It's really hard to type with a cat sitting on both of your wrists, but I'm gonna give it a go.  Nori is a feeling a little lap-deprived since I've been gone for the last 2 days.  It's time for some cat/mom bonding time, even if it involves impairing my wrists for the time being.

Before I left, I read this post on Centsational Girl and was totally inspired.  First of all, I love Emily Henderson's work, and I've always admired her bookshelf styling skills.  She manages to combine just the right amount of quirky statuettes and old books to make me swoon.  Also, I have a lot of time on my hands and love a new project.  Enter: Project Bookcase Re-Style.

We have 3 major bookcases on our main level, and we have a lot of books.  Not like an obscene about of books, but a LOT of books.  Anyway, here's our built-in hallway bookcase before I touched it.


Haha, this is almost embarrassing! This is probably not the best place for a catch-all, but it has turned into our place of stuff-stashing.  Bottom shelf:  lamp shade.  Third shelf:  random white shelf that needs to be hung in the bathroom.  Fourth shelf:  supplies for next crafty project.  Fifth shelf:  angel figurines from my recently deceased grandma that I haven't had the heart to put away yet.  Shelves 6 and 7 don't look that bad, fortunately.

And now for our living room shelves:


Just lots of books.  And a black cat that likes to play jungle hunter by camouflaging herself against my black furry blanket.  (It actually works pretty well for her, she's scared me a number of times that way.)

I started by taking all of the books and arranging them by color on the hall bookshelf:


I've seen a lot of people arranging their books by color instead of by content/title/author.  Like this one on curbly, or these on colourlovers.  I really like the way it turned out, even though I think it works better if you have a cubby bookshelf like the expedit from ikea or something.  (T and I have been dreaming about getting an expedit for ages now...)

Then I went to the thrift store and found some treasures....(the book is for T, he loves old medical books.)


After literally hours of arranging, re-arranging, and re-arranging again, then coming back 2 hours later to re-arrange again, here's what I came up with:


People, I have a lot of white dishes.  Yes, I know that.  It's just that they're so charming and look so good against a black bookcase!  I love the way it turned out.  Midway through the process, I realized that I had a ton of old books stashed at my parents' house in my old room like the silver oil burner, the 3 blue bottles, and some of the books in the left bookcase.  We had to leave T's old textbooks on the bottom 2 shelves because a) they act as an anchor because they're so stinkin' heavy, and b) we have nowhere else to stash them.  So maybe I'm not Emily Henderson, but I think it turned out all right.

Have any ideas on what I should do differently?  I'd love to hear 'em!

Last year T and I were gifted some day lilies.  We planted them in front of our house and they had maybe 2 blooms all summer.  I thought I had managed to kill some of the hardiest plants around.  This year though, they came back in full force!



I get so tired of weeding the bed so T and I bought some black landscaping fabric at a garage sale and some gardening stakes.  We laid the landscaping fabric down over the lilies and cut x's where the plants were.  (In retrospect, we should have laid this fabric in April before they sprouted.  I'm a little concerned that they got squashed, but we'll have to wait and see if they survived the trauma.)  Anyway, we got the black plastic laid and staked, and it looked like this:


Yeah, it's lumpy, but we plan on getting some rock from craigslist to cover it eventually.  Anyway, then the fun began!  These blocks were on sale at our hardware store so after a long debate on how we should lay them, we got to work.  I dug the trench and T pounded them into place:


(Ted is actually working on the other side of the house where a hydrangea bush lives.)  It was a glorious day outside today, perfect for manual labor!!  I dug up so many rusty nails, worms, and this giant piece of styrofoam.  So weird!


Anybody know what the heck that came from?  I sure don't.  Anyway, we LOVE the finished product!


These little blocks weren't intended to be set up on their side like this.  I think they're meant for a retaining wall, but they would have been too tall if we had put 2 layers on, and 1 would have just looked silly.  I think it worked out really well!


After we put the last of the bricks in, I had to fill in the rest of the trench with a little extra dirt.


See my cute little gardening gloves?  T bought them for me.  And my little yellow kneeler.  I have the best husband ever.

More pics to come when we get some rock in!  Have you been working on your garden lately?  Tell me what you've been up to!

I revamped the blog!  Hooray!  I am not a tech savvy person, and I have no clue when it comes to html.  This is when I say thank you Jesus for google.  This morning I showed T the new "Projects" tab and he looks at me and says, "I feel like we've done a lot more projects than that."  Translated:  "I know you've forced me to help you with way more projects than that."  I thought about it and realized, (other than the severe lack of blogging in the last oh...6 months) we have done a lot more projects than that.  Mostly, we've redone chairs.  So, let me share with you.

You've already seen a chair story.  This was our first foray into upholstery.  Here's a pic of the chair in it's new home:


Now this next one isn't actually a chair, but it sits next to the chair and the same upholstery rules apply, so I figured I'd include it.  This is our reading nook in our office.  The ottoman was $10 at an estate sale and we recovered it in some snazzy red fabric.



(I had intended on the red matching the chair a little better, but oh well....haha!)

This pair of chairs lives in our dining room.  They're our extra dining chairs when we have more than 4 people at the table.  They're pretty retro and we got them at a thrift store for $5 each.  We decided not to re-paint them even though they're a little chipped and nicked up because we have a lot of wood in the dining room.



Now to the breakfast nook.  These chairs were my very first purchase on craigslist.


Here's our gossip bench that we recovered after we rescued it from a flea market.  It's houndstooth fabric.


This one I did just for fun and sold it at our garage sale.  I got it for free from another garage sale, painted it black, and T and I recovered the cushion in composer fabric:




And last but not least, my little desk chair from my music room.  This one had a caned seat that was completely ripped out, so T and I made a seat from scratch.


I cannot tell you enough how utterly easy it is to recover chairs, people!  All you do is rip the old staples out on the bottom and then stretch and re-staple your new fabric where the old one is.  We've replace a few pieces of foam, but that's relatively easy too.  We cut it with a bread knife to fit the seat.  ;)  Cause we're sophisticated like that.

Stay tuned for when I attempt to recover a real chair instead of just a seat cushion.

About a month ago I found a treasure in a thrift store:


I loved the cute retro starbursts and had to have it.  Then, I decided it needed a friend:


This is actually from the same line of cake carriers, from what I can tell.  The little blotchy things are actually the same little starbursts from the first carrier!  I about flipped out when T and I found this one at an antique store.  Then, I decided to make it a party!

The other day my mom and I found a fun new store in downtown Sioux Falls called Random Harvest.  They have all sorts of vintage, antique, crafty things and we fell in love with it!  I picked up a copy of Emily Posts' book Etiquette, a super-secret birthday present for my sister, and a new sign for our kitchen:




(Ironic, no?)  Anyway, we also got inspired for a new project.

My mom is a music teacher, just like me.  But instead of teaching at a school, she teaches at home.  This means she has 50+ children come through her home every single week.  She always makes it a point to have a cute little vignette on her entry table that usually pertains to the season or upcoming holiday.  Her students love seeing the display changes though the year.

My mom also has a love for the old hymns of the church.  She actually has quite a collection of old hymnals.  Instead of letting the hymnals sit on a shelf unused, we decided to get all crafty and make a little display out of them.  Actually, the idea was all hers, I just helped in the execution.  ;)


Sorry the pics are so fuzzy, it's from the cell phone camera because my battery died in my camera.  Lazy.  Yess.  Here's a fun tip of the day:  did you know that Menards has a super secret stock of scrap wood that they will sell you for less than a buck a piece?  All this wood came from 2 pieces of scrap wood.  Then we batted our eyelashes and smiled at the nice Menards man and he even cut the wood for us! FOR FREE!  We jumped for joy.

We went to town with black spray paint, mod podge, and this fabric flower tutorial.  These were so easy to make!  I'm just sad you can't see them very well.  That's 44 cents of Hobby Lobby tan and black gingham fabric and black buttons that we had.


What do you think?  Kinda fun, huh?

Oh how I love antique stores.  I mean, I really, really love them.  Today my sister, sis-in-law and I spent the entire day antiquing in Stillwater, Minnesota.  They're known for their awesome (and usually over-priced) antique stores.

We also found some lovely boutiques and I found this treasure:


We visited store after store with rooms that looked like this:


It makes my heart skip a beat.  It also reminds me of the Room of Requirement.  Honest to goodness, that was my first thought when I walked up the stairs and saw this room.  So many treasures to find!  It's rooms like this that make me get excited digging through piles of old crap.  You never know what you're going to find!

You might, for example, find a blue ceramic elephant for $6.


I love it!  I'm still a little surprised that after all we looked at, I only found 1 adorable little elephant.  I guess it just goes to show you that the real thrill is in the hunt.

Here's the long-awaited next project!


Pretty retro, huh?  Ted and I picked up a pair of these from two different thrift stores when we still lived in Pierre.   We've been holding onto them for over a year now, and our guests and guest room have had to bear their ugly existence for far too long.  I guess I just didn't quite know what I wanted to do to them to make them beautiful...until Tuesday.


Yup, check out that fat drum shade.  This thing is huge.  Anyway, I knew I wanted something more modern and I knew I wanted a white base.  I was thinking something metallic would bring it into the 21st century.  I scoured Mill End for some pretty raw silk and instead ended up with this purplish grey taffeta.  The plans were to use mod podge on the shade since that worked so well on our suitcase project.    Word to the wise:  mod podge will stain your taffeta.  Good thing I tested it first, eh?  Now you know.  Hot glue to the rescue!


Ta-da!  By the way, we have no idea what the wall color is, either.  It changes with the light of day.  Sometimes it looks mushroomy, sometimes green, and now, apparently it looks beige.  Well, whatever.  I love the way this turned out!  And what's even more shocking is how easy it is to recover a lampshade.


Sorry about the grainy picture, apparently I should have T take my blog pictures again.  Photography is so not my thing.  Did I mention that I got the fabric for $2.50/yd?  Awwwww yeah.


We have a guest that is staying in this room for the next month or so and I'm so excited that this year she doesn't have to endure the ugliness that was these lamps.  Hooray!

I absolutely loved this inspiration project when I found it on fun.kyti.me:  an old suitcase turned into a picnic basket!  I've seen it re-posted everywhere and I had to try it.


I already had these fabulous hula plates from a garage sale last year ($2?) and the cups I got on clearance at Target last year, intending to use them for outdoor dining.  The plastic flatware I got at World Market on clearance ($3 for 4 place settings).  I love it!  We had the napkins too.


My friend Meg taught me how to make these fun fabric flowers.  She had them as pins on her purse, but I decided to dress up the front of the suitcase.  They're so easy to make!

A big thanks to T on this one as he put up with my hot glue fits and stubborn perfectionist tendencies.  ;)

P.S. The fabric under my place setting is a sneak peek from my next project.  So excited to show you!