03.22.10

i love me some spray paint. the opportunity to use it doesn't come up very often; i made silver ornaments for our christmas tree a few years ago and have long-standing plans to make a magnetic chalk board (if someone will step up and sell me a reasonably-priced-but-interesting-looking vintage frame, brooklyn flea), but joe tends to ignore me when i point out poorly finished wooden things at thrift stores and note that we could paint them. finally i managed both to read the faux porcelain pottery tutorial over at ps - i made this... and to finish the fancy bottle of rum* joe's coworker gave us for christmas (he gifts us with liquor without provocation every now and again; i don't understand it, but i like it). Project Adler-Inspired Vase was born.



ye olde rum bottle. it's lovely, thick, bubbly glass, and probably would've made a fine vase on its own - but when one must paint, one must paint. i coaxed the labels off with some goo gone and ran it through the dishwasher.



per the tutorial, i used a sharpie to draw lines on the bottle before puffy painting it. i thought the red lines would be light enough to cover with paint, but i ended up using something like five coats. if there's such a thing as an extremely light-colored sharpie, i'd recommend that.

after letting the bottle dry overnight in a kitchen cabinet (the kitten can be trusted with nothing at this point - last week he pulled joe's only credit card out of his money clip and hid it under the rug), i newspapered the balcony within an inch of its life and spray painted like it was my job. i started out with a cute little craft can of krylon from the local art store and ran out long before the red lines disappeared; i came back the next day with a giant can and felt much more powerful. and deeply toxic.



et voila! i could pretend that i've stopped anthropomorphizing things and didn't immediately refer to the finished project as count vasie, but i think we all know the truth.

*pyrat, that is. i'm not usually a rum fan, dark and stormies notwithstanding, but this stuff (from the folks who make patron) is good enough to drink on the rocks.

02.11.10: valentine's day (part i)

amanda's second annual valentine's day swap* has been afoot for the past couple of weeks, so i've been wandering around muttering about owl-faces and paper. i love making things out of other things, but i'm not very good with deadlines - and knowing i wanted to make jamie a barn owl out of patio furniture fabric (long story) didn't mean i knew how i was going to do so. but! the owl came to be.



the card was a bit of a head-scratcher as well; i considered trying to make elementary school handwriting paper with lines from a photo of the F train subway tracks, but i didn't have a good, bright paint pen, and my glitter experiment looked like a sneeze. i knew i wanted to do something with a photo, ideally something with a boat on the river, if only one would happen b...and then a tugboat chugged past the window just as i was leaving for work, so i dashed out to the balcony with my camera.



not sure how the neighbors felt about the random river-looker yelling NO CAT NO, but hooray, valentine! i completed the trio with some brooklyn jam, the box o'love made it to california in time, and manray sat in it. a fine conclusion, no?

*in which one sends one's assigned blogger a small gift, a little something, and a handmade valentine. i met rachel the crafty kitchen sorceress when we were paired last february, and a year of marvelous recipe inspiration ensued.

10.08.09: recycled magazine bows



i like to think of myself as a budding assembler of things, but the truth is that i'm happiest when i'm hacking them up (which is convenient, what with my being a magazine editor). i'm especially fond of hacking them up for gift wrapping, so this clever how-to (from jessica jones, a graphic designer in chicago) made my morning. if you've got five minutes, a magazine, a pair of scissors, and some combination of a stapler, tape, and glue, you've got these boys. jessica also worked her magic with a map of chicago that turned out beautifully. i tried to follow suit with a map of the adirondacks that had been living under my desk, but the thicker paper is trickier to arrange properly; i prefer to work with food photos (that little guy at top left is crudités and ellie krieger's green goddess dip; the center strip is broccoli). chop chop, internets.

09.18.09

it is a truth universally acknowledged, that an antsy woman in possession of a large pile of sunbrella fabric sample-scraps, must be in want of an upcycling project. my head has been full of rachel's delicate fabric flowers (and the real ones that pop up on her blog on fridays), so i adapted a ribbon rosette video tutorial and made these guys.



(please excuse the questionable craft photography; it needs work, i know.)

fun, no? each one has a reasonably realistic stem as well: i created a bud with wrapped florist tape and then spiraled on down to a length of wrapped wire for each. i've been destroying my fingers on them over the past few days, as i think they'd be interesting decorations for an apartmentwarming party (still unscheduled - we're still trying to set a date to close on the apartment purchase - but inspirational anyway). the mysterious black octagon beneath them is the van amburgh stool* we spirited home from brooklyn (and the excellent warehouse sale at the future perfect) yesterday; it's the first piece of outdoor furniture we've ever owned. i think the roses femme up the stool's lion tamer vibe a bit (and since they're made of formidable fabric, i don't have to worry about fading). it feels good to make things, internets.

*athletically discounted, mind you.

02.12.09: soon



hey hey, a project wrapped up in due time for once! this is the card i made for rachel, my crafty-giftin' counterpart in amanda's valentine's day swap. she's out in los angeles, so i decided to give her all things new york: the card is a cutout of the hell's kitchen skyline as seen from the hudson (the bat signal heart is coming out of what would be the new york times building). i picked up the japanese newspaper at sapporo, our favorite local ramen place. i sent it with a jar of ginger-grapefruit bath fizzes, made from the aforementioned citric acid from zabar's on the upper west side,* and a wee jar of david graves's nyc rooftop honey from the union square greenmarket (and rooftops all over the five boroughs). in return, she sent me two of her lovely stitched cardstock valentines, a pretty dessert** (which i have hidden from joe the pastry-seeking missile), and a garland made of hacked-up science journals, which, predictably, i adore. as she put it, what says love like the annual data for red tailed deer mating?



an upcycler after my own heart. thanks again, rachel!

*and some seriously peekaboo essential oils. when i was mashing everything together on friday night, our apartment was one big citrus slamdance; when i smelled the leftover crumbles yesterday morning, they'd calmed down to a positively timid salt-with-hints-of-ginger tang. still plenty fizzy, just not as stinky as i'd expected. that's how we roll on valentine's day around here, internets: we expect stink.

**specifically, tasty shortbread from sconehenge in CA - which is the best-titled business i've heard of in months. i kind of want to change my name to sconehenge.