Creative Outlets: Weekend Craft Overload

Oh friends.  This weekend was a crafting overload, and it mostly happened in a five-hour span on Saturday evening.  I sat on our kitchen floor, hunched over, bound and determine to craft anything I could get my hands on.  And it was good!

Let’s start at the beginning.  Last Friday evening, I was browsing through Craigslist (still a guilty habit) when I found an ad for a chair for $10.  The chair looked like it was in excellent condition, and for $10, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to look.  I emailed the person and waited for a response.  Approximately three minutes and 42.75 seconds later, I had a response.  It was brief, a little forceful, but completely direct.  He would call me the next day to set up a time and give me directions.  Done and done.  When I talked to this gentleman on the phone, he had the same mannerisms.  I kind of reminded me of what it was like to talk to my grandfather on the phone.  It must be that generation.  We agreed to meet at his house to look at the chair.  A half hour later, B and I found our way to his lovely home, into his basement (which I would have found creepy if I had been alone, but that’s why I take B with me), and into the realm of the chair.

Now, this chair is in stellar shape.  Everything is solid, there are hardly any signs of wear on the arms or legs, and the fabric has been well taken care of.  So what’s the problem?  See for yourself.

Yeah.  It’s that ugly.  I had to stop myself from laughing when we first saw it.  The nice man we bought it from definitely took good care of it, though, so I felt secure enough in purchasing it from him.  After about 10 minutes of trying to figure out how we were going to get it in the car, B became my chauffeur and we headed to Joann Fabrics.

We needed some fabric for this chair’s makeover, STAT!  We decided to go geometric and green (okay, I did and B just picked which of the final three he liked more) and then picked up a few extras, like paint and Spanish moss.  B also asked why there were “candy fruits” in the moss aisle, which I laughed at and then told him they were fake.  Haha… oh B…

Once at home, I decided to try out the fabric on the chair first before painting and mossing it up.

Much better, right?  Now I just need to… oh… figure out how to undo the chair.  Yeah.  That’ll be fun.  I’m also going to paint the arms and legs black.

On to painting!  I decided to jazz up our bathroom containers with a coral pattern, so I got some coral red, white, and clear overcoat paint.

From there, I decided to paint and fix up one of our leftover wedding supplies.  We had a great topiary on our escort card table, but it has since bit the dust.  Hard.  

Topiaries are so expensive, but super cute, so I decided to save this.  With our new Spanish moss in hand, I cleaned off all of the old moss, took the dirt out to clean and paint the pot, and covered the dirt balls with Spanish moss.  Phew!  So it went from the picture above to this:

Better!  Not perfect, but much better!  I do like how the pot came out.

My final moments of crafting genius came when I looked at the box beside the topiary.  It started out looking like this, thanks to my mother-in-law who sent it with us on Christmas Eve filled with cookies:

Sure, I could have saved it for next Christmas, but honestly, I had no place to put it in storage and there were so many craft supplies I could put in it now.  I took some of the scrapbook paper I already had and modge podged the life out of that little snowman box.

Tah dah!

And with that, craft night came to a close.  Mostly because I didn’t have anything else to paint.  Or modge podge.

What have you crafted lately?