Desk

I have finally finished the desk renovation for Juliet, after a few delays, such as the vintage cotton reels I wanted to use as knobs on the drawers getting lost in the post, and then having a lot of trouble getting the old knobs off. It's not quite how I anticipated it would look, but I did learn a lot.

 

Here are the vintage reels, I left the tread on them and put a couple of layers of lacquer on top of it so it wouldn't unravel.

The paint was given to me so once that ran out I had to stop. I painted a few layers using different application methods and wiped and scraped off paint to give it a worn look.

A photo frame alternative

A got this picture at the op shop the other day when I was looking for a frame for a print I got given. I thought it was really cute but the picture is pressed metal and didn't belong in a frame.

I didn't really like the colour of the wood either, so here's what I did.

I gave it a thin layer of acrylic paint. This is a pale yellow or cream colour. Then I attached 2 rows of lace with drawing pins. I used some of my vintage scrabble tiles and glued them along the top, and then pegged my photos to the lace. I'm happy with how it turned out. I think it would look lovely with a coloured wall behind it too. It was quick and easy to do. The part that took the longest was finding and printing out the photos since I have thousands of them on the computer.

Yarn wrapped coat hanger hearts

What started out as a lovely autumn morning planting a new crop in our veggie garden, spiralled into a full day outside enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, and getting creative.

I thought I'd share this little tutorial of how I made yarn wrapped hearts.

First I got some old wire coat hangers and bent them into heart shapes. I just did this with my hands, and then used the pliers to cut the bottoms off (the hook part). If you want to be a bit more perfect with your heart shapes you can use the pliers to give a better shape.

Then I cut off a length of yarn and tied it to the peak of my coat hanger, and wrapped the bottom bit tightly with my yarn. I'm using this wide yarn called 'fish net' yarn which comes in these gorgeous bright colours.

Basically I just kept wrapping fairly tightly and crossing over whenever I felt like it.

Then it was just more crossing and wrapping. When I ran out of yarn I just cut off a bit more and tied a knot to keep going. I wrapped some yarn around the knot to disguise it a bit.

 Here's my finished heart, tied to my fence.

And another one.

I've got four kids, so I had to make 4 hearts. Yes, they make me smile.

It was lovely outside, so I used the last bit of sunshine to do some more sewing of blankets onto my trees. My yard is doing a lot of smiling on it's own now, and it's a very happy place to be.

I live in the best place on earth!