#408...chalkboard skillz

I think I'm ready to apply for a job as a chalkboard artist! I enjoyed creating these food and beverage boards for a client's upcoming wedding.

#407...window planter bedside table upcycle

BEFORE

For the past couple years, the loft bed has looked like this picture above, with planter boxes hanging on the wall as bedside tables, filled with holiday light strands. I posted about this here. The light strands burned out, so I decided to upgrade the bedside boxes and make them more functional. 

AFTER

To give the area some lighting, we added some swivel reading lamps on either side of the painted headboard. I once blogged about the headboard here.

Next, we cut some pieces of leftover shiplap (which I sanded and waxed) to cover a portion of the wire basket and serve as a tabletop. We thought keeping the basket space accessible would be more functional than covering the entire box. This was a pretty simple fix, but I feel like they are a lot more functional now. You may also wonder what happened to the small chests at the foot of the bed. Well....they sort of blocked access to the bed, so we re-purposed one here.....and the other here (sans yellow base).

#406...leather edge pillow

Earlier this year, I made some pillows from a Mexican Serape for a client. See them here. I was left with a small scrap and decided to make a pillow for myself. The leftover scrap was really small, so I decided to try adding some leather to it to make it a bigger pillow. I pulled out my re-sale leather bin and cut some strips of leather from this black skirt.

I sewed the leather to the serape and now have a colorful leather edge throw pillow.

#405...cement entry steps

The 1000 plus people that came through our house for the holiday home tour put the final nail in the coffin of our front slate steps, which were already crumbling before the tour. Since we are working on cementing our entire property, we got ourselves some new cement steps poured. The cement guy told us that we would have to add a step to the configuration. We used to have 3 deeper steps and now we have 4 shallower steps. It has taken some getting used to the added step. I trip over the steps nearly once a day running out of the house.

Before

After

Here are some during shots...

I finally finished painting the railings, and spent a little time outside replacing and trimming our potted chimney plants. Sadly, we lost our potted pencil cactus tree (see it here) during the unusually cold winter we had this year. I replaced it with some sticks of fire variety pencil cactus plants that I picked up at a local nursery. Hopefully by the end of summer it will have grown back into a tree.

#404...ginger beer

I have been on a ginger beer kick lately. Tyler decided to make me some homemade ginger beer last weekend. It's very spicy, and very yummy! He followed this recipe by Olive's Pantry.

#403...woven rope light strand

For the holidays, I wrapped a light strand around my laundry/bath mirror (see it here), and I have left it up this year because I like the lighted effect. The strand looks pretty Christmasy, and I've been searchign for a way to make a less holiday looking light strand for the mirror. I came across this DIY on A Merry Mishap, and thought I would give it a try around the mirror.

I bought some thick rope at the local hardware store and used one of my LED light strands that I had out for the holiday home tour.

To weave the light strand into the rope, you pull the rope apart against the twist.

We used two galvanized nails to drape the rope around the mirror. I tied the rope knots to hide the plug ends.