Oh Joyous Rapture

Has anyone heard that Incubus song "New Skin"?

No? Oh well.

Anyway, check out this intense mastery of your sensory perception!



Woohoo!

You don't get it do you?

I just made you see blue! I did that. I just momentarily took control of your brain!

No?

Ok, let me explain.

So, in the real world what would happen is you would look at a piece of wood thats actually in front of your face. White light (from a bulb or the sun) would hit the wood and everything but the blue light would get absorbed by the wood and the blue light would be left to bounce off. And so, since your eye is aimed at the piece of wood, your eye is collecting the light that just bounced off the wood. Cool, huh? You wait, that was just the physics.

Ok, in our real world example, your eye just caught some blue light. It just stays bouncing around in there forever, right? WRONG. We all have these neat little structures dispersed around the back of our eye that are designed to be sensitive to specific types of light. Rods and Cones, you've probably heard of them. The Rods pick up light intensity, how bright something is. (They're the ones that leave that little white dot when you look at a camera flash) they work kind of like those "Measure Your Strength" carnival games.


Was I right? Just like the carnival game. The the light hits the Rod and the rod says how bright it is. DING

The Cones are responsible for telling the different colors apart. Guess what? There are three different types of Cones! (First person to correctly tell me what the three different types of Cones are responsible for in the comments below will get a custom antiqued mirror a'la Elizabeth)

After the light hits the rods and cones they send the information along a series of small nerves to the main optic nerve of each eye. Watch out for those blind spots. Those nerves meet up at a little junction called the optic chiasm and split into two parts. So now we have light information about a single image broken up into four parts. Two parts, two eyes, two plus two is four, yes? Ok, moving along. Your brain takes those four parts to four different places in your brain for processing.

Once all that is processed, your brain sends the processed information to other parts of your brain. When it gets to the linguistic center you may say to yourself, "that's a nice blue". When it gets to the memory center it might bring up that episode of The X-Files when the guy with brain cancer kept saying "cerulean" until a police officer drove into a semi-truck.

Anyway, I TOTALLY just hijacked your brain.

And I'm going to do it again.



I made you see red!

Here's another one. What do blue and red make?



Purple!!

Um, oh yeah. This is a blog about my awesome stuff. What in the hey does all this have to do with all my stuff?

Well, those colors are actually wood stains that I made. Yeah that's right, Minwax doesn't have purple wood stain but I do.



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Jacinda's Makeover

Oh Jacinda, she is quite possibly the most sultry piece of furniture I've ever laid my eyes on.

Unfortunately she was a little under the weather. Her last, uh, uh, lover? kept her in a garage and forced her to hold up a sofa. Poor girl (I think it was an abusive relationship).

Anyway, all that's over now. I've got her and I'm giving her a fabulous makeover.

Just a sneak.



Look everybody! It's Jacinda-henge!

Oh yeah, she's going to be purple. It just gives you the tingly shivers doesn't it? The color is called Blackberry Harvest. It's rich and velvety like good milk chocolate.

I'm on a major purple kick right now so pretty much everything I'm churning out is some shade of purple. Let me know if you get tired of it.


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The Beautification of Elizabeth

Meet Elizabeth.



When I first saw her at the Habitat for Humanity Restore (I'm going to call that place The Cashville Orphanage from now on) in Nashville I knew I had to get my hands on her. Luckily for me Tom saw her too, and he "needs" a replacement medicine cabinet for his bathroom redo. So he forked over the outrageous sum of $16.50 and I brought her home.

Wait? Did I say "Medicine Cabinet"? Yes. Yes I did.

This is what the inside looked like.


Ewwwww.

When I got her home, I took her apart, cleaned her *gag*, and fancied her up.
Now-a she-a looks-a like-a dis-a!



Here are some "before and after" pics.

The frame



The cabinet.



The mirror.



I like her.

The whole process only took a couple of hours but I had to space it out over about two days. Stupid laundry.


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Gaman

In January of 2010 my family moved into our current home. It was roughly triple the size of our previous home. As we unpacked boxes and boxes of previously stored goodies I quickly realized that what we seriously lacked was vertical storage.

I spent a fair amount of time looking for some solid locally made bookcase, because that's the kind of thing that makes my husband happy. (HI JEFF!!! ) Everything I found was unbelievably expensive. Then I spent some time looking at thrift or secondhand stores, because that's the kind of thing that makes me happy. I couldn't find anything I liked enough to commit to rehabbing or refinishing it.

Ultimately I decided I'd just build one my own damn self. I think those were my exact words of exasperation when I brought it up to The Husband. Much to my surprise he was completely fine with it. Woo hoo!

I found the plan in a book on decks and gazebos I checked out from the library. I wish I could find that book again but the library gods apparently hate me because I haven't seen it since. I scaled it to the size I wanted and headed to Lowe's. A super nice, and patient, and attractive guy helped me cut all the wood to the sizes that I wanted. He actually set it all out on the floor and squared everything to make sure all the joints were right. It probably took about an hour and a half and I enjoyed it.

Anyway, when all that was done, I called in some construction instruction and got some schooling on how to properly place screws in joints that for all practical purposes shouldn't even exist. When that was done, I had built my first bookshelf!




Neat, huh!?

It was the first thing I had ever "built"! Yay! I was so freaking proud!

Of course, I'm in the middle of anchoring it to the wall so it doesn't kill anyone and The Husband says "So, you're just going to leave it like that?"
"Like what?"
"All RAW like that."
"Raw? What does that mean?"
" I just didn't think you were done."
POP!!!Fizzle...

Apparently he wanted me to carry the thing outside and stain it. At 2 in the morning. In the middle of January. In the snow. I'm sure you can see where THAT conversation was going.

So last week I bought a quart of Minwax Bombay Mahogany Poly-Shades. I cleared off the crazy shelf and enlisted The Monkey to help me get it on the porch.

Now it looks like this:


In all seriousness, If I had known almost three years ago that this shelf would turn out this beautiful, I would have gone out at 2 in the morning, in January, in the snow and stained it.

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Introducing....

Jacinda!!



This lovely lady was a Craigslist find. For $30 and a little under 3 hours of my time this seductress belonged to me.

Let's get to know her a little better.

First off she has some beautiful curves, doesn't she?



Kind of makes you want to lick her, doesn't it?

And now...




Get ready for it....




Wait.......




I just can't stand it.......




Here it comes.......




It's......






Her.......




HARDWARE!!!!!!!






Ahhhhhhhhhh.



Dear lord they're beautiful.

Oh, Jacinda. I can't wait to get my hands on you.



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A Ceiling Fan Experiment

A while back Tom's mom gave me an old outdoor ceiling fan. (HI TOM!!!! HI SANDY!!!!) She took it down and stored it before she ripped out her old patio. The new patio didn't have a space for a fan so it just sat in their basement. I'm not really sure how I ended up getting it, but somehow I did.

It sat in various places under my carport until a few weeks ago when Libby came over to do crafty things. (HI LIBBY!!!!) A sudden hailstorm stranded us under the carport in craft mode so we made do with what we had. We flipped the fan over and took off all it's light fixtures. We plugged the sockets with paper towels so we wouldn't get paint in them. Then we spray painted the thing with Rustoleum Hammered Metallic Black spray paint until the can went empty. We may or may not have cleaned it first.

And, since this was a completely impromptu craft, I don't have a picture of the fan before we started spraying. It was brown though. The blades were woodgrain with a wicker/lattice inlay and the fan body was brass. You know, early to mid 1990's ceiling fan, brown. Apparently I got crazy carried away because I don't have a picture of it after I painted it either. I just left it there and was glad that I finally did something to it. Even if all I did was randomly spray paint it black, I did SOMETHING to it!

A few days later I stumbled upon this fantastical stuff.




Yeah, I'm color shifting paint and my name is Galaxy, I know I'm cool.

Oh, ummmmm, yeah...so I HAD to have it.

How much is it? $15. Ouch. I had to do some quick rationalising. My basic rule is: "I must have two completely independent legitimate reasons to buy something from a home improvement or craft store". Typically paint is excluded from this because, really how many times can one person use cotton candy pink paint? I decided to invoke this rule anyway and give it one reason just because it is paint and paint is damn useful.

Ok, reason number 2...

It's really cool!?

No! Crap, that can't be a reason.

I could...paint...a...table!!!

YES! I definitely need a color changing table!

Hmm, that didn't actually sound very cool when I said it out loud.

Let's read the instructions, that'll help.

Shake thoroughly, blah, blah, for use over black.

What? That's stupid! Who just has random black stuff hanging around their house...

Ohhhhhhh, I could paint that fan.....O,O

Reason #1: it's paint, and paint is damn useful. Reason #2: I can paint that fan with it. Purchase rationalised.

I went straight home and painted the fan. And by "straight home" I mean I left my van running with the kids in it still strapped into their carseats watching The Princess Bride. It was conveniently still in the exact same spot it was in when I painted it the first time.

Once it dried I hung it up!



Ok, I tried for three hours to do it by myself then gave up and called my electrician. He hung it up for me. Thanks Marvin!

It was looking pretty cool so far.

I didn't want to put the original glass shades back on it because, well, they were brown. I looked around a bit before I decided that I probably wasn't going to find exactly what I wanted and should just make my own.

I've used some glass paints before and didn't really like them. I decided to give them another shot but use a different brand. I went with DecoArt Crystal Gloss Enamel Transparent Glass Paint. I had seen a few other bloggers use them and their projects came out nicely. Anyway, I just squirted the paint on the glass shades and used a cheap sponge brush to spread it out.




They're still wet in that pic, so they look kind of gooey.

The instructions say to let them dry for 48 hours then bake them at 200F to set the paint.

Yeah. This is what they look like on the lamp!!


I think I'll eventually wash off the blue and repaint them purple. Then paint the ceiling turquoise. Yes? No? Ok, probably not turquoise.

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Camera-less depression.

I found my phone taking an unscheduled swimming lesson. It worked for a few more days before it died. Unfortunately it was my only camera. So until my new phone gets here I'm camera-less. And I'm super sad about it. My life pretty much comes to a screeching halt when I can't take pictures.

So, in lieu of of a project, here is a picture of my daughter wearing the straw glasses that we got today at The Container Store. (the picture was taken with her phone)

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