Product Review -- Easy Canvas Prints

I am a total sucker for gallery-wrapped canvas prints -- they just look so professional and highlight pictures so well.  So when Brendan from Easy Canvas Prints asked me if I'd like to review their pictures on canvas, I didn't have to think twice.  I checked out their website and was impressed with the variety of sizes -- you can order one of their "most popular" sizes or pretty much any combination of dimensions you can cream up -- and other options, like color treatments and retouching.  They also have a cool visualizer that shows you what the size of print you're looking at would really look like up on the wall.  Of course, being the cheap-o that I am, price is a major factor in where I shop for anything.  I am happy to say that Easy Canvas Prints pricing is extremely competitive, even with some of the sale prices I've seen on other sites.  Even better -- if you become a fan of Easy Canvas Prints on Facebook, you can get 50% off AND free shipping.  I hate to pay for shipping, so that's a big plus for me.

I have to say, I was impressed by the service team as much as the print itself!  After I uploaded my file to their website, there was some problem with it.  They let me know right away and worked with me to make sure that my canvas looked exactly the way I wanted it -- even though it was over the Labor Day weekend!  I don't think the people I was working with even knew I was reviewing the product; they are just awesome like that.

Shortly thereafter, my canvas arrived, and I am genuinely impressed with it!  The color is what strikes me the most -- some wrapped canvases are a little muted, but the colors in this one are very true to life.  The texture is beautiful as well, and the detail is crisp and clear.  In fact, as many times as I've looked at this photo, I had never noticed that Sam is wearing a wristband until I looked at this canvas print!  So glad THAT made it into our family photos...

Conclusion:  I will definitely be looking to Easy Canvas Prints again when I'm ready to print more pictures on canvas.  Check them out, and let them know I said hello! :)

P.S.  Many thanks to FotoFly in Draper, Utah for taking this adorable photo of my kids.  Seriously, people -- if you need great family photos but don't want to spend a gazillion dollars, that is the place to go!

Family Art Collage Wall

Hello again!  Today I want to show you my latest project, which solved two big problems at once.  One: what to do with mountains of kids' artwork.  Two: What to do with the very tall wall on the staircase landing in our entryway.  My kiddos love love love to create, so I always have a stack that needs showing off.  So I wanted to create a special place where we could display it.  I needed something that would be easy to rotate.  But when the boys and I worked on special pieces to contribute to our church art show, I knew those needed a permanent home.  Thus the idea for the collage wall was born.

I blogged about my mixed media piece here.

My mother-in-law made me this cute clipboard...

I may or may not have had to replace one of the clips and the word "artist" because my little "helpers" decided to disassemble it before I could put it up...

And that got me thinking about other ways I could display the kids' art by just clipping it up, but I wanted something that would really give their artwork some presence and show that we are proud to display it in our home.  Then (hooray!) I found these two enormous empty frames at a yard sale for $2 each.  They were a really gross maroon color, but a few coats of spray paint later they look fantastic.  My awesome friend Kelli contributed some chicken wire, which I attached to the back of the frame with a staple gun.

I let the kids decorate plain mini clothespins for attaching the artwork.

The kids really loved picking out their favorite pieces for our first display.  They did most of the cool projects they picked in the art classes they took this spring with my friend April Staker.  If you are at all local, I totally recommend her classes for kids -- the boys learned so much and grew to love creating so much more!

This is really an ideal solution for displaying lots of sizes and types of artwork.  They can either put in several small pieces, as shown above, or one really big piece.  They love to color on those big paper rolls from IKEA, so we have a lot of those.  As an extra bonus, hanging up those big pieces makes it really easy to take a good picture of it, so we can save the picture and eventually lose all the giant pieces of paper. :)

Oh, and here's a funny story.  I cut this vinyl saying out and put it up, but it just didn't seem right somehow.  It took me two days to realize that that wasn't what I meant to put up at all!  I meant to do "Home is where the he{art} is" but somewhere between my brain and setting it up on the computer it got switched to this.  What do you think?  Lucky mistake, or should I switch it?

Hanging this collage in the stairwell worked out perfectly because I can hang things both higher and lower than  I really could on a normal wall because you start out either below or above the whole thing anyway.  I have lots of room to expand, especially above, as we create more special pieces that we want to keep up more permanently.

Thanks for stopping by!

The World's Ugliest Dresser

When Eliza was officially potty trained enough that I felt confident getting rid of the changing table, I went in search of an awesome dresser to make over.  Now, I have a serious love affair with yard sales, and I envisioned finding the perfect vintage dresser, something with great lines or fun details that just needed sprucing up.  But I was striking out in a major way, in spite of the insane multitude of yard sales that sunny Saturday morning.

Then I pulled up to a yard sale and saw this:

Cue horror movie music now...

I thought, 'That has got to be the world's ugliest dresser.'  I had to check it out.  It was a rock solid dresser in very nice condition, but man was it ugly!  No details, no pretty girly lines, just laminate, not anything that I had envisioned.  But the owner did say he'd let me have it for $10.  I told him I'd pass and went along my merry way.  Further searching yielded no results, however, and I could not get the Ugly Dresser off my mind.  It was like a challenge, calling out for me to try to turn it into something beautiful.  Plus I'm really cheap, and the thought of getting such a nice quality (you know, for laminate) piece for so cheap, which I then wouldn't feel too bad if I totally ruined, was just too enticing to resist.

So I brought it home and started mulling over ways to make it awesome.  I had a few different ideas, but nothing really clicked until I thought "STRIPES!"  (It was actually surprising that wasn't my first idea, since I have a major obsession with stripes right now.)  A few coats of paint and some hardware later, here is the new dresser!

This project took a little time, but was not complicated.  Here is how I did it:

1.  Clean all surfaces really well.  Give them a light sanding (just to rough up the laminate surface a little bit).  Wipe down to remove dust from sanding.


2.  Apply a coat of Zinsser 1-2-3 Bullseye Primer.  *This is the key for painting laminate furniture!*  This primer is made specifically to coat slick surfaces like laminate and give the paint something to hold on to.  It is seriously awesome stuff.  An important thing to remember, though, is to not overload your brush or roller -- the primer is really thick and sticky but dries fast, so if you get globs of it on your piece it will be hard to smooth them out.  Let dry for a minimum of 1 hour.

Don't mind that little nightstand -- I just decided to paint that as long as I had my supplies out.

3.  Paint base color.  Mine is Behr Bleached Linen, because I had nearly an entire can leftover from doing my kitchen.

4.  This is the only tricky part.  Decide how many stripes you want, and divide the width of your drawer by that many.  I wanted 13 stripes (7 pink, 6 white).  Try not to bang your head on the driveway in frustration as you try to figure out how to equally divide 31 1/8" by 13.  Well, that's not difficult -- the answer is 2.394230.  But they don't make a mark for that on most rulers.  I probably marked and remarked the stripes on the first drawer 10 times trying to get it worked out.  I finally figured out that if I made the two pink outside stripes 1/8" wider, the rest could all be the same.  Unfortunately, unless you're some kind of crazy math-or-measuring genius, it's probably a matter of trial and error.  Once I finally did figure it out, it was very simple and fast to do the rest of the drawers (it took me the better part of an hour to figure it out, but only about 15 minutes to mark and tape).  I used a pencil to mark where the stripes should be at the top and bottom of each drawer, then rolled painter's tape for each stripe.

5.  Put all drawers back into the dresser to see if they actually line up.  Do a little happy dance when they do. Then be glad it's 6 in the morning and none of your neighbors are out to see you.  Wonder if it's so cute with the green stripes that maybe you should just leave it that way...

Just a note -- when I went to paint the stripes, I ended up putting another piece of tape in between each set so that the white stripes were completely covered.  It saved my sanity because I didn't have to worry about pink paint getting onto the white stripes.

6.  Using your base coat paint, paint over the edges of the tape.  This will seal the edges of your tape, making sure that you won't get any bleed when you do your stripe color.

7.  Paint your stripes!

8.  Remove tape.  Do a HUGE happy dance (complete with fist pump and "Whoohoo!") when you see how awesome your stripes look.  Then realize that it is now the afternoon and several neighbors are out in their yards, but hey -- they already knew you were weird.

9.  Add hardware.  I forgot to take a picture of this step, but it was very simple.  I made myself a cardstock template the exact size of the pink stripe, then found the center of it by folding it in half both ways (super scientific, I know).  I laid that template on the pink stripe, then drilled a hole through the center.  Repeat for all drawers, then screw in hardware.  Easy peasy.

Voila!  The World's Ugliest Dresser turned super fabulous on the cheap.  My cost for this was:
Dresser: $10
Paint and brush: $10 (Thanks to a Groupon for Kwal paint), with TONS of paint leftover for other projects.
Hardware: $12 (I got these at Hobby Lobby -- they have knobs 50% off very frequently)

So don't pass up a good deal just because it looks ugly -- a little creativity and elbow grease can transform anything!

To see the rest of the room, check out this post.

I'll be linking up to these great parties!

Eliza's Big Girl Room

Goodbye, sweet baby nursery...

This summer keeps getting busier and busier, but for some reason I have recently been overcome by an unquenchable desire to re-do Eliza's room.  Do any of you suffer from the same problem -- no matter how much is on the to-do list, if you get an idea in your head you can't let it go until it's done?

I've actually been wanting to do something cute and girly since she was born and I've done bits and pieces of it over the past couple of years, but something about getting her potty training and her approaching 3rd birthday made it imperative to give her the room she never knew she always wanted...  (Click to enlarge pictures.)

Hello, big girl room!

It began with that banner over the window, which I made for her first birthday party using the Girl Friday collection from Cosmo Cricket.  I knew that would be my color inspiration for the whole room -- turquoise and pink with little hints of green.  I completely splurged (for me) on the bedding, and had such buyer's remorse after about it after that I was determined to do the rest of her room on as small a budget as possible.  I'm going to show you the whole room today, and then over the next couple of posts I'll show you the blow by blow of a few of my favorite elements.

I think the most eye catching element is the tree mural:

I wanted something to break up and lighten up all that turquoise.  My first thought was big wide vertical stripes, because I'm kinda obsessed with stripes at the moment.  But since I had already done stripes on the dresser (and didn't want the room to look like a circus tent), I opted for a large-as-life tree.  I wanted something graphic but still organic -- what do you think?  I'll post details on my tree-painting saga in another post. (You can check out that post here.)

My favorite little bit about the tree is this little "carving" I put in:

And also the pretty pink bird cage and birdie (which you may recognize from my blog header -- yeah, it's pretty much my favorite graphic I've ever created.  And it's available in my etsy shop if you're interested!)

The other big eye-catcher in the room is this dresser:

Which I bought at a yard sale for $10 when it was officially The World's Ugliest Dresser.  A little paint and voila -- fabulousness!  I will be doing a complete tutorial with pictures for this one in my very next post.  You have to come back just to see how ugly this puppy started out.  The round mirror was another ugly yard sale find, made much happier with a few coats of white spray paint.  The cute pink flowery thing on top is a felt flower ball, for which you can check out a great tutorial here.

Other happy details:

Some friends of ours kindly gave us the pretty girly bed, which was in good shape except for the brass knobs, which were pretty beat up.  I painted them with the same pink from the dress re-do.  My husband thought I was insane, but I LOVE the little bit of whimsy they add:

And every girl needs some big puffy flowers over her bed, right?

And here's a close-up of the banner, which I blogged about in greater detail here:

Eliza may not have ever told me she wanted a new room, but she love love loves it.  Her favorite part is the birdie on the wall, and she really loves the hanging poof balls.  Plus, there is plenty of room for dancing:

And jumping on the bed:

A big girl room for a suddenly so big girl!  (If you know any way to stop her getting big so fast, please let me know!)

A few notes:  The color on the wall is Behr Eucalyptus Leaf, mixed at 3/4 strength by the nice man at Kwal.  If you'd like to get a better look at the cute little table and chairs, I blogged about them here.

May Flowers

My sweet hubby gave me a pretty bunch of tulips for Mother's Day.  He knows me so well -- tulips are my fave!  I decided to try something different than my usual plunk-in-a-vase arrangement this time around, and stole my favorite vintage canning jars from the tops of my cupboards.  I grouped them on a pretty tray with some nice spring-y moss and it just makes a lovely centerpiece for our table.  I like it so much I might have to keep flowers in them all the time!

 Which means, of course, that I'll have to be on the lookout for more pretty vintage canning jars.  Darn...

My happy kitchen :)

A few months ago I posted here about some makeovers I had been doing around the house in an effort to get it spiffied up to sell.  I showed you how I transformed our kitchen from this:

Snoozeville, right?  To this:

SO much better!  I love how bright and happy it turned out.  I promised then that I would do another post about the decorations above my cabinets, so I when I saw the kitchen linky party over at Love Stitched I thought now would be a good time to actually do it!

I tried a bunch of different things before I did all this.  I had live plants up there for a long time -- what a mess!  I tried some pretty grapevine stuff... well, it was pretty in my head.  Then nothing (as in the first pic) for a long time because I just couldn't figure out what to do.  Then at last, I was inspired!

First, some closer-up pics...

Starting from the left, here is what you'll see.  The plates are definitely the big-impact pieces in my kitchen.  I wanted to add plates as bright pops of color, but I did NOT want to pay the $8 and up for the plates in great colors with fun details that I had been finding.  I found these plates at DI (our local thrift store) for 50 cents - $1 each and spray painted them!  I added paper from the Cosmo Cricket "Early Bird" line -- the colors (red, yellow, and turquoise) were perfect for the vision I had in mind.  (Keep scrolling down for a tutorial.)  I've also been working on my old glass jar collection every time I go to DI, and I filled a few with fake fruit and another with styrofoam balls that I covered in strips of the same patterned paper as the plates.  And see that funky pitcher way over on the right?  My brother brought me that guy as a present from Hungary!  Even though he really doesn't match the style of everything else, he's a permanent fixture in my kitchen!

Oh, and I really love this sign above my pantry.  It's from Adorn-It.



This lineup is a mixture of thrifting (canisters), deal shopping ("Blessed" sign for $2.50 at the Scrapbook Expo), As-Is (white enamel pitcher from IKEA for $2), hand-me-downs (that little red baking powder container came from my grandma's house), and one "splurge" -- the awesome turquoise strainer came from a little consignment shop and was a whopping $20.  Don't laugh -- that's the limit of my budget for one piece and I felt totally luxuriant buying it.  :)

Oh, see those glass tiles above?  Those are cheap little frames from IKEA.  They used to be on our living room walls, but I just cut paper to fit and hung them above the stove for a very cheap backspash-ish idea.  I cut the birds out of red vinyl and adhered them to the glass.  I left room for a vinyl phrase in between the rows, but I still haven't hit on quite the right words.

Mostly more plates here, but I also wanted to show you the cool cauldron.  That was a wedding gift from Dan's aunt.  It is really heavy iron.  At Halloween, of course, it takes center stage in the decor, but right now it's the home of the red rooster I bought at TJ Maxx because I have a weakness for polka dots...

**Just a note -- after I took these pictures, I was freaking out a little bit about how white the cabinets were.  But I didn't want to go all crazy with glazing or anything because I wanted to keep it clean.  I took some 60 grit sandpaper and did just a little distressing on all the edges, which helped a little, then I went over everything with a coat of rub-on poly.  Magic!  Just adding that extra layer really toned down the brightness and it looks just like I envisioned now.  Here's a picture -- I couldn't replicate the lighting conditions, so hopefully you can at least get an idea:

Thanks for hanging in there!  Now, a brief tutorial about spray-painting plates so you can create your own custom awesomeness!

1.  Go to the thrift store and dig through stacks of plates.  Don't worry what color they currently are, or what hideous patterns they might be sporting.  You are looking for shape and texture.  I found some with really cute scalloped detailing or pretty flowers or fruit shapes around the borders.
2.  Clean the plates really, really well.
3.  When they're dry, give them a coat of spray primer.  Repeat as necessary to cover aforementioned hideous patterns:

In this picture, all but those awesome sunflower plates are already primered up.  Those babies took several coats to cover. 

4.  When the primer is completely dry, spray paint away!  As always, quick, light coats are the way to go.  But you might be impatient like me and prefer to blast them in heavy coats, in which case you will get some dripping and such, but you won't care because they're going up on top of your cabinets and no one is going to look that close... oops...

5.  Add paper to centers if desired. At this point you could mod-podge over the whole thing to give it a more finished/cohesive look, but I wanted to be able to easily re-paint and change out the paper if I decide to do something different in the kitchen.

So there you have it!  All these little touches make my kitchen happy, and that makes me happy every time I see it. :oD  Thanks for looking!


And no, it's not really that clean 99.9999% of the time...

Easy Nativity Centerpiece

We all know how crazy schedules can be during the holidays, so I really love a timesaver -- especially something that is quick and easy but still looks fantastic.  The ladies in our church congregation were getting together for a lovely Christmas dinner and asked for volunteers to decorate and set the tables, and I wanted to put together something that was classy and elegant, but not too hard to transport.  Solution?  The Christmas Village cartridge from ScrapbookPal.com!

I love nativity scenes -- just a sweet reminder to keep Christ as the reason for the season, right?  I cut the Baby Jesus at 5 1/2", Mary at 6", and Joseph at 8".  Then I gathered up some Christmas decorations from elsewhere in the house to put together the rest of the centerpiece -- an amaryliss, an apothecary jar full of ornaments, and a silver-colored charger with spanish moss to serve as a base for my nativity figures.  The red fabric is actually a twin sheet artfully folded, and the striped fabric is just a long strip of material.  The green runner I got on clearance at IKEA for 99 cents. 

Making this little centerpiece set my wheels turning about all sorts of handy reasons you might need a really portable nativity scene.  Do you have a loved one in the military or maybe away at college?  Maybe you're not in a position to buy a fancy nativity scene or you just don't have any room to store decorations through the year?  These pretty figures can be tucked into an envelope until next year, or you could just cut more out next year.

Many blessings to all this beautiful Christmas season! 

House Before and Afters

We put our house up for sale almost two months ago, and boy, this market is rough!  We don't have a lot of equity, so we decided to make some changes that would be low budget but hopefully high impact.  I thought you might like to see my two biggest projects!

Project #1 -- The Master Bathroom
I really wish I had taken a true before picture, while the walls were still a gross hospital-gown-green color.  I painted that back when we first moved in and hated in ever since, but I was always too lazy to repaint (plus I could never trust myself to pick the right color!).  Before we listed the house I painted it the same tan as our bedroom, but then it was SOOOOO boring.  It actually made our boring ugly we-had-no-money-for-upgrades-when-we-built-this-house cabinets look even worse, probably because now you had nowhere else to look...

Before:

After:

Biggest impact is definitely painting the cabinetry.  It seriously looks like a million bucks compared to what was there before.  I also framed out the mirror, following the tutorial here.  We replaced the ugly mini-blinds with pretty honeycomb shades, and I made super basic toile valances.  My favorite score?  The light fixture was $17.49 at NPS Store, a big overstock/scratch-and-dent warehouse place in Salt Lake City.  The shades were ugly and one of them was broken, so I spent another $12 to replace them with these pretty seeded glass shades.  I even got the lightbulbs at IKEA for 29 cents a box.  Oh, how I love a deal. 

Project #2 -- Repainting the Kitchen Cabinets
I have been wanting to do this for YEARS, but the hubs was not a fan of the idea until he saw the impact in our master bathroom.  Then he realized that yes, I was right and we did, in fact need to transform the ugly cabinets downstairs as well. 

Before:

After:

Since we wanted light cabinets and the walls were white, I first had to repaint our whole main floor.  Let me tell you -- the color "Harmonious Tan" from Behr is decidedly green, but it's a very nice green!  It's what I would have picked as a green had I not been completely scared away from green by my disastrous previous experience (see bathroom history above...).  I then scrubbed up the cupboards really well, gave them a light sanding, and went to town on the refinishing.  I LOVED the look of this kitchen redo, so I followed her instructions for adding the beadboard wallpaper to the insets.  I'm not in love with the color of my cabinets -- I think the "Bleached Linen" (Behr) color I picked is too bright white, but it's definitely a huge improvement over what we had before.  I am in love with the stuff up above my cabinets, but that's another post for another day...

I think these projects make the house look a lot more "custom," so hopefully the buyers out there will realize they are just dying to move right in!