Giraffe String Art Tablet

Hello everybody! And a big welcome to all our new subscribers just tuning in... I've been crazy busy lately with string art orders.  The best part? A lot of the people ordering have all kinds of fun ideas, so we've been working together to come up with some new (fun!) designs.  Check out this giraffe:

What do you think? I love him (or her?), I'm considering making one for our house.... hehe. I had trouble deciding what pose to do - straight on, side profile, etc - and settled with straight on.  The ears were too cute, and the tail is a nice touch.  So now that I've made one, I can make more for those who want one too: You can order them in my etsy shop by clicking here, or on the "My Etsy Shop" Tab above.

Here's another one I did this week, with the name "Jace" - I'm really diggin' this color combo that the person chose. The stain is "Weathered Oak" and came out so differently than I'd expected. In a really good way! It's kind of brown gray, and looks like it's description....weathered!  Plus the blues, white, and light green string they chose look great together.

Name tablets can also be ordered in the shop if you're interested, I tried to make ordering easier by putting up generic listings that say "3 letters name tablet" or "5 letters name tablet". This way, you just buy the ad with the number of letters you need, choose your strings, stains, nails & fonts - and BOOM! Done.  You can find those types of listings here.

On a side note, I also wanted to show some new fonts I have! Everyone seems to love the classic, but I think it would be fun to play around with some of these on a name board:

Market and Remachine are my favorite, and I'm making a few in those fonts right now. So I'll show them soon. 

Anyway, hope everyone is having a great week, and if you haven't already - don't forget to enter the Father's Day Ryobi giveaway! There's still $400 at stake here... Hop over to this post if you  missed it. 

Take the time to enjoy your day today..   :)

-Jesse

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Giveaway Alert: $800 worth of RYOBI Power Tools!

Gooooood MORNING!
We’ve got a special surprise for you today… who doesn’t love a little friendly competition and GIVEAWAY?!?! (there will be a randomly drawn winner in addition to the winner of the contest, so you should enter both ways!)
The premise of this contest stems from the fact that ALL OF US are guilty of Pinning an idea without ever checking the source… guilty as charged! But there are likely pins on your boards that are from your favorite bloggers, and you don’t even KNOW it! (amiright?)
And that’s where the contest comes in:

Here’s the line-up! SUCH an amazing group of bloggers that we wrangled!!

And below are projects from each blogger (including ME!) that you’ve likely seen viral all over Pinterest!

Before we get to the rules, can we talk about how

RYOBI is giving away $800 worth of POWER TOOLS?

Just… in time for Father’s Day!

Perfect timing if you ask me.

$400 RYOBI Giftcard goes to our randomly selected winner, and $400 RYOBI Giftcard goes to the first person to correctly match up all 16 bloggers with the correct projects!

UPDATE: We have a big winner for the Matching Contest part of the giveaway (but the random drawing is still open till Sunday)! Stephanie Richardson was the very first one to match us up like a PRO! We still encourage you to see if you can figure them all out too! There's so much amazing talent in this group, and you're sure to stumble upon some serious inspiration. Thanks for playing!
SO!
When you click on the Contest Form (at the bottom of this post), it will direct you to a page that will show you an image of the project, and a drop-down menu of bloggers. You just go down the line and select away! Some projects you probably know already, but some you may need to SNOOP AROUND blog-land to find!
We call this BLOG-HOPPING. And it’s highly encouraged in the blogging world.
Here’s the links to the home page of each blog (in no particular order). Now get busy!

1. Sawdust and Embryos
2. All Things Thrifty
3. Interiors by Kenz
4. Whatever Blog
5. Home Stories A to Z
6. Sarah M. Dorsey Designs
7. Twist Me Pretty
8. The Idea Room
9. DIY Village
10. Pretty Handy Girl
11. Domestic Imperfection
12. One Good Thing
13. Kara Paslay Designs
14. Nine Red
15. Vintage Revivals
16. East Coast Creative

Entry #1 (Randomly drawn) ‘Like’ us ALL on Facebook, and let us know that you did on the Rafflecopter form below!	Entry #2 (Contest!) Click below to match up each blogger with their amazing project!
a Rafflecopter giveaway

• One entry per person, per entry method.
• Winner of matching contest will be emailed, and publicly announced on Facebook.
• Winner of random-drawing giveaway will be announced on Father’s Day here on the blog, as well as Facebook.
• Be sure to hop over to RYOBI Nation and check out some amazing inspirational projects!
• Be AWESOME today (that’s a given)

This contest/giveaway is in NO WAY affiliated with Pinterest or Facebook, and we hereby release them of any liability related to this promotion, the receipt of prize winnings, etc. The giveaway prize has been generously provided by RYOBI Nation. All prizes will be mailed by the sponsor and all participating blog owners are not held responsible if the prize is not fulfilled. Giveaway starts Monday 6/10/13 at 5am est and ends at midnight on Saturday 6/15/13. Alternate entry available by sending your entry via email to wehopeyouwin@gmail.com. Winner will be announced on Sunday 6/16/13 and will need to respond within 48 hours to claim their prize, or another winner will be chosen.Winner must be 18 years of age or older and a US citizen in order to win.   May the force be with you.

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Gold Table For Airbnb

Well there she is.  Lately I've been working on a no-longer-secret project, this gold tiled table.  I was approached by the people of makeably, who had a client, who had their own client, that needed a Gold tiled table.  Top, Sides, legs... all of it - gold. They asked if it could be done, and the collaborating began.  So yesterday when makeably.com did their article on it, I was surprised to see that the table was actually for the offices of airbnb.com!  You can read more about it on Makeably.com, or click here.  But the jist of it is that airbnb wanted to celebrate their success by decorating their new office in the themes of some of their popular apartment rentals. This table, was apparently in someones apartment in Berlin. Neat! Some close ups:

This was not the easiest table in the world, but it also wasn't the hardest. I learned a lot, had a lot of fun, and was really happy how it all came together.  Finding gold tile was the hardest thing in the world, every company I talked to said "no one ever asks for gold, so we stopped carrying it years ago".  Special thanks to Opus Mosaics for really pulling through for me here! 

The company I was working with also asked if I could tile up a table they would send me, which is this:

 Yes, it's missing it's legs! Haha. They will be attaching those later on.

Special thanks to Jessica over at Modwalls, she really helped me out! See, in order to get a custom blend of colors, you usually need to order at least 20 sq. feet.  Well, I clearly only needed about... two square feet? So she lent me the tray, and I hand placed the color tiles one by one.  It's a multi-step process but worked out well. Check out Modwalls when you can, they are a local company (Aptos!) but ship all over the place.  The custom tile blender is awesome!

So that's done.  Dropped them off yesterday and swung by IKEA on the way home.. it was a Tuesday so it was EMPTY. Best time to go EVER.

Thanks for checking in, have a good one!

-Jesse

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How To: White-Wash the Fireplace

Roughly 1 million  years ago I asked all of you for your opinion on whether or not we should whitewash the fireplace.  The results were pretty mixed but a lot of you leaned with us towards whitewashing - so one brave evening, we took to it. It was SO much easier than I expected!

So much brighter! We aren't completely done with our front deck yet, but it turns out both Ralph & I prefer to balance too many projects at once - and we started in on the living room.  The fireplace was the perfect kickstart we needed to get to work.   Here's a side by side so you can really see the difference:

If you think you can't do this, you're wrong. It was simple! I took a few process shots to share.

The process is simple. Take diluted paint, and one person brushes it on, while the other follows behind with a rag to remove the excess.  I thought we would have to be really fast about this, but to my surprise - the paint was really forgiving.  In fact, we had to let it soak a little longer on the brick to get the white we really wanted.

Pretty straightforward - dust & clean your fireplace as best you can.  If you want some more darker bricks to show through later, this is the time to paint some of them black, or brown, or deep red or whatever.

We skipped that step, as we already had some dirty bricks. Then, mix up your whitewash.  This is a simple half & half mix: 50% Water, 50% white latex paint.

 Yum!

Then you get to work! Brush a small area on, then wipe it off.  You can always repeat if it's not as white as you'd like. 

We started with the mantle first to get the hang of it, but I guess it would have been smarter to start somewhere LESS visible.  Luckily it came out fine, but you can see we wanted it a little lighter than this:

So we started leaving it on longer, and got this:

We found that wiping less vigorously helped too - gently removing the excess paint vs. scrubbing the bricks to death worked way better.

Stand back, take a look:

And just keep going. We did this in about an hour.

We chose not to tape because we figured we could be careful enough (and we were!) and we also had planned to paint the wall behind it another color someday (Update, we painted! Click here to see), to really make the fireplace pop. (again, click here to see!) And finished:

It dried so fast we were able to start playing decorator, and decided that our mantle needed a mirror, even if it's sliced in half by that chimney.  Can't really fix that, but I love the extra light the mirror brings!

So refreshing! We also have another crazy idea for this area, not sure if it will work... we want to get grey river stones, medium to large size, and cover the brick area around the stove.  We'll put a wood border, and just let the rocks be loose. I think it will bring a modern touch.  Have you ever seen anything like that before? I've been looking all over for tips (or warnings!) about doing that, but we might be on our own....**UPDATE** 10/3/13, we did it - we added river rock to the fireplace,  and it's great!

Well I guess it's Monday again, back to work, huh?  Have a great day & a productive week ahead!

-Jesse

P.S. Here's a sneak peak of the fireplace with our new wall, click here to go read more about it:

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DIY Security Sticks

There's been some robberies in our hood lately, which moved this DIY project to the top of the list.  Granted, I understand these sticks won't completely save the day, but they won't invite anyone in with open arms either.  But safety doesn't have to be boring, am I right? Break out the paints!

I don't know what these things are really called, so I'm gonna go ahead and name them Security Sticks, which is the best name ever.  This is an extremely easy DIY project that doesn't even warrant a tutorial.  You can look at them and already know what to do. So easy you can get the kids involved.  For the adults this project pairs nicely with beer, wine, and good music.

See? Simple.  We have the type of windows that those little screw locks BARELY hang onto, and ya know what? Those are a paint to screw and unscrew each day.  I like to have a little breathing room while we are gone at work, and these puppies fit the bill.  OK here's my super quick security stick project, that I think came out kinda cute.

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