Projects

I've had a couple of projects going recently around our house. The first was a sanding/painting project. I love new furniture, but also love old pieces with meaning or that have had a little "sweat" put into them. I can promise you that if I had the time to refinish/paint, I 'd be totally okay with decorating my house with flea market finds. I have several pieces of furniture that are sentimental to me, one being my Mammaw's gate-leg table, a side table that belonged to my great-grandmother, and now the high chair that belonged to my sister and me.

This is what the high chair looked like when my daddy brought it to us last fall:

This is what it looks like now:
I finally got around to sanding it one morning, and Evan very graciously painted it for me. My mom ordered the high-chair pad off of Etsy and it came in the mail today. We've basically just had Kendall sitting in it with one of my belts around her to keep her from sliding out!!! I just love the way it turned out and love even more that Kendall is eating from the same high chair that her Aunt Kara and mommy ate from!

The second project was a painting project. A couple of months back, I was needing a small diaper bag for Kendall. When leaving her in the nursery, it's such a hassle for me to carry a purse for myself and one of her huge diaper bags to church. I looked on-line for something for a while, but didn't want to pay an arm and a leg for one. One day, I ran across a bag in Target that was on a clearance rack for $4. I picked it up, thinking, "I'll send this to my mom and let her take it to be monogrammed." One Sunday night when I was picking Kendall up from the nursery at church, my new friend Carey said, "Did you get that bag at Target?" I told her "yes" and then went on to say that I was planning on sending it to my mom so she could have it monogrammed for me. Carey said, "Well, I can take it and monogram it for you." I said, "You have a monogramming machine?!?!?!" She said, "Yes, and I don't care to do that for you." So, I sent Kendall's bag with Carey.

Later that week, Carey invited our family over to play games with some other couples (which was a blast, by the way!) and I picked up my bag. I asked her how much I owed her, and she handed me a canvas and asked if I would paint the canvas for her daughter's room. Of course, I jumped on an opportunity to do some painting!

So, I got this:

In exchange for this:
I get really nervous painting for other people because I am a perfectionist, and most of my paintings are FAR from perfect. (Evan says that is the joy in painting. There isn't anything perfect about it!) I sent this picture to Carey via email and she said she loved it. She also said she was thinking of doing some craft fairs this fall with her sewing/monogramming and wanted to know if I might join her with some canvases. I think it would be tons of fun!