Wedding Wednesday Preview

As I'm sure many of you know, Troy and I got married last summer.  And it was awesome.  See, look how awesome that looks.

And in addition to being generally awesome, there was also a pretty solid level of DIY included.  This being a largely DIY blog, I wanted to make sure to capture some of those elements here.  Also, as you can see from the picture above, we had a seersucker wedding, and I hold the firm belief that the world needs more seersucker wedding resources.  So, over the next several weeks, I'm planning to share tips and tricks for:

Fabric Flowers and Bouquets

Table Runners

Programs

Letter Hangers

Cake Toppers

... And plenty more!  Stay Tuned!

Stenciled Accent Wall

I know it's not part three in the comic book storage series, but this weekend I started (and finished!) our master bedroom accent wall!  This is one of many projects that I've been thinking about doing in a master bedroom for AGES, and I'm so, so excited about how it turned out :)

This is what the master bedroom looked like pre-us.  

Very serene and well-done.  But a little too earthy for me.  Troy and I have more or less decided that our "style" is turn of the (last) century, nautical (which holds, right up until I start sharing pictures of what he's done to his new office - prepare yourselves for bold).  I also tend to gravitate a lot more toward cool neutrals as opposed to warm neutrals.  So, our master, like our wedding, is going to be all about the blues, grays, and coral pops.

When querying Pinterest for accent wall ideas, I found that I liked the stenciled look, and even more than that, I really liked the same color, glossy-on-matte look.  So that's what I decided to do.  The colors in our master are Behr Southern Evening in high-gloss and flat, and Behr Light French Gray in eggshell.  I purchased my stencil from OMGStencils on Etsy.  

Stenciling Process

I started by applying spray adhesive to the reverse side of my stencil  I did this outside, and it seemed to be working pretty well, until about two minutes in, it started raining.  I finished, but the stick wasn't very good, so after I gathered my other supplies, I reapplied the spray-on adhesive.  Other supplies mostly consisted of the most adorable mini-roller and tray I have ever seen, and the stirred glossy paint.

My strategy was to start stenciling from the upper left corner, go across the ceiling (over the window), and then work down in rows of two at a time.  What happened instead was I started at the top, did approximately two repeats, and stopped until Troy could come in and install a light (we had a ceiling fan that was pretty gross looking, so we took it down, only to find out that the hardware wasn't in place to have a fan there, so we opted for a light fixture instead).  As it turns out, with only natural light (and a torrential downpour), it's really, really hard to line up stencils when you're painting Southern Evening on Southern Evening.  Lesson learned.

Once the light was installed, it took me approximately two more hours, and two more spray adhesive applications to do the majority of the wall.  Because the bottom row was shorter than the rest of them, I stopped to let the paint on the stencil (because some paint gets on the back of the stencil) dry, so as not to get blue on the trim.

To paint around the windows, and on the bottom row, I used painters tape, rather than the spray adhesive, which worked really well.  Around the window, it was helpful to have a second set of hands, because there was only ~5 inches between the last full stencil and the window that needed to be painted, so I taped one side and Troy held the other while I painted super fast.  I then went back with a small paintbrush (probably about a centimeter wide) and filled in a few places on the wall where I had missed a line or a corner with the roller.  Below are some pictures of the final result (which I LOVE).  It almost looks like velvet on the wall.  The pictures aren't superb (again, trying to photograph Southern Evening on Southern Evening), but I think you get the gist.

Lessons Learned

So, so many of them (or four, whatever).

• I was not in love with my spray on adhesive, but I don't think that the one I had was designed for stenciling.  As you continue to use the stencil, more and more paint builds up on it, which makes it heavier, and the adhesive doesn't stick as well.  I thought that the painters tape was wildly easier to work with, and held very securely, but I was able to position the tape in such a way as to not mess with the still-drying paint of the previous stencil.  I'd imagine that not all stencils allow for this.
• If I had to guess, I'd say that I had too much paint on my adorable mini-roller basically all the time.  This led to a little bit of a bleed, which didn't bother me because of how large the area was, and to paint getting on to the back of the stencil.  A solid lesson learned for me was to stop and let the stencil totally dry before I used it in a corner, near the trim, or by the window, so as not to get Southern Evening all over everything (only had to make that mistake once).
• I was not quite as diligent about lining up all the overlap points as I should have been.  For the most part, they're good, but in a few cases, they're half an inch off or so.  Again, based on the size and the blue-on-blue nature of the project, that doesn't really bother me.  If I were using two colors that had more (read: any) color contrast, that would probably bother me a lot more.
• Especially for glossy on matte, make sure to have good light in the room.  Even with a working overhead, it's easy for a line or a corner to have been behind a shadow and missed in the initial run.

Comic Storage (Part 2) - Painting Knobs

I suppose that this is less of a tutorial, and more of an intermediate process for getting from point A (dyeing the wood) to point C (constructing the actual unit), but it was still something that happened, so here we go.

Clearly the goal of the unit was to highlight the comic books, so I wanted some way to make the unit itself themed without being overwhelming (which is good, given Troy's paint choices for his new office - stay tuned, true believers!)  I considered a few different options, ranging from wood burning (would have been awesome, but the dye/tinted poly were too dark for it to really show up), to painted comic book covers on the sides.  The problem with most of those options, however, was time and maintaining the surprise aspect of the project.

So I looked into knobs.  Hobby Lobby actually sells super hero drawer knobs (just not on their website).  They're really cool looking (see left), but had a few downsides.  First, they're $7.99(!!) each.  That's a little steep for a DIY project, especially when I needed ten of them.  Also, they didn't have ten different options, so there would have been a lot of repetition, rather than superhero representation.  So I kept looking.  Etsy to the (inspiration) rescue!

The IKEA RASTs came with knobs, and it seems like a lot of the super hero drawer knobs that are being sold on Etsy are those same knobs, just painted with super hero logos.  Well, I figured I could do that, and then customize and represent at the same time.  So that's what I did.

First, I painted all 12 knobs white, figuring that I would screw up some of the detail painting along the way (that absolutely happened). In doing the detail painting, I focused on the top of the knob exclusively, and left the sides to paint later.  I used these brushes and acrylic paint. The knob painting probably took about four hours total, but I was watching American Pickers and intermittently doing homework, so that's a pretty rough estimate.

As you can see, I opted to include the logos for the Legion of Superheroes, Thor, Spiderman, Batman, Captain America, Yellow Jacket (Troy is a big Hank Pym fan), Iron Man, the X-Men, Avengers, and the Fantastic Four.  I'm happy with the variation, and mostly with the way that the knobs came out.  In retrospect, if you screw up with black paint, it takes a lot of coats to cover over completely (more coats than say, my Avengers knob actually got).

To protect the knobs, I sealed them with a couple of coats of clear polyurethane, and hid them in a drawer until it was time to move everything to the new house and assemble the unit.  So much stealth! 

Comic Storage Tutorial (Part 1) - Dyeing Wood

So, now that Troy's birthday is over, I can finally start to post some of the crafting I've done lately!  Other than painting (and painting, and painting), I've been working on a surprise birthday gift for months (stealth is hard when Troy gets home before me in the evening, and doesn't tend to go out of town with the same regularity that I do).

Anyway, here's the finished product is a five-drawer super hero themed, IKEA-hack, comic book storage solution (that will hold maybe 30% of the current comic book collection).

The genesis for the project was that Troy had a pretty reasonable storage solution for part of his collection, but that really wasn't enough.  Also, I like themes, and last January (ten months ago), I saw that Marvel Universe Live! was going to be in Charlotte over Troy's birthday weekend.  So, of course I bought those tickets.  Had to.  Spoiler alert: It was adorable.  As such, I was on the lookout for a comic book storage solution.

After a quick and mostly fruitless web search, I determined that the options were to either keep going with comic long boxes, which really lack aesthetic appeal, or pay INSANE (like Taylor Swift in Blank Space) prices for custom file cabinets.  That wasn't going to happen either.  So finally, I stumbled on to this, seen to the right.  And that seemed like something that I could make.

So, after some research, I decided to take the drawers and hardware from two IKEA RAST dressers and pair them with two five-foot side panels.  How hard could that really be?  And that takes us to the first part of the tutorial.

Dyeing Wood
I'm pretty fanatical about surprises remaining surprises.  So, for that to work, I needed a way to color untreated pine (the natural IKEA state) without Troy knowing that anything was going on.  That ruled out any kind of polyurethane, since the smell would have given me away.  I considered painting, but I knew that his preferences tend more toward natural wood colors than paint, so that was a last resort.

Pinterest came to my rescue.  I've never really considered it, but you can use RIT Dye on wood.  So, I picked up a bottle of dark brown at Hobby Lobby ($3.99), waited until Troy was at Nerd Recess, and tried it out.

Pretty much all I did was boil 16 cups of water, and dump in the bottle of dye.  Then I mixed it up and started dunking the different pieces of the two IKEA RASTs.

The wood generally absorbed the dye really well, so I let each piece sit for a minute or two per side, and then took it out and let it dry on a towel (not a nice towel, since the dye is permanent) for 10-15 minutes.  I was able to dye the vast majority (whoops) of the wood from the RAST dressers in approximately two hours (while also cleaning the kitchen).

I was really excited by the results when the wood was still wet (see right).  Pretty color, wood grain intact, super easy to do.  Unfortunately, it didn't dry quite that nicely.

The wood grain remained, but somehow, the rich brown color changed to a dark-but-still-somehow-neon purple.  I don't know how that happened, but it did.

After some colleague consultation, I took a chance and used Minwax Water-Based Wiping Stain in the lightest, yellowest shade I could find.  That was the Oak.  This worked wonderfully (and didn't have much of a smell, which kept the surprise a surprise!) to neutralize the purple tones and bring the wood back to a nice normal brown color.  It was very easy to wipe on, using a cut up old tee shirt, and it dried super quickly (fast enough so that I could almost immediately restack the pieces in my office closet).

Earlier, I said that I dyed the majority of the wood in the first go around.  At that point, I hadn't yet gotten the side pieces.  For those, I went to Home Depot and got a 1" x 12" x 10' common board for $20.34, which they were kind enough to cut in half for me.  This time, I didn't need as much dye, so I used the powdered RIT Dye.  While this didn't dry as purple, there were still some serious purple undertones, so I went ahead and used the wiping stain on those too.  Overall, I used one tube of the wiping stain, but I didn't stain the sides of the drawers (just the fronts and the backs), so that cut down on the need for it.

The final wood color is shown below, as part of the finished storage solution.  I plan to do two more posts: one on creating the comic knobs, and what will probably be a super long post on actually assembling the final creation (not exactly a fool-proof process, as the case would be).  At the end, I'll list my costs for the whole project, which were less than $175 (a far cry from the $975 base price for the Comic Crypt).  Hope this is helpful for anyone interested in trying something similar!

Step 2

At this time last week, I was getting ready to leave work to meet my husband, do a walk-through, and close on our very first house (!!!)

As he announced, we now own approximately 2.327 x 10 ^ -8 % of the Earth's land surface area and the dwelling built thereupon (pictured below).

Super, super cute. That was Step 1.

Step 2 was to create a blog, so that I can chronicle the compulsive level of crafting, DIY, and everything else that goes into turning said dwelling into a home.

There will be a lot of it. As far as I'm concerned, this is a living laboratory for both the types of projects I normally do (sewing, cooking, glass etching, etc.) and those that are somewhat less familiar (furniture redos, painting, and anything else that needs done. We've been renting for years, and I finally feel like we have a place to play.

Stay tuned - it's all getting done.  And it's all going to be awesome.