Dip dyed beads (the obsession continues)

 

When I bought the wood blocks for our little scandi-blocks I also picked up a boat load of wood beads and buttons. Mainly to keep Wren busy and included in craft time that day, but in the end she didn't use up all her beads and I decided to make a little Thank You gift for a blog friend. 

You already know I love me some dip dye, but the fun of actually dipping or dying anything never seems to one of the steps. So I decided to do a quick dip on the beads.

 

The best and easiest way to dip is by watering down your paint slightly (I just used acrylic) and the unbending a paper clip to hook your beads on.

If you dip them like this you get a horizontal dip

 

or you can hook and dip them on the first bend and get a vertical dip line.

 

The other trick I found was to just leave them on the paper clip until they dried by just setting the clip across the paint bowl. 

After they were done I thought I would release my inner fifth grader and make a friendship bracelet. 

Let's just say my knotting skills have some improving to do...

 

it's not perfect, but it's perfectly cute.

I really hope my friend gets a surprise when she opens the mail!

Dip Dyed Table

 

Is your inner mermaid dying to make a break for it too after yesterday's post? Mine made a little leap for freedom on Monday when Wren and I made a day out of painting our recent finds.

My score was this $10 table and hers was a school desk my mom passed down to us (which I'll try to remember and show here soon)

 

She went with a soft purple, I went with Tropical Dream by Behr.

Since we only wanted to add a slight hue to our otherwise white items I bought the sample pot sizes. 

 

A coat of high gloss spray paint on everything, although not too thick where I planned on doing the dip dye was all the prep this project needed. Mainly just because I'm cheap and didn't feel like wasting paint.

 

My assistant was in full purple mode as we tackled this project together. She definitely commits when she decides to.

 

A little painters tape and some light brush strokes was all it took to get the dip-dyed effect. Could I actually have dipped it? I guess, but that seems like a freaking massive amount of work and paint for such a small project. Plus I imagine that to sound like a great idea until you lift the furniture out of the paint and have to deal with runs and drips everywhere. So a good brush and $5 in paint sounded more on my level. 

 

I love the subtle, not too bright color of this minty-sea foam hue.

 

 

I don't want to get too crazy, because not much would hold it's own against this rug, but a little color is creeping into here at a slow and not-too-frightening pace. Of course I still require all my basic elements to feel light and bright. But some unoffending hits of color don't seem to be throwing me off yet.

 

Have you 'dip dyed' anything yet? I have another small table I'm going to give it a go on in Wren's room I liked this one so much!

Vintage Sheet Music + Water Colors

 

Last Summer I was in a pinch when I was trying to fill a frame that I wanted out before company popped over (check out that post here) so I threw a cover sheet from some vintage music in a frame. Once upon a time I scored 3 GIANT boxes full of antique sheet music for $1 ( I was doing my best Ikea lady impression that day "START THE CAR!!!!!!!!!!!". Because I'm positive all the 70 year old men there were gonna regret missing that one. Not ). It may take me a lifetime to figure out what to do with it all but I will file that one under purchases I'll never regret!

I have since moved that framed sheet and I felt the corner it was occupying needed a little tiny hit of color. A really tiny one.

 

I got the smart idea to add a graphic in a bold color using a stamp.

 

I hate to admit it... but I kinda felt it looked bad.

Horrible actually. Not everything, just the stamps. 

 

In an attempt to salvage it I just simply watered it down and smeared things up.

I actually kind of think it looks neat now. I think it is the perfect marriage of my antique/vintage side and my clean, modern side.

 

Water colors aren't perfect and with a small dose of teal at the bottom I kind of dig it. 

 

I like the simple, soft color pallet for an otherwise neutral corner.

 

So the stamp didn't go my way... but I gave it another go on some sheet music as well. A little more color and a little more abstract.

this one I LOVE!!

What do you think, would you ever consider trying it out in your space? 

the shuffle continues

A leopard never changes his spots and neither does a Holly I guess...

I am SO happy I am not alone in my misguided Target splurge last weekend. You all made me very happy to hear that we have all been there from time to time, trying to fit a decorating square into a circle. As long as we recognize that while we love it all, we don`t necessarily bring it all home. I love Kaylan`s comment about keeping a few photos on our iphones to stay on track and I will definitely be doing that (thanks, girl!).

Now that I have a little time on my hands again I have been going full tilt on my house spruce up. It has been just over a year since WhiteBerry wound down and I am still in the midst of creating our 'true home' (anyone who works from home or has had any sort of career in furniture flipping knows what I'm talking about here!). It is the journey, not the destination, I hear. But I am excited to finally arrive.

Part of my living room update has been to find a lower, more substantial coffee table for the room. I have looked high and low, and at every price point. Nothing has jumped out at me but I did find a pair of great vintage coffee tables at a resale store for $40 last week. 

 

2 cans of high gloss spray paint were all I needed to fall in love. Here is a little glimps!

 

A couple of you were kind enough to ask what went back to Target. The pillow on the chair in the photo above and the wood frame are keepers so far, but these guys just didn't feel right for me.

But I still love them...

 

I also painted this guy over the weekend for our bedroom. He has sat in our garage for over a year and Sean gave me an ultimatum to make it happen or say goodbye during his garage purge this weekend. See what I mean? Shuffle is an understatement for what the last week has held in our house. Plus I completed the powder room makeover (more on that later this week)!

 

With the dresser heading up to our room, our slipcovered thrift store sofa came down to the kitchen nook. 

Sean has not been a huge fan of this sofa (not the concept of a sofa in our bedroom but the french legs in particular we his issue), but as soon as we set it down in here we both looked at each other and smiled. It was like it was made for this spot!

Dare I say I am looking forward to a couple lazy afternoon naps in here?

So that sums up my last few days. Hope yours have been productive and filled with pretty as well!!

Spring Animal Parade Cupcakes

 

These fun and happy cupcakes are actually a creation of Wren's and I found them so adorable that I just had to share!

If you have little people or a party on the horizon I am sure these will please everyone.

 

Our project starts with the animals. Wren and I picked up a bag of various animals at a thrift store for $2.99. Some of the animals had stripes wearing off and were ready for a new lease on life. We tossed them in the dishwasher just to get them all clean before we started painting.

 

With a few paper plates and our favorite colors of craft paint we gave each animal 3 coats. After they were dry we added a few variations to a handful like polkadots or stripes, but others we just left as is. To do the polkadots and striped we just used the blunt end of a skewer dipped in paint!

 

This is where Wren came in. We originally just planned to paint and play with the animals but she really wanted to put them on our cupcakes. I am well aware that craft paint is not edible and probably not a good idea to use on products touching your food. But for a little afternoon fun I felt it was fine. Would I leave the animals on the cupcakes for days? Probably not. For an hour or two? yeah. If you have an issue with it I am sure it would be easy enough to mount the animals on skewers with some hot glue so they don't quite touch.

To give our cupcakes a little hint of color and a lot of flavor we diced and added blackberries to a boxed white cake mix. These adorable baking cups are AMAZING because they don't brown or discolor during baking, I am a huge fan. You can find them here at Sweet Social.

All iced up, with a few nonpereils Wren stuck her favorite few animals on enough cupcakes to serve at a family dinner we had at our house.

 

To top off our creations we used our favorite stamp and made little flags on skewer sticks. A Happy Day, indeed.

 

The rest of our zoo wandering around, waiting for dessert to be served.

 

Be sure to stop by tomorrow to enter a really cute, customozed giveaway I'm hosting!

A homecoming (of sorts)....

I am feeling so fresh and renewed lately. It sounds so superficial but sometimes a change of pace, or in my case space, can put that extra little umphf in my step. 

It has a lot to do with re-calibrating my design compass. Sorry if you are confused, I think Sean is still whirling from some of the recent changes too. So let me explain. I have always LOVED white interiors. Love, love, love them. My favorite design book of all time is called Living With White by my design-hero: Atlanta Bartlett. And while I have ALWAYS loved time-worn and well loved items as well, my original vision for my home was a balance of the two (which Atlanta does exquisitely). When we bought this house it was a big house for two 24 year olds with little furniture and lots of expensive renos to do. Meaning furniture was not in the budget.

As many of you know, that is how WhiteBerry Reinvented came to be. The only way I could get this house feeling like a home was thrifting, garage sale-ing and dumpster diving for furniture I could refinish on the CHEAP! 6 months later I was doing it as a full-time job. While I always stayed true to my vision of white, our house became a constantly evolving 'show room' of pieces, coming and going as they sold and I finished new ones. Obviously I managed, and found myself enjoying the whole process (if you are a design junkie it is addicting to constantly reinvent your spaces). But as WhiteBerry wound down over the past year as I ventured on to bigger and more time consuming projects (aka Lexington and now ParkView) I took a look around and realized that while I loved every item individually my vision for a fresh, yet warm, lived- in interior was not my reality.

I know more and more moms are venturing into the painted furniture business, and if you have then you know that right now distressed furniture is HUGE. Whenever I finished new pieces the first ones to sell were always the most distressed. So before I knew it I was distressing things left and right! Which is a good thing for some people, but for me I need a little bit of that new-sparkle. Some crisp, straight lines to play off my still-insanely-loved old items. And now that we don't live in a 'showroom' I am getting back to it.

This is my homecoming. To embrace the idea of designing a room and *gasp* then live with it! So slowly, bit by bit Sean and I are tweaking a few things. Not starting from scratch, just shifting a few things in the direction we always envisioned our home to be. 

So we started with our dining room/living room. I have rambled about it endlessly here. How I have never been content in here, hence the constant work in progress. 

Just because we are finally making our space our own, it doesn't mean we can break the bank, so you know I hit the thrift store when I went looking for a new table.

I found this tacky, dated table for $45 (of course my original before shot disappeared mysteriously from my camera). It had good lines, but most importantly it has really awesome chrome legs. So I unscrewed them from the table top to save myself a ton of taping during the painting process. Thanks for the support during this project mr. garbage can!

The table was not special or all that great, in fact it is what I call a 'particle board special' with plastic veneer. The lesson here is you don't always need to buy solid wood furniture to paint, so long as the veneer is in good shape and you use a paint that adheres to plastic. For this table I just used a can of krylon spray paint.

30 minutes and $8 of spray paint later this is what the outcome was. I left it in the Garaga

 to 'cure' for a few days then we hauled her in and used a little stainless steel polish on the legs.

And Voila, I finally have that little bit of sparkle I've been craving.

 

I played around with bringing the wing backs around the table but in the end I feel like I simplicity won out.

As things stand.

 

The one splurge we have made in our tweaking is the Stockholm rug from Ikea. 

 

There are 2 sizes they make but the largest size is almost ALWAYS out of stock. It is massive people, you don't get this much rug for under $500 very often! 

 

It is just the perfect punch of fun for us. We are negotiating what we want to do for a coffee table still because we've always known the trunk was both too high and not substantial enough for our big room but loved it enough to look past those flaws. So who knows what will happen there...

But for now we enjoying the luxury of feeling like we are actually creating the home we insanely adore. 

And if you read this whole post, thanks for listening, and more importantly thanks for not laughing (at least to my face) that we've changed the dining room... again. 

MyColor inspired by Pantone Painting Party

I am super excited to join in the MyColor™ inspired by Pantone^® Painting Party today! A group of wonderfully talented DIY bloggers {and little old me} have all put our thinking caps on to come up with some neat-o projects using MyColor™ inspired by Pantone^® paint. Keep reading to see what I whipped up for the party and then hop over to visit Courtney (a Thoughtful Place), PJ (Blog-A-Dazzle), Cassie (Primitive & Proper), Angela (Number FiftyThree) and Heather (Paper Princess Studio) for even more inspiration!

Just what are we painting today? Bet you thought it would be furniture, right?

Nope! We're making:

You see, I've always adored these fun little jars from Anthropologie. 2 problems: they are kind of small; and while I LOVE their happy, colorful lids, I know they are a little too much for my otherwise white kitchen. Oh yeah, and they ain't cheap!

So I figured I could whip up a whole batch of them for about the price of just 1!

I LOVE me some blue, so of course when I saw the lovely array of Pantone colors my eyes darted right off to this color called Skylight. IT IS so soft, serene and calming. I have at least 2 pieces of furniture I see this going on in the near future. And my other colors were what I figured would replicate the look of ceramic the best: Seed Pearl (oddly enough most of our house is also painted Seed Pearl by another brand) and WhiteCap Grey (Fun fact: Our Master bedroom in our last house was also painted a color this name by another brand). In person I decided WhiteCap Grey was the best match for that look of real pottery. 

I also decided I LOVE it so much I think this will be our new Living/Dining room color. Now I just have to convince Sean to help me move all the furniture so I can get started! 

 

But back to the task at hand! Next I had to round up all my 'ceramic' cannisters. Easy to find and super cheap, you can load up on pretty much any size/style at your nearest thrift store! Obviously the bigger ones might be more, but the standard sized jars are insanely cheap. This whole collection ran me about $3.50, and most of that covered the big guy. Try to find jars that have screw on lids, and preferably ones that are a single piece (not the ones with the round piece that pops out).

Because I may want to put food  or food related items in the jars I only painted the outside. The easiest and fastest was is to flip them upside down and either spray them real quick or do 2 coats with a good artists brush. I find sponge brushes aren't that great with curvy projects like this.

I LOVE the color of them and how they turned out. Very minimalist and modern if you ask me. I actually see cool replica jars like this at a couple high end home stores locally and books stores like Chapters and Indigo for about $20 each! I think they would be really pretty all down a table with fresh flowers, etc. But our project doesn't end here...

Next, we are going to add snazzy chalk board labels! I made my own using a roll of adhesive backed chalkboard paper I got at Dollarama for $1, but I am sure you can probably buy similar paper or pre-cut labels at the craft store. OR you can be even more artistic and paint the label on with chalkboard paint.

While the jars were drying I painted all the lids in Skylight blue (not on the jars, obviously). When the lids and jars were both all dry I threw the labels on and VOILA!

 

I'm keepin' it simple with some numbers for now, but later on I could label everything with what's inside, or the type of flower it is holding, etc. I think they would be insanely cute for those jars people give as gifts with all the dry ingredients for cookies or brownies, so the label could be the gift tag or recipe.

 

It was a good excuse to swap out a few things on the shelf for a while and I am loving the outcome!

 

My favorite part is how nicely the black labels tie in a few of my other black/dark elements like the light and stools.

 

Simple and fresh, probably my two favorite adjectives for our kitchen.

It was a weird day for lighting so I thought I would take an opportunity to show you how much I rely on the White Balance adjustment on my camera once the days get shorter here. What I see (looks good here,  but doesn't really accurately portray some colors)

 

And how my camera sees the same thing. It always comes off a little cold, but it seems to be the most accurate portrayal of color.

 

What do you think? Yay, Nay? Will you just buy the real deal at Anthropologie?

I think I'm kind of smitten with them, and the itsy bitsy price tag on this bunch is just icing on my cake!

Thanks so much to MyColor for sharing their beautiful new paint with me! Please make a trip over to visit Angela on the next stop of the paint party by clicking here. 

Here's the best part! MyColor is giving away 3 cans of paint to one lucky commenter on this blog post (as well as at every other blog participating in today's paint party). All you have to do is leave a comment for me with what project you would tackle with your winnings. The contest will be open until 8pm Pacific on Monday, October 22.

 For a second chance to win, tweet your project ideas to @MyColorPaints using hashtag #PassItOn. Also check out and like the MyColor™ inspired by Pantone® Facebook page to get access to the schedule for today’s parties as well as the rest of the parties going on this month! Share your project ideas there for one more chance to win!

GOOD LUCK GUYS!!

{ My post represents my honest experience with MyColor™ inspired by Pantone^® paint. I am not being paid for this post, but I did receive MyColor™ inspired by Pantone^® paint to use for this project.}