Living Room Addition

When we bought our house, we started thinking about upgrading to a wall mount TV, but could never decide.  Thus, the old TV has been sitting on an old quilt in our living room for the past 5 months.  So it was time for a longer term solution in the form of a TV stand from Nick and Sean's old room that his parents gave us.  So we repurposed it to fit our current living room's colors and here's the handiwork.

After we took the shelves and doors off

Taking all of the pieces apart

Sanded and Primed

Painted and put back together

And the new World Market knobs that take the place of the old bronze handles

Overall I was pretty happy with this project after it was done, but it did prove to be much more work than I had anticipated thanks to the faux wood taking a LONG time to dry in between layers, and then we couldn't get the shelves back in which ended up being alright because I think I like this piece of furniture without the shelves anyway.

This Great Fall Life: Best of Comfort Food

Since I'm nauseous all of the time thanks to night shift, I don't feel bad about fattening up when I do eat.  Thus, fall's season of comfort food.  Best-of and all-around crowd pleaser?  White chicken chili.  It's like you can't go wrong.  Just put chicken, seasoning, and then all of the things you like into one big pot and pretty much just cook it on low until it's hot.  Our sister-in-law Lyndsey turned me on to this, and it's grown since then.  I like to put it in a dutch oven or crock pot a couple of hours before sean gets home.  It's a good food to make your house smell good, which makes me feel a little Betty-Crocker-like.  It's the little things...

Anyway, here's how I do it, but like I said, I like the idea that you can pretty much put what you want.

Ingredients, sans Lysol.  The Chicken Chili kit is an essential short-cut.

Great Northern and Cannellini Beans

Put 2 cups of water and a can of diced tomatoes with the juice into a dutch oven

Add in spices in the kit, jalapeno, and chopped up boiled chicken

And put it over tortilla chips with shredded monterrey jack cheese with jalapeno

Huge hit in this house.  And super easy.  And of course it's easy to make a lot more and freeze it, which is something I can appreciate.

Four Legged Crandalls :)

I'm going to interrupt any normal sequence of blogging to post some pictures of the four-legged Crandalls...after all, they add a lot to our lives.

Mr. Grady, Nick and Lyndsey's puppy on his first trip to go tailgating in Clemson.  He wouldn't stay still long enough to catch much of his cute Clemson bandana on camera...but just know that he did wear orange.

Rora, our sweet cat back from the brink of death since last month.  Sadly, her brother Oliver wasn't as lucky, but we're glad to have this sweet girl back happy and healthy.

And Mr. Mogatu, fat tabby, the longest-standing member and hands-down most photogenic of the furry variety of Crandalls

This Great Fall Life: Frame Project

I think that one of the easiest and cheapest seasonally decorating options is replacing picture frames with seasonal ones that have seasonal pictures (in this case, I had tons from part of our engagement session in the woods of the Botanical Gardens that our photographer Kim DeLoach marched like a mile down a trail to get to).  Thus, my project of the week: replacing picture frames on our living room bookshelf and kitchen.

Plain wooden frames.  These are like, 2 bucks.

Painted...

Scrapbook flowers and buttons :)

Completed corner

And some brown ribbons

Completed #1

What I like about doing this is that I like painting, and it's easy to collect stuff I already have for them.  Like for these, I had tons of flower petals, leaves, paint, paint pens, wires, burlap, and buttons, so I just collected everything in my box that looked fall colored and put them on frames.  

#2

#3

#4...buttons and wire

You get the point.  Anyway, our living room bookshelf is now welcoming fall in all its glory.  Is it obvious that I love this season?

This Great Fall Life: Wreath #3

Continuing with my love of burlap, following my bubble wreath, I thought that the pictures in our hall bath should be seasonally swapped with a more "fall" visual appeal.  And I'm big on wreaths now, so that's what I went with.

I like to periodically check out Craftaholics Anonymous, which is where I found this.  I like that blog, mainly because it always has tutorials for things that are pretty simple and mindless that I can do while we watch TV and hang out at night.  And this was no different.  Easy and relatively quick.  I pretty much followed the tutorial with the exception of having to dye some of the burlap.  Rit dye is a favorite craft material of mine because it's just particularly useful for a variety of things.  Not that I use it a ton, but I always love it when I do.  So that's how I got purple burlap.  Turns out that colored burlap is hard to come by in the store.  Who knew.  Anyway, here's some progress pictures:

Hot glued burlap strips

Completed flower

I did this Clemson style in honor of football season's part in fall

Buttons wrapped in fabric.  I thought this looked good with plain buttons too.

And the final product

This Great Fall Life: Wreath #2

Like many others, I have recently found a new love in the form of pinterest.  And like many others, have recently pinned this burlap bubble wreath and subsequently created it for my front door.  Actually, I created it in huge form for the centerpiece of my dining room wall, and subsequently promoted it to front door and moved this masterpiece to my dining room :)

What I love about this project, is that it's modifi-able (is that a word?) for the seasons.  Since I'm in love with it, I've given a lot of thought to the various ribbons that will accompany it throughout the year, as soon as I'm over the fact that I spent seventeen dollars inadvertently on the 2 yards of brown ribbon that I bought to hang it from and have the heart to switch it out.  As a side note, that's a little ridiculous.  I didn't think it'd be more than a dollar or so per yard and after it was cut she rung me up for seventeen dollars...are you trippin'?

The project itself was simple, but extremely time consuming after making the management decision to buy the biggest foam wreath that Hobby Lobby had to offer.  It took more like 2 1/2 yards of burlap contrary to the tutorial and more like 200-250 pins.  I measured all of my squares 4x4 for the sake of consistency in the "bubbles" which I think is a good idea, and this was really helpful in my quest to cut and measure straight.  I used it for multiple burlap crafts following this one.  Anyway, here's a few pics, but the tutorial is pretty straight forward.

A few of the 200+ squares

Bubbles

Finished product

And the seventeen dollar ribbon

Burlap is my new favorite material.  Happy Fall!

Christmas Crafts: Wedding Invitation

In looking at fall wreath ideas, I came across a picture of a wedding invitation ornament online and thought that it was great (that's my "credit" since I don't know where I saw the picture and upon googling it, came up with a lot of potential sources).  I'd considered framing our invitation, but it was shaped kind of oddly, so until now, it's just been sitting in a box of wedding stuff.  But now, it's in an ornament :)  From the picture, it seemed pretty self-explanatory, so I just picked up a box of empty ornaments and did it this afternoon.  So my new past time is going to be figuring out what to use the other 3 glass balls for since Hobby Lobby didn't sell them individually.

Our wedding invitation and clear glass ornament

I cut the invitation into strips, and then cut off excess so there wouldn't be so much white space, and then curled each piece around a pen

My addition to this idea was spray gluing the inside of the ornament and then pouring and shaking around some silver and white glitter.  We used silver in our color scheme, and silver and green were both on the invitation.

The other thing that I added to it was the ribbon that we tied our programs with.  It's olive green, and matched the font on the invitation.  Nostalgia..  After cutting up the whole invitation, I found that I would have needed more than one invitation to fill the ball, which I didn't have, but I liked it this way too since you can roll it around and read different parts.

And the inside.