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September 20th, 2011 | by Emily | 
My friend and coworker, Beth, just recently got back from a trip to Peru. She graciously brought me back a sweet bracelet for a souvenir. It’s one that you can wrap around your wrist a couple times. Or 600 times if you’re Beth. The girl has tiny wrists. Anyway, it’s really cool. It inspired me. I remember seeing this post and thought, hey – I can make that!
So I did.
But I wanted to make it a bit more interesting.
I went to Ace and bought a roll of cotton multipurpose twine, can of black spray paint, and a box of small hex nuts. Total: around 12 bucks.
Ace had several options for twine but I bought the cotton kind because I knew I wanted to dye it. See previous post for ombre dying. I decided to make it yellow with green ends.
I took the nuts outside and spray painted them black. It was Beth’s idea to paint them black, and I thought it would be a fun contract between the yellow of the twine.
After I dried the twine, I followed the steps here.
It ended up being really easy. I like that the string is extra long so you can wrap it two or three times. That way you were able to see where the string changed to green on the ends.
Once I finished, I decided I wanted to make a bracelet but keep it unpainted silver. I love the silver/blue combo so I dyed it blue. I loved the way this one turned out too! There are so many ways to change this up and add something special to it. My brain is spinning!
Thanks to my hand models, Beth and Blake, for helping me out with this post!
September 8th, 2011 | by Emily | 
![Ombre[3]](http://nothinggetscrossedout.com/arts/styled/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Ombre3.jpg "Ombre[3]")
Pinterest is my fave. Anyone out there who has an account knows what I’m talking about.
It’s a virtual pin board. It’s an easy way to collect the things you love. I use it for work inspiration, food inspiration, DIY inspiration, etc. When I first started pinning, I was coming across a lot of images of ombre dying. From shirts to fingernails, it felt like it was all up in my face. It got me thinking, I could do this, right?
I went exploring around the blogs I frequent for tutorials and came across this one.
So cool, right? I loved it. I haven’t dyed anything since like middle school when we tie dyed shirts at the library, so I didn’t know if I could handle it. These instructions looked pretty easy so I set out to try. First I went to ritdye.com to pick out some dye. I know you can buy this in craft stores but I knew I would get a better selection if I bought it online. After some debate, I settled for Lemon Yellow and Evening Blue. Duh, two of my favorite colors. Plus Yellow and Blue make Green – bonus third color!
Then I set out for Goodwill to find some plain white shirts that I liked the shape/fit of. I found a few of them, picked up some rubber gloves at Target and set out to dye. I happened to have a nice sized bucket already at home, so I used that as my dye bath. I followed the instructions from the blog link above and it was really easy.
The first attempt was to do a yellow dye. I followed the instructions to have the shirt more saturated with yellow at the bottom. I turned out so well that I wanted to keep going.
The second attempt was to use both the Yellow and the Evening Blue to make a green effect. This one I saturated each layer longer so I got a really good contrast between each level of color.
Lastly, I was so jazzed about how the shirts were coming out that I wanted to try something different. I’ve been wanting a lamp for my cube at work but wanted to get it cheap. Hello Goodwill. $4.99 for this gold beauty. First, I spray painted it green. Then since the shade was in good shape, I kept the bottom part how it was and dip-dyed the top blue. I love it and it now happily sits in my office.
Thanks to Naomi Payne and my Momma for helping me take pictures.
August 17th, 2011 | by Emily |  This past year has been challenging. Probably the most challenging one I’ve had to face in my 28 years. Well, soon-to-be 28 years. Personally, I’ve gone through a lot, and as a family, we have had our trials. We’ve had our ups (Jacob getting married for one) and we’ve had our downs. When I was home one weekend in April, I noticed a verse my mom had written out on a scratch piece of paper.
It was Romans 15:13:
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
She had it taped up in her bathroom as a constant reminder to her that she was not alone and that anything is possible. That verse really struck a chord with me and I thought it would be something that I could make a little prettier for my mom and give to my siblings as well, as a reminder to us all. This verse gives me hope in whatever I am facing, and I wanted to share with you all. I know my trials are small in comparison to some, but no matter what, there is always hope.
  
It’s available for download in three different color schemes so that you may print it and place in an 8×10 frame:
Blue
Green
Natural
I welcome my 28th year.
August 4th, 2011 | by Emily | 
As some of you know, our brother Jacob got married about a month ago to his beautiful bride Morgan. Jessie wrote about their engagement last fall.
I had a lot of fun helping out with wedding invitations and decorations for their wedding. Morgan has a great eye for design and had some great ideas for her wedding. Her theme for the wedding was vintage-romantic. She wanted to use blacks and whites and off whites and creams and champagne colors. So first things first, I got to design her wedding suite. Using Morgan’s color palette, I incorporated lace patterns, stripes, worn textures, and hand-stamped art to make her save the dates, invitations, RSVPs, etc.:
After we had an initial design concept going, I thought of what other decorative items I could make to carry out this theme for her reception. Searching through wedding blogs, and DIY sites, I could see that chalkboards were becoming a very popular and clever idea for weddings… and do I love making chalkboards!
Inspiration Links:
a. http://katycarrierevents.com/blog/?p=85
b. http://www.weddingbycolor.com/theredqueen/milestones/164031
c. http://lisaholtzmancalligraphy.blogspot.com/2011/05/wedding-chalkboard.html
d. http://www.elegala.com/go/unveiled/461/diy_shabby_chic_wedding_chalkboards/
e. http://wedding.theknot.com/wedding-planning/wedding-reception-planning/articles/wedding-chalkboard-ideas.aspx
So I first went to Goodwill to see if I could find any frames that I could use. I wanted this to be fairly big and knowing that the price for a large frame would be pretty expensive, I decided to look for one that I could just repaint. Well I found the perfect size frame and BONUS it had a print that had been mounted on a board that would be perfect to repaint over for the chalkboard. Boy this thing was not pretty. It was some sort of mountainous landscape scene from the 60s.
The first thing I did was to use Illustrator to draw up a design using several of the themes and objects from the wedding suite. I used the same stripes, patterns, and fonts that I used before and scaled it to size of my new Goodwill frame. Then I printed it out to size to use for a stencil.
Next, I painted a couple coats of the black chalkboard paint. This stuff works great. I used my leftover Valspar Chalkboard paint that I have used for several projects now. Keepin’ things real cheap.
After the chalkboard paint was dry, I used white graphite transfer paper to transfer my printed out design to the board. I bought a pack of white graphic sheets at Hobby Lobby. They work great!
Once I got it all drawn out on the board, I went to town coloring in my design with chalk. Since this board is a large 48 x 24, it got a bit tedious. But who doesn’t love coloring with chalk?
Once I was done with most of the chalking, I took it to my parents house to spray paint the frame. Ideally, I would have done this first instead of masking off the chalkboard in order to paint the frame, but I don’t really have the space to spray paint something this big at my apartment, so I worked on the chalkboard first. It ended up working fine and I was really happy with the result. We had it placed in the entrance of the reception hall displayed on an easel. Jacob and Morgan’s wedding photographer got a great picture of it too (posted on her site), thank you Libby Asay!
April 5th, 2011 | by Emily | 
Over the weekend, I acquired a chair. This is no ordinary chair. I’ll blog about this chair later. But it’s awesome. It’s green and awesome. I’m now rearranging my living room around this chair. I had a large painting on my wall that I did probably 6 years ago. It was painted pinks and purples and blues because my living room at the time had these colors in it. It was just a simple square pattern, not much to it. But I liked it. It was graphically fun and fit the room perfectly. Well, I’ve moved from that location and still have had this painting in my living room for several years. It was time for a change.
 So, this new painting I wanted to be vintage looking, with large type, and also to be a chalkboard. Why? Because I found a can of chalkboard paint that I had leftover from a previous project. So I did some research online for old restaurant signs. I found some inspiration pictures and used Illustrator to mock up what I wanted this new painting to look like. It’s pretty simple. But I wanted it too look like it was made of wood. That was the only really challenging part.
I first drew out on the old canvas where I wanted the chalkboard paint to go. Then I did a couple coats of the chalkboard paint. I used Valspar Chalkboard paint. It went on great and ended up being really easy and fun to write on when it dried.
 Next, I started with a coat of brown paint. I didn’t really love the color that the first coat turned out, so I did a little darker coat of brown over it. Then I just sort of freehanded in some of the wood grain over top of it. This was a little challenging but I had a printout of some wood textures that I used as a guide.
 Next, I transferred my Illustrator design to the canvas with a pencil. Then I started painting in my lettering. The lettering took a few coats but it went fairly quickly because the letters were so big.
 Lastly, I hung it up and played around with the chalk. It really worked great and was really fun. I don’t know what I’ll be writing on this canvas. A giant grocery list? A to-do list for the day? (note that these last photos are showing the scale of this painting. It’s 24×48 in). Knowing my memory, a life size list is probably beneficial for me. Who knows! But it’s fun and I really like it.
 
March 17th, 2011 | by Emily |  A few weeks back I got an email from Emily, a friend and former classmate of mine who saw some of the paintings I have done for my art shows and she was requesting my help in doing a painting for her mother’s upcoming birthday. I told her I was interested and wondered what I could do to help. This is where it gets crazy. She asked me to do a painting of her mother’s THIRTY ONE year old horse! Wait, what? Two things quickly came to mind. Number one, the horse is 31 years old?? Is this common? Number two, Have you seen Black Beauty? Photo realism isn’t my strong suit.
I really wanted to help but I knew I would have to paint it in a style that I was familiar with for me to feel comfortable. I asked her to send me a picture of the horse and we’d go from there. She quickly responded with several really good shots of the horse. I later came to find out that she had her younger sister go out and photograph the horse since she was still living in the area. I was quite impressed with her photography skills. Here’s the picture she sent me.
Isn’t he pretty? His name is Shazam. I just think horses are so pretty. I’ve always wanted one but my one-bedroom apartment probably isn’t going to work.
So I took this picture of Shazam and went into Photoshop and tried to come up with a way to paint him so that it was still semi-realistic, but also in a style that I might do. So I played around with colors and filters and came up with this.
She gave me her approval and I got started. I thought it would be fun this time to take pictures of all the stages of my painting process. From the canvas preparation, to the sketching, to adding the layers of paint, to the final varnishing – Here’s the evolution.
I was happy with the end result and Emily was too. She left me a sweet message that said her mom cried when she gave it to her. That always makes me happy! I can imagine how much he means to her when he’s been a part of their family for so long. I think it’s pretty neat.
February 14th, 2011 | by Emily |  I just want to say first that I was going to title this post “Mailbox Makeover” but since it is Valentines Day, I thought that this title – which also doubles as a cheesy 90s romantic comedy – would be much better.
So this Saturday my friend and coworker Billie and I did some recon work in Ames. Billie is in the process of making an Iowa State t-shirt quilt (which I think will be pretty cool) and was looking for a particular shirt from the Insight Bowl to complete her t-shirt squares. She got a hot tip that this particular shirt was spotted at the Goodwill in Ames. Knowing my love for Goodwill, she asked me to go along with her. Of course I would. After successfully finding the shirt she sought after (and some other great ISU finds) we browsed around the rest of the store.
That’s when this lovely number caught my eye. Here she is.
It’s a wooden mailbox. I think the shape drew me to it at first. I loved the kind of vintage look. Second, was the fact that it’s a mailbox. That is one thing that I can’t seem to keep under control at my apartment. I get my mail from the mailbox in the hallway. I open it if it’s important (or sometimes don’t) and then set it conveniently on the side table next to my door. Then it just sits there. And I hate looking at it. Also, now that my brother is living with me, I thought this would be a good way for him to see when he gets mail as well as keep it organized for mine. You’ll notice that this box has two slots for organization.
Letters and Royal Mail. What the heck is Royal Mail? I don’t know. But I knew I could do something cool with those wooden tabs. My mind raced when I thought of all the opportunities this mailbox had, so I bought it, for just under five bucks! Also, the original price tag was on it, and it had been priced at one point for $29.99. Now, that’s a good deal.
I went home and immediately went to work on my mailbox. I knew the colors I wanted to use. I used a “bahama blue” for the overall color, with accents of royal blue, red, and white. I thought I would continue the look of the vintage style of the box by using some retro-ish looking mail graphics. I designed the graphics first, printed them out, and transferred them with graphite paper on the box. Then I painted them.
After I painted the graphics on, I painted over the words “Letters” and “Royal Mail” with white paint. Then I transferred the words “yours” and “mine” again with graphite paper. I knew I wouldn’t always be living with Jacob so I didn’t want to specifically put our names on it, but rather something that could stand the test of time.
When all that was done, I did several coats of varnish spray to keep the paint from chipping off. I really love this mailbox now, and I can’t wait to get mail and keep it organized! I’d say this 5 dollar mailbox makeover really delivered. Ha ha ha, that was terrible!
December 20th, 2010 | by Emily |   I’m lucky to be part of a fabulous book club with a bunch of friends/coworkers from Meredith. Actually, we are all but one from Meredith. The odd man out is a wonderful woman who joined via a Meredith gal.
We just finished our first year of the club and thought we should have a holiday party to end the year. It was a great night minus the blizzard going on outside the doors. But, remarkably, we all managed to get there safely. We held it at Azalea, and it was wonderful. If you don’t know, Azalea is located in the historic Hotel Kirkwood Building on 4th and Walnut in downtown Des Moines. They feature “New southern cuisine with contemporary and inventive interpretations on traditional southern fare.” It’s delicious and I would highly recommend it.
I wanted to do something special for these ladies, not only because they are great friends and coworkers, but because they have supported me so much this past year. I’ve had two art shows that I know wouldn’t be as successful with out the support of my friends. I just wanted to show them how much it really means to me. So I had this idea to give them a bit of art – book club style.
I went to Goodwill to find old, hardcover books that were all about the same size and thickness. Goodwill had an abundance of old books. And I think I paid about $1.50 for each one. It was a steal. I took them home and removed their paper covers. Then I took Mod Podge and adhered all the pages together and the covers down. This was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I really didn’t have to use too much Mod Podge. I just coated the outside edges of all the pages a couple times as well as the lining of the covers, and it all just stuck together really well. I let them all dry and then I applied a couple coats of white primer to each one. This also helped in keeping the books one solid piece. After I had all the primer coats on, I went to work designing and researching what I wanted each cover to be painted. Each cover is specific to each member of my book club. We’ll start with Billie.
Billie and her husband are ISU super fans. I’m talking season ticket- tailgatorific superfans. So I turned Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice to Jane Austen Arnaud’s Cylcone Pride and Prejudice.
We have two Lindsays in this group. A Lindsay Berg and a Lindsay Berger. It’s really difficult to keep it straight. This Lindsay has a lovely little cat named Ike. But this lovely little cat can sometimes turn. When his personality changes to a not-so-nice cat, he’s Spike. Lindsay will sometimes come to work with wounds from Spike. So I thought I would do a take off of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for Lindsay’s book cover. And I had to use some James Bond type skills to get a picture of Ike to paint from. When Lindsay was away from her cubicle, I took this picture of her picture of Ike in her office from my digital camera.
Here’s the other Lindsay. Lindsay is the fashionista in the group. I mean, really. EVERY day, she dresses beautifully. It kind of makes you sick. She has such a great style, that Audrey Hepburn in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s immediately came to mind. So I went with Truman Capote’s book for this one… except with a local twist. It’s Lunch at Dillards instead of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Notice the Tiffany’s blue on the Subway cup? Yeah, that was intentional.
Ashlee is a super hip, funky, music lovin’ friend of mine. I love when I walk by her at work and she has her awesome purple headphones on. For her, I took the classic Moby Dick and turned it into Moby Chick. People know who Moby is right? I immediately think of his glasses when I hear his name, so I ran with it.
Kelsey hearts volleyball. Well, I don’t know if she loves it, but she was on like eight volleyball teams at one time this year I believe. Ok, maybe it was two… but regardless I wanted volleyball to come into play for her book cover. So I took One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and changed it to One Flew Over the Opponent’s Net for her book cover.
During our Book Club Holiday party as I explained to each lady why I painted what I did for them, I’m pretty sure I told Nicole and our whole group that I thought her husband was attractive. Appropriate? I don’t know. Maybe it was the wine talking. But Nicole’s book is a take off of The Catcher in the Rye. Nicole’s husband was a big time pitcher, and now works for the Iowa Cubs, so I thought it was fitting to do The Catcher of my Guy for her.
Lovely Jill. Jill is now a stay at home mommy to her beautiful little girl Adeline. But when she was working here with us at Meredith, she was like an all star. I mean, I was just starting when Jill was leaving, but I still hear people sing her praises. She was just an awesome proofreader among other things. So I took Catch 22 and made it Catch 22 Mistakes. Notice the correction marks on her cover?
Megan is also a graphic designer here at Meredith. I don’t work with her now, but I did a few years ago. And this lady is talented. A nerdy designer might know what the color build of orange is. That is what color build of cyan, magenta, yellow and black you use to get the color. It’s geeky, I know, but I took A Clockwork Orange and changed it to A Clockwork C-0 M-47 Y-100 K-13 for Megan’s book.
Erin is the one girl who hasn’t worked at Meredith. It’s nice to have an outsider in the group. She came to us through Lindsay Berger and we’re so glad she has! Erin is a pharmacist, so I thought it would be fun to do To Kill a Mockingbird and change it to To Heal a Mockingbird, using a little bandaid over the word kill.
It was such a fun night and I’m really looking forward to next year’s book club! Here’s a group shot of all the girls with their books!
September 20th, 2010 | by Emily |   Welcome to another installment of the styled section of NGCO. Today I’m sharing a lamp makeover. Every project I do has three things in common: it has to be cheap, easy & quick. I don’t have a lot of free time and money to throw around, so when I want to make some updates to my apartment, I definitely have to have these criteria in mind.
I joined a book club this year so I’ve taken to reading books at night before going to bed. I had just one main light in my bedroom and getting up after reading to turn it off was just not cutting it. So I thought I’d take a trip to the Salvation Army to see what I could find for a lamp for my bedside table.
1) I knew I wasn’t probably going to find the perfect lamp that didn’t need any beautification so instead I looked for a lamp that had a nice silhouette and that was in good shape. I came across this beauty that was very nice as far as it’s shape, but very boring. It was just a brown stained wood.
2) Next, I took it home and put it on my side table and determined how I wanted to paint it. I decided to go with a monochromatic blue color scheme. I have other items surrounding my bed that are in this same blue palette.
3) This lamp provided an easy guide to segment the lamp into different colors. It had many ornamental beads and bevels that I wanted to accentuate. Back to illustration #1, you can see these dotted lines showing how I segmented the lamp.
Finally, below, photo #3 shows you the final product and #4 shows all of my accessories tying-in together. Note: the picture frame and the table itself are DIY projects to show in the future. My dad welded my table! Stay tuned.
July 23rd, 2010 | by Emily |  
Oh those summer nights…
One thing I love about summer is when finally the heat of the day subsides and you can sit out outside and relax on those cool summer nights. One thing I do not love about summer is the mosquitoes.
I got inspired the other day when searching through one of my favorite blogs: Design Sponge. I love this site. It has a lot of DIY projects, before and afters, and really cool decorating/design ideas for your home. I was inspired by this really cool project where they took old coffee cans and turned them into lanterns.
So, I decided I would attempt to make my own luminaries.
First stop Salvation Army. I was thrilled when I found about a dozen of these old Terry Redlin popcorn containers. Perfect shape, all the same size, and for 49 cents each! Perfect.
Second, I went Ace Hardware to get some spray paint. I’ve been on a yellow kick lately so I decided to go with Krylon Indoor/Outdoor spray paint in Sun Yellow. This stuff is good because it can be used for all sorts of materials and metal is one of them. It’s also nice because it dries to the touch in 10 minutes or less. I already had a hammer at home as well as a nail starter. I use the nail starter when I need to get through some tough material. Lastly, I was able to find these Terra Cotta Tiki Citronella Candles at Ace as well. They were about $2 a piece.
I ditched the lids, took the nail starter and hammer, and randomly made holes in my tins. It was tough to get through. I even had to beg my neighbors for help. But I finally found a solution and got all the holes done.
After I was pleased with the placement of the holes, I spray painted all of them a solid coat of yellow. After the yellow coat dried, I hand-painted the top rim of the tins blue. I just used some acrylic craft paint that I bought from Hobby Lobby. The lip of the tin made it easy to paint an even line across the top. Then I went through and hand-painted the circle patterns throughout. I found this pattern off of one of my fancy paper coffee cups. Inspiration comes from the strangest places. I didn’t trace the pattern, I just kind of eyeballed it in different spots around the tins, making sure to evenly space throughout.
 Lastly, I set the candles in the tins and lit them up! Pretty simple. They are neat decorations as well as practical. Now I can sit outside with my luminaries and enjoy the summertime without being completely bitten up.
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