From pumpkin to carriage - part 4: The Dr. Seuss mural is done (and other miscellaneous stuff)

Tada!

I'll give you time to gasp, have your jaw drop in appreciation and then stand up to give us the ovation we deserve. I am all out of proportion thrilled with how this wall turned out. It is officially the new happiest place in our home. 

Ok, on to logistics. I used Liquitex Acrylic paint mixed with Liquitex Matte Medium (1:1). The medium reduces glare and reduces the appearance of brush strokes. THO helped with mixing colors (The Yep was a pain to get right), he has a good eye for that. I painted the figures, then set up the projector again and went over the outlines one more time with the Black Sharpie Brush Tip. All the shading is also done with the same sharpie. Oh, and I don't think you can tell from the picture but not everything in that mural is painted on to the wall. The balloon is actually made of foam sheet. I projected on to pink and yellow foam sheet to get the outline and the shading done, then cut out the pieces from the sheet. THO stuck them in place with command strips.

THO has assembled the crib, the crib mattress has arrived (no sheets yet though). THO also put in the closet organization system and is working on hanging bookshelves as I type. We're close to the finish line (and one month away from the official baby arrival date). Part 5 will have it all, I promise.

From pumpkin to carriage - part three: the mural comes to life

I stood in fear before the canvas. I looked down at my hands and my many, many thumbs looked back at me. I swear they were smirking. A couple looked at me with pity. My throat was dry. When I picked up the sharpie, I noticed a distinct tremor in my hands. How did I get myself into this gut filled with butterflies (or, perhaps, based on the size of them, pterodactyls) situation? Perhaps we should back up a bit and tell the story from the beginning.

With the painting and carpeting all done, I was raring to work on the next step in the transformation of ugly to nursery but THO was doing his best wet blanket impersonation. He wouldn't let me in the nursery for more than about 40 seconds at a time because of the smell of the paint. While 40 seconds is about enough to let out a few appreciative oohs and aahs, and rub your toes in the plush new carpet, it is not, I assure you, enough time to work on a mural. We had the window open and I just had to do what I did worst, wait.

We had decided that the we were going to do a Dr. Seuss mural. I love the good old doctor. I grew up with his books. Marvin K. Mooney and Wocket in my Pocket are my two favourites. I can still recite pages. I love how his words wriggle into your brain, and roll off your tongue and how his awesome art makes it impossible not to smile. THO has been reading Dr. Seuss to She-Who-Is-Coming for a while now - he scoots down to tummy level at bedtime and reads her a story. She, in return, punches me in the gut or ribs. Good times are had by all. I sat myself down, surrounded by our collection of Seuss books and picked out images for the mural. We planned for a mural that covers half a wall in the nursery - the lower half is chalkboard paint. I made a rough sketch on a piece of a paper (no grid, nothing too fancy) of where each image would go. The characters that made the final cut are The Yep on the Step, the boy and the balloon from Oh the Places You'll Go, the Blue Fish, a pair of Sneetches, the Lorax and a Truffula tree.

The plan was to project the images on to the wall and trace them. Basically, to cheat. We own a Cinemin projector. I dug that out of storage and that is when we hit hurdle one. The Cinemin is able to project from an iPhone or iPod (not from a laptop). The problem though is that the Cinemin connects to the iPhone 4, not to the latest and greatest iPhone 5s (which is what THO and I both currently own) and which, of course, in true Apple fashion has a completely different connector.  Undaunted, I went spelunking in our box of electronics past and found an old iPhone. I also managed to scare up a power cable for it, and soon enough we had the projector up and running, only to discover that the image it projected was so dim that I would only be able to work on the mural in the dead of the night and that the image was too pixelated to actually work as a stencil. Aaaaaargh. I ran around in panic (cue headless chicken impersonation) for a bit, bemoaned the fact that all our mural related dreams were dead as proverbial doorknobs and beat my chest in despair that our nursery would forever more be the ugliest in the world. Having got the histrionics out of the way we sent out an SOS email to friends and acquaintances and a couple of days later were in possession of a full size, I-mean-business-turn-on-my-bulb-instead-of-the-heat projector that made an image bright enough to see at noon with the blinds open. We had a few teething problems with this projector too - we didn't have the ability to connect it to our macbooks, we had to scare up an old laptop that hadn't been booted in three years, had driver problems with the Windows installation, had to boot up the Ubuntu installation instead (and this one hadn't been run for 6 years) - but finally, finally we had the first image projected - the Sneetches were on the wall.

Cut back to me plus sharpie plus pterodactyls plus surplus thumbs. What if I ruined the wall? What if I did the eyes wrong and all the images turned out just a tad creepy? THO gently pointed out that our worst case scenario was having to repaint half a wall and hang up Dr. Seuss pictures from a calender instead of having a mural. With this sensible back up plan I calmed down and stepped up to the wall quivering with new found confidence. I had a blast. It was really easy to trace out the images. I loved watching them come to life one after another. The eyes and faces and a few other small details took a bit of work because the images in some cases were not as high resolution as we would have liked and I had to use the book as a reference when the tracing got a bit fuzzy. THO did some basic image editing as well. He worked on the Boy with the Balloon  - we needed a slightly larger boy but not a larger balloon. THO also edited blue fish a bit - there was something about the fish's eyelashes that THO was convinced made the fish look a bit, well, mean, when viewed from certain angles, so he edited the eyelashes to his satisfaction.

Here it is in all it's glory and it makes me smile every time I walk into the room:

From pumpkin to carriage - part two: the canvas is prepared

The problem with grand plans is that a certain amount of back breaking effort is required to convert them to reality. It took THO and I a while to muster up the enthusiasm for said effort.

Step one was painting the walls - we wanted to get this out of the way before we put down new carpeting. I decided that I wanted the walls to be white. And I wanted one accent wall. THO toodled off to Home Depot and came back with eighty nine white sample cards from the Behr range of paints. Did I want Moon Rise? Was Vermont Cream a better bet? What were my feelings about Cotton Fluff? Was Polar Bear what I secretly desired, or perhaps Snowy Pine had caught my eye? I (pretty much at random) pointed at three of the whites. THO brought home three little sample paints and put up swathes on the wall to help us choose. We ended up picking the boringly named Creamy White. Next up, the accent wall. I started off wanting this to be green. THO dutifully picked out green samples, we pored over them together, selected our favourites and got the samples up on the wall. The colours looked like mold, phlegm and three day old cow cud to me. I went off greens and decided that yellow would be so much prettier. Rinse and repeat. I hated every yellow we tried out with a passion. THO, with patience worthy of sainthood, did not blink an eye when I declared that purple was the way to go. He is a better person that I. Luckily, I really liked the purple (called Wildflower) and we did not have to test the strength of our union any further.

The next task was the one we both dreaded the most - taping. Taping sucks. Until you start taping you forget what a mind numbing painful awful task it is and how you swore on everything holy the last time you did it that you would never, ever under any circumstances ever do it again. And the room will always surprise you with how many little things there are to tape that you did not previously consider. Once we were all taped, THO donned his Dexter outfit (a white plastic full body painting suit) and went on a painting binge. Over a weekend and a couple of weeknights he worked on two coats on 3 white walls (and the inside of our Harry Potter closet), two coats of purple on our accent wall, and finally, one half wall of chalkboard paint. The dog and I kept trying to sneak into the room and both of us were repeatedly chased away. When he was all done though, I was thrilled. The room no longer closely resembled a dingy dungeon. Paint is a magical thing.

A couple of weeks later our carpet shipment arrived and the transformation was complete. The dog adores the new carpet, as you can see

Here is the 'before' again aka the dingy dungeon of depression:

And here is the after:

Our canvas is ready. Next stop, the mural.

From pumpkin to carriage - part one: executive decisions are made

In April our first born is expected to make her way into this world. Since neither of us have made deals with Rumpelstiltskin in the past, we are going to end up keeping her and are tasked with creating room for her in our home. After careful deliberation we picked the bedroom that is to be her nursery (For those of you, like me, who are curious about where that word came from: c.1400, "breeding, nursing," from Old French norture, norreture "food, nourishment; education, training," from Late Latin nutritia "a nursing, suckling," from Latin nutrire "to nourish, suckle").

Here it is:

It is ugly. It has a carpet the colour of phlegm. The walls are a grey-blue colour intended to encourage one to seriously consider slitting one's wrists. But look beyond that. See the potential. The room overlooks our back yard, which is very pretty. It is a nice size. Oh, and it has a Harry Potter closet (top left photo - the door behind the entrance to the room is the closet. The door to the right of that is the Harry Potter closet. It is this weird little room in the wall, about 3.5 feet deep, 3 feet wide and about 5 feet high. The door to this little room has no handle. The reason for it's existence remains a mystery).

We needed a plan of action. A grand vision. We were the fairy godmothers and with or without a wand (well, to be realistic, without a wand and with a lot of sweaty labour) we were going to convert this room from a pumpkin to a carriage of the bejeweled variety.

Here is the high level plan we came up with

• We will paint the walls. One wall shall be painted an accent colour.
• Chalkboard paint shall make an appearance somewhere in the room.
• We will have new non-bodily fluid coloured carpet put down.
• There shall, of course, be curtains.
• There shall, and now we start to get truly ambitious, be a mural.
• We could do with some switch plates. Plates that don't look older than my grandparents would be nice.
• The closet would need more than one rod. An organization system of some sort would need to be procured.

 I leave you here for now. In my imagination you are seated at the edge of your couch, biting on your fingernails, agog with anticipation, waiting, wanting to know how it all turned out. I'll keep you posted.

Witchery and Curtains

Our home is plagued by ugly blinds. Every window has them - the white (plastic?), horizontal slats with the cords hanging down one side, cords that are in a perpetual state of knottitude. I've managed to live with these blinds for nearly a year and a half, but I never made my peace with them. Recently, when I was at Target I happened upon some cheap-ish curtains (not cheap, curtains are never cheap in the United States, are they?) and a reasonably priced curtain rod. I called THO and had him quickly measure the window in our guest bedroom. A short while after I traipsed in the front door with 4 curtains and associated hardware. THO humoured me and hung them up post haste while I stood around, hopping from foot to foot in eager anticipation. They looked lovely. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself.

That did it. I wanted curtains everywhere. Now, if I had a curtain budget of a few thousand dollars, this would be a piece of cake. I did not, so I set off to the mecca of those of us with modest budgets - Ikea. My goal was to transform our living room window from an Ugly Sister into Cinderella. Here is the before pic, taken in poor lighting to make it appear even worse than in actually was:

Make a note of the aforementioned homely blinds. Also note the sad-sack skinny browny-grey curtain panel (there are two of them, one on either side of the blinds) that some well-intentioned, but possibly partially blind previous owner of my home had hung on either side of the blinds, ostensibly to improve aesthetics, but in reality serving only to highlight the ugliness.

Ikea did not disappoint, though one does wish that the unwashed masses did not pick the exact same time as one to procure their giant couches and shelving units. I found curtains that did not demand an arm, leg and first born in payment, but they were very long. This, to me, was an obstacle of insurmountable proportions. I can't sew. I stood around the curtain area, despondent, possibly looking like even more of a sad sack than did my skinny brown curtain panels back home. Bobbing around my sea of sadness, I reached for the one raft of hope, the internet. I entered, rather hopelessly, 'no sew curtains' and behold! these were a real thing. What I needed was apparently something called 'Stitch Witchery. I love the internet. I headed home with a dual curtain rod (ooh fancy) and six curtain panels.

I procured the stitch witchery from Michaels, and then let everything sit around for about a week while I got over my fear of ruining the panels and/or burning my fingers with a hot iron. This tutorial from the Young House Love blog helped boost my confidence. When I was once more the master of my emotions, I got started.

It was really pretty easy. THO hung up one of the curtain panels for me from the existing sad sack rod. I marked how long I wanted the curtain to be. Folded it to the mark and measured it out on the tape. Heated up the iron. The stitch witchery is a roll of thin, wispy white tape. It isn't sticky at all. I placed it in the fold of the curtain, ironed over it with a steam iron and ta-da my curtain was hemmed. The heat dissolves the witchery tape into something gooey that bonds fabric. Truly magical stuff. My ironing board isn't as long as my curtains were wide, so as I went along I used the marked out length on my tape to make sure I wasn't going crooked. The only thing to be careful about is do not, DO NOT, get any of the stitch witchery tape on the iron. I touched an edge by mistake and then had to spend 15 minutes scrubbing the goop off the bottom of the iron. Nail polish remover helped. Each panel took me between 10 and 15 minutes to 'hem'. Most of this time was spent making sure my fold was straight and re-measuring it about eleven thousand times. Oh and I spilled a pool of water on one of the panels from my iron. I held the iron sideways for a bit while I briefly day dreamed. Ten thumbs remember?

THO got the rods up the next day with just the right amount of cursing. Now for the big reveal:

One last thing. In my moment of euphoria at Ikea, when I discovered witchery, I may have gone a tad overboard. I didn't just buy curtains. I bought fabric. Yards of it. We're putting together the nursery for our baby due in April and in that moment I decided that I would make her curtains. But that is going to be a whole other story.

Vows and 3D art

We wrote our own vows for our wedding and the vows were one of my favourite parts of our wedding (along with the beach, and my husband singing, and the salt ceremony, and my father singing and the dancing, and the toasts, oh and the food, and the cake was yummy - actually I loved it all). Post-wedding I kept taking sneak peeks at the email that contained the text of my husband's vows, and on occasion, I'll admit it, at my own too. So, it seemed like a good idea to have our vows displayed in our bedroom so that I could re-read them and gloat whenever I wanted (and, of course,  point to particular lines during a fight and say a-ha, that is not what you promised).

First I attempted to find someone else who I could pay to do the job for me. I really liked the Geezees Etsy store, but the prices are rather steep. Also, the more I thought about it, the keener I became to have the vows displayed in our own handwriting - spidery and ugly though that might be compared to all the pretty fonts out there.

My second idea was to write up our vows, take photos of them, have the photos printed out and framed.

Then, I happened upon the Umbra 3D wallflower art and, for reasons I cannot explain, it became imperative that these flowers participated in the vow related art project. So, I ordered them and Amazon had them waiting at my doorstep the next day.

While I was waiting (a whole day and half!) for the flowers to arrive, it seemed like a good idea to get the vows ready to hang. I decided that I did not have the patience to wait for photos to be printed, and that I did not want to shop for frames. I actually did not want to shop at all because a) I was feeling lazy and b) It was cold and rainy out. So I dug through my meager supplies at home and found that I had two 8*10 canvases, stretched on wood frames just lying around, begging to be used. Twenty minutes later I had two canvases ready - I used acrylic paint and a sponge brush. The soon-to-be-vow-wall is red and so I picked the yellowey-orangey background for the canvas.

Then it was go time - putting it all together. I laid out the flowers on the carpet and fidgeted with them for a bit. I added the two canvases, and then called upon THO for his aesthetic input. He fidgeted with the flowers till they were just so and then I had to get them on to the wall. For the most part this turned out to be much easier than I expected. As I moved each piece (canvas or flower) from the floor to the wall, I marked it's position on the floor with a push pin. That way I could measure the distance between push pins on the floor, measure the same distance on the wall, and reproduce the pattern. Here is what the floor looked like, with a mix of pins, flowers and canvas:

and this is the wall taking shape:

The flowers attach to the wall with little round bits of adhesive tape (included in the box). Three of the flowers drove me insane. The moment I took my eyes off them they would fall right off and lie around innocently on the floor as if they had no idea how they got there. This got disheartening after a bit, but I come from hardy stock and my middle name is keep-at-it-with-bloody-minded-determination, so I ended up winning that battle. For now. The trust is broken though; I eye the flowers with grim suspicion every time I go past that wall.
This is what it looked like with all the flowers and both canvases up on the wall:

All that remained was to write our vows. My vows in their entirety were too long to fit, so I had to extract a modest selection of text. We used black sharpies, added one more crucial flower to the wall and voila: