A Cupcake Christmas

Almost every November, the panic starts to set in. What the heck am I doing for the greeting card this year? And how am I going to get it done with all the craziness over the holidays? As I mentioned a few posts ago, I usually need to have an idea and materials purchased going into Thanksgiving. This year, I came up with that idea almost a year ahead of time. So this year's batch was a piece of (cup)cake. Almost.

If you've read any of my posts before, you pretty much know how the construction process for my greeting cards works. So, I'm turning over a new leaf. Less verbose descriptions, more photos to tell the story.


Fun Nordic holiday paper that I used for my muffin papers:

Beautiful microbeads from Martha Stewart that created the little non-pareil decorations. Note that these do not stick easily to paper, even using a fair amount of glue from a glue pad. I'm fairly sure that they fell apart in the mail and created a mess for those who received them:

Frosting the cupcakes was time consuming and messy.

The working area. This was a multistep process where I, 1.) Cut out the cupcake shapes, 2.) Glued the "paper cups" and the un-decorated cupcake tops to the card, 3.) Put "sprinkles" on almost half of the cupcake tops, and 4.) Glued on the final cupcake tops and then added the "tree-topper". Oh, and then of course I had to delicately write out the cards for fear that all the little micro-beads would fall off.

Work in progress:

 The finished product:

Nailing It

With all the craziness that work has been throwing my way, I sometimes need a little escape for just a few seconds. I joined Pinterest in late December or early January, and at the time, most of my friends hadn't joined. Now, there are so many people to follow that I can barely keep up with the latest posts. Everyone I've talked to about it has said that it's addictive; "digital crack" was what one article called it. So anytime I need to put my brain at rest, I make a little trip to the world of pretty things.

One thing that I manage to make time for are manicures. I have loved the new nail art trend that seems to be popping up. I remember my first nail art when I was little; my mom let me get a little flower on my nails at the nail salon next to the Chinese food place we always ate at. It was really special, and I treasured the opportunity to make my short piano-playing nails look pretty. But now, since I am too cheap to pay for manicures, I haven't thought of it as an option for me. 

Enter Pinterest.

Daily Candy had a board titled "Nailed" with lots of cool ideas for nail art. Not all of it is stuff that I can execute on my own, but I found two specific ideas that I've tried in the past few weeks that were actually quite easy. I call the first version champagne nails. 

These turned out to be relatively easy. I already had a dark shiny gray polish from MAC and a gold polish from OPI. I even had a little sparkly gold topcoat, but it turned out that the glitter was too fine to really show up. With the help of a toothpick, I managed to make a reasonable facsimile. Here are the results of my own attempt. As mangled as I thought these were, I got a lot of compliments. From the office to the hair salon, girls everywhere were mooning over them.

By the way, I really like the blog of the woman whose site these nails were originally posted on. Check it out here.

The second set was even easier to execute. These have a sexy name that I can't take credit for: Galaxy nails.

Basically, you just need a mishmash of cool-toned colors. I used a range of blues, greens, purples, and a shimmery silver to try to recreate the look. 

Easy peasy! It's a little hard to see below, but I just applied a base coat of the Revlon navy color, and then swooped on layers of each of the other shades (in order that they are shown here), and used the silver to make a little Milky Way across each nail. Personally, I love the swirly look that I was able to achieve on mine, even versus what the original looked like. I made vertical, horizontal and diagonal strokes to make it look like some crazy aurora borealis moving across my nails. The best compliment that I could have been paid came today when I was at the register at a spa. The cashier said, "Oh my gosh, are those Galaxy nails? You did such a great job!"

One final lesson learned from this photo session is that it's really difficult to capture nails in artificial light at night. Best to leave those things to the beautiful light of day.


Addendum:

Another idea for nails from Pinterest led me to this little experiment. It's difficult to see in the picture, but it's a layer of Essie Chinchilly with some sparkles just at the tip of the nail. Subtle but sparkly!

 

Thinking of Christmas on a 70-Degree Day

This is summer's last hurrah. As I writing this, I'm sitting with tea in hand on my deck in Chicago, and it's about to be one of the last nice days of the year. The forecast says that it's going to be 70 degrees today and the next few days, so I intend to make the most of it. Which is why it's strange that I'm already thinking about Christmas.

Many of you already know that I put out a handmade Christmas card every year. Maybe you noticed that I hadn't posted about last year's card? Well, that's because I didn't start thinking about the darn thing until so late in the year that I was scrambling to get it done.

I originally had an idea that I wanted to do something with a sewn pattern, but I wasn't sure how to really create a nice looking line, how it might damage my sewing machine, or if I would even be able to execute it.

So I decided to stick to a technique I knew would work: good old-fashioned threading a yarn through a hole. I've done this before on one of my first cards but with ribbon. It's the card that's the second from the left in this picture.

So, I came up with the idea of stringing mittens on a clothesline for the theme. Frankly, I was running out of time, and I knew that I didn't have time to screw around with cutting out everything by hand this year. I typically like to buy materials before Thanksgiving and start the heavy construction work over the holiday, if not earlier. Even with the Thanksgiving start, depending on the level of labor, putting together the cards can stretch well into the week before Christmas. (Some people even get their cards around the new year.)

This past year, I didn't even start ideating until right before Thanksgiving, so I knew that I would have to make it simple. In prior years, I frequently cut out shapes by hand after printing them on paper. But I finally decided to join scrapbookers in the 20th century by making use of paper punches. I ordered a tiny mitten punch from some random craft website and hoped that it would turn out to be the right size when it arrived. Luckily, it was, so I proceeded to punch out hundreds of mittens from different pieces of scrap paper I had in my craft drawer.

I used some multicolored yarn and strung them on the card with a little "Happy Holidays" message on each end of the string.

One thing that I'm still not sure was the right decision was to leave the mittens loose on the string instead of knotting them to the string to prevent them from shifting around. How did they arrive in the mail? Were they all clumped or creased or funny-looking by the time they got to the recipients?

All in all, this was not my best card project, but I feel pretty good about how it turned out given time constraints. I have grander plans for this year's card. We'll see what happens. Maybe I'll even enter the Paper Source Holiday Card Contest.

Cocktail Collection

Have you ever noticed that when you are searching for something specific that you can never find it? I've been looking for a set of beautiful vintage stemmed cocktail or martini glasses for quite a while now. It's not as if there aren't lots of beautiful modern glasses out there, but there is something incredibly cool about vintage barware and glassware.

I've been inspired by a lot of the traditional American cocktails that I've been drinking at a lot of lounges here in Chicago: The Violet Hour, Sable, and Le Bar all seem to have great traditional drinks with a little modern twist.  Then, when I was at Boka earlier this summer, my friend Nora ordered this delicious drink in an even better looking glass.

It's a little tough to see how gorgeous it is, but it really inspired me to find a set of glassware with this same look and feel. I visited all the great shops in Andersonville - an area in Chicago that has the cutest little antique shops that are wonderfully curated - and searched for that perfect cocktail set with no luck. Barware is getting so popular that there are very few sets these days, and even fewer with the specific look you might be looking for.

On a recent trip to visit my parents in Ohio, we passed by a promising-looking antique store on our way to another attraction. I insisted that we leave whatever family activity that we were doing in time so that we make it back to the antique store before it closes. Man, that was a great move on my part.

Entering into Stagecoach Antiques in Akron was probably one of the more overwhelming shopping experiences I have had. China and glasses are everywhere, with shelves stuffed so full that you couldn't even see was stashed in the back.

Luckily, I'm a patient girl when it comes to shopping, so I was happy to spend an hour wading through glasses to find something perfect. But then it dawned on me: why settle for one style of beautiful glass when you can have several and still have it look like a set?

Few of the remaining cocktail glass sets had enough for even a small party, so I decided that I would get a variety of glasses and use them as a set. Plus, like the lady in the store said, if you break a glass, you can just go out an buy a gorgeous new one without having to match it.

So, here's the variety that I came up with. I'm starting with six glasses and will add to the collection whenever I find something that I love. I think this works for cocktail glasses and could also apply to other things that we buy in multiples. What do you think? Any suggestions on what other items are even more versatile when they're not in a totally matched set?

The Power of Flowers

When I lived in San Francisco, I used to buy a bouquet flowers from the little florist in my office building every Friday. It was usually a sad little bunch, on sale because it was the end of the week, and it was better to sell it for 50% off instead of letting it die in the store. The blooms usually only lasted for a few days, but I loved having fresh flowers around our apartment.

After we moved to Chicago, I didn't have a real florist in such close proximity. (Well, maybe I did, but I just wasn't looking for one.) Plus, that 50% discount in San Francisco had been very motivating, and living on a student budget made purchasing flowers at full price less appealing. Even after I started working again, I had just gotten out of the habit of having flowers around.

But recently, I ran across this great article about flower arranging from the NY Times magazine and decided that I needed to start having flowers around again. All the prearranged bouquets I had ever purchased always looked a little sad. This article addressed what you can do with a cheap bunch of flowers with just a little trimming and arranging. I pulled out the article and put it in a little heap with some magazines, thinking that it would come in handy at some point.

A few weeks after reading this article, I was strolling through Whole Foods' floral section one day and saw a some gorgeous hydrangeas and peonies. I decided to give flower arranging a shot with these luscious looking buds. So, I bought the flowers and a few greens to get started.

I took everything home and started trimming wildly. Whenever I would bring home flowers before, I would hack all the stems off at one point on the stem and stuff them into the nearest vase. It was very efficient, but produced somewhat iffy results. Plus, I noticed that almost all the vases I have are meant for tall, traditional arrangements, but I like tighter, denser bouquets that sit a lower to the table. So this time, I tried to have a nice little bunch of flowers grouped low to the vase. I have to say that I like the results.

It was definitely a lot of fun trying to arrange the stems, and turned what was normally a five-minute activity into a half-hour long adventure. (The last 10 minutes of that half-hour were cleanup from the insane number of stems and leaves littering my counter, but it was part of the whole experience, I suppose.)

I ended up replicating this arrangement a few times because I liked it so much, and then peonies went out of season. (A very sad time in my summer.) I tried a different arrangement again a few weeks later with some spider mums and these weird purply prickly things.

I haven't gotten as many flowers recently because of a project that has eaten up my whole dining room table, but I plan on trying again soon. I'm pretty sure I won't have another gap like the one I had before after my SF-Chi move. That's too long to wait for something this pretty to show up on my dining table again.

New Life - Repurposing Old (Ikea!) Furniture - REDUX!

Hang on. Repurposing old Ikea furniture again? Didn't we just go through this? It doesn't seem so long ago that I dreamed up this whole scheme to start this blog and repaint and old Ikea chest to make it new again. But now we're back in the same place.


See, we finally decided to redecorate our office. No more baby-boy-themed paint scheme with a mishmash of cheap furniture. Now we have a real desk, a cool paint color, fancy chairs, actual non-ugly light fixtures and table. New! That's all fine and dandy, but where are we going to put all those books we had accumulated over the years? There was no room left in our office for all our books. Our one tall and one short Billy bookcase from Ikea were still serving a very real purpose but didn't fit the space anymore. So, one bookcase got shuttled off to the attic, and one earned a place in our guest bedroom as a functional decorative piece.

Oh, but Billy, you're kind of boring, and your natural finish doesn't match the room I'm putting you in. So let's hit those paint cans again. I have to be honest: even though the room is very clearly a homemade Holly Hobby piece, I'm totally in love with it. It's the only room in the house where I picked all the furniture, color, and decor myself, and I think of it as MY room. MY work in progress. The room is a deep grape color (crazy, I know) with black and white accents modern and baroque accents, so I wanted to keep with the theme and paint the bookshelf white with black accents. 



To be as thrifty and environmentally friendly as possible, I used the same paint I had purchased from the last Ikea refinishing project two years ago. So, I dug out the old paint I used last time to paint my furniture and scraped off the icky solid layer of paint that kept the rest of it relatively fresh. After sanding and cleaning, I painted the craptastic chipboard veneer and even that terribly flimsy chipboard backing that slides into the grooves on the back of the shelves. You know, the one that actually you could pop out just by giving it a gentle nudge? 

In my thriftiness, I didn't really calculate how much paint I would need. It was barely enough - I didn't even paint the underside of one of the shelves. (Yes, friends, if you come visit, I officially give you permission to inspect the shelf and mock me.)

Keeping with the modern baroque theme I'd already started going with in the room, I chose a stencil from Michael's that mimicked the pattern on the bedspread in the room:

I toyed with the idea of taking the design across the sides, top, and even the back of the shelf. However, I planned to put decorative items on top of the refinished pieces, so it didn't make sense to take all that time stenciling the top. Also, since I'm bad at editing my book collection, I figured that no one would ever see the back of the shelf. So, I just took the stencil up the side in black stencil paint.

Why is it off center, you ask? Well, in my brain, it made sense that it would be slightly closer to the front of the bookshelf so you can see it, and I thought it would look fine since there is a little divot on the back of the shelf to prevent it from tipping forward. Like I said, it made sense in my brain. Don't judge me too harshly


After finishing the stenciling, the paint took f-o-r-e-v-e-r to dry. The stencil paint I purchased had a dense, dry, powdery texture, which gave the stencil a nice antique-y look. However, the high-gloss paint that I used as the base probably extended the drying time by a lot. On the paint, it tells you to let it set for 24 hours. After 3 days, it was still rubbing off with a touch of the finger. I thought I was going to have to scrap the whole thing - and let me tell you how excited I would have been about that - but luckily, it finally set after almost an entire week.


Add a few vintage books, some adorable little foo dogs from west elm, and voila! A new decorative bookshelf is born. Okay, it's not that impressive, but at least it looks different from how it started and it matches the room. That's all I ask for.

Materials used in this project: 

• Old Billy bookshelf from Ikea
• Gloss oil paint
• Stencil from Michael's
• Stencil brush
• Masking tape
• A place where the bookcase can dry for days on end since you can't move the stupid thing for fear of smudging the stencil.

Cheater, cheater, Chrysanthemum Eater

I've spent the last few months buried up to my neck in... the New York Times Sunday Crossword! I'm obviously terrible, because I work on it for a while on Sunday and then gradually throughout the week. I'm almost about to break through, though - I've only got one little chunk left to solve from this past Sunday's puzzle. Hooray! Only one week later.


So, creative endeavors have taken a backseat lately. But a few weeks ago, I saw the front cover of the Paper Source catalog and decided that I HAD to have the chrysanthemum wreath featured on it.







So pretty, right?


Paper Source sells these kits that you can assemble yourself. The make it really easy to be creative. Actually, it's so easy, that it feels like cheating. All you have to do is punch the petals out of the pre-cut paper that they provide, curl the petals, and then stick everything together with the tape that they provide. Really, the only decisions you have to make are where to put the flowers and leaves when they are assembled.


That got me to thinking: so much of my creative activities are really just following directions that the real creative people give me? Most of us pull inspiration from elsewhere, but there comes a certain point where it crosses over from "drawing from" to "copying." Where is that line? I'm pretty sure this project is pretty deep into copying territory, but I loved the process (and the result) just the same.

Materials used in this project:

• Paper Source Chrysanthemum kit
• Bone folder