Saturday Project 3-28-09

Well, I have spent most of this rainy morning playing with my blog template to no avail. Hours of sitting here trying out new things and none of them working, (sigh) My brain actually HURTS. I did get some new music up and started using tags (labels). But the good news is that is has stopped raining and I have some great projects to share with you that I have been working on!

You might remember me talking about my PUC's - Projects Under Construction. Well, this year, I hope to complete 40 of them. Some are easily completed, others will take the whole year. One of the ones that will take the whole year is a 9-9-9 Challenge of books to read. The challenge: To read 9 books in 9 different categories in 2009 for a total of 81 books, but you can have at least one book overlap in each category which would give you 72 books. But I'm going with 68. It's still 9 categories but I've adjusted the number of books read to something that I feel I can do without stressing to much.

One of my projects for this year was to get new lampshades for my pair of vintage marble lamps. I was lucky enough to have my MIL ask me what I wanted for Christmas, so I received a giftcard to Lowes, and after the first of the year, I picked out two pretty shades. Then the next step was to paint the two endtables that the lamps sat on.

Here you have the lampshades, the endtables and just a few of my books!

The tables were originally white and pretty dingy. I have been trying to come up with some kind of style that I think I would be happy with and also Hubby. He doesn't understand my fascination with the old things, but I thought that the blues and greens would add some soothing tones to everything.

It's hard to see from the above picture, but after painting the endtables blue, I added a dry brush technique with silver paint. I love it!

This is one pf a pair of vintage drapes that I've held onto. For now, I have literally used thumb tacks and attached them to the wall, but lately, I've been thinking about using one to make a comforter for the bed and using the other as a shower curtain.

And the next thing that I started working on was an interesting technique I saw at 2cre8art. I haven't totally completed the task because I haven't used the wonderful background to make any ATC's or anything, but I love the technique!

I have a confession on this one. One of the steps is to use a spray bottle with water to dilute the colors. I didn't have an empty one, so I poured out the contents of a bleach/water solution and then rinsed the bottle, but didn't think to rinse the nozzle part. So when I sprayed, I got bleach water which turned some of the paper pink. But, hey, I meant to do that ;0)

I used one of the vintage hymnals for this technique also with some other vintage pages. I have some of the hymnals fpr sale in my Etsy shop if anyone would like one. I just love feeling the paper in those books!