Baby Food Jar Week: Tea Candle Holders

I have a bunch of baby food jars--half a closet shelf bunch. (The other half is full of toilet paper tubes, but that is a subject for another day). I have collected these jars faithfully knowing that they would be so useful. Then, I failed to actually use them mostly because I didn't know what to use them for.

I have decided to force myself to use all these fantastic jars by declaring this week Baby Food Jar Week. I will make a post about one use for baby food jars per day until Friday. Some of them are ideas I came up with, some of them are things I was inspired to do by someone else, and some of them are somewhere in between.

Today's use is as a cute little tea candle holder. There are millions of ideas for ways to make candle holders out of these little jars. You can use Mod Podge to put tissue paper on the outside of the jar like in this post from Tinker Lab. Or you can put doilies around the outside of the jar like in this post from Our Mush Push. Or you can use rub on transfers like in this post from Finding My Aloha. Or...well, you get the idea.

From Rags to Bridesmaid Dress

This was a project that I didn't expect to take on this week, but I found a need I could fill for minimal money on Tuesday, so it was added to the top of my list.

I believe I have mentioned before a large bag of fabric I purchased from the thrift store for $4. So far, I have made a cooler for Patrick's lunches, a tablet carrying case, a onesie, and four no-sew fabric drawers out of the contents of this bag. Not bad for a bag of scraps, in my opinion. We can now add to that list a bridesmaid dress.

Inside this bag of fabric was a large assortment of random pieces of lavender crepe. I don't know what this fabric did in the past, but I think it may have offended someone. It was punished quite brutally by being cut into lots of odd-shaped, four-sided polygons. I can't imagine what the purpose of this was since none of it was cut nicely enough to have been table squares at a wedding or anything.

Faux Iron Scroll Decor from Wire Hangers

As I mentioned, I have a grand plan for the pieces of wood left over from dismantling our box spring, but this grand plan has first led me to the adventure of the wire hangers.

You have probably seen the toilet paper tube art all over pinterest and the internet in general. I first heard about this idea from a co-worker and a couple years later, I actually made some of my own. I started simple, but I saw this blog post on Suzy's Sitcom and ended up making a much more complicated one along those lines. Unfortunately, I have never found where to hang that one and therefore never ended up painting it either. It may yet find a home.

Speckled Paint Effects by Accident

I purchased some "wood" frames from the dollar store a while back with the intention of hanging them on our bedroom wall with family pictures inside. The wood it appears is actually particle board (which I guess is technically a wood product) covered in a wood-grain-printed plasticy coating. I decided to try to spray paint them.

I have grand ideas about our bedroom that may very well not come to fruition for some time yet, but I have selected a kind of color pallet. I decided to paint the frames a light blue and got the only bottle of light blue spray paint at home depot. It was a pretty color (which I neglected to photograph, but just picture the frame to the left as bright light blue and you will have it), but it was too saturated for what I was going for. I decided to try white washing over it to mute it.

I got some white paint that had been sitting in the cellar of our last apartment for who knows how long and watered it down (It was acrylic)I painted the frames with a thin coat so that you could see the blue through it. Though I did like the effect, it was not right for my room visions. I may do this again somewhere else. Perhaps it would work with a different base color in my kitchen some day. I also needed to work harder on getting it all to look right in the corners, a battle I decided not to fight for this picture because I was going to cover it all up anyway. In any case, I decided to try something else.

If I had read the labels before trying this, I never would have tired it, but then, I never could have painted the frames the way I did. I mixed my blue spray paint with some of my watered-down white paint. That is to say, I sprayed a fair amount of spray paint directly into a paper cup and poured the white paint into the cup immediately following and stired the whole thing up. So, my white paint, as I have already discussed, is water based. My spray paint, on the other hand, is oil based. In other words, no, they did not mix. 

But it is what they did that is why I wrote this. I got speckled and somewhat textured paint. I have seen speckled paint in the store, so this isn't earth shattering news, but I still think it is pretty cool. Since the spray paint speckles sort of float to the top, I had to add more spray paint part way through to keep my speckalage even on all frames, but I was pretty pleased with the results.

At first, I wasn't sure if this effect fit with my vision either, but I made it work in my head. Since the grand visions for our room will probably not be realized until we actually own a house, I figure having it work in my head is good enough for dollar store frames for now.








I think it is kind of cool. What do you think?

Call for Input

I have this lovely table. It was $35 at a thrift store just when Patrick and I went to the thrift store looking for a table. It is sturdy, has three leaves that extend it to about 9 feet, and mostly solid wood. Mostly meaning all except the top layer. There is some sort of material on top that I think might be formica, but I have never had formica pointed out to me in person before. The table top just looks like pictures of formica I have seen and it doesn't seem to react like other laminate is supposed to react to attempts to iron it off (it doesn't work).

The paint on the edges of the top. 

Blogger thinks this picture should

go sideways, and I don't know why,

so I can't fix it.

I like this table in a lot of ways, though I must admit it may not be my number one pick of style if given lots of options. The main problem I have with it is that it apparently had a previous life as a craft table, and it shows. There are little bits of paint splattered all over the wooden parts. The formica, or whatever it is, is mostly free of paint, except one of the leaves has a bit of gold metallic paint on it. But now the question is, how do I refinish this table?

I know I can't stain the top and I am pretty sure I can't paint it, though it is true that that gold paint doesn't come off, so something must stick. Also, even though I think real wood is prettier, this coating is perhaps more practical for a dining table; it seems virtually indestructible. The top of the table is in good enough condition that I wouldn't have to do anything to it, but the edges of the table top that are wood are probably the worst looking part of the whole table.

I have many ideas and reasons for and against each. Some of my ideas are as follows:

fantastic brown paint drip all the
way down one leg.

1) Sand the legs and the edge of the table top. Then, try as best as possible to match a stain to the top of the table to use on the whole thing.

2) Sand as above, but then choose a much darker stain. This would make the center of the table a lighter color than the rest of the table, kind of like an inlay, except not really at all, especially since the lighter stuff will be up higher, not even with the darker stuff.

3) Try to match the edges of the top, like in option one, but paint the legs white or some other color.

4) Remove the entire top of the table, including the leaves. Straighten the legs (they are angled out) and add a new, rectangular top. Build new leaves as well. Then, stain or paint the table as I see fit.

I have been pondering this for many months, so I decided to open it for discussion to anyone who wishes to put in their two cents. Let me know which of these ideas you like best, or offer your own.

Bye Bye Box Spring

When Patrick and I first got married, we decided to just buy a mattress and a box spring, and not a very expensive set at that. It turns out, it didn't even have springs in the box spring. If you ask me, that kind of defeats the purpose. The picture to the left is the only picture I took of it, it seems. In any case, it is gone now. Here is it's story.

Back just before David was born, all his baby stuff began to clutter our one bedroom. As a solution, I designed a bed frame, and then Patrick and I built it. It was designed to have the box spring placed on top, and since the bed was designed to have enough clearance underneath for a large box of diapers, this put the top of the mattress a ways in the air.

Coveralls

The other week we went to the first reunion for my parents descendants. They have 3 grandchildren form their 3 married children and we decided it was time. Like the reunions I had with my mom's side of the family growing up, we went camping.

A few days before we left, I was watching David crawl around on his belly and I realized that he was going to be absolutely disgusting on this trip. I own very few baby clothes since my wonderful sister has a boy about a year older than David and she graciously lets me borrow her son's cast hand-me-downs. I know she would not be so ridiculous as to be really upset if he ruined some clothes, but I still would feel bad about it. I needed a solution and it came in the form of some denim I had gotten from my grandfather's house a few days before; I made coveralls.

I used a pattern that my mother had sent me. It had patterns for a pair of overall type pants and a button up jacket included, but it did not have coveralls. It was also made for stretch knits, not denim. Still, I thought I could adapt it. I used the bottom half of the overalls, which kind of went out like balloons, and then blended the top together with the jacket. The front and back were each two pieces to allow me to make pants that would fit a baby bum and also put a zipper up the front. I used sleeves from the jacket. I made the whole thing big, because I wanted room to grow.

I originally had put snaps along the bottom like so many baby outfits. Unfortunately, I have not found snaps of a comparable quality to those on baby clothes. David always manages to burst his way out of the bottom by crawling around. I spent a while putting in the snaps, but then I took them all out. I had put David in to test the coveralls and he had all the snaps undone in less than a minute by rolling back and forth. I just sewed up the seam instead. The front zipper still allowed me to put him in and out, and, though diaper changes were not as easy, he stayed covered and his clothes clean.

I decided that David needed a collar instead of just and regular top and came up with making it a little like a NASCAR driver suit. I sewed on a stand up collar that overlapped in the front to snap. This was great because it kept everything from going down the front of his clothes.

His outfit was perhaps a bit warm for the middle of the day, but it really made life easier. The coveralls also made a very good bib. I did taking a high chair camping; I would totally recommend both. And I also brought a pack-n-play. I am apparently not much of a hard core camper when I have small children, but be it known that I still do not consider sleeping in a trailer to be camping. That is where the line must be drawn.