Crafts

I told you last time that I was working on a new project! It's been a while since I have had any time to work on something!!  The room in our house that bothers me the most is definitely our "study."  It's a pretty good sized room, and considering that neither Ben nor myself have any REAL reason for a study, it's kind of wasted space that just houses all the junk in our house!!  If you know me, you know I love a good craft!!  I am a scrapbookaholic, but I also love to sew, paint, crochet, mod podge, and just about anything else!  Basically, I never met a craft I didn't like!  So, you can imagine the nice little collection of "stuff" I have accumulated for all my crafts!  I really wanted some type of storage unit to house it all.  The other issue I had is the only place we really have for me to work is the dining room table.  Now, as much as Ben LOVES coming home to a table piled up with junk and being told he has to stand while eating his dinner because I'm in the middle of a project, I really wanted a real craft space!

Enter Ana White.  Have you been to her site?  Oh my word, it's amazing.  I think Ben and my dad may ban me from it for a while so I'll stop dreaming up projects!  If you've never heard of Ana from Knock-Off Wood, she is a carpenter who takes the furniture from expensive places like the glorious Pottery Barn and draws up the plans so you can build it yourself!  I was looking through her plans when I ran across this.

Ohhhhh, I love it!!  A craft table that neatly houses all my junk and looks pretty at the same time!  So, I set out to build my first piece of furniture!  It went something like this...
Step 1:  Print out lumber list and drag Ben to Lowes.
Step 2:  Take lumber to dad's house to cut for me because we don't have a garage and it rains pretty much every day during the summer.
Step 3:  Dad and I start to build.  We got 1 side built in about 30 min!  Not too bad.  We just used an air powered nail gun with little finishing nails and wood glue.
Step 4:  Go to mom and dad's 1 afternoon and find my craft table completely built and set up in the garage!!!  Haha!  Yes, I have to admit, dad did all the work.  He even went back and screwed it all together for extra support, and put brackets under all the shelves!  Everything was perfect and neatly caulked.  Love that man! :)

I don't have pictures of the finished product yet because I wasn't expecting it to be finished, and didn't have my camera!  Ben did snap a few on my phone the day that I actually helped dad start the table!

I like these because it looks like I did a lot....haha!

Check back soon for the finished project! I just have to get it primed and painted!  Unless dad has already done that too!  :)

P.S.  You can find the plans for this table here.

Support a great cause!!

Helllllooo!!  I have one quick request and then I'll get right to business sharing a new project I'm working on!  This September we are participating in our first Heart Walk!!  We are SO excited!!  This is one of those things you never dream you will be a part of.  I knew heart disease was the number 1 killer of Americans, but it never hit home until my OWN child was born with a heart defect!  Just typing those words still seems surreal.  Now that we are personally affected by this, we want to do everything we can to raise money and find new ways to help others who are affected!  Since we are rookies, we are starting small. Our family will be walking the heart walk in Charleston, and we are looking forward to reuniting with the doctors and nurses who took care of Walker!  We can't wait to show him off! I have set up a page where people can donate to our cause. All of the money goes to the American Heart Association.  We were so blessed to receive all of your prayers during the hardest 2 weeks of our lives.  We pray now that you will consider donating just a couple of dollars to help!!  Imagine if EVERYONE we knew would just give $3.00!  Amazing things could happen!  Here in the link to our page!

http://heartwalk.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?msource=Gigya&ievent=447039&supId=333856750

I'll be back later to show you my new project! (it's still in the works!)

Give Away!

Did you all know I sell Mary Kay?  I had never even tried the products until this year!  I have always been someone who wore cheap make up and just washed my face with whatever $6 cleanser looked interesting at Walmart! LOL!  Then, my mom had a Mary Kay party in March, and I went and tried the skin care line. UM....it's amazing.  I promise I'm not saying this just because I sell it!! I started selling it BECAUSE it was so awesome!  Since it's a little pricey, I started out buying the trial size set of the skin care.  It is $44, but it lasted me about 2.5 months, and that is while washing my face twice a day!  It includes the 3 in 1 cleanser, a day solution, a night solution, and the moisturizer.  I loved it so much, I decided to start selling, basically so I could get all my skin care and makeup half price, and because the started kit you get when you sign up includes 2 FULL SIZE skin care packages, and 12 foundations!! Haha!  I don't really have time for doing lots of parties and stuff, but I do take orders!  I have been wanting to do a give away on here, so I decided I would give away something from Mary Kay! I will randomly choose 2 winners to get a $15 gift card, so YOU can choose the product you want to try!!  I promise you will LOVE anything you choose!!  Also, for the entire month of August, if you purchase the skin care line from me, either the full size OR the trial size, I will throw in a FREE lip stick or lip gloss in the color of your choice!!!  To enter the give away, just leave me a comment telling me what type of make up or skin care you use, and what you like or dislike about it!! I PROMISE I will NOT bug you and start filling up your inbox trying to get you to buy Mary Kay!! This is simply a give away! :)  You can get another entry by referring 3 friends to my blog!! Just add another comment telling me the names of the people you sent! I will keep this open until Aug. 11.  That's 2 weeks from now!!  Good luck!!

Here is my website if you want to browse and see how you will spend your $15!  Oh-and YES, you can apply your $15 to the skin care and still receive the free lip gloss!

http://www.marykay.com/Valerilwilson/default.aspx

Completed Picture Wall! (For now at least)

Well I finally finished my cheap version of the Pottery Barn picture wall! Go here to see theirs!! VERY pricey project if you buy their frames!!  My version looks pretty good for not spending any money!! The only thing I spent money on was printing the pictures and $8 for the mat board!  I designed mine so that I could add more pictures to it later on.  This is how I did it!

First you have to choose which pictures you will use and what sizes you want them to be.  This was the hardest part for me since I have about 9988492093809889 pictures of my kids.  Once they are printed, you need to mat them all.  I did NOT mat them the way pictures are supposed to be matted! LOL!  It's too expensive to buy actual mats and get them cut to fit each picture!  I bought 1 sheet of the bright white picture mat board from Hobby Lobby.  It was $7.99.  Then to save time and money, I just cut the mat to fit the frame and then taped the picture right on the mat.  It was pretty time consuming to do it my easy way.  I can't imagine how long it would take to actually cut the mat opening to lay on top of the picture like you're supposed to!  I should mention that before I even chose my pictures, I gathered all the frames I had in my house, so I knew how many pictures I should print.  I didn't want to have to buy any frames! When I work on a project like this, I have to have lots of space to lay everything out.

And of course having a cute little chubby boy to help is nice!

Here's another one of my secrets....

5 of the frames I had weren't black...until I hit them with some spray paint!  I already had a can of black, so it didn't cost anything!  And think of what I would have spent to buy 5 new frames!

After all your pictures are matted and framed, I would suggest laying them out on the floor or a large surface to see how you want them.  Then you can arrange and rearrange as much as you want until you like your design.  I wanted it to look somewhat random and not symmetrical.  Lay the biggest frames out first and then work your way down to the smallest.

Wanna know another secret?  5 of these pictures are matted on white computer paper!! Haha! I'll betcha $100 bucks you can't guess which 5!

Now it's time to transfer to the wall.  I MAY or MAY NOT have left the pictures sitting on the island in our kitchen for 3 hours days because I was dreading moving them to the wall.  When the time finally came that we needed our counter space back, I sloooooowly came up with my plan.  Here's a hint-once you get your arrangement the way you like it, take a picture.  I probably looked at my picture 30 times while hanging them on the wall.  I started with my biggest frame.  This picture is 10X13.

I found the center point of the wall and went from there.  While I didn't want my arrangement symmetrical, I still wanted it even on the wall!  One by one, I added the photos.  I am somewhat happy with the finished project, but now that it's on the wall, I see that I need 1 more picture on the top right and maybe a couple small ones in between.  I'll be working on that.  I also realized a few pictures are hanging crooked.  Those have already been fixed!  I HATE crooked pictures!!!

So what do you think??  Any suggestions?  Do you have a picture wall in your house?

Picture Wall

Hey! So apparently keeping up with a blog, 2 kids, 2 dogs, 2 cats, a husband, and a house is a little more difficult than I anticipated!! I'm working on it though!  I'm currently working on a fun project that I've wanted to do for a while!  We have a very large bare wall that runs down the hallway.  We have plans to hang some large canvas prints there in the future, but that will be pretty pricey.  For now, I am excited to turn the space into a picture wall!!  I have always drooled over the pictures in Pottery Barn of the big collections of black and white pictures in all different sizes.  I'm doing my best to create our own, without spending a ton of money.  The hardest part has been choosing which photos to use!  We all know about my obsession with pictures!!  It just so happens that a friend of mine is a great photographer!  We had planned for her to take newborn pictures of Walker when he was...well..a newborn.  Of course we didn't plan on spending 2 weeks in Charleston in a hospital.  As soon as we were home and settled in, we set a date!  She did an amazing job and is super affordable if you are in the Lexington area and need a friendly photographer!  You won't be disappointed!  Here are a few of my favorites from the shoot.  I will share pictures of the completed picture wall when it's done!  I'm still waiting on a few prints to be delivered.  Here is Kayla's site for those who are interested!  http://kaylawilkes.smugmug.com/

We're Back!

Thank you all for sticking it out with me for the last 6 weeks or so!!  Now, after a heart surgery for my son and 2 stomach viruses in 3 weeks for my daughter, I finally feel like our family might be put back together. I am excited for the summer, and looking forward to showing you some more projects, and hopefully getting a few new ones completed!!  I have a lot of new pictures I can't wait to share!  And I hope you won't mind the occasional squishy face picture in there...

We left off with the mantel project.  Ben and my dad had it pretty much built in 1 day, and then we just painted and put down the tile!  And of course Ben had to go buy a new TV that fit the space better after his buddies picked on him and said our old one was too small.  So here is how our mantel looks now!

Here is a close up of the tile we chose.  I LOVE it!!  It brings all our colors together perfectly!!

Didn't they do a great job?  Not too shabby for a weekend's work!  Look for a new project to be posted this week!!

Where I've Been

For those who don't know, our sweet Walker was born on April 28th.  He was perfect and so handsome, and we only had to stay in the hospital for 2 days before we got to go home!  His big sister is so in love with him.  On May 7th, when he was 9 days old, I was sitting on the couch on a Saturday morning holding him.  I couldn't put my finger on it, but something just didn't seem right.  He was working really hard to breath, and seemed very cold.  I am an extreme worrier, so I just told myself not to stress and just kept an eye on him.  A few hours later, I couldn't get him to wake up.  Ben and I passed him back and forth, both trying to wake him up.  We made a quick decision to take him to the Urgent Care by our house.  Things got bad very very quickly.  I'm not sure how long we were there, but we ended up taking him to the Children's ER by ambulance.  Shortly after we arrived, we were told our precious "healthy" son had a pinch in his aorta, and would be flown to MUSC for heart surgery.  We were there for 11 days, and he had a successful surgery that saved his life for sure.  Thank the Lord!!  We are home now and trying to figure out how to do everything.  It feels like I've never been a mom before.  Needless to say, blogging has not been a priority.  And of course no home projects are being done.  When we get into the swing of things, I will be back with more posts!! Thanks to all those who kept up with our story and sent lots and lots of prayers and sweet messages! We couldn't have gotten through without you all!!