Chipping Away

Happy Hump Day to all of you out there!  It has been a slow week, and when I say slow I mean slower than a snail, its verging on ridiculous but on with todays project.  So you can see below its not super pretty or super straight or super anything.  This project is by no means a failure, but I can see that it does need a little extra work that I had not thought about.

So lets start with where this inspiration came from...Im sure you can guess it came from pinterest, and here is the link so you can check it out.  I saw this and thought it would look great over one of the lights in my hallway going up to the media room.  For the example it looks like they used a small frame and I needed it to fit over a light so I bought some floral 10 guage wire and made my own form.  This was the first misstep because this floral wire doesnt hold up when it is sodered together.  I am going to have to make a new frame but that shouldnt be too hard.  I made 2 frames on big enough to fit over the light and another smaller to fit down the middle to make a layer for the "chandelier".

The circles arent perfect but I figured they would work.  So on to the paint chips.  I always go to Home Depot for my paint because I love Behr and the selection they have.  So I got a whole bunch of paint chips in purple.  What I love about Behr is there are 3-4 colors on the sheet so you can see how the color gets darker in color which is perfect from the ombre for this mock chandelier.

 I cut each strip apart (as shown below) so I could get the punch where I needed it to go to get the most out of the strip

So to cut the circles I used a whole punch from Michaels scrapbook section.  I think this one is a 1/2 inch but I cant remember.  I was able to get 3 punches from each strip so that was excellent.  I had to take the back off the punch so the holes would fall right out rather than stay in the plastic holder so I could see where I was punching to maxamize the punch, yes Im a little crazy but I think we all know that by now!  After I cut all the holes out I seperated them into baggies so I wouldnt get the colors mixed up (I did one color at a time also to not get them mixed up).  The I was ready to move on to phase 3...follow me this way :)

So this was the dumbest idea I had and will fix this too when I do my redo, but I decided it would be best to use string to connect each circle.  When I do the redo I will use metal sticks to make sure its even and not lopsided like this mess here.  But I used string on 4 sides and was ready for the next step.

I used a flat surface to line up all the paint chips in the order or color that I wanted (2 of each color)

The I flipped them over

Using tape and upholstry thread (because thats what I have in the house dont judge!) and taped the thread to the backs of the chips leaving enough string to tie the chips to the metal frame.

You can kinda see the string a tape better in this picture.  I did about 20 of these and was ready for the last phase...attachment.

I decided to hot glue these to the frame to make sure they dont swing around and show the backs, which started out as good idea as I did the bottom section.

See the hot glue here.

But as I made my way around, I noticed the biggest error which no hot glue can save me from...you can still see the backs because the circle is so big.  The hot glue worked great as was a fantastic idea, but since you can still see the backs I am going to have to take them all down and attach another paint chip of the same color to the back so it looks amazing no matter what.  I will give you and update when I have enough patience to get this going again. 

Now you go try this at home, trust me it was harder than I thought but I am sure once I make some adjustments its going to be awesome!!  What do you think, any suggestions on how to make this better?

Project Housewife Out!

An Organized Mess

A while back my friend Lauren and I decided it would be such a good idea to organize and share our recipes with each other.  Lauren found this cute idea on a blog and I cant remember where she found it from, but the pages were so cute, each section given a scrapbook paper to define them.  We thought that was cute and wanted to do one for ourselves.  Boy did we have a MAJOR project in store for us!  Let me tell you, the putting the binder together was sooo easy compared to typing up each recipe!  I have to say I think someone may have hit me on the head when I agreed that we should do this.  It has taken me...so far...2 weeks to type up the recipes I had in 1 binder...thats right ONE!  I didnt even type them all I copied and pasted them from the originating websites (thank you Betty Crocker/Better Homes and Gardens for making my life easier).  I do admit they look amazing all uniform and pretty with no food on them from previous cookings, but it really is a lot of work.  If you are going to take this project on be warned that it will take a looooong time to get all the recipes together.  What I would suggest is get the binder done first, then you can add the recipes as you go.  From the beginning of the blog I said that the idea came from a lady who did scrapbook paper on each page, yeah well we thought she was crazy because A) thats even more work and B)if you run out of paper and want to add more recipes you are screwed because then it wont be uniform, so we came up with our own twist to the idea.  Below you can see the binder I used (super cute from target!) and the index we made.



So for the index, we picked scrapbook paper that we liked and used Lauren's awesome scrapbooking supplies to make the circles, she had one of those big circle hold punchers so they are all the same size and awesome.  We found that centering the text and using an arrow to point to the corresponding circle worked best for us, but you may have a better idea so of course feel free to make it your own (we did!).  To make the tabs we realized that using sheet protectors hid the dividers and that stunk so what we did was take the 12x12 scrapbook paper and cut it down to 9 1/2 x 11 that way it stuck out enough that we can see it but not too far that it sticks out of the binder (trust me we cut that paper and measured so many times it was getting insane).  So once we had all the paper cut, we realized that it didnt do any good if it could just get wet/ripped/torn so Lauren with her amazing scrapbook supplies had 12x12 laminating sheets.  So we lamanated each sheet, 3-hold punched it and now had awesome dividers.  You can see some of the colors here, but the 2nd picture is a full shot of the divider.

Aside from the horror of typing up all the recipes, this project took all of 2 hours (with all the cutting and laminating and just plain being tired because of the rain) and looks awesome!  Now that this is all done I cant wait to get all my other recipes added to the binder.  If you make one share!  I would love to see what you came up with.

Project Housewife Out!

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