HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I know, I know…it has been a long time since last time I wrote something, but I have a very good excuse: I was on vacation! :) My Christmas vacations are a very special time because is usually the only time of the year when I can meet my family and old friends. You can imagine how exhausting and time consuming (but very rewarding) this is, so my rule was not to bring my laptop with me. Sorry, but it’s the only way that I know to have real vacation. That is why I couldn’t post anything, I even didn’t have time to check other blogs! :/

But now that I’m back I can tell you that I’m excited about this coming year. The truth is that I love to make lists for everything but surprisingly I never had a New Year’s resolutions list. But this time is different, I have one, but I’m keeping it very short so I’ll try to accomplish everything! Although in the end the only thing that matters is to be as happy as possible! So I wish you a great New Year full of happiness!

Wish, dream, work, don’t give up, enjoy and be happy! Happy New Year!

DECORATE YOUR WALLS!

We live in a rented house. I liked it a lot but all our walls are the same colour, it´s too uniform and after some time they are boring. We are not allowed to paint the walls but I would love to do it. So instead of complain and complain (something that I have done for a while :/) I decided to start decorating them...

Well, the truth is that so far only 2 of the walls are decorated. I hung 3 frames with postcards from our trips to some National Parks on one. The other has a tapestry in yellow, white & black that brings some colour to the room. I really like this one but I need more…So I search a little bit to have some new ideas about what to try next, and those are the ones that I liked better.

With Tiles

Copycatcrafts

-This would look great in our bedroom as well-

With CDs
Re-nest

-Super original-

With Stickers

Calfinder

With Plywood

Curbly

-Love love love this one for our kitchen-

With Pictures

Makeundermylife

-This should be easy, I just need to spend some time deciding which pictures I want!-

So more things added to my ‘Project List’. It’s time to decorate the walls!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

I’m sure everybody is busy these days: shopping, cooking, organizing, making sure everything is perfect…but please, don’t forget to enjoy, laugh, smile, and tell all your family and friends how much you love them!

Have a wonderful day:

INSPIRATION: PENDANT LAMPS

I love big pendant lamps. They are an important point in a room, and in my opinion they can totally transfrom the entire room .

When I saw this one, I fell in love. This lamp is gorgeous, stylish and the best thing: is a DIY lamp! Can you believe it? I want one!!

Designsponge

And just searching a little bit I found more stunning lamps. Take a look to these pictures, I’m sure you will want one for your living room, your bedroom or your studio.

Craftynest

Cutoutandkeep

Hommemaker

Martha Stewart

the3rsblog

Designsponge

the3rsblog

Can you believe that alll of them are DIY! Don’t you want to try?? The difficult part will be to choose only one!

CRAFTY HALLOWEEN

Hope you had a great Halloween! It was a really fun weekend for me: crafts + party with friends + candy = perfect combination! :)

Here is a pic of our scary pumpkins! The truth is that they were more cute than scary, also because they were small, but I think they look great! I think I'm going to keep them for a long time!

And here is another pic of our Halloween crafts. The moment I saw the spiderwebs here I knew I wanted to make them. And I decided to add some life there, so we made the spiders as well. The spiderwebs are made with trash bags (but go to How About Orange for the tutorial, I’m sure you will find more things that you like in her blog) and the spiders are made with foam balls (bought from the dollar store) and straws!

Fast, easy and cheap, so if you didn't put any decoration at your home this year, you should try that next time!

Crafty Halloween = Lovely Halloween!

TAGS

I love this idea. It’s easy, cheap and you can be as creative as you want!

projectwedding

I think I will create some to use as gift’s tags, to make bookmarks, to label all my supplies-boxes (right now they are a mess, I’m not even sure what I have inside!) …you see, there are tons of possibilities! Just try it!

I give you a hint of how to do it....

but go to projectwedding to see the full tutorial!

I will show you mines soon—I hope! :)

I FOUND IT!

Do you remember that I was looking for something to put in my wicker basket? Well, I found it!!

Last week, I saw this branch lying on theground of the parking lot where we had our car. I liked it from the beginning. Although I thought (still think) it was a little too thin but as I really liked the shape, I decided to take it with me and see how it looked like.

So this is what I did:

I bought at the dollar store one of those floral foams (I’m not sure if this is the right name, but is one of those green squares/rectangles that are use to hold floral arrangements). I made a small hole in the middle and I placed my branch in it. Just to make it more stable I used some glue. I left it overnight, to make sure that it was dry (and also because it was late and I was tired! : ) )---That's also why I don't have pics of this! :(

Then I filled the wicker basket with some wood chunks that we had (we bought them last summer for some gardening but we never used them!). Well, the truth is that I only filled the top part with the wood, the rest was filled with some cardboard packing taken from our recycle bin.

So I put the cardboard, then some wood, then my branch glued to the floral foam and then I covered it with more pieces of wood. I was thinking of leaving it like that, but as I said, the branch is too thing so it looked like was missing something. Solution: another trip to the dollar store! I found tehre some artificial leaves that had the perfect fall colours. And the best part is that I even didn’t have to glue them, I just put them on the branch, using their natural spots and it worked.

I have to say that I really love the final result, perfect for the fall season…although I must hurry up because here we got our first snow last week!

MINI-GARDEN

I love to eat fresh veggies and fruits. And although most people think I’m crazy, salads are one of my favourite meals! Have you ever though how great would be to have your own garden?! I spent the entire summer thinking that we should have a garden at home, but I knew that was a lot of work and a lot of time!. Now summer is gone and we don’t have a garden… but a couple of weeks ago, I saw these ‘boxes’ on the street (yessss, I found them on my way home! :) )

I knew they had a spot on our backyard! This is our easy way of having a mini-garden at home!

Those are the ‘boxes’ as we found them----(I’m sure there is a more appropriate name but don’t know which, so if you know how to call them, please let me know and I’ll correct it!).

They weren’t too bad in fact. They just needed to be dressed up a little bit. So I sanded them, mostly to remove some kind of blue tape and glue that they had. Then I put the primer. I thought one layer would be enough, but I ended up doing 2 layers.

Once the primer was dry I used some painter tape to create some stripes. We wanted something fun and colourful, and we weren’t looking for perfection so we sprayed them, let them dry, and after that, put the soil and the lettuce seeds. And this is how they look like!

Now we are just giving them tons of love and water, and hopefully we will be eating a home-grown salad soon! :)

WICKER BASKET

I wanted to show you today my second spray painted project but to be honest, the pictures don’t show what I wanted to show you!! :( Does it make sense? Anyway, I decided that I will post it and hopefully in a couple of weeks I’ll show you a better pic --- (I’m working in another kind of project that will go with this one, so I’ll try to have better photos next time. But is still to early to know if it would work, so more on that later! )

So here is my little story:

I bought this wicker basket more than 6 months ago in a thrift store, it was cheap but it wasn’t in perfect conditions… but I liked it a lot, so I decided to bring it home. If I remember correctly, I just applied some varnish that I had at home, and just with that the basket was back in life again! But the truth is that some of the damages were still visible…

This is the basket after the varnish!

A couple of weeks ago I decided to change it a little bit. I knew it wasn’t going to look perfect, so instead of trying to have a neat effect I went for something more rustic (…if that can be possible!). So I sprayed it first with a light brown colour (in fact it was just the leftovers of some wood spray paint that I used for something else), and once it was dried I sprayed it with white spray. I have to say hat I like the change, but my pics are very disappointing, because is not easy to see the difference! Sorry about that! But I swear I changed its colour! :)

This is the basket after the white spray paint!

Now I just need to find the right thing to put inside ….any suggestion??

BUCKET-POT

Ok, I know that I’m not doing anything special or new here, but I like the result, and I like even more the super-low price! This is a very simple story: I went to a thrift store and I saw this bucket for just $ 0.69! Ok, maybe this is not the most amazing treasure...I know that we can find better things, but that was just one among others thing that I got that day! :) Anyway, I liked it and the price couldn’t be better – To be honest, when the price is lower that $1 is difficult to resist…. Ohhh, yeahhh!

BUCKET BEFORE

So, I didn’t think it twice: I bought it and directly after that I bought a can of spray paint that matched my backyard chairs. So here is the result; a beautiful, colorful bucket that I’m using as a pot! Isn’t it nice?? and I love the green with the pink-purple of the flowers!

POT AFTER

Not too bad to be the first thrifty project, eh?: cheap, easy, fast and nice. I think it was good enough to start, don’t you think so??? :)