I haven’t blogged in a long time. Umm. . .duh. But seriously I haven’t blogged in a long time. This spring I began feeling a lot of stress related to blogging. Silly, I know. I had placed goals oriented to consistency in blogging on myself that just lead to stress and feelings of failure when I didn’t live up to them. But I wasn’t living up to them for good reasons so I quit blogging for a while. For those who noticed I stopped blogging and quit Facebook at the same time and were concerned, thanks for reaching out :) All is well! The Facebook thing was a totally unrelated decision, I didn’t all together quit the internet!

All that to say. . .I am going to start blogging again. . . but with no expectations. I might blog 4 times in a week and then not again for another month and I am giving myself permission for that to be okay. I really have missed this outlet and Jonathan misses the way it records our life’s happenings (since I don’t scrap book or anything, this is it!)

If you read this, thanks for caring and sticking around!

xoxo,

Michelle

I hope you had a good holiday yesterday. We enjoyed the day with good friends swimming, eating, and fireworking (I am aware fireworking’s not a word). It was a really good day.

I was surprised how well Genevieve did with the poppers and sparklers. She LOVED fireworks.

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Today I am thankful for true freedom.

It’s summer :) I like summer until it gets to triple didget temps day after day. Then not so much. We did enjoy a nice May and the first half of June before the sweltering heat began. . . so I’m going to call that summer and the rest of this something like ‘the season of sweltering heat from Hades’. Anywhoo. . . just sharing a few really random pics of us this summer. Maybe I should say pics of Jonathan and Genevieve. . . because I am not in any pictures. That needs to change.

Spunky Miss Genevieve loves to swim. She is her mother’s child. She wants to be let go of in the deep end and is pretty adamant about it. When we swim at the Y -which has a fantastic toddler swim area- she beelines for the deep end.  So tonight at almost 20 months old she starts swimming lessons. If the girl insists on swimming on her own. . . she should learn how :)

We rode bikes to the park for a picnic.

This picture documents a few firsts for Genevieve. This is her first pair of sunglasses. Her Gigi sent them to her and she would not take them off. No joke. I wrestled them from her for nap time that day. She is also sporting her first skinned knee. That happened at the pool. She fell, stood up and said “ouch”, and the proceeded to run for the deep end. She is also showing off her cute painted toe nails. It’s my new trick to get her to cooperate with getting her nails clipped. The alternative includes a lot of kicking and screaming so toe painting it is.

She feels pretty glam in her sunglasses. She now has a few more pairs (dollar bin at Target people) and reeeally likes wearing them.

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Today I am thankful for my family. I think they’re pretty great.

I haven’t been blogging (says captain obvious). I have been busy and something had to give and blogging was it.

I am almost done watching my friends daughter. I am looking forward to Genevieve & I’s days freeing up, but we will also miss her. We have had a lot of special time with a little one we love very much. I will say, all mothers who have their children one year apart (or less!!!) deserve a medal of honor. A newborn and a one year old at the same time is no laughing matter folks.

We have had 24 TONS of dirt delivered to our house and dispersed around our property in the last few weeks. Sounds like a lot of dirt eh? It is. If you call and we don’t answer, it’s safe to assume we are outside. Working. (if that sounds like complaining, it’s really not- it’s actually been a fun family project. Jonathan may disagree)

Genevieve is 18 months old. One and a half. Crazy.

I have done 8 loads of laundry in the past 2 days. That’s whatcha get when you’re lazy for 2 weeks.

There is so much dirt tracking in our house I have given up on cleaning the floors until this project is done. I sweep, but the floors are dirty people. I mean, we have dogs and a toddler. Dirty. Don’t judge me.

Jonathan got a kite. It’s been good times.

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Today I am thankful for my family.

A while back Sherry on Young House Love tried to paint a chair. . . it didn’t work for her BUT she lead me to this tutorial and I couldn’t get it off my mind.  I have since done a lot of reading and then I took the plunge (like in October) and bought a $10 chair off Craigslist. My hero hubby went to pic it up for me and it has sat in our living room. . . stained and dejected ever since. I did clean it when I had rented a carpet cleaner for a rug that the dogs had . . . .well you don’t need details. . . .my point is I cleaned it. And then it sat. In January I bought my supplies. And it sat. And two weekends ago I decided to paint it.

Here is my chair before:

Now. . .how I did it. Like I said. . .I read a lot. I also went into this with a very open mind. I gave myself permission to ruin this chair. If it ended up in the trash I wasn’t going to feel bad about it. I let myself off the perfection hook. I highly recommend this step. Without it there would have been crying on my part during this process.

Disclaimer—- this is not a real tutorial—- I want to share with you what I learned as I went BUT I highly recommend reading the tutorial at the above link. 

Supplies I used:

Latex paint (I should have bought a quart. . instead I started with one test pot. . .ended up buying another test pot. . .could have still used another)

Fabric Medium (you can get this at a craft store near the puff paints and other fabric paint)

A spray bottle

Foam sanding block

Paint brush

I mixed the paint and fabric medium 50/50 in a clean plastic container I dug out of the recycling bin.The fabric medium keeps the paint from being crunchy at the end of this. It is very important so don’t skip it!  I would also recommend watering this mixture down. It shouldn’t be thick. Like thin pancake batter would be the right consistency.

I started on the back because it won’t be seen. That was a good decision. Start by spraying the fabric with water. Lots of water. My experience was the wetter the better. Then I started brushing. I didn’t water down the paint when I started and it made it very hard to blend. It looked like this:

Blotchy. . . made me want to cry. I honestly kind of felt like giving up at this point. So I took a break and regrouped. Here is what I learned- more water is better (this is where I started watering down the paint mixture). I also would re-spray areas that I was struggling to blend and that helped a lot. You can see in the picture I was applying the paint in an up and down motion with the brush. . . and then it occurred to me you would never do that on a wall (you should always roll paint on a wall in a W motion so you won’t have lines) so I started using the W technique while applying the paint. Those things combined made a HUGE difference on the rest of the chair.

So I painted a coat on the rest of the chair, let it dry and then I sanded. This is the key to pleasant feeling fabric when you finish. It might feel weird to sand fabric (but lets face it- we are already painting fabric- it doesn’t get weirder) but it matters so much. After each coat of paint it felt terrible. After sanding my chair feels like canvas (it was velvet to start). Sand (and paint for that matter) in the direction of the grain of the fabric.

I also painted the legs of the chairs with white paint we keep on hand for the trim in our house.

I ended up applying 3 coats (sanding in between and a lot of sanding after). I did not achieve perfect coverage. Honestly I am not sure with my fabric it is possible, nor do I think I want to.  A friend who was over the other day remarked that it made it look more like fabric- the imperfection- which made me feel better about the whole thing.

Here she is finished:

The verdict? I like it. I’m not in love with it. Like I mentioned. . . it feels like canvas. I am actually impressed with how good it feels. I think I would like it better if I did it again knowing what I do now from learning on this one. You can see the places where the coverage is a lot less than perfect and I think using more water than I did in the beginning (I ended up adding more water during every coat) would make a big difference in the even coverage department. All that said- this is GREAT for a $10 chair off Craigslist. A chair from your Grandma’s house with sentimental value though- no way would I paint it. Too much room for error. And I think it’s likely I won’t like this any more in a few years.

I’m happy I tried this. It was fun actually. . . and it’s fun to talk about. People can’t believe I painted upholstery. What do you think?

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Today I am thankful for spring break!

Okay folks. . . I have a lot on my plate so while I wanted to under take some sewing projects this past week (like these or these) I did something super easy instead. I found this tutorial for DIY Craspedia flowers (or billy buttons)  from Sincerely, Kinsley a while back. I forgot to pin it then (or it never took) because I had to hunt it down this morning. Whoops. I had read the tutorial (which again, is super easy) when I originally found it so I never needed to reference it when I made these.

I like Craspedia’s. They are super trendy right now and perhaps a tad over used. . . but I still think they are happy fun flowers and in an effort to bring spring to my house they do just the trick :) If you want to make these. . . it’s like a 15 minute project. I made these in the time it took Genevieve to eat lunch.

Happy right? Did you make anything you saw on Pinterest this week?

Check out what other’s made during the Pinterest Challenge here , here, here and here! Thanks to Sherry and Katie for hosting and motivating!

All tutorials were found via Pinterest.

Are you addicted to Pinterest? Me too. Are you guilt of pinning tons of things and never getting around to making any of them? Me too. So I LOVE when Sherry at Young House Love and Katie and Bower Power host the Pinterest Challenge. . . it motivates me! So I am jumping on the bandwagon. . . not sure what I am making yet but I will post about it next Wednesday and let you know! I have a lot of completed projects I haven’t shared here yet. . . but I am committing to myself to do something new instead of using something I’ve already done . . . because. . . well. . . I can always use another excuse to be creative instead of doing laundry. :)

I wanted to give you a heads up in case you need a swift kick in the pants to actually DO one of the projects you have pinned. For more details (and to see hilarious pics of them on Survivor) visit Sherry and Katie’s posts here and here. If you participate I would love to see what you make!

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Today I am thankful for His provision.

I’ve been MIA. . . I feel like I’ve started every post this year that way. . . it’s been a doozy of a couple of months. Lots of adjusting having another babe in the house all day. . .lots less day time free time for me. All is well though :)

I have had it with winter. . . which is pretty pathetic considering you could hardly call this a winter. . . but all the same I am ready for sunshine. It’s been beautiful the past week or so and we’ve been enjoying it. Last night we walked to a pizza place in our neighborhood and ate outside. . . so ready for weather that allows for that every day!

Last week one night when I was really itching for spring I made this wreath (and took down v-day decorations and put up spring-y fun things). I was inspired by this. I actually like hers a lot better than mine. . .but I just didn’t have it in me to cut into any of my vintage sheets for this project. Maybe one day. So seeing as how this isn’t really what I wanted I made it able to come apart once I’m sick of it. I just used straight pins to attach all of the fabric and the rosettes.  You can see some of the pins but I’m not too hung up on it. I had these fabric scraps my Mom gave me from a quilt she made. I just wrapped them around a straw wreath form and pinned the ends. Easy peasy.

Please pretend you don’t see the really awful frosting on the glass part of the door. It’s a DIY gone wrong. . .that we will fix. . . one day.

Tomorrow I have a bazillion excavators (did you know that was a job title? me neither) coming to the house to give me quotes to replace the main sewage line coming out of our house. Sound like fun? It sounds intimidating to me. I have to ask questions and communicate everything Jonathan told me to. . . eek.  We are DIYers to the extreme. . . not because we are that cool. . . but because we have Champagne taste on a Free budget. So shelling out a bunch of moolah for something like a sewer line is painful. Necessary but painful. . . . and annoying.

I hope you are getting some beautiful spring weather and you are able to enjoy it!

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Today I am thankful for Light.

Hi. . . just stopping by to say hello. . .

We’ve been sickies at our house. Finally getting over it though. . . . I can’t tell you how ready I am to feel well.

This morning Genevieve helped me make muffins (her first time helping cook) and then we sat and ate them together. It was a good time.

I am making over our dining room chairs that a friend trash picked for me today. It’s about time. He trashed picked them over the summer and they were gross. I’ll show you a picture when I’m done.

Today is Ash Wednesday. Did you know I was raised Catholic? I was. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Lent lately. I haven’t observed Lent for the past couple of years and I have missed it. Spending time mourning loss and death and sin helps me rejoice on Easter. It’s a celebration and I am looking forward to celebrating.

Okay. . . enough rambling for today. I’ll be back with a for real post soon. Off to spray paint. Happy Wednesday to you!

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Today I am thankful for joy.

Happy Monday! It snowed. I like snow. I’m wishing both babes would nap at the same time so I can go out and shovel (it actually sounds like a good time. . promise!) While this isn’t Genevieve’s first snow. . . it is the first one she was old enough to play in. She didn’t so much play (or move once I set her down) but she did have a great time watching the dogs play.

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Today I am thankful for laughter.