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!

Creative Kate's Cupcakes

Editor's Note: These cupcakes are not from my kitchen (though both my stomach and creative mind wish they were!) but are from the creative prowess of Dr. Kate and her roommate in Philadelphia. When she sent me the pictures, she said that she hoped I appreciated her creativity... Um! Yes! I really do. These cupcakes are darling, and certainly very, very creative! Being a bit hamburger obsessed, I naturally put the hamburger cupcakes at the top! I love that Kate served them with chips.

Welcome to the Church Wreath

What are you supposed to give a friend when that friend decides to become Catholic? My mom pretty much nabbed the "large book collection" gift category, and I'd already given him a rosary... And well, Catholic gifts are pretty much aimed at the blue-haired grannies set or 6-year-olds who are receiving first Holy Communion. And since my friend who became Catholic last Saturday was a 33-year-old guy's guy, the options were limited indeed.

So I crafted him a wreath of holy cards covered in glitter. Yeah, that's right. It's a pretty ridiculous item and will likely not be hung on a wall anytime soon, but I'd been itching to use the gluegun and I haven't played with glitter since Christmas. So here it is, wrapped in tissue paper and in a cardboard box, ready to be shipped up to Tennessee where Jason lives.

Save the Date Scribbles

So I volunteered to make some save-the-date cards for the Dallas Theta Young Alumnae (yes, my sorority, which I'm still linked-heart-to-heart with). So above are a couple of the samples I submitted as options for the gal who's actually making the cards. Not bad. I need to practice a bit more of my scripting before next week's calligraphy course starts up again.

Let me know what you think.

Spring Sugar Cookies

In his Holy Thursday service, the priest at my church mentioned his affinity for parishoner-made cookies. And that reminded me, I haven't made cookies for Father since Christmas! And... it's just about time Father get a Spring helping of my baking efforts.
And in keeping with the breezy, light, sunny and bright days we've been having down here (all things Spring and delicate, birds singing, new leaves on the trees, you get the idea), I decided some pastel frosted sugar cookies, shaped like little daisies would really fit the bill. I don't think Father is as into aesthetics as he is to taste, but goodness knows I am!
Pictured above are the first batch of cookies with their blue and yellow petals. I'll post more pictures of the completed project (as in the cookies in their box with ribbon). The cookies are about the size of a quarter, so it would be easy to get carried away, eating about a dozen at a time. I made them with a regular sugar cookie recipe, then I rolled the dough between two floured sheets of wax paper. When I cut the dough into the flower shapes, I dipped the cookie cutter into flour between each cookie. That way the little goobers didn't get stuck in the cookie cutter but plopped right down on the baking sheet. They baked for about 5 minutes at 350 and I took them out before the sides got completely golden. After they cooled, I spread on the frosting (which I dyed with regular old food coloring) with a butter knife, carefully trying to shape each little petal. The finishing touch was a dab of frosting in the center. And well, that's about all there is to that...