I was just taking a look at apartment therapy's site and saw that they featured some other awesome chalkboard paint ideas... in fact, they've had a few blog posts about the awesomeness of chalkboard paint. They even have instructions on making your own!
I still haven't had time to be crafty, but I can't wait to find some fun uses for magnetic and chalkboard paint!
So I've got the crafting bug right now, and am dying to mod lots of stuff into cooler, more useful stuff... so I dragged Chris to Home Depot last night so we could walk around and be inspired by the tools and supplies that are available. Let me just say, I love Home Depot. In college I used to wander around coming up with solutions to whatever art projects I had to complete, but it's been far too long since I just got to walk around and oooh and ahhh at stuff.
Last night I discovered panels of pre-built tile for backsplashes and the like (very fun), but even better, we stumbled upon Magnetic Paint! And chalkboard paint, and whiteboard paint. I wanted to buy them all! (But we were good, we didn't buy anything... just filed it all away in our brains until we're ready to actually use them in a project). Back in college my friend Dan introduced me to the wonders of tool dip... between that and all these other cool surface paints, I'm in resurfacing heaven!
Friends of ours got married this weekend, and they requested handmade gifts for their wedding, so I decided to make another set of felt coasters for them. This time I went with brown and tan, and I actually steam-ironed them to make them more flat and well formed.
Chris suggested I do different designs on each coaster, instead of doing the same thing for each one like I did for my gray set. He thinks they look like crazy monsters, so while that wasn't my intention when I started, I guess the grommet can't help but look like an eye... but that means I have some pretty deformed monster coasters!
I'm also working on a couple other ideas with felt circles, but those will take a while to finish. I did make a couple other crazy felt things this past week that I'll have to get Chris to photograph... it was a crafty week for the Kendra.
I've got all sorts of ideas for things I want to make, and some of them are things Chris and I can work on together, which is really exciting... I think we make a good team, skill-wise. So hopefully we're able to do some of the things that have been floating around in my head, and then I'll have all kinds of new stuff to post later. But probably things will slow down the rest of this month, because we are moving to a new apartment soon, and I have some freelance stuff that needs to take precedence over crafty fun. Alas!
the coasters (above), and the trivet (below)
So we move later this month, to an apartment complex in Decatur. The past couple weeks we started looking at Decatur townhomes to buy, in case we found something we loved at a good price that we wanted to jump on instead of doing another year in an apartment. It was kind of nervewracking. We did find a place we loved and couldn't afford, and another place we liked but didn't think was worth what the seller wanted. But with all of that said, it was a great learning experience and we're feeling pretty content to rent for another year (in a different apartment where I can walk to the grocery store and will be closer to the Dekalb Farmer's Market) and watch the housing market until we find a place that meets all our requirements, including price.
The scary thing is that we haven't started packing. It's gonna be a bit nuts.
And that's what's up with our world.
So this isn't a new idea or anything, but after seeing tons of felt coasters on Etsy, I decided I needed to make my own. And a bowl and trivet to go with them. They make me kind of happy.
I made The Chris take a ton of pictures for me. Poor guy. We don't have any room to actually set up anything real for the photo shoot, so he has to improvise. A lot. But he's talented like that.
Maybe one of these days I'll try to block these so they are a little less frumpy. I'm bad at things like that though... all the crocheting and felting seems like no problem, but the process of blocking seems like too much work to me. I have no idea why.
