nursery – dresser drawer saga

It’s an IKEA dresser so you know I couldn’t leave it just like it was supposed to be, right?  I wasn’t planning anything more major than lining the drawers and swapping out the knobs – I’ve seen some crazy awesome IKEA hacks on Apartment Therapy but nah…

I just went simple.  I lined the drawers and swapped out the knobs. 

Unfortunately, lining the drawers proved bizarrely complicated.  Or maybe I just made it overly complicated.  I don’t know.

The bottoms of the drawers are yellow and white stripes.  I think I’ve mentioned my distaste for yellow, right? So I bought 4 different scrapbook papers – 8 drawers, each paper for 2 drawers – to line them.  I decided that it would be easiest to do this before putting the drawers together so that I could just deal with the flat bottoms of the drawers rather than wholly made up drawers.


My materials – paper, drawer bottoms, DIY modpodge (I don’t recommend it or find better directions than the 50/50 mix of elmer’s and water that I was working with), and a foam brush.

Apply glue with brush.  Stick paper on…

and watch your paper destroy itself :(

Try the rolling pin… no dice.

Try stacking a whole bunch of flat weight on top… no pictures but this didn’t work either.  Actually, that was a complete disaster.  It all stuck together.  No, actually, first it worked but the paper peeled right back off so then I tried to put the “modpodge” on the top surface too and that stuck to everything.

Finally move on to Plan B – use spray mount to stick the paper down and then cover in clear contact paper.  That actually worked like a charm.  I lapped the contact paper over the edges since they would be hidden under the edges of the drawers once they were put together.  I figured that might add to the staying power and make for a more seamless look.

Will put the the rest of the drawers together.

With his little supervisor watching every move, of course ;-)
 
These are the smaller top drawers – the bigger bottom drawers are lined in the green polka dots you see above or pretty plain turquoise-y.

The dresser comes with dark, nearly black knobs which I didn’t think “went” with a pretty white dresser in a baby’s room.  So awhile back, I picked up some pretty pink glass knobs half off at Hobby Lobby.  I know I said that I was going gender neutral but that doesn’t mean that I can’t put in pops of girly that can be easily swapped out if the next munchkin turns out to be a boy.  I also convinced my mom to give me all the brushed nickel knobs that she got for her kitchen cabinets but had to replace since they were too shallow.  Score!

Complete!

 
Bonus – you can almost tell that the walls are 2 different colors in this picture! But – oops!, I just realized that this picture is actually from before I swapped out the rest of the knobs.  D’oh!  Oh well, other things changed too so you’ll see later.

So that’s my very basic, simple IKEA hack on the Hemnes dresser.  Here’s the first part of the story.

kate’s graduation present

I got crafty with my present for Kate’s graduation – ok, I’m still not sure if graduation is the proper term.  She’s still finished with her residency anyway.  It involved my new love Etsy as well.

In looking for something that was interesting and different for my very deserving sister-in-law, I considered a lot of different things.  There weren’t many things that I wanted to straight up buy so I decided to buy supplies (Etsy sells both handmade products and supplies for any number of different projects) and make something for her.

Basically – get crafty.

I found this lot of 40 x-ray clippings from old medical texts:
 

My original idea was to select a few and frame them.  Well, when they arrived, they were all much smaller than I’d expected.  So I had to rethink my project.

What I decided to do was to use a piece of mat board that I had leftover (from when I bought a whole sheet, had it cut into 4 16” x 20” pieces but only used 3 of them for the pictures over our bed) and make something of a collage.

Here’s my “cast of characters” if you will:

One 16” x 20” black frame, the 16” x 20” white mat board, Tombow removable adhesive, 3M spray adhesive, my Creative Memories picture cutter, and the x-rays, of course.  I should have included a pencil and a ruler – preferably a yard stick.

My first step, sadly, was to trim each clipping so that they had straight edges – the woman I bought them from had done just slightly better than a random hack job with a pair of scissors.

Next I moved on to layout.  First I had to decide how much white space I wanted to leave.

I decided on 3.5” all around with a 1/4” bottom weight (wherein you have 1/4 – 1/2” more border on the bottom edge of mat for a picture) and drew guidelines on the back of my piece of mat board so that I could begin to determine how I was going to lay out the clippings.

Clearly then, the next step was to figure out how to lay things out – a completely trial and error process.

Once I had the layout mostly fixed:

I used the removable adhesive to hold them in place while I determined which ones needed trimming.
 
Having the pictures more or less stuck in place as I worked made it easier to be more precise with layout and trimming.

After I was completely satisfied, it was time to turn the mat board over to begin for real.

I lightly drew a box as guidelines and got to work spraying each clipping thoroughly with the adhesive putting them into place permanently.
  

Almost finished…

The final steps: erase the bits of pencil that show between the pictures, prepare frame, and then put the whole thing together.

Final product:

It seemed to be a hit.  Kate plans to hang it over her desk in her new digs.

I also found this:

on Etsy and thought it would be funny for her to hang on the fridge.

crafty crafty

So I randomly will decide to get crafty at times.  Ok, I know that cross stitching can be considered crafty but there’s not too much personal creativity in it for me (because there’s a pattern to follow) – but that’s part of the joy of it for me.  I think it’s a math-brained thing really.

But I do like to get creative sometimes.  I really loved coming up with the various paper design elements for our wedding – the programs, the place cards and the table numbers.  I think that part of it was that I spent easily 3 hours or more searching the internet for a free source to provide me with the exact same font on our wedding invitations (I found it a whole bunch of places for sale for about $50).

Of course, what you can’t see (and there aren’t pictures) is that inside each place card there’s a “fun fact” about us (thanks to Ruben and Sarah for that idea) and on the back of each “table number” is a story about our time spent in each state.

I’d also designed the invitations for my matron of honor’s bridal shower and bachelorette party.  If I wasn’t in NC, I might make the effort to dig them out and take pictures.

Sometimes I wonder about trying to make an actual paying side project out of it like Michelle has but then I just don’t think I’m creative enough in a graphic design sense and I stick to just doing what I like for people I like – and myself, of course.  Besides, I don’t need to encourage my Paper Source habit in the slightest.

Oh – and I’m lazy.

Oh – and I really am going somewhere with this. 

I swear. 

It’s just that sometimes I feel the need for intros when I launch into something new and then the posts get really long if I continue on to my point and I don’t like that.