Monthly Archives: May 2012

do what you pin: a tassel keychain

So rather than just pinning every pretty thing I see on Pinterest, I’ve started tackling some of my favorite projects. First up this tassel keychain. Being an Interior Designer gives you lots of access to lots of samples. I have a very colorful stack of leather swatches lying around that have been begging me to create something out of them. I always always lose my keys in my purse and a tassel keychain would be the perfect solution.

The supplies were mostly items I had lying around the house, aside from the brass keyring I picked up at the local hardware store. I like the closure on it because it’s easy to snap onto my keys without breaking a nail. I know that sounded a lot more diva than I intended it, but you know what I mean. I decided to use two coordinating colors of leather for my tassel. I chose a fun citron for the main body of the tassel with a small accent of mint.

First I cut a 3″ x 6″ piece in the main color, and marked a line across the top about 1/2″ down where my fringe would stop.

Carefully I cut teeny tiny strips up to the line I had marked to create a nice fringe. The smaller the strips the harder they are to cut, but the better they’ll look in the end. Trust me! My swatches had holes punched in them and the manufacturer’s name embossed, but I worked around it, knowing the hole punch would be on the inside of my tassel.

Once all of your strips are cut, it’s time to cut a small 1/2″ x 3″ piece of leather in a coordinating color for the tab.

Be sure to wrap your tab around your keychain and glue BEFORE you attach it to your fringe. If your keychain is anything like mine, this step is crucial otherwise how will you attach it when you’re done?

Place a small stripe of glue along the top of the backside of your fringe piece. Attach your tab at one end and begin tightly rolling your fringe piece around your tab. Be sure to use a strong glue for this, you don’t want it slipping around. I chose Aleene’s quick-dry tacky glue. I use this stuff for EVERYTHING. If it can hold porcelain tile on a finish board, it can do anything.

Now to cover that little line you drew, and to hide any imperfections in cutting cut a small strip long enough to wrap around your tassel. Mine was 1/4″ x 2″. After glueing it around your tassel take your brass nail and tap it into the strip you just added to hide the two overlapping ends. I like the little bit of bling it adds too. That’s right. Tassel has bling.

And you’re done! I even made one for my mom too :) Twinsies!

I have lots of colors left if anyone wants me to make them one. I’m selling them for $10. Let me know if you’re interested!

wedding wednesday: OMG shoes!

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First of all, I want to apologize for being MIA the past few days. I initially only planned on taking a small break for the nice long holiday weekend, but my much needed vacation and family time was cut short after waking up Monday covered in hives and swollen joints. Yay! The doctor thinks it’s some sort of severe allergic reaction to something, but there’s no way of knowing what it is. They have me on medication for the next week, but if it doesn’t clear up by tomorrow I will have to go back in and get some more thorough tests ran. Boo. So needless to say I’ve been lying low the past few days, but now that my hands look a little less like balloons I’m able to type again and can get back to this oh so neglected blog! Thanks for being patient with me. Enough medical talk, let’s cheer everyone up with.. SHOES!

So initially I didn’t care what shoes my bridesmaids wore as long as they were black. Easy enough right? Well apparently, that left the options waaaaay to vague, and rather than having to approve five pairs of shoes, I’ve decided to pick a bunch of my favorite styles out there in every price range for my girls to choose from. Something fun to go with that LBD. Here are some at the top of my list:

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

Clearly I have a thing for bows and baubles. I would die if everyone could get No. 15, but they’re Valentino and a little extravagantly priced. ;) If only! What are some of your favorite little black shoes out there?

what i wore: give a penny take a penny

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shirt {gap}, skirt {webster via target}, shoes {tory burch}, belt {target}, necklace {charming charlies}, ring {charming charlies}, earrings {tory burch}, bag {kate spade}, watch {michael kors}

Since I haven’t shared any awkward moments with you lately, I felt like last week’s incident took the cake and was definitely blog worthy. I was in the checkout line at Target during my lunch hour [you know.. the usual] and there was an older woman in front of me about to pay and be on her way. Or I thought. Her total came out to $12.01 and she handed the cashier a $20 bill. The cashier asked her if she had a penny, and the baffled woman explained that she handed her a $20 and that it was more than enough. Then the cashier said “but if you give me one penny, I won’t have to give you .99c that’s a lot of annoying change”. The woman was still confused and started digging for a penny for over five minutes. And kept asking “how much more do you need?!” So I thought I would play good samaritan for the day and give the woman a penny. It isn’t that big of a deal, people do it for me all the time, or sometimes there’s that little jar of pennies at gas stations and whatnot to use in such a situation. Target should get one of those. I handed my penny to the cashier who winked at me with a kind smile. The lady in front of me whipped around and this happened:

CRAZY: “HOW MUCH DID YOU GIVE HER!!??!!?”

ME: “Oh I just gave her a penny so that you didn’t have to dig one out, I already had it in my hand”

CASHIER: “ma’am she just gave me a penny, so now you won’t get all that change”

CRAZY: “I don’t need your help! I have my own money! I don’t want to OWE you money now! You made this very hard on me!”

ME: (flustered) “No no it’s okay it’s just a penny don’t worry about it, I was just trying to help..”

CRAZY: “WELL I DON’T NEED YOUR HELP I’M PERFECTLY CAPABLE OF PAYING FOR MY OWN THINGS!”

Then she finally found a penny in her purse to give to me and yelled “SEE? I told you I had money! Now here! I don’t want to owe you anything!”

After she left the totally baffled cashier looked at me with sad eyes saying “wow you really don’t know who to be nice to these days”. It kind of made me feel better, but I wad kind of shaken up over the the whole drive back to work. I thought I was just doing my duty as a friendly neighbor and helping her out only because people have done WAY nicer things to me in the past [Dear college roommate, Remember when we ran out of gas in Claire, TX and had to push my car the rest of the way to Lubbock, but some nice fisherman and his son drove us to the nearest gas station and bough us a tank of gas saying "I would hope that someone would do the same for my daughter"? Now THAT was a good samaritan!] so it wasn’t a big deal at all. Weird. The moral of this story is that buying this skirt was totally worth the crazy.

Have you ever gotten yelled at for helping someone? It doesn’t feel good.

wedding wednesday: DIY calligraphy

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After posting photos our Save The Dates, a lot of people commented on my “amazing penmanship” or “beautiful calligraphy”, well guess what? I faked it. Are you totally disappointed now? There are a lot of ladies out there with incredible everyday handwriting or mad calligraphy skills. I for one, am not one of those ladies. My everyday handwriting is okay, it’s sort of a mixture between cursive and print which allows me to be a note taking fool. Thanks college! My parents both make fun of my handwriting saying I can only get three words to a line of paper. Which is probably true.

My handwriting is definitely not handwritten invitation worthy, so I thought, “why don’t I just find a cool scripty ~~font~~ typeface and print them all out? It would save time and hand cramps! But after reading my Emily Post’s guide to wedding etiquette book cover to cover I knew this wasn’t an option. As I mentioned here, all formal invitations or announcements must be handwritten. It makes them more personal. And I’m all about making things feel personal, so I had to come up with something! Derek’s poor mother tried to teach me how to use caligraphy pens, but I was seriously calligraphy challenged. It felt like I was learning to write all over again. I should also mention that I hold a pen like a toddler, and that calligraphy doesn’t allow for such cave man-esque behavior. So I gave up.

After scrolling through all of my downloaded typefaces, I had an idea! What if I print out the address very lightly and trace it with a fancy pen? My years of art classes and model building reminded me that I have a very steady hand. Perfect! So I typed up everyone’s addresses into a Pages document using their #10 envelope template.

I chose HaloHandletter as my main typeface, and because I don’t like the way scripted numbers look I decided to use Futura Std Light for a more modern number. I think they ended up balancing each other out quite nicely, if I do say so myself! I also made the executive decision to place all apartments, townhomes, and condos on a separate line, while also putting all zip codes on their own line and spacing out each number. Because names and street addresses can be very “wide” on an envelope, I thought that this helped it look a little more uniform.

I printed them out using a medium grey text rather than black so that I could barely see them to trace over. I initially used a light grey which looked dark on screen, but once I printed it out it was completely invisible! So medium grey worked best for me, but it honestly just depends on your printer. After running all of the envelopes through I flipped them around in order to print the return address on the back of each envelope flap. I thought about handwriting this part too, but I decided that printing it would make the envelopes look more custom.

Once that was all said and done it was time to start tracing. I was so nervous about this part, that I tested it out on a few scrap envelopes first. I actually tried out several different pens to see which flowed better, was smoother, didn’t bleed, looked nicest, etc. I ended up settling on an old favorite #05 Micron pen from my early mornings in Architectural Delineation class. It was definitely a challange at first, and I had to really take my time on each letter.

At first I had planned on maybe doing 20 or so envelopes a night until I was done, but as I got used to the way each letter was shaped and connected to the next letter, I was zipping through these like it was my real handwriting! I even stopped to see if maybe my handwriting had morphed into this new beautiful version, and tested it out without a template to trace. It was close but no cigar. I still badly needed the template as a guide. Darn!

Within a couple of hours my hand was numb and all 75 of my envelopes were complete! I had such fun with this method that I can’t wait to try it out on our formal wedding invitations too!

the dark side of the room

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My parents [and cherubs] are coming in town this weekend for a long five day weekend, so Derek and I have a bunch of projects to tackle first to make our new place a little more inviting. Sunday night we felt a little ambitious and decided to paint the wall opposite of the bed a moody navy blue. Here is the floor plan for a little refresher:

It was a very tight space to work in [there's about 18" in between the dresser and bed] so after some finagling we were able to remove the drawers and turn the dresser on it’s side. A little history on that dresser. I scored it for $40 at a flea market and it’s heavy as crap! Solid wood, dovetail joinery. It was such a steal! It was originally powder blue and missing some hardware, but after a fresh coat of paint and some new pulls we were back in business! Anyway! Here is a before shot of the room. Excuse the messes.

And yes we’re definitely in the market for a new “grown up” laundry hamper. I’ve had this baby since my Freshman year of college! We bought the same Valspar primer + paint that we used in this project because we loved how it only took one coat, and with such a dark color we knew we’d be painting for days! We also decided to slap on one coat of primer first, just to be safe. The walls of our apartment are a semi-gloss finish [yuck!] and I know from past experience to never try to paint over a semi-gloss wall without priming it first. Once again I was in charge of cutting in and Derek was in charge of rolling. Except for when ladders were involved, so Derek also cut in the ceiling portion as well.

Another side story: we’ve always called our paint edger “the kitten” because when it rolls along the wall the wheels squeak and make “mew” noises like a kitten. Not a cat. It’s definitely a kitten. Also the pad on it is uber soft like a kitten. So the name just stuck. To learn more about the exact tools/methods we use to paint go here.

Here it is after one coat of primer. We were itching to get that navy up there because it was looking a little black in the can.

Luckily it went on like butter and was a nice deep blue, and not as dark as we feared, so that was a nice surprise. We ended up having to do two coats but we expected that. It definitely beat five coats!

Here is the final product, although the above photo is more true to color. We just love how the white doors and switch covers pop against it.

I have big plans for this wall involving about 40 white frames. We have a pile of frames of all different sizes taking up some primo real estate in the dining room, so I’ll hopefully be hanging them tonight! Have any of you painted a room a dark color outside of your comfort zone? Did you fall victim to 1,000 coats? Do you have weird names for your painting tools? Oh that’s just us? Awesome.