Getting it together - DIYs

Hello again! 

     Welcome back to the farm.  Part of the fun of moving is getting to try to make your new space nice.  Part of the fun of having a place of your own is getting to do it any which way you want to.  I actually really love the paint colors in our place.  I told my husband that it’s like a chicken egg pallet.  He’s started calling me the crazy chicken lady, because I cluck at him every now and then and ask him where my chicken coop is, since he has deemed the barn uninhabitable and unsalvageable, other than maybe 1/3 of the wood and some of the metal.  I know, I know, quit pouting.  

     Anyway, I was going to tell you about some of the crafts I’ve been doing to make our little house more “ours.”  I had decided that I wanted to use some kind of gauzy white something-or-other for some pretty overlapping curtains in our dining area.  But at the same time, I really hate working with sheer material, because it slides so dang bad I wind up with some really crooked hems.  Then there’s the fraying.  And I know, you can overcast the edges to fix the fraying, but every time I’ve tried to overcast edges, I wind up with a big snarl of thread and one really ticked off sewing machine. 

     So then I thought about cheese cloth.  Have you ever tried to find large yardage of cheesecloth?  I did find some on bolts, but it’s still just one yard wide, so I would have had to sew it together in strips to get panels wide enough for the window.  And it wasn’t nearly as cheap as I was hoping.  So I gave up on curtains for a little bit longer and decided to go through another box.  It’s a good thing, too.  I stumbled across an IKEA Ofelia bedspread I had bought on sale a few years back thinking to make a skirt out of it, but it just always made me look like the marshmallow man, no matter how I draped it, so I stuffed it in a bin of fabric and figured it might be useful later. 

     Please excuse Little Bell’s second breakfast. 

     Since there are knobs or filials on the wall instead of a rod, all I had to do was cut the bedspread in half.  The fabric is basically cheesecloth gathered gently at fairly regular intervals.  That meant I didn’t even have to cut or sew holes to hang it, just poked a ribbon through the loose weave of the cloth and tied it to the knobs.  I think it worked out perfectly.  I’m not quite done.  I want to change the narrow ribbon tie-backs for some burlap, but otherwise, I really like the way it turned out. 

     Next, I needed to be able to protect my pretty table.  We sealed it with a matte -- or do they call that satin? -- poly coat, which looks just wonderful, but doesn’t clean up as easy as a glossy smooth finish does.  Live and learn, right?  So I needed some place mats.  I knew what I wanted.  I’d seen them online.  Cute burlap mats with manners on the bottom edge, right justified, in this old-time typewriter font.  I loved it!  But I wasn’t going to spend $50 for the dang things.

     I had some muslin cloths that I had used for flat-fold diapers when Little Bell was really little.  That didn’t work out too well for us, because no matter what type of cover and extra liner, padding, and filler I tried, bought, sewed, or contrived, the dang things leaked and bad.  So we switched to disposables, because I just couldn’t have my baby waking up screaming in a puddle of pee every half hour to an hour.  Anyway, so these muslin flats were stuffed in a kitchen drawer and used for light clean up instead of always grabbing for the paper towels.  Most of them are still unstained.  How that happened beats me. 

     I printed out the manners I wanted in the font and size I needed.  I used the “show ruler” tool for Word so I didn’t have to guess.  I cut out my burlap, then cut out my muslin just a bit smaller. 

     Using my lightbox (also known as a south-facing sliding glass door) I printed out the manners and traced them with sharpie onto my muslin rectangles.

     Then I sewed the muslin to the burlap.  It looks great, but it isn’t water set.  So I can’t wash them.  Which kind of defeats the purpose, right? 

     I had read online (so it’s got to be true) that you could make sharpie colorfast by heat treating it, using salt, and a variety of other things.  It’s crap, because a few of my place mats have spots where the black has bled, particularly where sweat from glasses has dribbled.  Fortunately, it was a really easy project, and one I liked the results of well enough to try again.  I think next time, I’m going to splurge for some washable fabric pain pens.  At least I can reuse the burlap, and the muslin didn’t cost anything extra, since I already had it.  And the bits I take off the place mats will still be just fine for cleaning rags, which is all they were before they were turned into place mats.

     Our latest decorating project -- okay, I say “our”.  I really mean Pa’s, because he did all the work.  All I did was supply indignant inspiration.  I went to Hobby Lobby for the burlap for the place mats, and while I was there, I saw all kinds of things that I just *needed* to hang here and there in our house.  There were cute signs for the bath, the kitchen, the laundry, the kid’s room, our room.  Then I’d look at the price tag.  For a piece of half inch plywood painted cute, they might want 40 bucks, or more! 

     

I also found this cutie and took him home.  *giggle*

     So I took pictures of things I wanted.  The cuteness will come to my walls, provided that once I have the time and resources I still want them hanging on my walls, but the cuteness will NOT cost that darned much, I can promise you that.

 

     For example, I found this coat rack/key hook thing made with what looked like 1/4 inch thick strips of trim around the tiniest chicken wire I’d ever seen.  Every single one of the ones on the shelf were broken in some way, because they were that dang flimsy.  It is hard to tell in the pictures, but it’s not very big.  I don’t think it was even a foot and a half wide at its widest.  Sticker shock slapped me in the face when I saw they wanted $60 for the thing.  But gosh, it was cute.  So I took a picture, trotted home and said, in my best Veruca Salt impression, “Daddy, I want it.”

     This was made with scraps of crap that my husband scrounged out of the scrap/trash pile next to his shop.  The thing is sturdy enough that our three-year-old could probably swing off of it, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it held.  I’m still debating whether or not to paint it.  The more I look at it, the more it grows on me as it is. 

     If you read our Christmas post, you’ve seen that Bells sign before.  Pa’s dad made it, and it used to hang on a gate post type thing over their driveway.  We weren’t really sure what to do with it, because we don’t have a gatepost to hang it off of.  Our mailbox has to be mounted on a particular type of break-away post do to ordinances so nowhere to hang it there, and we don’t have a front porch door or entryway to hang it on, so Pa put it on here, and it just fits, I think.

     Baby steps of progress are being made, and each little one makes our house more ours and more home.  There is so much that needs doing, and some of it isn’t going to be cheap.  It’s kind of overwhelming, honestly.  But these small projects that we can complete in between give us a sense of progress and accomplishment, and that keeps us motivated.