatever - it is what makes the picture frame stand up) off because when hung, you would see the bottom right of that black stand piece and it looked stupid. I ran some black ribbon through the crochet holes in the booties, hot glued some black ribbon to the frame of the vintage mirror, and viola. The hard part was arranging it all.
I love it. Just love it. And the best part? It was FREE! BAM! Love it even more.






Next up? I shall be attacking that armoire. I'm kinda scared, but go big or go home, right? I'll give you the before and cross your fingers that I love the after. I get very moody while doing "projects" and love something, hate it, love it again throughout the process. Here's hoping we end on a "love it" note so I don't wind up biting more than I can chew. (because truthfully, I still have to finish the quarter round in the rest of my house.)