Restoring an old photograph

A little while ago Aaron's dad gave some old airplane books to Matthew, and while were were flipping through them we found a photo. It was clearly old and on the back all that it says is the photographer information and handwritten in the corner it says "Othello Wash. 1949" I liked the picture but it wasn't until Aaron saw it that he recognized it as being his Grandpa Burns. Well I've been collecting pictures to make a photo wall in my living room, and this one just seemed perfect to add to it! Only problem was that it was torn in several places... had water damage, and was just cracked and generally beat up. I've been experimenting with Photoshop for a while now and I thought I'd try my hand at restoring it.

Here is what it looked like originally...

And here is the after...

Pretty awesome picture if you ask me! It still needs some tweaking here and there, but overall I'm pretty happy with how it came out. All I can say is... technology is amazing! There is so much detail that you just can't see in the photo! Matt's face alone is an improvement... in the photo I would never have guessed that was him. But after fixing it up I can actually recognize his face!

It's amazing to me what even just a little tweaking can do for a picture. I edit all photos that I make prints of, though typically I only edit for things like brightness and contrast. These days most photographers will take a child's photo and smooth the skin, correct discoloration, remove scars, or whatever. To me that is silly, children are beautiful and there is no need to do all of that. The most I ever remove from one of my kid's faces is food on the face (typical of kids!) or sometimes a scratch... like in one Christmas picture when Matthew was 2 he fell and got both a purple bump and a scratch on his forehead the day before we went to see Santa. Well I didn't feel too bad removing that because those are temporary, and we were sending the picture out to everyone in the family. But to remove the red mark on his forehead? No way, it's part of who he is.

Here is an example of what I mean... take a look at beautiful Mattie:

She is gorgeous! There is absolutely nothing wrong with this picture. But personally I prefer to brighten things up a bit. She has such beautiful porcelain skin, but everything looks just a bit grey here.

And here is the after...

 Her face stands out a bit more and now that it's been lightened up her blue eyes really pop!

Anyway, I'm not sure of the point of this post I guess, mostly that I loved that picture of Matt and am excited I could clean it up and make it good enough to go up on the wall. It makes me wish I had more old photos to restore.

The tale of two windows

Way back in August of last year (yikes, a whole year ago!?) I started taking about wanting to give my master bedroom a makeover. We didn't have money for me to take on any new projects until October, at which point I posted that I had started painting and working on curtains. Well believe it or not (after all, its only been a year), I've actually made progress (well, a little...)!

I did finish painting, and I can't tell you how happy that makes me! I actually enjoy painting. However, painting was just the first step before doing everything else I was wanting to do... so I was anxious to get it out of the way so I could move on. It's {long ago} done though, which means on to bigger and better things!

The next thing I wanted to tackle was our window situation... we have these two big windows that butt up against each other in the corner, and I've just never known what to do with them. At one time I attempted making a roman shade (not bad for my first attempt) but it just didn't look the way I had hoped, so I never made the other. We then just hung up a dark curtain over the other to block out light, and left it at that. (You can see the "before" photo was an afterthought... seeing as half the walls are already painted in this picture!)

 
Beautiful, right?
I know you're jealous.

 These windows are so awkward! I love the idea of something open to let natural light in, but the reality of living in a condo: our bedroom window looks out on our neighbors front door. Talk about awkward! So we never leave our shades or blinds open, because that is just too weird for us. I'm not exactly a private person most of the time, but I don't really need complete strangers looking in on the bedroom I share with my husband.

I envisioned frosting the windows somehow... but I was having trouble finding a good way to do that so that it would neither look tacky, nor be anywhere in the realm of expensive. It took some time but I finally settled on frosted contact paper. I didn't know how well it would do, but it was only about $7.00 to do the windows, so I considered it worth a try. There's a slight pattern/texture to it, but in person you really don't notice it.

I very meticulously cleaned each window pane and wiped it down with a lint free cloth, and then I just lined up the contact paper making sure there was some overlap anywhere it met the frame of the window. After that I carefully used a box cutter to trim exactly along the edge of the window frame. As I wanted this to be as permanent as possible, and since our windows are old and needed to be resealed from the wet Washington weather, I then used clear caulking all around the edge to seal it in place. It takes time and patience to make sure everything is lined up and that there are no air bubbles... but it was so worth it!

After that it was just a matter of putting together the things I've been collecting over the last year or so. My thoughts were to turn this into a little reading corner but now that I'm pregnant, expect it will be more of a rocking/nursing corner. 

When I changed Matthew's nursery into a toddler bedroom, I moved the rocking chair into the corner. That's right, that big comfy chair is a rocker! It was my one big purchase that I really wanted when I was pregnant last time... and thank you to my Grandma for giving it to me! It has been used endlessly, and I'd buy it again in a heartbeat!

I also had this lovely chandelier waiting to be hung, it was a birthday gift last December from my mother-in-law Kathy. Isn't it pretty? Just what this room needed (although my husband might disagree, but he eventually gave in and let me have a pretty light).

It lets off such gorgeous shadows when turned on, I love it! 

And here is the (nearly) finished corner of our bedroom...

A far cry from where it started, am I right? You can see I'm in the middle of something with the curtains, but that is a post for another day (mostly because it's not finished yet...). The frosted windows have been amazing. SO glad I did it! I finished them about 6 months ago, and they have held up beautifully - especially considering the wet months we've been having this year. I love waking up in the morning with the soft light coming in through the windows... no more cave for us!

That brings you nearly up to speed as to what's been going on with my little master bedroom makeover, I lost my job a while back and so my very tiny budget for projects went down to nothing. I'm happy to say though that I'm working again... between that and being out of the first trimester (the doggedly tired trimester) of my pregnancy, I'm started to get back to doing things. I've got finished curtains and a new headboard in my sights... hopefully there will be a post on those soon, and by soon I don't mean next summer!

killer zebras - at last!

I've been pretty much MIA lately... some of that is just life (and a 2 year old!), but some of that is because I've been starting up a new blog! Bowl of Oranges has been fun, and I'm going to keep it up... but it was only ever a just for fun thing and often times I just don't get around to updating it. I'll still update when I get projects done, but if you'd like to see what I've been hard at work getting started, check out my new blog:

I mentioned in my last post that I have been thinking about selling cookies and so I decided to get things started! Killer Zebras is all about cookies, and just cooking in general! You can expect regular updates over there, so come check it out!

Killer Zebras

and be sure to check out my Facebook page!

in which I give tips on how to make scratch tickets

I know Christmas is over, but I still wanted to show you
guys how my nephew Elliott's coupon book came out!

My sister had it printed at Shutterfly, and it looks great! I'm sorry to say that some of the colors didn't print exactly right, but luckily none of them were too far off. Now all we needed to do was turn the multiple choice pages into scratch tickets. This was my first time making scratch tickets, and it was a lot of fun to do... but there was definitely a lot of trial and error! For anyone wanting to attempt this, here is my little how to/list of tips that I learned, so that you don't spend ages sitting at the table looking frustrated like this:

Ok for starters, here is how you make scratch ticket paint:

Materials:

any type of acrylic paint

dish soap

clear tape/stickers/labels

1. Mix paint with a few drops of dish soap

2. Paint multiple thin coats on top of clear adhesive of some kind

3. When dry, apply on top of whatever you want!

And... that's it!

On to the tips though, you'll find those basic directions (or some similar version) 

all over the internet. Here are the specifics I've learned however:

1. When mixing paint, some sites will tell you "2 parts paint, 1 part soap" or something like that... you do not need that much soap! Not only will the mixture get all bubbly and not paint on smoothly, but it dries kind of weird. Use only a few drops (assuming you aren't mixing up an entire bottle of paint) and you'll have no trouble.

2. You need to paint it on top of something clear and shiny (so that it scratches off easily) ... clear tape will do, but any office supply or craft store should have some kind of clear label or sticker which will be much easier to work with... which leads me to:

3. Paint it on the clear label, and then apply to paper. Doing this allows you to have straight perfect edges, because you can paint it on as messy as you like, and then cut shapes out of it. 

4. Apply thin coats, and let it dry completely between coats. If you don't, the paint kind of... shifts. I'm not sure of a better way to describe it, but it will leave you final layer looking weird.

5. Examine it from different angles before you decide you have enough coats of paint! 

Here is the very first attempt. I applied tape first, and had too much soap in the solution. You can see a black marker was used to make the boxes, which I didn't do later because it's too hard to cover that up! The edges were hard to keep looking nice and even, and the finish of the paint it all crackly looking. Not great!

Here is the second attempt. I fixed the paint and dish soap ratio, but I still applied tape first. Although on this one I felt I had to because of the odd shapes that were to be scratched off. I tried to paint carefully in the lines and I later touched up the edges (to make them as straight as possible) and you can see it isn't perfect, but certainly better than the first!

After those two, I decided to try painting some clear stickers and cutting them out afterwards. As you can see, it's about 1,000 times better! Also, because of the soap in the mixture, the paint doesn't chip at all when you cut it.... so really you could easily cut out any shape and it would look perfect!

Quick and easy application, I could paint everything all at once, and then just go
through the book and cut out all the right shapes and sizes. Easy peasy!

Here it is all wrapped up for Elliott... this was his big present this year,
so that's a giant gold E on front! I hear he saved it, too!

...if you didn't catch the original post, check it out here!

christmas sugar cookies

Last week I was laid off from my job (you'd think I would have time to blog more... but apparently not), and so money for Christmas is a bit tighter this year. I decided to put together some Christmas goodies to give out and here is the first thing I made: sugar cookies, of course! My husband was skeptical when I said I was going to make cookies to give away to people... but he amended that after he saw the finished product! I love making sugar cookies, but they can be time consuming and I don't usually have an excuse to do this much baking.

The icing is just royal icing, I've tried several recipes (they are all pretty close to the same thing, with only minor variations) and my favorite recipe is the one from Sweetopia, definitely worth trying!

Sweetopia's Royal Icing Recipe

Oh, and if you are wanting to give this a try yourself, a good place to

start is to read Sweetopia's How To for royal icing!

Merry Almost Christmas everyone!

I've been a busy girl

As most of my friends and family know, I was laid off last week... this means two things:

1. We are extremely tight on money for Christmas presents, and

2. I have a lot more time on my hands!

So for general Christmas presents this year I'm sending out Christmas goodies, and I've got some recipes to post up! This weekend I've been a sugar cookie machine!

Final pictures tomorrow, and some recipes!

- Posted from my iPhone

christmas coupons

Normally I struggle with posting Christmas ideas or projects before Christmas, because most of my friends and family check out my blog (right...?). I'm fairly certain however, that my 7 year old nephew won't be reading this.

{full name blurred for their privacy}

My sister came to me a little while ago and said she'd had an idea to do a coupon book for her son for Christmas. She wanted to include things like game night, his choice of a special dessert, "get out of jail {timeout} free"... that sort of thing. I think the picture she had in her mind was of a pretty basic homemade book, and she came to me and asked if I could help her with some designs. I had an immediate picture in my mind and ever since then... this has evolved into something much bigger! There are 38 coupons now, some of them from other family members. Since money is tight for everyone these days, she told the family about it and mentioned that if they wanted to add a coupon as his Christmas present this year - that all they had to do is let us know what they wanted to do for him and we'd put it in.

I think the pages turned out really great! We uploaded them to Shutterfly and they are being printed as a photobook. I'll do a post on that when it comes in, because we still have more work to do on the book! Some of the pages are being turned into scratch tickets - any page you see that has more than one option is going to be one. More on that when the present is completed! As for the ones from family, each page that is from someone other than mom or dad, has that person's name/s along the right hand side.

A quick disclaimer:

Designing stuff like this is a hobby of mine, but we really only had a few weeks

to put this together (and in our spare time at that) so I didn't have time to do all of

these from scratch. A few I made on my own, and the majority of them were taken

from either Minted or Tiny Prints card previews and then edited by me to fit our

needs. I've lost track of which are from where, but check out those sites

for some great designs!

I'd like to post up all of the pages here, but as I said there are 38 (not counting the cover or first page!) so I'm only going to post most of them, and I'm going to try something a little different. I'll hide the last half of my post so that this page doesn't take a year to load - if you'd like to see the rest, continue on to the rest of the post by clicking the link at the bottom of the page!

howdy, howdy

Or as Matthew would say, "habby, habby!"

We had such a great time this weekend - Matthew is officially in love with Halloween! Last year he was a zebra... an adorable zebra. This year I figured he was old enough to understand the concept of dressing up, so I went with his all time favorite duo:

Toy Story! He is an absolute fanatic about anything Toy Story related - especially if it's Buzz. At first, just to make my life easier, I looked at buying a costume. WOW - they are both expensive and cheesy! After looking at the poor excuses for Buzz and Woody costumes, I decided to make one. Buzz seemed too tricky (to make one that was believable) so I went with Woody (he carried Buzz around with him half the time, so it worked). After dressing him up the first night, he looked in the mirror and his jaw literally dropped. Best reaction ever! I think it's safe to say I did a good job - at least in his eyes!

I got lots of questions from people over the weekend, everyone wanted to know where I found a shirt and a vest like that! For the vest I just bought some cow print fabric, and then sewed it using a vest of his as a general guideline. For all you out there who are good at sewing (*ahem* my mom and sister Merry) don't look too close - I'm moderate, at best, when it comes to sewing. If this were anything but a costume I probably would have had someone help me! It came out looking pretty decent though, so I'm happy!

The shirt took the most amount of time. I found a white button up shirt that he was just barely growing out of (you can see the sleeves and bottom are just a hair short) and dyed it dark yellow using a box of Rit. When it was dry I took a red sharpie and a ruler (thats a lie, I used the straight edge of a frame waiting to be painted... but you get the idea) and just drew lines onto the shirt. Nothing too specific, I just eyeballed it. After that I put a spot of white paint on the buttons (the Rit even dyed the buttons! Strong stuff.), and that was it! Easy peasy.

The hat is made of foam, and he wouldn't really wear it anyway! The badge is 

just a wooden star I found and painted gold. I was having trouble deciding the best way to attach it to the vest, without worrying that it would fall off. In the end I drilled two tiny holes, and just sewed it on like a button. Good thing too, because he kept playing with it!

I  added a pull string on the back: just ribbon tied to a big metal ring (that I spray painted white)

Lastly: the boots. OH the boots. I was worried that we would spend the most money on these, and in the end never really get use out of them. I was so wrong. He wears these everywhere, and never wants to take them off! Fine by me, I think they are adorable. It was tricky finding them though. Fact: every store we could find that sells children's shoes, has about 5 different types of cowGIRL boots (I mean truly girly...pink, flowers, hearts, gems, you name it) and exactly ZERO cowBOY boots? What's up with that!? In the end we managed to find these... and yes, they were in the girl section. Thankfully, someone thought to make girls boots that weren't sickeningly sweet looking!

We had tons of fun trick or treating, Matthew was such a little charmer! He was shy at the first few doors but once he figured out what we were doing... he was saying thank you and blowing kisses to everyone! Although, he did have a hard time grasping the concept that people were opening their front door for us... but we were not going inside. He tried to walk into pretty much every house! He was also fiercely protective of his candy bucket... if you tried to hold that hand he would yell "no, that bucket!". And speaking of yelling... as we would be walking to the next house, he was having so much fun yelling into the night, "Bobo! Matt! Bobo! Matt!" (what he means is: Gobo & Uncle Traveling Matt... from Fraggle Rock. His other obsession.).

Another fact: Matthew ate exactly 2 pieces of candy the entire weekend (even though he went trick or treating twice, and to a Halloween party). You wouldn't have guessed it though... he was running around like a crazy person... we had someone ask us, "So I guess he's figured out that on Halloween he can have as much sugar as he wants?" The basic answer is... he never really wanted any candy! In fact after we got back from trick or treating, this is what I caught him sneaking out of the kitchen:

Yup, cereal. That's my strange little man! He had such a good time this weekend, and he was so wound up from the excitement of the weekend that Sunday night he didn't fall asleep until almost 11 PM.

In the end I'm so glad  I made his costume… the price was about the same as if I had bought one, but it looked so much better!

Here is the breakdown:
cow print fabric: $4.00
Rit yellow dye: $3.00
cowboy hat: $2.00
cowboy boots: $15.00
wooden star: $0.30
everything else: free (I had everything else sitting around the house)
Total: $24.30

Ok now for comparison... I could have bought a Woody costume for about $20-$25
but it would have pretty much been a screen printed jumpsuit without a hat or boots.

Lame!

I'm SO glad I went to the effort to make his
costume... and so glad he had so much fun with it!

master bedroom step 1: paint

Finally!

We've been on a strict budget around here lately, so I've had to put off starting my master bedroom makeover... until now! We finally have the money - and time - to get things started. I knew from the beginning we were going to paint the walls... when we first moved in, everything in the place was original. I understand no one replacing the carpet, but our home was built in1985! We bought it in 2005... how can it have gone 20 years without even one wall being painted!? I'm sorry, but that's crazy. Well in the beginning we were so anxious to get rid of the sterile feeling that we pretty much painted everything! Our master bedroom is fairly large and has vaulted ceilings, so we were ok with a little bit darker color. We went with Behr brand Brown Teepee #700D-4:

I actually really love the color - we also used it in the master bath (and I think we are going to keep it in that room), but it's dark enough that it made our room feel smaller. That was ok with us - at the time - but when I got pregnant with little Matthew, we had to turn our office into his nursery. And where did our office go? It got smushed in to the corner of our bedroom. Ever since then... our bedroom feels like a cave! It's cramped and small... not to mention it's the only room I never really got around to decorating in any way, so it's boring too.

I wanted to go with something on the gray side, and I settled with Gull from the new Martha Stewart line of paint. Note: the swatch provided online is not very accurate, it seems to have a lot more brown in it than the real thing.

We are about half way done painting, and I can't believe the difference! Our room feels big... and open... and bright! When I say we are half way done... that's mostly because we have vaulted ceilings and I realized we had lent our extension pole for the paint roller to someone. So currently there's a definite line around our room at about the 9 foot mark (as high as I could reach while on a chair) where the new paint stops. But I have the pole back! Which means this weekend hopefully the job will be finished. I so can't wait to have that finished and to move on to other things. My next step is to make new curtains, and to condense our "office" area of the room so that it takes up as little room as humanly possible. Pictures soon!

a much needed mail sorter

 My goal as of late has been to get our home organized. It has gotten significantly better, however we still have a long way to go. One of my biggest hurdles is getting our mail under control! How do people keep up with it? I've switched everything I can think of over to paperless (for statements and such), and I always recycle anything I think is junk before I even walk in the door. Yet, it just keeps piling up! Once upon a time I actually did have it under control... but then I had my little Matthew and certain things got pushed aside (as so often happens when you are learning to take care of a newborn!), and now it's piled up and out of control again!

I've spent the last week purging our filing cabinet, and trying to get down to bare bones the things we actually need to keep. I thought a mail sorter would be of enormous use, so I thought I'd make one! I didn't want to have to spend any money, so I used scraps left over (that polka dot fabric can be seen here!) from previous projects. Bright and Blithe was my inspiration for the sorter, but I altered it a bit to fit my needs (and supplies!). I am truly not talented at sewing, but somehow I managed to throw this together. My recommendation would be to follow the directions on Bright and Blithe, as I am no good at explaining anything sewing related!

This has already come in really handy! Now I just need to remember not to let this pile up, but to actually file/throw things away occasionally!

I decided to use iron-on transfers for the labels, which was a lot easier for me. She provides her own labels for printing, but I wanted to make my own categories! Here are my labels: