Posts Tagged: DIY

Decor

It’s A Party In The Bathroom

Jordan Reid home decor

Note un-sweaty hair and relative non-dishevelment. (This is the “before” photo.)

Our bathroom – the one off of the master bedroom – is easily the most unattractive spot in our house. It is tiny-tiny-tiny (you can barely open the door if you’re standing inside), and is accessorized with nothing more than a dark-brown, 2-inch-deep cupboard that holds literally nothing – even miniature medicine bottles come tumbling out when the door opens. My least-favorite part of the bathroom, though, has to be the color: a vaguely nauseating combo of olive green and beige. Not “forest green” and “ecru”…olive green and beige.

Olive green and beige are not my happy colors.

DIY Projects

The Attractive Decongestant

hanging eucalyptus in a shower for medicinal benefits

Here is my friend Brie busy being awesome and having great hair

P.S. Ten points if you can spot the random hanging octopus doubling as bathroom decor.

P.P.S. I love the title of this post, but I want to be clear right from the start that it does not refer to Brie herself. She is indeed attractive, but (as far as I know) does not herself possess anti-congestive properties.

DIY Projects

Odd (But Strangely Useful) Little Idea: DIY Wine Charms

skull glass with rope and berry wine charm

You know those little charms that you can hook onto your wineglass so that everyone at a party can tell which glass is theirs? I've always thought they sounded like a nice idea, but there are two problems with this: 1) Most of the charms I've seen around are a little on the cheesy side (although these are kind of cute); and 2) I usually use tumblers for wine instead of traditional glasses, and wine charms are made to hook around the stem of a glass.

Those aren't the biggest problem, though; the biggest problem is that owning something like wine charms requires forethought, and forethought is not something that I typically possess. The only times that it has ever occurred to me that I might like to own some wine charms has been when I am mid-party and suddenly discover that I have no idea which glass is mine. Over Thanksgiving weekend, this is exactly what happened, and so do you know what I did?

Broke out my crafting box, of course. A little twine, some jewelry clasps that I have hanging around from a bracelet project I did with Michael's, and a few fake berry branches leftover from a photo shoot, and BOOM. For real, if you have some string (twine, Christmas ribbon, cooking string, etc) laying around, you can do this...and you can use anything as an identifier - a couple of beads, a dried flower, a leaf, whatever. It's totally something you can do in five seconds. And it's fun. And free.

DIY Projects

For Your Girls

wise woman once said fuck this shit and lived happily ever after embroidery

{ Wise Woman Embroidery Kit }

Everyone needs a hobby. And specifically, everyone needs a hobby that they can do while half-listening to E! or Bravo! or other channels with virtually no educational, redemptive, or illustrative elements whatsoever, in order to make themselves feel less guilty for spending entire hours (or, okay, perhaps months) deep in the throes of the wonder of the world that is Bachelor in Paradise. 

If you craft while Bachelor-ing, you can find ways to feel good about your morally bankrupt, reality TV-watching self. I speak from experience.

DIY Projects

Weird Little Idea: Password Painting

I know there's a way to change your wireless user name and password. I just don't know what that way is (yes, I know: google it), and so ever since we moved into our new place, whenever a guest comes over and needs to get onto our Internet, my system is to root through our junk drawer in search of the tiny piece of cardboard that the installation guy used to write down the user name and password for me, hand it to my guest, and hope that I remember to take it back and that it does not end up getting thrown out (which would make sense, because it looks like garbage).

Obviously this system is not ideal.

I've been meaning to do something a little less likely to result in a massive fight between myself and my husband (seriously, I'm going to guess that forgotten iTunes passwords and such have surpassed money as the number one reason for divorce in our country), but haven't gotten around to it. And then the other day a colleague came over to my place for a meeting and needed to access les interwebs, and in order to allow her to do that I had to first locate that minuscule piece of cardboard with twenty thousand numbers written on it in Boy Handwriting (a.k.a. Terrible Handwriting), help her figure out which were "1"s and which were lowercase "l"s, and then, after she left, try to re-locate the piece of cardboard so that it could be re-filed in our very secure and organized junk drawer (that is a joke; our junk drawer is a black hole into which objects like sip cup lids and passports routinely disappear).

Decor

In The Real World

via A Beautiful Mess

Blogger homes really stress me out.

They're all fiddle leaf figs in adorable woven pots and white carpets that my dogs would destroy instantly and lamps that I can't afford and perfectly arranged gallery walls of expensively framed prints that look like they were collected during a succession of impossibly glamorous round-the-world trips.

DIY Projects

DIY Christmas Cards For Kids

Well, this is an adorable little project.

The problem with crafting generally - and Pinterest crafting, specifically - is that normal people don't have cabinets full of stuff that they can use to effortlessly whip up DIY-ed whatevers. And adding a run to Michael's to a craft transforms it from "fun and affordable alternative to store-bought" to "abject misery."

Anyway, I'm all about the crafts that you don't need to leave your house in order to do. In other words, the actually cheap and actually easy ones that just use stuff you've already got lying around.


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