Before I get started with this week's Pin-spiration, I just wanna tease a few awesome things coming up this week. First, I just made/devoured a DELICIOUS dinner, so there's a Food Friday to look forward to. The first since July, in fact. Womp womp. Also, I got a lil somethin' somethin' in the mail from eShakti today, so expect a product review soon. But most excitingly, I have a sweeeet giveaway lined up for tomorrow! So that's pretty awesome. Make sure you come back tomorrow evening and ch-ch-check it out.
Okay, anyway. Pin-spiration time! Inspiration on top, my take on it below (if you want the original pins, just click either of the top photos).
Just for reference, here's how it looked before:
So, functional but ugly. A re-do was definitely necessary. This was yet another "I'll just kind of wing it and see how it turns out" pins. (Are you noticing the trend here?) I went to Lowe's and bought a couple of 1/2 inch dowel rods, a pack of 1-5/8 inch screw eyes, and several packs of 1-5/8 inch s-hooks.
I cut the dowel rods to the size I wanted them with our circular saw, which was actually pretty terrifying, then sanded down the raw edges. As it turns out, the dowel rods were just the tiniest bit too thick for the screw eyes, so I sanded them down a little more to fit in the hole. Then I spray painted them...guess which color...white. While they were drying, I bent the s-hooks open a bit so I could hang my jewelry on them without opening the clasps every time. That proved to be pretty difficult with just a pair of needle nose pliers alone, but when I gripped the hook in one set of pliers, then pried them open with the other set, it went pretty quickly. There were nearly 30 of them though, and my hands are still sore :(
Anyway, after that, it was an easy enough process. I just measured out where I wanted to hang the bars, drilled some pilot holes with a drill bit, and screwed the eye screws into the wall. (If you're doing this yourself, it's important to remember that you should drill the pilot holes smaller than the screw itself; that gives the screw something to hold on to in the wall.) Then, I just threaded the bent s-hooks onto the bar and slipped them into place. Voila!
I'm thinking about getting some sort of mirror piece for the top of my dresser, but I haven't decided yet. All I know is that black-ish wood does NOT jive with the stain on my jewelry box. Eh. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, don't forget to come back tomorrow and enter to win some jewelry :)
shirt: secondhand
jeans, flats: Target
Oh man, you guys. I can barely keep my eyes open to type right now, and it's not even 8 pm. Work has been absolutely brutal this past week or two...the fiscal year and biennium are both drawing to a close, so all of my agency's offices are writing up their budget requests for the next biennium...and sending them to my office for proofing. My boss and I have been through something like 40 requests, and it doesn't sound that hard, but it has just been physically draining for me.
Do you remember back in high school or college, when you were writing a paper but came up a few hundred words short of the minimum word count, so you repeated yourself and turned phrases like "X caused Y" into "The ramifications of X were numerous, ultimately resulting in the effect of Y" like it was your job? Yeah, it's kind of like reading essays like that. All. Damn. Day. Professors, teachers and TAs have my ultimate respect...right now, I'm so brain dead I can hardly think.
So my friend at work gave me this shirt, tags still on and everything. It's pretty cute, but I think next time I'll have to wear a bra with less push-up...the gals are looking pretty prominent here, haha. Ugh. Now I'm blogging about my boobs. I need a nap. Or maybe just a super early bedtime...
I would like to start this blog post by saying that I had this whole damn thing typed up and coded, and then I lost it because Blogger doesn't autosave any more. So I'm probably going to be a bit short here, but sorryI'mnotsorry.
So. To summarize what I just pointlessly typed up, Matt and I recently painted an accent wall in our bathroom. I decided to make some bathroom art to hang on the opposite wall, using the accent wall's color. So naturally, this project was the first one to come to mind:
All in all, it was a pretty easy project. The only supplies were the two canvases, some masking tape, my leftover wall paint, and a painting utensil. Originally, I was using a foam roller. But that wasn't playing nice with the canvas, so I switched to a plain old wall paintbrush.
I was kind of but not really surprised by how much the canvas bled. It makes sense, I suppose, but based on the original pin, I guess I wasn't really expecting it.
Anyway, I'm really pleased with how the whole thing turned out. It's hanging above my toilet, so I'll spare you the wide shot. There's a floor-to-ceiling cabinet to the right, and the sink/mirror is to the left. We decided not to paint this wall because it didn't seem worth the effort to move/detach the sink, mirror and toilet to paint, knowing we'd have to do it all again and paint back to white when we move out in a year or two. But still. Now we have an accent wall! (It's the wall directly opposite this one.)
I made another art addition in the bathroom, too. My bud Sydney of Take Me For A Twirl took a cool umbrella shot a while back, and I emailed her to ask if I could get a copy to use for art. (Funny story, that was our first interaction besides complimenting each other's outfits via blog comment.) Anyway, I tweaked the color a bit, then created desaturated versions of the original and lined them up from brightest to palest.
It's hanging above my towel rack and really lends to the beachy theme of the rest of the bathroom. Thanks, Syd, for letting me use your photo! And just for the heck of it, here's a wide shot with the rest of the beachy decor. The shells are from various vacations I went on as a kid, and the three beach photos (which are kind of hard to see here) were taken by my friend Emily. (The same friend whose Eiffel Tower photo is hanging on my living room wall. Hey, I know what I like.)
So. I officially deem today's Pin-spiration Monday a success. Onward!
dress: gifted
sleeveless collared shirt: New York & Company
cardi: H&M
shoes: secondhand
necklace: Target
bracelet: Forever 21
Sorry if you're tired of hearing (reading?) this from me, but my office is COLD. Like, keep-a-heavy-sweater-in-your-cube cold. Once, I wore a skirt and long sleeves, and wound up having to wrap my sweater around my legs and tie the arms in a knot to keep it in place. That. Cold.
Anyway, the best way to handle such frigid temps when it's 90 degrees outside is, of course, layers. I just throw a non-wrinkle-prone cardi in my bag with my high heels, then throw it on when I get to work and switch my comfy shoes for my actual shoes. (Hey, walking around downtown in four-inch heels is NO FUN.)
So I need some feedback from you guys with this outfit. When I was wearing it, I felt really thick around the middle. Just kind of...puffy. And when I look at this outfit, I feel like I look puffy. Does anyone else see that, or is it just me? Also, I'm not really sold on these shoes. I think they'd be cute with long pants, so just the toes poke out. My friend at work called them "grandma" shoes...you can't see it in the photos, but they have a square one-inch heel. Any opinions on those?
T-shirt, shoes: Old Navy
skirt: secondhand
necklace: Forever 21
If I were a serious, full-time style/fashion blogger, I'd be too embarrassed to tell you the truth about this outfit. But I'm just some chick who uses her little corner of the internet for pictures of her clothes and DIY projects. So the truth is, I actually wore this outfit back in June, never photographed it, then re-created it to take photos like two months later. Oops?
I wore this to a quadruple-birthday party; four of our friends have birthdays within a week of each other, so we usually celebrate with one big party. The bright pink skirt, seemed perfect for a nighttime soiree. I couldn't figure out how to style this skirt, so I went with the classic add-a-white-T-and-go method. Never fails!
(P.S. That third photo up there? It was supposed to be my "model" face. I'm so cool.)
Update: My friend Kathryn was observant enough to remember that I wore my pink flower clip thing in my hair at the party. Seeing as how I'm a horrible perfectionist, I had to say something. I may or may not Photoshop the flower into these pics and repost them, haha. Thanks for the reminder, girl!
For this week's project, I decided to tackle something that I've been meaning to do for more than a year now. Looking back, I can't figure out why I put it off for so long...it was super easy, and I really love the look. So here's the pin that inspired me:
So I went to the thrift store to grab a cheap frame, which originally was unfinished wood. I had some leftover black spray paint, so I just hit it with a few quick coats. Then I hot-glued the key to a piece of paper, and printed off the date and description because my handwriting is terrible. And here's how it turned out!
The frame didn't come with glass, or a proper back for that matter, so I had to get creative. The piece of paper that the key is glue to was just a tad smaller than the frame itself, so I just had to sandwich the paper between the frame and the piece of cardboard that came with the frame:
Then I just used a little wire left over from last week's project, and hot-glued it to the back of the cardboard/frame.
The final product turned out great, and I really like the shadowbox-like quality of it not having a glass cover.
It's now hanging, along with another new addition, among my living room gallery wall. The other new photo is the cool Eiffel Tower shot in the top right corner. My BFF Emily took that shot on her recent trip to Paris! It's a great shot; this image really doesn't do it justice. (The frames are mostly thrifted and spray-painted, and you can click here for info on the other art shown here.
So, week two of Pin-spiration challenge is a success! Do you have any Pinterest-inspired projects you've been meaning to tackle lately?
