Monogramed and Vinyl Lettered Ironstone

I have been collecting white ironstone for quite some time with the intention to add vinyl lettering, monograms and images to them. Well after much encouragement from my wonderful friend Lucille I finally became friends with my Quickutz Silhouette machine and now I am in love with it!!  I am cutting out and adding vinyl to everything I can find around the house. I really have to get more serious about Etsy or Ebay because I literally am running out of space to put things and (shhhh the kids are going to have a fit when they come home they think I need to go on the Hoarder show!) we can barely get a vehicle in our huge garage! Enjoy.

A little kitchen redo

I have been wanting to have that old feel to our kitchen forever because our house is over 160 years old. Back in the day we redid the house to make it look more modern and now I regret it. I wish we would have put in replacement windows and kept the look of our tall old windows but they will have to stay as is. Hubbie would not be happy if I even suggested redoing them after putting in new ones and then siding the house. So instead I have been trying to restore the inside to look like it may have originally. I wanted wainscoting but when you have a house as old and unlevel  as ours it would have been too much of a chore. Instead I used beadboard paintable wallpaper and love it. I got smart after putting the paper on 2 walls and painted the paper before putting it up because it was a pain in the you know what to paint around the kitchen cabinets. I ended up using a small craft brush on the first 2 walls and it took forever! I just used a sponge paint roller dipped in water to activate the paste then I only had to do a few touchups - so much easier than painting with a tiny brush. I did add some white glue to the seams because they kept wanting to roll back and when that dried I went back and  filled in all the seams with quick drying plaster because I wanted the seems to disappeared. Just sand it down after it dries and go back and retouch the paint. This was an easy project and so worth it!

A few new projects

I don't seem to get much accomplished these days other than making a mess and leaving tons of unfinished projects all over the place. I did however get a few things completed and I'm sure it was because they were fast and easy. I fell in love with the books on Pottery Barn but not the price. How simple and only cost me $1 total for the books and ribbon. Easy peasy -  go to your local thrift store and buy old books then just take an exacto knife and cut off the covers, tie the ribbon around them and whala! The Lincoln bottle was pretty much free too-just the cost of printing out the label on my laser printer. I found the liquor bottle in the recyclables at our dump so free-love that! Then I dipped the bottle in leftover blackened wax and had all the other supplies left over too. Love cheap projects but from now on I may have spend $'s and find someone to give the liquor too out of a bottle because they no longer recycle glass here. :-(  Finally the remote holder was an old recipe holder I found for .25 at a thrift store and just sprayed painted it black and added the label leftover from a bunch I bought on ebay last year. Enjoy!

What a long winter!

Seems like winter has gone on forever here in Iowa. My husband suggested I take pictures because he can't remember when we've had so much snow. Well I have a better memory and I do. It was back in the late 80's when our children were in high school and ended up stuck in the house for 2 days and they drove us crazy! No computers or game councils in those days - just a good old antenna on the house and you got what you got on TV. LOL They finally decided to shovel a path wide enough so that we could get a vehicle out of the driveway and the snow was as high as our Isuzu Trooper. It took them forever but they were determined to get to town and we all got a breather from each other. Thank goodness we live in a time where they have superb equipment and we never get snowed in anymore. In the first few pictures our grandson and his friend are trying to make a snow fort and you can see our phone box and 911 address pole but two weeks later they are gone under tons of snow along with our shed. Gosh I can't wait until spring!