Hostess Gift

I am visiting one of my very best friends over this Memorial Day weekend. We've been friends since grad school days and though we don't get to see each other as much as we'd like, I'm so happy when we do! A couple years ago, she came to stay with us for a week and now we're seeing her - on the other side of the great lake that we have in common! It's fun to have another perspective of Lake Superior that we look out on every day! We're going to spend time exploring Sault Ste. Marie as well as taking drives (and ferries) down to Mackinac Island, quilt shops (as her partner and I have that in common) and just general relaxing!

I wanted to share one of the little hostess gifts that I brought along for our wonderful hostesses. I baked some slightly healthier shortbread cookies and wanted to package them in an attractive way in some container that I wouldn't need back. My mom sells Tastefully Simple products, so I find that I always have lots of jars and containers from them that I like to find other uses for. I found that one of the drink mix containers is the perfect size to hold a couple dozen of the petite treats. Then I scoured my recycled papers boxes and covered the container, added a little label from JSIM, and it was ready to go!

New Color Chart

After many, many, many hours I finally finished my newest color chart! I should have kept track of all the hours but after about two weeks of putting this together with every spare moment I had, I just gave up on keeping count. As soon as it was finished I sent if off to Spoonflower and patiently waited for it to arrive last week. Now I can reference over 1,000 more colors in addition to my first chart with over 1,400 colors. These charts have been so helpful in putting my designs together as even if the colors look good on screen, they don't come out as hoped when the printed version arrives. I've discovered, along with a few other Spoonflower designers, that reds, greens, and yellows can be really problematic. Red was the biggest frustration for me in putting together one design in particular so these charts are helping to save me lots of time and lots of money on printing multiple swatches of the same design just to get to the correct color!

I'M A WINNER!!!

Imagine my excitement when I was checking out Facebook earlier today and saw in my daily update from The Creative Connection Event to see that I won a prize!!!! And a beautiful one at that. This gorgeous piece was created Debbie Murray and Shea Fragoso, a mother-daughter design team who will be teaching a couple of fantastic classes at The Creative Connection Event. I can't wait until this lovely pendant arrives at my doorstep as a most beautiful and unexpected birthday present - the best kind!!!

Vintage Workshop Contest

The Vintage Workshop is having a fantastic contest for their blog readers and I'm so excited! All you have to do is post a comment to their blog post answering the question, "What are you growing in your garden this year?" You can enter through Sunday, May 16 and you might just win one of two wonderful garden-themed prize packages of their products! I love so many of the Vintage Workshop products and patterns! I was giddy when I saw this contest as I just got my herbs planted for the season and am hoping to grow some tomatoes as well. I'm also so excited to get to meet the founder, Amy Barickman when I'm at The Creative Connection Event this September!

I am probably the last person on earth who knew about Google Analytics, but having just discovered it, I am so excited! It's so much fun to look at the results and see the real numbers of people who "visit" each day and where they're "visiting" from. It's amazing to see people stopping by from all over the world from places like Germany, Spain and Australia - all places I want to visit but haven't just yet. I wish it was so easy to transport myself to any of those places as it is to click a button and be there. I really wish I had that ability today as my mom is back in the hospital after surgery fighting an infection and is so down about it as everything following this hip replacement surgery was going so much better than her last one. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers, if you are the praying sort.

Our New Room...

I have got to blog more often than once a month! I'd have more time for blogging if I weren't so busy working on updating the rooms in our rowhouse. Our bedroom was a pretty time-consuming project but I'm thrilled to get to share it with you now!

As I said a couple posts back, we finally got a new bed which was desperately needed and very much appreciated now that I'm not waking up with back pain every morning. You can see the mostly finished product now. I say mostly finished as I'm always doodling new possibilities but for now I'm so happy to be resting and relaxing in our new room and just enjoying the fruits of my labor. My husband loves it, too, and is happy that with the room redecorated and rearranged, my computer (seen at the end of the bed) doesn't really find its way into the bedroom on most nights.

I'm most happy that I was able to take items that we already had and repurposed them. You've seen the re-do of the nightstands already. As we re-oriented the furniture, we decided to place the new bed against the wall that has a bit of a bump from the fireplace in the living room below. I didn't like the way the bed looked without a little something behind it to make the bump seem less prominent. To remedy the problem, I took a set of sheets that wouldn't fit our new bed and stitched up fabric panels to hang from tension rods on either side of the protrusion. They also make the room look that much more dramatic!

You can't really see it in these pics but the valances above the windows are quilted table runners folded creatively to fit our windows perfectly. The artwork above the bed is a very cool H monogram I found somewhere and had it printed on fabric at Spoonflower. Once the fabric arrived, I stretched it over the TYGLOSA frame from IKEA (I just love that place!).

Now, it's time to move on to the guest room as we've got guests coming soon!

At-Home Retreat

I've been feeling really down in the dumps this winter for many reasons which I won't get into here. At one of the very lowest of those depths, I was talking with my husband and we discussed some ways that might help to lift my spirits and help my self-confidence. In the midst of that coversation, I mentioned something about needing to go to a creative retreat where I could connect with other creative people, but money was obviously a concern. As we further investigated retreat possibilities and there were none that were close enough to our home and they were many months off as well. We then moved on to something more immediate and my husband offered to give me an at-home retreat - he would take care of all the cooking and just let me relax and create to my heart's content all weekend!

So a couple of weeks ago, my husband gave me my at-home retreat. He made lasagna and deep-dish pizza, brought breakfast home, ran out for coffee, even gave me a goody bag of Ghirardelli raspberry-filled dark chocolate squares! I got to just create art as much as I could and as long as I could stay awake. I cut and soldered, made earrings, painted canvases, and anything else that I could squeeze in. I also created the fabric ribbons in the picture above. Those began by painting the selvedge edges of some of my Spoonflower fabrics. Once they were dry, I lettered them and added some little accents. Now I've got about 6 yards of totally unique, calligraphed ribbon - what exactly I'm going to do with it I don't know!!!

Hopefully, I can come up with something fabulous by the time I go to The Creative Connection Event!!!! During my at-home retreat weekend, I finally got a chance to look through some of the magazines that I am so far behind in reading. As I was looking through the latest issue of Where Women Create, I came across an ad for the event and got so excited that it was going to be just down the road in Minneapolis (the closest locale to my home along the North Shore). I became a bit disheartened when I saw the cost as I haven't had regular, full-time employment in about four years, but talked about it with my husband. He was so supportive and we decided we were going to do everything we could to get me there!!! I told him that this was all I wanted for my birthday, anniversary, everything - so my deposit has been sent in and in September I'll get to connect with a whole bunch of other creative souls at The Creative Connection Event!!!!

Long story short - I have a honey of a husband!!!

Revamped Nightstand

I've been feeling way under the weather for way too long and haven't had the energy to blog in way too long! But I'm back and ready to report on the creative projects that I have been able to work on. The biggest project was redoing our bedroom as we finally got a new bed which was long overdue. With a new bed coming, I wanted to give our master bedroom some new life without spending much money, if any at all. One of the elements of this project was to revamp our old nightstands to coordinate with the new black bed frame that was coming. I wanted something that you wouldn't find anywhere as well as something that reflected my love of typography and collecting quotations. I started by repainting them in black. Then, I found a couple quotes related to sleeping and napping, worked with them in Photoshop, printed them on antique scrapbook pages and then decoupaged them into the recessed panels of the doors. They look pretty cool next to our comfy, new bed!!!

Valentine's Day gift for my hubby...

I've had this box for over a year just knowing that I could do something fabulous with it. It was a gift from parents that began life as a Christmas coffee collection container from Starbucks. I just thought it was so cool as it had two sections that lift up and resembled a book, I only had to figure out it's newest purpose.

My husband and I have been talking since we got married almost four years ago about putting together a box that would hold brochures, suggestions, dreams, hopes, little gifts, etc. that each of us could access to get ideas to surprise one another. I realized this Starbucks box was the perfect container for this project. I couldn't just leave it as it was - it had to be a lot more creative! So for the last couple of weeks I've been perfecting the graphics for all the elements of the box. I combined vintage elements from my collection as well as some fun French graphics I found at The Graphics Fairy and created others when I couldn't find exactly what I wanted. Once I had them all designed, they were printed out and glued to the box and then sealed with some beeswax to add a more vintage-y feel.

Now the fun part of adding ideas and little surprises to the "Love Wishes" box begins! I can't wait until this weekend to see hubby's reaction!

XXXOOO

Spoonflower Contest

Spoonflower's latest fabric of the week contest features insects. I was inspired to create a honey bee fabric! I'm very excited to come up with coordinating fabrics for this one!