Busy Week Blues!

Yo! I've been wicked busy this week. Yeah, I said wicked. I did winter twice in Maine so I feel like I can pepper my posts with that New Englandism every once in a blue moon. I didn't get a chance to pursue all of the crafting delights I was hoping to pursue this week (I don't even know where the time went...), so I'm publishing some classic doodles. This is all from my April desk calendar. You don't believe me? Look at the picture below!!

Benny and the Jets was on my Pandora... decided I needed to try my hand at a rather mannish topic--airplanes.

This is how I feel. The items on my to do list are like scary, spikey monsters standing right behind me. "Help! I'm stressing!" -- that's my mantra this week! I hope to bring you some good stuff soon though. I've been procrastinating on a sewing project that promises to knock my socks off, perhaps yours as well. Don't know yet.

Fav doodle of April. Hands down. Fav.

(Insert very small plug for the awesomest team in baseball...) No, really, the song was playing on Pandora and I was feelin' it with my new pink pen. So thus ends my lamest post ever, but I wanted yall to see something creative from me...

I've been driving around with glass in the trunk of my car for a whole week

Hi everybody! I feel like the doctor on the Simpsons every time I type that. I just realized that I have been driving around with a trunk full of glass sheets for about a week now. That thought led me to this next thought--I never blogged about the new glass tabletop for my dining room table. It's a pretty odd choice of tables, I'll give you that. I bought it off craigslist on a day that can only be described as serendipity. I was planning to drive out to Ikea and buy a completely run of the mill dining room table (oh goodness gracious it was boring but ever so cheap!) and I thought, hey, why not look on craigslist just once? So I saw this thing and emailed the guy and before I knew it, my father and I were piled into his big ole' Texas Edition pickup truck, driving to halfway-to-Oklahoma suburbs for this table. It's an antique German drafting table, the kind that architects used (before CAD) to do all their work. It's wrought iron and hardwood. It has all kinds of industrial knobs and wheels so that the architect could raise and lower the table and adjust the angle of the table, too.

Unfortunately for this piece, it was separated from the drafting table top and instead, a white piece of Formica was put on it instead, which really messed up the style. No wonder the guy couldn't find anyone besides me to buy the thing. I finally ordered a piece of cut glass to go on top of the table from the friendliest people over at Alamo Glass on Henderson (they subsequently supplied me with the glass that's in the trunk of my car, which I plan on painting and then blogging about). And, well, above (and below) you'll see some artsy shots of my new table centerpiece. I'm calling the thing in the middle of the display a terrarium as it has a couple kinds of dirt and a couple plants, too. And some shells, though the shells don't really add too much to the whole thing. I clearly got camera happy when taking pictures for this post. I can't even explain what happened. I had no pictures stored on the camera's memory drive and suddenly, there were dozens of pictures of these little jars and ceramic flowers. No explanation at all.

A great thing about these plants is that they are basically really hard to kill, so they require almost no work at all on my part, which is good because I'm prone to planticide. Though I do have one complaint about the succulents--those little green beady things fall off really easily. More than one stem is now a mere stump. Too bad. I think I was multitasking a bit too much the day I bought the plant or you'd be seeing a better looking succulent on display. Also the use of a succulent in a terrarium officially makes me "green." So there, I'm green.

(And I can't seem to fix the amount of space between the end of the text and the start of the photos. I'm sorry. Believe me, it bothers me more than it bothers you. I used to work as a page designer and I'm predisposed to abhor the poor layout options provided to me by Blogger. I'm only asking for one little pica of space here!!)

Wallpapered Wine Crate

I collected a trio of wine crates last fall and, for no apparent reason, I've not started turning them into amazing shadowboxes until now. I'm lucky enough to live about a block away from two of Dallas' trendiest wine bars (though I haven't ventured into Crush to beg for castoff winecrates just yet) and getting the wine crates was pretty easy. The man who runs Chateau Wine Market seems to keep stacks and stacks of crates around the store and he let me take my pick of some pretty exotic looking crates. The one pictured above has a lovely French brand on one side.
This is a sneak peak of how the shadowbox will look when it's finished. The "walls" have yet to be papered with this retro 70's lounge paper I bought at Old Navy (of all places to get funky paper??) a couple of years ago when it was sold as gift wrap. I bought the Nubian Prince (or so I'm calling him) at an antiques shop over the weekend. He's really cool. The bottom of the bust says he was made by Margaret in 1954. Other than that, he's a pretty anonymous fellow, though I very much admire his choice of headware.
I got the idea from the DIY section of designsponge (the bestest design blog out there, for my two cents). In their instructions, they recomment you carefully measure the inside walls/back of the wine crate and cut your paper to fit. I decided to take the back of the crate off so that no part of the wooden crate would show through and to minimize the wrinkles of the paper. It turns out that removing the back of a wine crate isn't a tough chore at all (though you will have lots to sweep or vacuum up when you've finished, the wood likes to split into delightful flying splinters!). I'm sure my neighbors will love it when I re-install the backs of the crates and add the hanging hardware so that my shadow boxes can live on the dining room wall.

Sorry for some technical delays

I've been having issues with logging into Blogger recently. But looks like I'm back! And so excited to show you these new projects!