How do you do this?

Good morning! This is the top of a table that I bought here in town last summer. I wish I knew how to get this two-colour, scraped, old, (beautiful!) finish on wood.

Old side table

Ugly isn't it? We got 2 of them for free when we moved in to our house. Jesse has been wanting to throw them out for years now, so they have been in the basement waiting for a coat of light blue paint and some distressing. I used the original hardware and mixed the blue out of 3 almost empty cans of old paint from our large almost-empty-cans-of-paint collection.

Still haven't gotten around to doing the second one yet!

painting old furniture

Oops, I haven't posted anything in a verrrryyyy looong time. That's because I wasn't feeling very creative until about a month ago, when bam! All I want to do is take old furniture and paint it pale, distress, and decorate all the corners of my little house.

How ugly is the dresser above? Soooo ugly. It was $10 on kijiji. I decided to paint it blue and add these beautiful handpainted knobs that my sister sent to me from Guelph.

The table above was a $15 kijiji purchase. It was kinda wobbly and cheap feeling, probably Debbie Travis or something like that. I like the curved legs and little drawer.

We have about a hundred half full cans of paint in the basement, all different shades of grey, white, and blue... for real... some of them were here when we moved in to the house. The rest are because we've painted every room in the house about three times in the past two years. I mixed the same 3 colours in different quantities to get the shades you see on the dresser, table, and grey mirror.

I'd like to get a little bench and a small mirror to turn that table in to a vanity.

2009!

Happy New Year! I love these notecards from nestdecorating. And these. And these...

Impatient

Waiting, waiting for this perfect Kings of Leon silkscreen poster to arrive in our mailbox. It will go in the kitchen, I think. 

I can sew! (straight lines, that is)

I made a quilt over the holidays! It was the first time I had used a sewing machine, sent generously to me by my Aunt Debbie way back in October. It is not a large quilt, it's the size of a couch throw. It is pictured above neatly folded in half. It was fun to make & satisfying and now I spend a large chunk of my free time looking at cotton fabrics online for my next quilt, and the quilt after that, etc...

tiny warbler

Look how sweet these are! Handmade felted little guys by Vancouver's Kate Keeler, of Tinywarbler Designs. I found her through this article on the Canadian Home and Country website. How wonderful that this magazine is featuring talented Etsy sellers! I am trying to decide which magazine to ask for a subscription to as a Christmas present, since Country Living really isn't doing it for me anymore (I enjoy the website more than the actual magazine). I'm going to choose a Canadian one this time, and I'm thinking it's between Home and Country or House and Home right now...

100 Bits of the World

image courtesy of Sabrina Ward Harrison

100 Bits of the World is a truly beautiful and inspiring site. Check it out here. And isn't S.W.H's studio space lovely?

Monday Afternoon

Mercury glass hurricanes, lovely stuffed owl pillows (via Decor8), Smokestack poster.

Hooray!

My $15 kijiji mirror!

A self-congratulatory post

Pearls can be very hard to photograph, especially white pearls, and so I am quite proud of how these photos turned out. It's all about the lighting, you see, and since I have no equipment other than Jesse's old Sony camera that really doesn't take very good photos except for those of the extreme close-up variety, I have to wait for perfect weather in order to get perfect lighting.

Sunny

Fall is coming, and even though it is my favourite season, I could do with some more hot sweaty weather. Why did summer in Thunder Bay feel like it was only a month long? (Answer: because it was.) Anyway, I'm loving the sunny oranges and yellows in the handmade, vintage-inspired items above. From left to right: musical tags from Royal Buffet, budgie screenprint from Alyoisius, linen pencil cases from Cool Citrus Basil.

Petersham

Lovely imagery from the photo gallery of Petersham Nurseries in Surrey, UK. 

I'm loving that slightly dilapitated pink chair on the left, and I'd also like to sit down with lunch and a good book in that sweet cafe on the right. Speaking of, I picked up The Thirteenth Tale on the suggestion of one of CC's readers (scroll down to the bottom of this post to see all the favourite book picks) and pretty much didn't put it down until it was finished. I haven't enjoyed a book so much since The Time Traveller's Wife.

simple, shiny & black

New earrings for the shop this week!

Green

Find this print of bubbo's caligraphy here...

It's a garden party

These new ones will be up in the shop soon. Happy weekend!

Jess Gonacha

I keep trying to inject little bits of pink in to our decor without Jesse noticing, and this one would look perfect on the mantel above our fireplace.

Peonies, again

I recently bought these gorgeous birthday cards from EnfinLaVoila, and am waiting impatiently for them to arrive :)

I will be listing these and some other earrings in the shop this week...

tweet tweet

Cute little handmade, one-of-a-kind cards from the super talented Anna Ruby King of this etsy shop.