Birdhouse, Night light and Lady's room

I've got a thing for trees. I love them. I just do. I can't help myself. In our house back east, I painted a tree in my kids' room in the corner, floor to ceiling, and on the ceiling. I seem to still want that. So, since we moved into a rental and I can't paint the wall, I made a tree out of cardboard. You can see parts of it behind the night light.The night light was a lot of fun. It hangs above her bed and has LED Christmas lights in it. The lights don't get hot, they save energy, and they're blue! So, it almost looks like a moon or fireflies caught in the japanese lantern. I also had this awesome sunflower that is seriously 4 feet across. It hung above the stairs back east, and it's just so happy I had to find a place for it here.
The room is still in progress, probably always will be.
Entry to the room.
Pretty good shot of most of the room. At least the tree, bed and book house. Remember the pvc house we built last time? Well, Lady wouldn't allow us to break it down, so we had to move it to her bedroom. It sits between her bed and bookshelf (that we built this spring and posted about that a while ago.) We left one side open to the books, filled it with pillows, and she decorated it like Christmas. She loves it.
I also made this birdhouse for her tree and thought I'd include instructions because it's made from recycled stuff and I love that. I took a cereal box and a granola bar box and a paper bag.

I cut the granola bar box in half,Taped it to fit in it's corners so it would be pitched like a roof. I covered all the boxes in the brown bag paper.Hot glued the roof to the cereal box, hot glued felt cut-outs on the box, stuck a pencil in the bottom and cut out a hole for the bird to go in.Home, tweet home.

Pvc Pipe Play house

I finally got to this project. Thanks to Wintertree Design for her instructions. We modified it just a little. We made the connection from the roof to the cross connectors longer for a taller roof. I can actually stand inside it.We took old (repurposed-love it!) curtains and hung them around the side, they worked out really well.
Lady actually hung a flashlight from the cross bar on the roof for a night light and she slept in it a few nights ago.
We still need to add a front door and some details. Any ideas?

Then we got to my son's loft bed. This was completely constructed from our own plans, so we made it up.
Talk about a custom house. It will eventually be a fort.
My son actually cut the pipe himself. He loved it.
Great summer time project.

Dots baby shower

June was insane. But somehow I was able throw a baby shower for my sweet, very, very pregnant friend. But because of the insanity of the month (we moved, school was in its final phases, scout camp, youth conference, blah, blah), I chose to do a simple theme of just dots and circles of primary colors and brown. Above is the invitation that I made on Photoshop Elements. (My first attempt at Photoshop, not too bad.)
This is the centerpiece. I filled my three cylinder vases with these. The tall one has alphabet blocks. The middle is filled with wiffle balls (circles on circles!) and the m&m's in the small one had a spoon in them and were part of the refreshments. I put paper circles on the table over a white table cloth.
The favors were just m&m's in a basket tied with tulle. More circles.
As they entered for the shower, they wrote notes on clean diapers so my friend could have some reading material or some laughs while she was changing diapers. Some of my favorite notes said, "does this diaper make me look fat?" and "Daddy's turn." The written-on diapers went into the "dirty" basket.
Favors again.
I glued the invite on a big red circle and wrote "come in" with chalk on the blue circle so people knew to just come in and we didn't have to answer the door. The refreshment table had five salads, spinach dip and french bread, snickerdoodles, and Costco cream puffs. (And m&m's). We played only one game where we made babies out of bubbleliscious bubble gum on index cards. Laura got to choose which baby she liked best and the winner got a package of Sugar Babies ('cause that's what we made.) Then we opened presents. It turned out to be nice and simple, and fun still. Congrats, Laura, with your new arrival!

Place mat purses

My MIL taught me how to make these about two or three years ago. Funny how what goes around, comes around. This year for mother's day, guess what I made for her.
Yep. A placemat purse. A different placemat and with a few alterations from what the original instructions were, but still a purse. Interesting, too, how useful place mats are and for more than just a place mat. I was intending them to be used for scripture totes. My MIL likes red a lot, so the red one is for her.
And my mom likes softer colors, so this is more gentle for her.
Hope they like them. Happy Mother's Day.

Lamp shade

I hate lamp shades. They are so hard to figure out. What I've concluded about them is to never, ever buy them separately from the lamp. Or to add blue flowers. Which is the mistake that happened here. I had a perfectly good drum lamp shade. Plain, but good. Here's the problem: I always think plain is just not enough. In this case, it should have been. So, after I added the blue flowers, the shade looked a little too wedding-cake-ish. Not going to fly on the lamp. Not at all! So I had to laboriously pull (rip) each fabric flower, (which had been attached very well!), off of the shade. It left horrible pock marks of hot glue all over the shade where the flowers were attached. See here:
Poor lamp shade. It was still very useful, but I just couldn't leave the hot glue unattended. (You never should. Says so right on the hot glue label.)

So, this is how I fixed it. I know-- pretty unoriginal to just add ribbon around the edge of the shade, but I already messed it up so badly before that I just couldn't dare to hurt this poor lamp shade any more.

Nice and clean. Much better.

TV console cabinet

That student budget thing we were living on really got to me. I guess we're still living on it. We got a new TV a while ago, (time to join 2010, summer!) after not having one for about a year. And this new TV had no home in our house for a while until I found this cabinet.
In 2 pieces!?! It was a sawed-off hutch that also had a removable base, which is what you see here.
The top of the hutch was simply cut right off before I bought it, but it left these huge, ugly grooves in the top. I found it at a thrift store (yet again) and a lady who watched me buy it said, "Oh, I'd never buy that thing. But she's young and ambitious." I thought, "why yes, I am. And a little bit crazy, but that's always served me well." I loved being referred to as "young." I like to think I am. I wasn't about to reveal my true age. I won't here, either.
This baby had tons that needed fixing, hence, the "ambitious" part of the above comment. It was missing a hinge on one of the middle doors. You already saw that it was in two pieces and had gouges in the top.
The glass in this door was broken.
And some of the moulding on the base had come off, but we still had the piece.
Step 1: get the broken glass out of the door. I thought this would be easy. NOT SO! I was very wrong. First, I had to remove the wood that held in the glass. Not hard at all. Gloves and putty knife were all that I needed.
Then came the glass, which was actually GLUED in! Oh nooooo! Glue? So, I researched how to remove glass from cabinet doors and came across some pretty great websites. One said to use a heat gun to melt the glue and then pull out the glass. Ahh, I don't have a heat gun.
But I have a hair dryer! And it worked!
Slowly, but 2 hours (yes, a heat gun would have been much, MUCH faster!) I got the silicone to soften enough to pull out the glass. Halleluiah! After the glass was out, I went to Lowe's and had them cut a new piece of glass for me, costing a whole 6 bucks! And it took no time. They cut it for me right there in the store on a really cool wall mounted glass cutter. I was impressed.
I filled in the grooves with wood putty and let it dry FOREVER! (Can you tell this project was getting long? Maybe I was too ambitious. I am learning.)
Primed everything. And somewhere in there put the molding back on the base.
Then painted! I also used old hardware I had to replace the existing hardware.
It's a great size for that wall.
And for the TV. Thanks to B for mounting that.
Tada! Pretty insane project, but it's done and was a total of $41 out of pocket. We won't count up elbow grease or cost of labor hours spent. But all in all, not too bad. Don't know if I'll do that again, though.

Lady's Chair

Guess what I found at a thrift store. Oh, just a way cute chair for my little Lady's bedroom! It's even a bit shorter than most chairs so my little Lady's legs will fit just right for quite a while. This is how it started. Brown. And really upholstered. UPHOLSTERED?!?
After I primed and painted the thing white (and taped off the real upholstered -beige-bluh- seat), then I said, "Oh crap. I have no clue how to take off the springs and burlap wrap underneath this very comfy cushion. What do you do when you have no clue?
You staple and glue! I stapled the new fabric right over the top of the old by tucking in the new fabric as I stapled so I had a clean edge. The corners were tough. But B helped me muscle our way around them.
I had to buy gimp to edge it. I had some pom pom fringe that would've been fun, but would've been pulled off too easily. I tried using different kinds of glue to hold the gimp down. Nothing grabbed fast enough. So, I ended up with the trusty hot glue gun. I know I left some skin under that edging, and it's not the most permanent thing to hold down the gimp. But, it will work if no one starts pulling on it. Let's hope, anyway.
Here she is. Finished and ready for the ball.