Summer Sleep

Oh, to make it to summer.

Where you get to sleep till noon.

NOT IN THIS HOUSE!!

Welcome 5:45am.

Good morning Kylie.

Don't you know it's summer?

You can sleep till noon!

No? You say.

Oh, you want to play.

Right. We wouldn't want to waste the day!

The Table Project.. Part 1

A family member is getting ready to move into a new apartment. She needs a new table. We found this one for a great price, but the finish was an uninspiring putty color. So.... yep, I said I would paint it. And that began THE TABLE PROJECT. Cause you just can't paint the sucker. It had to be sanded.

I was really hoping that all it would take would be a light sand to knock the finish off. But alas, NO!  The putty color immediately started pulling away from the blue if you picked at it.  I'm guessing the putty color was latex, the blue was enamel. Cause they sure didn't bond well! Of course, they bonded well enough for me to have to work hard to get the paint off though :)!

A couple of hours and lots of hand sanding later, I was covered in green/blue/putty colored dust particles.  But the table looked great.  I really wish I could just poly it and go from there.  It looks really, really cool in person. But that's not the desired finish, and since it isn't my table (it just feels like it now!) I'll finish it the way the family member wants.

And that's leads us to part 2. The paint job. coming soon.

Oversized Coloring Sheets

Art Camp starts tomorrow.  One of the things the kids will get to learn about and do is create a mural. How do you do this with 40+ kids from 6 years old to 14?  Well, you teach it like a giant coloring page!

To do this, I decided on what I wanted for each of the 4 murals.  We are doing one per show/group.  Then I drew the design onto a full sized flat sheet. Then, with this one, since it's about Babe, the blue ox, I outlined Babe in blue, the farmhouse in red and and the windmill inn silver. 

Unlike a traditional mural for the stage, ours will have some white space, there is no way we could paint the entire thing in just a couple of rotations.  I'm looking forward to teaching the kids about stage painting and how to paint on a large scale!

Four full size sheets, going across the backstage are going to look great!! And for those of you out there who are leery of doing something like this with kids, instead of using paint, you could use markers...just make sure you put something underneath the sheet!

The Vintage Find

Last weekend Doug and I had some afternoon time to ourselves. So, we stopped into stores that we don't frequent with the kids.  There is a wonderful flea market/antique mall type place here in the ville called 377 Market Place. (I think that's its name...) You can find great items from glass stuff to living room furniture and more.

When we saw the green canisters, we knew we had to have them. We don't do antiques really, but we do fun and interesting items.  We have a quirky house and these just fit. Currently they live on top of the china cabinet. They are safe there.

Best of all, when I looked them up, they aren't some sad little knock off piece! They are L E Smith Moon and Stars glass canisters! Even better, we got a great deal!! I loved them anyway, now I adore them :)

A Picnic Table for Our Park

I have the pleasure of working with some really cool people. One of those cool people is our Construction Tech teacher. Towards the end of school Bruce and I were talking about what he and his students were making to finish out the year. I asked about a kid-sized picnic table. Nope, they weren't making that, but he would think about it...

So, a couple of weeks later, he asked me to stop by his room and he had a perfect table ready! He said that he would be adding these to his list to make next year as he had a number of people want mine!  I had to paint it (as he said, he builds, I paint), but that was easy. So for a small donation to his program to cover the cost of supplies, I have a perfect kid-sized picnic table for my back yard!!
 

Isn't this SOOO much better than the plastic primary colored one!!