Dreadful Pink Chair Makeover--Before and After

I hope everyone had a wonderful December and is rested up for the new year! I am going to sign off of 2009 by showing off the results of my long-term chair makeover...

Here is the Before & After just to whet your appetites!

Before:

And After!

Ta-da! Stay tuned for the transformation in Parts 2 and 3 of the saga...

Second Upholstered Brooch Display

After I made an Upholstered Brooch Display for all of my old brooches, my mother-in-law Jane said she wanted one as well!

Brett and I found this beauty of a frame at Marshalls for $5.00. Unfortunately it was a dingy gray, and it looked so much better once I painted it a shiny white.

Here is the finished product! I upholstered it with some fabric I happened to have from covering a lampshade. When I make these, its difficult to pick a fabric because you want it to be interesting and pretty, but you don't want the fabric to overwhelm the brooches you display on it. I thought this one would work well, and it is very delicate and feminine with the details on the frame.


I really hope Jane likes it! No one tell her before Christmas please!!!!

Jennifer's Pretty Christmas Card Display

After reading my post from earlier this month, Alternative Ideas to Traditional Christmas Wreaths, reader Jennifer sent me these pics of her beautiful Christmas card display. It was inspired by the photograph I featured from Traditional Home Magazine's holiday decorating ideas. It looks so nice, and I like that she put it on the inside of the door where she can see it everytime she comes down her beautifully-garlanded staircase!


Here is a closeup:
Nice work Jen, and thanks for the pictures! Does anyone else have an unusual way to display their Christmas cards?

Sophisticated Autumn Placemats

I really wanted some fall-themed placemats for the big Thanksgiving meal we had with Brett's side of the family. I found this one at TJ Maxx, but I needed 12 and could only find 3. So I decided to try to replicate them myself.

Of course I realize its a little late for a tutorial for a Thanksgiving placemat, but this would be gorgeous with colors for Christmas (reds and golds) or New Years (bues and silvers) as well!

I tried to get together fabrics that looked like the ones in the placemat--a chocolate brown taffeta for the back and the medium-sized piece; a bronze satin for the large piece on the front; and for the small piece a gold duponi silk. We cut them to size with a half-inch border all the way around each piece to allow for the seams.

This left me with the four sizes below, and twelve pieces of each size: 2"x 14"; 8" x 14" and 12" x 14". The final placemat size is 19" x 13" .


I also got some pieces for the appliqued leaves, but it didn't work out so well when I tried to applique them onto the taffeta so I nixed that idea! Of course, if I hadn't waited until the Sunday before Thanksgiving to try to make 12 placemats, I might have been able to make it work...maybe next time!

After cutting everything to size and ironing everything (blech), I ironed-on craft interfacing to the backing pieces to give the placemats some body and to help them hold their shape.

And then pinned them in place to wait for the front to be pieced together.

To piece together the three strips to make the top, I cut a 1" x 14" strip of paper grocery bag and pinned it down the center of the small piece. This gave me a line to follow on my sewing machine as I sewed it to the other two peices.

I then put the right sides together and pinned the small duponi silk piece to the brown taffeta piece.
I made sure the foot of my sewing machine followed the line provided by the grocery bag.

I then pulled out the pins holding the duponi silk to the taffeta, and ironed them out straight. Then I put the right sides of the silk/taffeta piece and the satin piece together, pinned them, and zipped right down the straight line provided by the grocery bag again.

Here's what it looked like when I took the pins out:

And this is what the wrong side of the top of the placemat looks like when its sewed together:

I then pinned the right sides of the top and the right side of the bottom together.

The beauty of this is that the interfacing is now on the outside and will eventually end up inside the placemat where no one will be able to see it. SO I used it to trace a 13" x 19" rectangle with pencil and then followed the line again with my sewing machine foot.


I sewed all the way around with the exception of a small area on one side. You can make that area as small as possible--just large enough to be able to fit your hand through will be fine.

Once it is sewed up almost all the way around, snip the corners diagonally as shown below and snip all the way around so that there is only about 1/4" of seam left outside the thread. Then you reach inside and turn the whole thing inside out. Then iron it smooth and hand sew up the small hole you used to put your hand through.


Here is the result!

I was super happy with the way my placemats turned out, and it was quite a learning experience. There are a couple of things I would have done differently if I did it over again! 1.) start sooner, 2.) use less delicate fabrics (I actually melted some of the taffeta with the iron!), and 3.) check to see if the fabric is washable before buying it!

Anyway, I managed to save myself quite a lot of money by making these instead of buying them, and hopefully they will last for years!

Gilded Pinecones! Holiday Decorating on the Cheap

Lately I have been seeing pine cones and acorns for sale. FOR SALE. PEOPLE, we can't get rid of these things, they are a nuisance, and someone is paying $8 for 10 of them?? Anyway, I decided to try my hand at making some gold pine cones of my own! Brett and I took Lolly for a walk and picked up some pinecones of two different types: white pine and Virginia pine. When we picked them up, some of them were closed because it was cold, so I put them on a cookie sheet in the house for a week to let them open.

Then I picked up some metallic paint from the craft section of Walmart--I picked gold because my dining room has warm tones, but silver would work as well, and so would flocking them to look like they are covered in snow.


Here they are being sprayed on my front stoop on a cut up paper bag:

And here they are as my Thanksgiving centerpiece! Add a red or green velvet ribbon rather than this one, and viola! Christmas. Add an orange one and viola! Halloween.

I arranged them around a candle in the center of my hurricane glass, making sure the flame would not be near any of the flammable pinecones of course!



Then I cut out some metallic scrapbook paper and made place cards for each guest. I propped each placecard up with one of the smaller pinecones to tie it in with the centerpiece.


Here is a closeup:

Just for the sake of full disclosure, I DID try this with acorns, and they SPROUTED ROOTS!!! Anyone know how to prevent that from happening?? Anyhoo, I got about 20 gold pinecones for the price of the spray paint, so eat that, big box decor store!

Alternatives Ideas to Traditional Christmas Wreaths

The traditional Christmas wreath has me bored to tears. There are plenty of fun wreaths out there made of everything from oranges to birdseed to ornaments, but those tend to be expensive. I started wondering...what kinds of door decorations are out there for those of us who want a wreath alternative?

Here's what I dug up:


I love the idea of vinyl decals on your door for some Christmas Spirit! This one says "Welcome Santa" but there are plenty of others out there that say other things or are pictoral.
Urban Expressions via Etsy

This is a fun DIY take on a wreath: a giant homemade snowflake!
Supersnowflake via Family Fun

I also like the idea of hanging a wooden sign like the snowman below.
Via Squidoo

This one is what I actually did to MY front door this year--wrap it up like a present! My ribbon is candy-cane striped and I think its absolutely adorable. I did this for windows too years ago at my parents house.
via Hubpages

I think this one is the most creative. If you did it on your front door, you would have to have a clear storm door or something to keep the cards from blowing away. I never know what to do with Christmas cards, and this is a great idea. Just pin them onto some ribbons and hang them from your door to display!
via Country Living


Does anyone else out there have any ideas for those of us who have had it with boring old wreaths? Please share! Even send me a picture of your beautifully-decked-out house and I will post it!

I'm Here!

So with all of the holiday hullabuloo blogging has fallen by the wayside lately. We had Brett's whole family at our house over the Thanksgiving weekend, which made for some happy chaos and much dog walking. I made the cranberry sauce, sweet potato pie *with gingersnap crust*, and mini cornbread muffins *with whipped honey butter.* We have had leftovers. We have rebelled from leftovers and ordered in Chinese.

We have put up our brand new Christmas tree and decorated it with home made popcorn garlands and not home made candy canes (we spent the money on the tree and have nothing left for ornaments!). We have decorated our house with garlands and lights and bows. We even started a Christmas puzzle which I spent FOUR HOURS unable to step away from last night.

We have not so much cleaned up...

But I'm here and I'm being artsycraftsy!

Upcoming posts for December include:

1.) Microwave Peanut Brittle!
2.) The Unveiling of the Upholstered Ugly Pink Chairs
3.) Adventures in Sewing Holiday Placemats
4.) Holiday Wreath Alternative Door Decorations

Stay tuned...