Loosen Up My Buttons table

One of my favorite things to hear when I pick up the phone is "I found something I need to give to you." People know I want their trash. It's the best.

This coffee table was one of those items, another piece salvaged for me by Lady Bird.  It was a sad, ugly piece of rubbish that had sustained water damage from being outside in the rain.  But somehow, it evolved into a thing of beauty, a conversation piece, and a labor of love.  I had a hard time painting the thing black.  After I had put on a coat of white primer, it looked so clean, so uniform, that I almost couldn't do it.  And it looked so good in all black that I didn't know how I could mar that in order to make it special, only giving in to the idea of covering the top in buttons because the surface of the table is a little warped.  But look at her now!

Each button was individually hand-glued onto the surface of the table.  I didn't time myself, but I estimate that between primer, two coats of paint, and all the buttons, it was double-digit hours of work, for sure.  The final step, covering the top in a clear, even coat of lacquer, is yet to come (that stuff is expensive).

This is perhaps my favorite piece to date.  Do I always say that?

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Shameless Self Promotion

So I'm in a swimsuit contest somehow.  It wasn't planned, but sometimes you have to ask yourself, do I want to be someone who has appeared in a swimsuit contest or someone who has not?  You can vote for me here and maybe I'll win $500 and bragging rights until the end of time.   Or you can vote for somebody else, just as long as you don't remember to do it every day.

And GO MAVS!

A Pineapple for Chance

My friend Chance is sort of into pineapples.  Yes, this is Chance for whom I made the Same-Same Picture Frame.  Chance is intoxicatingly specific, which translates to very easy to make things for - or at least very easy to come up with ideas for.  I'd say he's most well-known as the purveyor of the pineapple, and so I made him one.  

That's the Purveyor of the Pineapple in white,
my beloved Markasaurus Rex is in blue,
and of course, yours truly on the left.

I cut about a hundred 1" diamonds from an array
of different hues of yellow and green, and
layered them from the bottom up, filling in blanks as I saw them.

Rainbow Paper Flower Wreath

I'm so not over my paper flower kick.  In fact, this has only piqued my interest more.  New favorite-est thing I've ever made?

This was actually a wooden picture frame that never really panned out.  I found it at Walmart months ago for $4, and I never could quite make it look as good as I wanted.  Finally, that has happened.  This is another piece for my rainbow-themed studio/office at the new apt.

These flowers come from this Paper Flower Tutorial, and I glued them to the frame using a hot glue gun.  I ended up needing many more flowers than I originally thought, but isn't that always the truth?  I could have made the surface area more crowded or made the flowers into looser rolls to cover more.  That would probably also make the colors show more, although in the pictures it looks like the colors are showing more than it seems like they are in real life.  I can't wait to see this hanging up!

Tons more pictures:

Rainbow Alphabet Wall Art

So Mom got me a Cricut for my birthday, and I finally had some time to make something using it (other than the Quilt bulletin board)!  I'm a little bit obsessed with rainbows and the color spectrum lately - ever since I've decided to use them as the color scheme for my studio at the new apt.  This combines several of my loves, including typography and a reused frame I got for next to nothing at a garage sale.

Yep, those are paint samples from Walmart.

Lots more pictures (as always):

Yarn Wreath for Nana

Nana gave me this multi-colored yarn, so I made her something
out of it.

I used the ugliest frame I had (so what if I sort of capitalized on an excuse to get rid of that thing) and leftover felt from a project my students were working on.  It was perfectly serendipitous because I had been waiting for an excuse to make a wreath with the yarn, but I wasn't sure exactly which colors would be right.  When I looked down today and those 5 colors of felt (green, blue, light blue, khaki, yellow) were all that was left, I knew it was meant to be.

I love all the flowers!  If they didn't take so long, I might have made a wreath like this that I will love forever and ever with my whole heart.

Dahlia Tutorial

Rosette Tutorial

Carnation Tutorial

Inspiration Flower

Dandelion Tutorial

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Map of Mexico - Wall Art

I have a thing for maps.  I'm not sure if it's that I love what a map symbolizes - places you've been, places you want to go, places you've never heard of - or if it's just that I think the colors are pretty, but I like them.  I love art that's visually stimulating AND has meaning.  So I made this map frame collage.

4 Different Recovered Frames - 1 Map of Mexico

This  map of Mexico had been hanging out in the garage with several other random maps. Dad also loved maps, and atlases, and books (in fact I even got him a Big Book of Maps one Christmas not too long ago), and he and Mom had been on a romantic vacation to Mexico every summer for the last few years.  Mexico has a special place in the hearts of everyone in our family, I think.  We all have tons of Mexican and other Spanish speaking friends, and Tyler has a Spanish minor.  Mom and Dad worked with mainly Mexican men in landscaping, and Dad had a soft place in his heart for 'the brown man' especially.    Mexico is where we are going to spread his ashes someday, so it seemed like the perfect place to frame and put on the wall.

I cut along the center fold in order to divide the map in 4 pieces.  It was about 20" x 24", so I had to trim off some of the edges to fit it into four 8"x10" frames.  Pair with some frames I already painted black, hang in collage-like fashion, and voila!

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