pink – A Smith of All Trades

Indoor Window Box

April 1, 2015April 1, 2015 Jessica Smith

IT’S APRIL FOOLS! No jokes in today’s blog posts (promise!), but big jokes at work today. I had the pleasure of creating an April Fools poster and web story to hopefully give our students a chuckle or two. We had such a fun time brainstorming ideas and I was tickled to design and write a joke-riddled poster and story. It’s not often we get to be super funny at the business school, so this was quite the treat for me.

Do you play any pranks on April Fools? When I was younger I remember my dad calling me to tell me he had just seen an elephant run by his office at work. I totally bought it! A few years ago, my officemate (now one of my best friends and a great craft night buddy) decided to tape the receiver of my phone down. I’m dense and couldn’t figure out why my phone wouldn’t answer when people called me. She had to tell me because one of our colleagues kept calling and I kept accidentally hanging up on her. Whoops. I am very easy to prank.

So who knows how many times I will publicly demonstrate my gullibility today. Too many for sure.

Anywho, I had some fabulous thrift store luck recently that enabled me to do a quirky floral project for my bay window. We’ll call it an indoor window box.

I have been holding onto this teak box for a while, wanting to do a floral project with it. I couldn’t decide what to do though. I thought of doing glass jars with flowers, but mason jars were too wide. So I prowled thrift stores and found a bunch of pretty white vases to fill the box.

The funny thing was the vases I found were all from different thrift stores. They must be a standard florist vase because of how common they are:

You can see one is more opaque than the others. Meh, perfection is overrated.

The vases fit perfectly in my indoor window box, so I happily skipped off to Michaels with a birthday gift card from my god momma to buy paper flowers for the project.

I came away with these beauties:

All that was left to do was put all of the items together. Not that hard, huh?

I think if I stumble upon one more vase I’ll snatch it up and add it to the box. There’s definitely room for one more. Couldn’t hurt, right?

My indoor window box looks really great in the bay window. It fills the space nicely without blocking the view. Plus, I am really digging the pink, wood and white combo! Looks pretty sweet with the gray and mint combo I’ve got going on in the living room.

Happy April Fools! … do people say that?

Quick and Easy Crafts

Pillow talk, part 2

August 13, 2014 Jessica Smith

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about my pillow dilemma, so now that it is mostly solved I thought I’d update you guys on what went down.

Earlier this summer I shared with you a bunch of different options I was considering for my couch. Taking a page out of Young House Love‘s (and many other bloggers) book, I photoshopped my options before actually deciding on one.

I opted to go with option 1, buying a single coral poppy pillow from decomodwalls on Etsy.

After I got the pillow I of course wished I had gotten a larger size and multiple pillows, much like one of the other options in my original pillow talk post.

I let the pillow situation fade to the background for a bit, option to live with just one pillow for the time being. Then my neighbor and I got to talking about her pillow situation (don’t worry, we solved that problem!) and I realized that she could probably turn my single pillow into two! You see, Allie is really good at sewing (something I really don’t like very much). And, I had two pillows that came with the couch that had a fabric backing the exact same material as the couch.

So I asked if she would rip apart my new pillow and my two couch pillows, and then frankenstein them together. Being the kind person she is, she happily said “yes!”

The pillows look great and saved me some cash money, too. Gotta love when that happens!

Loving the added color in my living room 🙂 I still might add in a navy pillow, but for now I am quite content.

Craft Projects, Quick and Easy Crafts

White and Mint Metal Candle Holder

August 6, 2014August 6, 2014 Jessica Smith

I really try to like colors that aren’t a shade of blue or green. Honest, I do. I bought a coral/pink candle holder from Target a few weeks ago on clearance that I thought would add a nice pop of color to my living room.

You can see it on the table, pulling the same color from my poppy pillow on the couch.

And again on my console table pulling out the color in the maraca I brought back from our honeymoon.

I like the coral color on both of those pieces, but I hate it on the calendar. Seriously, it is awful. Every time I walk by our living room it jumps out at me. “Ha ha, there’s ugly pink in your rooooooom.”

Well, ugly pink no more.

I didn’t want to return the piece since I paid $5. It was a good price and I liked the overall look, just not the hideous color. I taped off the wooden based and, for good measure, a stripe to remain coral.

Then I rushed outside to spray paint the whole thing.

Ahhhh, so much better already.

Once the white dried, I pulled off the tape… and still hated the coral. So I sanded down the line left from the paint and did the entire thing in white. I liked it, but thought it needed something special. Something extra.

So of course I added mint to it. I can’t help it… I just love mint green. And aqua and teal and blue and green.

I then slapped a light stain on the wood base!

It looks so much better (to me anyway). And now it looks right at home on my new console table.

No more ugly pink staring at me in the room. I can breathe a sign of relief.

So what do you think? Better before or after? If you are pink people, then you probably think I’m nutso. It was a cool piece to begin with. But if you are like me and coral pink makes you want to tear at your eyes, the after is much better.

Tomato Tally: 120

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