This is where we started – with what I think  appears to be a little boy’s nursery.

Then I made these pillowcases from fabric I had around the house

And had to remove these shelves from my office at work to make room for another colleague. Since I had bought them myself, I brought them home and, instead of storing them, thought they’d probably go perfectly on the wall. So we (read: husband) put them up.

Then I grabbed books and things from around the house  in blue, white and orange. I bought orange spray paint and spray painted that old milk jug, and I made the “Just You. Forever” print myself (please applaud my ability to left-align and click print).

I stacked some orange books on top of a silver (not real silver) cake stand. I previously had a book here called Plaguemaker (because it was orange) and was asked politely by my husband to maybe not have books called PLAGUEMAKER above our bed. He had a point.

When I was little, my brother gave this little orange vase (then dark purple) to my mom with a bouquet of flowers inside it. It came with the flowers. And it is plastic and had been kicking around my parents’ house for probably 15 years. I stole it and spray painted it. Then we had this blue vase that we bought at a garage sale last year for 25c or something like that. Voila.

And finally, this ampersand was a very collaborative effort between a friend of ours, my father in law, and my husband and I. We had it made for our wedding.

And finally, the finished unveiling.I bet we’re the only people you know who have a blue and ORANGE bedroom. Oh well, way better than the nursery it was before, and this whole project consisted of spending an extra $7 for the spray paint. Everything else we already had! We also re-did the ceiling fan (in the below post), which makes the room way more modern.

Our bedroom has a tacky classic 80′s ceiling fan in it. I’m actually surprised it’s that new. I was also surprised that all the screws holding the blades on were the same, and not a hodgepodge of screws that generations of families have picked up around the house.

As you can see, tacky typical wicker and faux wood blades with terrible bright gold fixtures. I didn’t do anything about the fixtures because I didn’t want to take the whole thing down and I also didn’t know how. So I just took the blades off  -

uh... Honey... there's something wrong with our ceiling fan...

Then I washed and dried them and hung them from our pot rack to make sure they were really dry. And also because I had to go to Canadian Tire.

Honey... there's something wrong with these spatulas...

When they were really dry, I sanded both sides with my awkward, mangled hand to make sure the paint would stick.

And then laid them out to be painted.

I applied three coats on each side, letting it dry in between. You can see that I stood them up to paint the other side.  This photo is after the first coat. Painting the edges of them was the trickiest part and led to  a few paint imperfections. Thinking back, I would have painted the edges FIRST, let it dry, sand the flat sides and then apply three coats to each side.

And then, the next day I put the blades back up, and we breathed in paint fumes for 8 hours last night while we slept. Oh, who am I kidding? We never sleep for 8 hours.

For a better look - click to make the photo bigger

It’s not the most AMAZING transformation, but the fan blends in with the ceiling better and is less atrocious more modern. So I say it’s a win. What do you think? Leave me a comment and tell me!

What have we got here? Well, on the top those are my contacts, makeup sponges, packages of floss, Q-tips and cotton pads, on the bottom there’s Vicks and Tiger Balm (the latter leftover from my Trapeze experience), misc stomach meds, hair clips/ties/pins/elastics, some freshener, clean wipes, lozenges, misc [probably expired] sinus meds and a container of Tums. You’re welcome.

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I figured it would probably work perfectly as pillowcases and, if we move and don’t go with this colour scheme, new pillowcases would be easy to make/replace.

So my mom and I made the pillowcases. Well partly she made them while I signed her up for Pinterest, and partly I made then while she took the dogs out. I didn’t do a very good job documenting the process, and they’re pillowcases, so nothing that really needs to be documented anyway. We cut and folded the fabric and then sewed along the edges. The style we made opens at the back and Mom’s old sewing book called it the “Housewife Style” pillowcase. Score. Next step – lampshades and wall decor.

If you have questions about the project, leave  a comment here or on one of the pins, or email or tweet me (links in the sidebar).

We don’t yet have anything above our bed, and I wanted to create something personal to put there. I suppose we could just print a huge wedding photo and stick it up, but I like to think I’m more creative than that. Now, when we painted our room, we painted three walls a very light greyish blue and one wall a dark blue, which we thought was more of a gunmetal, but it turns out it’s actually the perfect colour for a little boy’s room. So I hate it and want to put as many things up to cover it as possible.

So I went with shoes. Well, I tried to. I wanted a 24×36 (poster-sized) photo above our bed that contained one pair of each of our shoes. I thought it would be nice to represent the journey Graham and I are on together, as well as the thought that, no matter where our feet take us during the day, we always end up back together at night. Perfect, right? Wrong.I spent a couple of hours doing this last night and the finished product was less than I had hoped for. Alas, here is my journey.

I’d had the picture of his runners and my tan oxfords in my head for days, so I started with that. I also tried out a couple of other combinations that you’ll see.

I put poster board on the wall and on the table and plunked the shoes down. The lighting in that corner is atrocious, so I moved a few lamps to complete my crazy ghetto photo studio. It was at this point (when the rest of the house went dark because of my lamp thievery) that Graham inquired as to what I was doing. Another way to make a really easy ghetto studio is to buy a roll of white paper from the kids section in Ikea for $5 and roll out a long sheet to go up the wall and down across the bottom surface.

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I snapped a few photos, tried a few combinations, and reinforced the fact that I know nothing about lighting or my camera.

I wish my hair looked like that every day

When I was done, I had something resembling this photo.

I edited it to eliminate my stupid poster-board seams and change the lighting a bit and settled on the final version below.

Then, before paying to print and frame it and putting it up only to (potentially and probably – as most things go) hate it, I took a photo of our room and poorly imposed the shoe art onto the wall. And then stood back (from my photo) and realized it made the room look even MORE like a little boy’s room and that I was, in no way, going to put this shoe picture I’d slaved over on the wall of our bedroom.

So there we go. I tried a project and it didn’t turn out exactly the way I’d liked, but I did get a few things out of it. I got to use my Photoshop skills, as well as ended with a cool shoe picture that we might turn into a custom doormat, or frame as a small photo and put it in our house somewhere. Perhaps where we keep the shoes.

Now back to the REAL task at hand: what to do with that wall.

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I immediately began scouring the internet for a protector/holder/case for it because I didn’t feel cool about throwing it in my purse with my keys and pens and that geometry set compass from sixth grade. A case for the Kindle (or any e-book reader) will run you $30-$60, depending on if you want it to cook you dinner or not. I looked on etsy, hoping there was something cheaper, and there was not, but there were indeed more creative options. Then I thought that, while I figured this out, I would want something to protect the device in the meantime.

So I, naturally, looked around the house for something I could take and turn into a Kindle cover. For free. And I found an Urban Outfitters bag in the back of our car that would work perfectly.

If you want more protection, I suggest using a bag with a bit more structure, but this works really well for now!

First I had to decide if  I wanted some of the text on the bag to be part of the sleeve or if I wanted the sleeve to have handles.

I chose the handles, traced around the Kindle,  leaving a centimetre of space between the Kindle and the trace mark, and sewed along the line with my dinosaur of a sewing machine, making sure to do it all inside-out.

I left a bit too much room, I discovered when I put the Kindle in and it went for a swim, so I sewed it again a bit smaller, and then cut beyond the sew line.

I turned it inside out and voila, my free Kindle cover! The bag was black on one side and white on the other, which explains the final picture.

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11. Planning a 2-day retreat to allow staff at our organization “room to breathe.” Creating space for 150 people to connect with each other and rejuvenate is a great feeling.

10. June 21. Finally watching the office building come down to make room for this.

9. May 31. Taking a sledgehammer to our old office walls before the building was demolished. And filming it.

8. November 23. Seeing my fundraising apparel line go from an initial idea to fully complete, and then seeing other people wearing it.

7. August 30. Being picked up from work by Graham, after he packed up and moved home from Ontario. The end of our long distance relationship!

6. August 20. Paying for $5 of an elderly lady’s $8.80 grocery bill because she was unable to cover the cost herself. She was buying milk and toilet paper. Read the story here.

5. The moment when Graham handed in his thesis and was done his defense, and now officially holds a Master of Arts degree.

4. January 24. Flying to Hamilton, ON (4 hours away) and surprising Graham at his door at midnight in the middle of a snowstorm. He thought he was dreaming and just kept saying ‘no’ and shaking his head.

3. October 3-10. Spending a week in Mexico with my new husband – relaxing, laughing and getting tanned. And playing ping pong.

2. February 23. Having Graham get down on one knee, in front of the Bow river, in -20C and ask me to be his wife. A moment I’ll never forget.

1. October 1. Marrying the love of my life  in front of (almost) all of our friends and family.

Leave a comment with your #1 moment from 2011!

I truly believe that almost the entire history of a family can be told through the story of their Christmas ornaments. Newly married couples usually have a smaller tree, or a number of ornaments that are store bought and generic, as their story together is still in the infant stage. I just finished decorating my parents’ tree with my mom, and with every ornament placed on the branches, a new memory is brought forward about how it was acquired, or what monumental occasions occurred during the year etched on the front. No matter how many times the ornament has been displayed, and how many times the story told, they never lose their importance. The little angel, with the pink crinoline skirt and the wooden face, was purchased by a young girl 46 years ago. In the deep cold of Winnipeg, Manitoba, the doorbell rang on one December night in 1962. Behind the door stood a woman selling small handmade ornaments for 50 cents. The young girl fell in love with the pink skirted angel and my Grandmother purchased it for her, as a gift, so my mother could have something of her own to hang on the Christmas tree. That wonderfully crafted moment of delight is still hanging on the Christmas tree so many years later.

Another cold December, my brother (then 3) wanted to buy ‘his’ new baby (unborn) a hockey stick for Christmas. My mother was in the hospital having the baby from December 19 until the 23, and so left little time for Christmas shopping for the new addition. Once I had arrived home in a bundle of blankets and weather protective gear, my brother quickly realized that the new baby sister was, well, useless, and would not make much use out of a hockey stick. In the cold Canadian night on December 23, four days after giving birth, my mom took my older brother to the pharmacy to pick out a gift. Almost immediately, he spotted it. He spotted the gift that would be absolutely perfect for his new baby sister: a blue bird ornament. He knew then that the hockey stick could wait, because nothing could be more perfect a gift as this. This, as my first Christmas gift ever, is, by far, my favourite ornament on the Christmas tree, this year and every year.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope you take the moments necessary to look at your Christmas tree and truly realize the memories behind the ornaments.