I’ve been using these $15-back-when-I-bought-’em folding chairs from Target as dining room chairs for a long time. Say, four years now? They’re fine and all, but eventually they break, and now I’m down to three, plus two sets of random chairs that definitely don’t go together (projects. of course. sigh). So when I volunteered to host a foodie meetup dinner at my house for twelve, I took a look at my seven mismatched chairs and decided they would not do.
Off to Craigslist.
Painted this two weekends ago and left it fumigating the dining room while I was gone for the holidays. I’ve placed it as my nightstand, but I think it’ll be for sale soon.
Finally got around to making my own sun jars this weekend. They’re so cute! The instructions at Not Martha are the best I’ve seen so far, as she goes into the whole “which lights should I not buy” routine, which is very helpful when standing in the middle of the aisle at Lowe’s faced with thirty rather expensive options. I got my Malibu lights for $8.96 each due to a pricing error, so look sharp and compare the prices between the displays and the shelves. If you find a discrepancy, they’ll honor the lesser of the prices.
I frosted in the inside of the jars rather than the outside, and I settled on epoxy to hold the panels to the glass and Blue Tak to hold the batteries to the panel. The epoxy worked pretty well, but the Blue Tak didn’t work so well on two of my four jars. In the future I’d use epoxy on all of it.
The jars are darling glowing in the early winter dusk, and I think they’d make great presents!
They will never let me be a famous design blogger because in my eagerness to share what I’ve been doing on a particular day, I frequently fail to properly stage my photographs. That, and ’cause I keep posting food…
Today I finished up some pillow covers for a friend that have been sitting undone on my dining table for the better part of two weeks. They’re nice. They have envelope closures and everything. Thus, I will blog them before they go away.
This is how I craft: I break out a bottle of gold leaf and look for something to attack. I spent five minutes rummaging around, and there they were: (more…)
Amy Butler and Michael Miller fabrics, bought by the yard on Ebay. If only the Belle Coriander print on the far left were on bark cloth or other upholstery weight fabric, I would so be doing the side chair in it.
Happiness is a warm gun cool blue.
In addition to being super psyched that my copy of Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret and Extraordinary Lives
I picked up this table on craigslist (From Sylvie at So Sylvie and Blossom Home, incidentally. It was nice to meet you!) and could barely contain myself with glee. I’m so glad to finally be finished with the refurbishing, not only so I can move on to other projects, but also because I’ve been dying to show everyone how awesome it turned out.
Inspired by the lime green pegboard at Design*Sponge, and also a similar craft station in ReadyMade, I saw an opportunity to finally get all my jewelry where I could see it.
I don’t know what has come over me lately, but I can’t leave Craigslist alone. Maybe it’s the weekly Craigslist roundup at Apartment Therapy that only seems to list $200+ items only in San Fran proper that has me daily trawling the more local South Bay page for more affordable items. Small successes, like scoring hot lime green Crate and Barrel bentwood chairs (for A, now in his apartment), or a vintage dresser for $15, keep me going, like mild fixes. I currently have four (4, count ‘em) Craigslist items in various stages of undress. Which is to say, I’ve procured them, plan to refinish them, and haven’t quite finished any of them. I was going to wait until the items were finished, then publish a play-by-play of their revival and rebirth. But that’s going to take too long. Plus, I could use some encouragement to finish what I start. Maybe if I get some admiring comments, the admiration will become my fix instead of new pieces, and I’ll attack my refurbishing with renewed gusto.
First posted “project”….one that I’m not even bothering to refinish at the moment. The fourth item acquired, it’s last in line for refinishing, and it’s perfectly usable (and photogenic) without the new coat of stain I have planned for it. It’s really similar to this (made in Yugoslavia just the same!) but was aquired for 8% of the cost.
