Custom Pet Portraits

For my birthday, Craig got me 4 custom pet portraits, one for each animal. Granted, I found these, and asked if they could be my present, but he gets the credit none the less.

I liked the idea of showcasing our pets in a unique way, and when I found SkribblyKids on etsy, I knew that this would be a really meaningful addition to my growing collection of artwork.

Joanna, who is the artist behind SkribblyKids, was a pleasure to work with through all of my little tweaks. I was totally that client, the one with a thousand little changes, and yet she continued to send me revisions until it was everything I wanted...and more.

They arrived about a week ago, but it looks like despite the protective packaging, that somewhere between Canada, and my door, someone had used my drawings as a punching bag. Needless to say, they were a little banged up. Maybe it was for the best though, because they arrived, and while they were all lovely, I discovered that having Mrs. Red in landscape format, and the rest were portrait, would make a hanging formation very difficult. Joanna was nice enough to switch this around for me, and resend the high resolution files.

Meanwhile, I decided to take advantage of a sale that Michaels was having on Frames, along with some coupons that I found online. I got the 4 frames that I needed, which were originally $20 each, but I snagged for $35 for all four!

I thought I would just get these hung, and then go get the prints made this week. However, when I was cleaning up a bit, I realized that I had a nearly full pack of beautiful matte 13x19 paper sitting next to my printer which was left over from when I added pages to my portfolio when I was interviewing for my job.

I thought that there was no way my printer would pull it off, not that it does not print good quality, but it has to be the biggest pain in the butt printer ever. It never seems to want to print when I want it to, and most the time I do not even bother with me anymore. However, it seemed like there was nothing to loose, so I decided to try it out and see what happened. To my surprise, it printed all four of them beautifully, with no problem (yay printer!)

After that, I was left with 4 beautiful prints that just needed to be trimmed.

...and a few minutes later, I had 4 fantastic prints ready to be framed!

I love that these frames come with the swivel clips for the back, they make things so much faster. I was not exactly prepared with wire on hand though, but I used some strong ribbon that I had on hand for the back.

Once I got everything framed up, it was time to put some nails in the wall. I was not exactly looking forward to creating a grid, but I had seen this technique over at the always awesome Young House Love blog, and decided to try it out. In that example, they use newspaper to help space out the frames, but in a previous post, they suggested just using the paper that came with your frames, which is what I decided to do. It was slightly tricky, as I knew my frames were 1.5" bigger on each side than the paper, but it was still a lot better than blindly going for it.
I have to say, I spent a long time tweaking this. The papers kept falling down due to my not great tape solution, but I finally got it done. I then left to find my hammer and nails, and lo and behold they were nowhere to be found. I searched for nearly the rest of the night, in which time all of the papers fell off the wall.

Fast forward to today, where I decided to just go buy a new hammer...and some tape. Luckily, I had put a few marks on the wall yesterday, so I did not have to start from scratch to get the papers back in the right place.

After that, I just measured to the middle of each piece of paper, hammered in a nail, and hung the pictures.

I am so very pleased to now have these up on the wall, I think that it is a really fun way to honor my furry companions, while adding some color to the walls.

A weekend of sewing

Since I am a renter, painting the walls is less of an option. I am fortunate that the landlord picked pleasing nuetral (non white) colors for all the walls in the house, from gray, to tan, and a light yellow. However, I crave bold colors, and strong geometric prints, and have found that one of the best ways to bring this in, are through curtains.

Last weekend, I bought fabric to make curtains for both my bedroom, and my craft room. For the bedroom, I wanted to stick with something not too feminine, and since we have a brown floral duvet cover, I also stayed away from any floral patterns. We do have a red silk sheet, and so when I found a red and cream striped fabric, I knew that it was the perfect fit to tie everything together.

I always thought I would go with something very bright and colorful for my craft room, but when I found this black and cream houndstooth, I could not pass it up. This will allow me a great opportunity to add pops of color through the artwork that I pick.
Turns out I did not buy enough fabric the first time around (I measured, I just did the math wrong, oops!) so I had to return during the week to get the rest. My windows are much bigger than the last windows I created drapes for, and in total, each window required 4 yards of fabric.

Once I got working, things went quite well. I have to say that typically I skip the step of ironing my seams, but this time I took the time to do this. Let me tell you, I will never skip this step again. I barely had to pin it, saving a ton of time, and in the end, the finishing is much more smooth.

So, here is the Craft room.
...and here is the bedroom
I had the bedroom curtains done last night, and when I woke up this morning, the were glowing with the light behind them, this photo was taken from bed, I just love this effect.

A few weeks ago, I bought some pillow forms, and all hopped up on the success of these curtains, I decided to dive into the pillows. I had this great colorful paisley patterned fabric, and thought that it would be great to add a pop of color to our new futon. I did not really feel like tackling a zipper, but wanted to be able to switch out the covers easily. Last week, I was reading one of my new favorite blogs Little Green Notebook, and stumbled upon the post about her parents bedroom re-model. Mentioned in there were the envelope slips for the pillows that were created. I had seen these before, but it had never occurred to me to create these, but they were the perfect solution for me.

I searched around for tutorials, and found this one. I have to say, these are the easiest, most perfect pillows ever. Nothing like a 15 minute project to really give some satisfaction.




The only thing that I would change, is to add an extra 1" to the back panels, as the overlap is a bit tight. Other than that, these are the perfect bright happy addition.

Next up, adding photos to the walls, it is interesting how bare they look now that these curtains are up.