UPDATE: Lampshades

The lampshades are finished!  I still need to clean up the acrylic bases and decide if I will embellish with seashells, something else, or not at all on the bases and the lampshades.  But for now I'm calling them done!

BEFORE

 (thank you dear mother-in-law for gifting us these lamps)


AFTER
(Forgive me dear Mother-in-law for always changing that which you are gifting to us as evidenced in the very beginning of this post from June 2010)

The shades are much closer in color than they appear in this picture, though there is less of the teal to them and more of the blue tones.  But I love them just the way they are!
Enjoy your day and do something crafty!

denise/deBRAT

Making plans...

With the Labor Day weekend and our departure date to the MB condo just around the corner I am busily making plans for what we will be taking up in the truck.  Our truck, a Ford Ranger is not a very comfortable ride even just to my parent's house an hour and a quarter away.  So the 7 hours journey to MB is a horribly uncomfortable ride.   So I want to make sure we fit as much as we want to transport up there any time soon in this trip! 

We will be stopping at Ikea on Thursday to buy the three shelves, two which will be horizontally placed to become much needed benches and one 2 drawer insert and one 1 drawer insert to test out how they perform.

I need to sew the three cushion covers for the bench in the manly master bedroom and one leftover foam piece for the bench in the all-bed-bedroom. I need to paint and attach the two lampshades for the livingroom up there and clean up the acrylic bases to the lamp bases.  I need to find and pack my glue gun so I can glue on some seashells to the acrylic bases if I decide I like the looks of them.  I want to use shells collected on the beach there so I will be collecting, boiling and drying those up there, if I decide that is the way to go.

Around all of that will be the job search process, the house chores on thursday morning and packing for the trip.

Lots to do so I must be off to do it!

be safe, be dry, be happy

Traveling light

Due to the 2011 secret santa swap on the yahoo group 25weeks a lot of banter has been going on regarding gifts etc.  In answer to a post I happened to mention that I use this when I leave the house.  I travel light now!  Very light!  a picture is below of my Droid X2 in the lovely leather case I got on ebay tucked partially inside a water bottle carrier I made from this free online pattern along with my large sized Maggie (Joan Hawley Lazy Girl Designs) which has my wonder wallet tucked into it and a lip balm. Of course, I have my keys!  If hubby is buying and driving (my obviously PREFERRED method of travel. I just grab the water bottle carrier with the lip balm in the bottom and the cased Droid X2 on top of it.

No affiliation to either the bestsources store on Ebay or Joan Hawley with Lazy Girl Designs or Nivea maker of my lip balm.  Just happy with products.

Made of pink ribbon fabric in honor of my beloved best friend Joanna Fritz-Reed who lost her battle with breast cancer 5 days before her 34th birthday, May 19, 2006.

shades- a working solution

I love that I have a stash of fabric.  I love that it is sometimes a bit more varied than just plain old quilting cottons.  And today I'm especially grateful that I had just over a yard of something for drapery backing.  either rain no stain or something like that.  it is a cream type canvas and it is heavy.  and when i laid the pattern for the shade replacement on it, it would fit twice!  So then I pondered that a for a few days.

Today I dragged that heavy drapery roll with the just over one yard of canvas type fabric out of the garage fully expecting to cut out the two pieces I needed.  Except... ut oh...you might think... except that i noticed there was a piece that was about 12" square that was sort of extra.  So I cut that off.  I cut that piece in exact halves planning to check to see if it would shrink in water as the rest of the fabric is rather dirty looking.  And then I let it soak for an hour in what started out as very hot water.  Well that fabric was hard pressed to get officially wet through and through.  So I wrung it out and laid it on a paper towel and let it begin to dry. 

In the meantime, I got out the newly remembered Neocolor II pastels watercolor sticks that I got for Christmas last year.  I had recalled those and dug them out while I was pondering the discovery of the canvas piece of fabric the past couple of days.  I had done a bit of research on how to use them on fabric.  I knew that they could be used that way because that is how I justified asking for them for Christmas.  If I found I did not like to do watercolor painting, or if I was just no good at it, I could always use them on fabric .  Clever I am for justifying a new craft don't you think?

I then picked out 5 of them that were close in color to the paint colors i'd used on the lamp bases and began to roughly use them on the dry piece of canvas.  Then I used a very wet artist brush and tried to blend the colors together on the fabric.  NO success.  The fabric was repelling the water.  Well I finished what I had done anyway to the whole piece to see what happened later and then got up and got the wet piece out and proceeded to roughly use the wax pastels on that piece in the same manner.  Used the artist brush again and SUCCESS! 

you should be able to see from the picture below that i am indeed really close in the coloring to the already painted lamp bases.  there is a plain white terry cloth towel over the tops of the lamps and the two pieces are laid on top of that.  Wet piece on the left and dry piece on the right.

Tomorrow I will heat set the two pieces and then cut out the main piece of fabric using my pattern.

I'm sooo excited about this lovely turn of events after my disappointment at finding the best fabric for the shades and knowing it was many years old and unlikely to find 2 yards of it.

hope your day is as productive and surprisingly crafty
denise/deBRAT in Florida

Help! Perfect fabric mystery

Yesterday I posted about the bases being painted for the condo lamps.  this morning I went searching for the perfect fabric to redo the lampshades.  Well the ones I found with enough yardage did not go.  and the one absolutely perfect MADE for it i haev about 6" x 15" of it.  Certainly not enough to cover even one lampshade, let alone two.

I thought it was part of the Fossil Ferns line by Benartex but looking under current fabrics and not in the archive.

so please if you can tell me what the fabric is (on the bottom of the part hanging over the lampshade and not the National Parks -Everglades at the top of it) please let me know!  And if you have any please part with it!
It will go to a great cause... the condo lampshades redo cause.

UPDATE: lamps

If I was a clever blogger I would be linking you to a previous post where I talked about the lamps I want to redo to put in the condo.  Well, they have been prepped and spray primer coated with XLM for over a week.  Now that dear son has moved i can refocus on those lamps.  Not too mention that we are tentatively planning a trip to MB for Labor Day weekend and already planning to take the truck IF we buy the IKEA shelves i fell in love with.  So that means preparing and packing and taking all that I can in this one truck trip!  The truck is NOT a comfortable ride and when we take my Miata there is just enough room for our two overhead luggage sized bags and well, us!


So today with a 50% chance of rain I dragged out the box of Sherwin-Williams paint samples I bought and the cutest little roller kits and some oddball artist paint brushes and then of course, the single section tv dinner / vegetable trays dh is forever holding on to... and then some very old yucky work clothes  and out to the magic plastic always-set-up-now folding table.
.
the before picture


And a few of the after shots today.  One picture is of the still mauve and very LARGE shades that I will need to do something with.  When I showed hubby tonight he just did not See it even though they were right in front of his nose.  But he did think to ask if I had anymore of that fabric left.  meaning the fish fabric i used to cover the two countertop bar stools I turned from being silver and black to white and oceanic!  and the last picture is from the internet and was the inspiration for the background colors used.  ignore the turtle and any other details in it and look only at the colors themselves.  those are what I hope to paint onto the large wall in the livingroom at the condo one day.  for now, I've had a good deal of fun playing with the paint and glaze and oh I took the leftover paints and looked around with brush and one of the five frozen veggie trays in my hand looking for a place to "use up the last of it so as not to be wasteful".  Ruling out the fence as more than dh could handle looking at.  Ruling out the wall of the house but oh so wistfully.  and then what did I spy but the above ground pool!  two of the many sections created by the support posts are now painted with the left over paint!  and I sprayed them with a VERY" quick coat of krylon clear glossy too!

the painters tape is still around the metal on the top portion and around the clear acrylic bases too.  just so you know.

U-Haul (picture intensive)

Yesterday Son and I went to pick up this in the early morning.

which he proceeded to load

 until the garage looked like this

and the truck looked like this

Note: the tubs and CA King mattress and box springs are not yet in the truck.  THey are still in the livingroom

and the diningroom   (the black tubs are his, the clear ones are my fabric and yarn cleared from the garage to make room for his "cube" area to store his stuff after he graduated and came here while he continued his search for a job)

the box springs are leaning against the wall but they were previously ontop of those totes with the mattress on top.  the table was moved back and forth in that small area as we ate at it or did not eat.  three chairs were in the kitchen at this point and one in the livingroom.

above just makes me think of "the princess and the pea" fairytale.

to fit our three vehicles and the Uhaul for the loading and overnighting we borrowed our wonderful neighbor Don's left portion of his driveway.

 the vette and miata are in the driveway temporarily like above while loading the truck.  after husband arrived home from work the car trailer was now at the uhaul place so they took the poor little Ford Ranger to pick it up AND they took the vette in case they could get it on there and trailer it home that way.  Which they did AFTER son had to remove the front portion of his vette!  The part that was always scraping our driveway.  Low profile vehicle takes on a whole new meaning when you deal with a '04 gorgeous vette.

sort of viewable in the above picture.  if you knew what it looked like normally (with that wind dam that goes to barely above the road) you'd realize he is indeed missing a portion of his car right now in order to get it to....

hmmm can't read it but he's headed to Maryland and on the side of the truck is the Chesapeake Bay "did you know".  How funny is that?
In order to prevent theft of truck, contents of truck, car and car dolly and contents of car. we parked like this

it takes a list like this (room by room and shed by shed) to help you recall where you've stashed everything in your parent's house in order to make it all fit in.

It takes a bag or two of snacks to get them through the estimated 20 hours or more drive.

And at 6:46AM -son, with husband helping, began their long drive to son's new job and apartment and the beginning of his career. They look like this pic below

and me?  well the waterworks and heavy sobbing began as the truck began the turn at the end of our street.  which by the way, is nigh unto impossible to take a picture of so i have nothing but moving tail lights

and here is a decent picture of the truck and the vette on the car trailer.

Fly high my dear son!  You worked hard to be to this point in your life and we wish you all the best that life has to offer you.  Explore.  Dream.  Achieve.  Enjoy.  Love.

three weeks?!!

Oh my, I was catching up on a few of my favorite blogs today and what did i see on one of them? My blog was listed and my last post was 3 weeks ago, yikes!


So here is much ado about..... well.... three weeks.

We took a spur of the moment trip to Mexico Beach and visited with my brother, now a first time homeowner and has the distinct distinction of being the first "homesteader" in his condo development.  In other words, he lives there!  Lucky him.  He purchased it "used" and so has had the walls painted during a recent bout of rain that made the painters happy as they had been working on an outside job :)  Then after the movers still had not delivered his furniture and another batch of well-timed rain, the painters came back and did the trim and all the doors.  So now it is very apparent to me that my brother just L-O-V-E-S the color blue.  Parkwater and Let it rain blue to be exact.  I wonder what all that will look like when I get back up there as his furniture finally Arrived!  Can hardly wait to see.  Amazing how excited we can get about someone else's home purchase and all that it entails. Do you think it might be so exciting as all the work is not ours?  wink wink

We fished while we were up there and while i did not catch record number of fish or even a record size of fish i did have two good hits but did not get to see what they were as they busted the line.  My normal fishing buddies are all off at their summer residences so not much in the way of chatter time on the pier but did make friends with one guy who was visiting.  he had grown up in the area and was in town for a few days and got to do some fishing.  he also had a hit on his line that he lost.  Neither of which was a shark or ray.  They did not run like either of them anyway.

What else have we done?  Hmmm I've been knitting up on a couple of projects.  One is a double knitted soaker for the first grandbaby of dear friends of ours to be born the end of this month.  Let me tell ya, that is the last double knitted soaker I will be making.  Quite possibly it will be the last soaker double knitted or not.  It took blessed forever to knit.  And all for a wee one to wee in?  Whatever happened to just plain cloth diapers?  Oh well, the revived 60's are here with their newly adapted manners and gadgets.  What goes around, comes around.

I knew the soaker would be finished before the rest of the pre-ordered yarn arrived for the ladybug jackets for the twins so I needed a quick knit project to work on til the serano (red) yarn got here.  I opted for a scarf pattern for myself called Wisp out of the apple green silk/angora yarn my sister spun and gifted to me.  I was working along on that very nicely and suddenly found myself wanting to make apple picking hats for the twins.  I bought the yarn at Joanns  (come on why spend 8-10 dollars a skein when they may get to wear them one apple pickin' time?  And could not find an appropriate hat pattern I liked so I cast on what I felt I wanted and just kept knitting it.  As I needed to make two - twins you know - I had to write down what I did so I could make the second one.  This is resulting in a pattern that I plan to publish.  Working pattern name?  Emma Jane's Basic Hat - Apple Pickin' Time.  The first one just needs the leaves sewn on and the ends worked in and Amelia's hat is already through most of the ribbing.  If the ladybug jacket yarn does not arrive soon I'll be casting on for yet another project to work on til it arrives.  Though I do need to revisit the Wisp (when you go to this link, think only about 7" wide and long enough to do that pull thru wrap thing, not the size of the pattern) scarf for myself as I'd love to have that for those days that are just a bit chilly here in Florida.

Still job searching and the pickin's on that front are mighty slim indeed.  Youngest son leaves on the 12th to his first non-college digs for his first-ever real-life job in MD.  We are excited for him and yet, it is sad to see him go.  Each time he moves it takes a larger vehicle.  I wonder if he has really made the connection thought process yet that as you age so does the trail of "stuff" you lug along with you get larger and longer?

Oh I have been painting two ceramic lamps my dear mother-in-law gave us.  As they are mauve and the condo is anything but mauve, I went searching for something to paint them with.  I finally used XLM as a primer for them.  Problem?  Well, they wound up looking VERY textured.  Like sand was sprinkled on them.  Which led me to re-think the paint the bottoms white and put a darkish shade on them.  Darkish shade choice due only to the fact that the existing shades are also mauve AND huge!  To buy new shades would certainly defeat the purpose of using gifted lamps so.... I am in deep thought and internet research over potential coverings for the shades.

The lamp bases were nearly going to become lighthouses but sort of gave up on that idea I think.  Then with the sandy texture I saw beach sand with some real MB sand adhered to them and shells etc.  Probably not, but not entirely ruled out either.

While I was at Sherwin Williams for the XLM and other spray on paint ("krylon fusion" supposedly does ceramic items) I decided to research the colors for my ultimate dream wall mural for the tv wall in the condo livingroom in MB.  We have 5 resin fish hung there right now and well I want a mural of underwater.  BUT murals are not that large and how to make the cut off of hte largest size I can get make sense is not working.  Not too mention that an underwater mural will cost upwards of $1000 and still not cover the entire wall.... well just not happening.  So I am back to the paint-it-yourself technique using glaze to make the wall look like underwater and to embellish the rest of it with the 5 fish already existing and some sort of painted seaweed and coral possibility.  Enter in the chosen colors for the water look and the glaze and finding out that you can purchase color samples in QT containers.  So that is what I did.

now let's revisit the lamps.  oh, perhaps you have known me long enough to figure out my next statement.  As i do not have any scrap wallboard around to test the paint samples for the undersea project on, I'm thinking.... dh would interject "ut oh" at this point.  I'm thinking why not..... test the paint color samples of the undersea wall mural idea on the lamps?  Much smaller place to test.  Would give me a good idea of how long the glaze keeps the different areas wet for blending in the next color of paint.  And worse comes to worse?  I just sand them down a bit and spray the tomato red version of Krylon Fusion on them.  Well spray it on multiple times to cover up the undersea thing.

And what will tie in the lamps to the wall mural?  Why the decals i found online of fish!  And reasonable too.
For instance this sailfish  or this mahi mahi .  The first one is probably too large for the lamp perspective wise but also the lamps have a raised ridge that goes vertically which will be challenging to sticking a fish decal onto my undersea mural.  that raised ridge also had a great deal to do with my choosing to not turn them into lighthouses as I'd be battling the look of stripes over ridges not to mention bleedage of paint colors even when masked off.  So you see I've been busy creatively lately and in many different ways than in the past and enjoying this burst of creativity in my life once more.

Gosh not even a picture?  Okay I'll go find my favorite sunset picture from the spur of the moment MB trip and leave you drooling over that image.