Friday, May 25, 2012

martha stewart craft paints in the garden

Summer breeze so softly blowing,
In my garden pinks are growing;
If you'll go and send the showers,
You may come and smell my flowers.
                      
                    - Old Garden Poem


A few weeks ago I was doing some potting of some flowers and I was distressed by how faded a lot of my old containers were. Some were plastic, some were that biodegradable stuff. Either way, there need some color enhancement.

Luckily, a few weeks earlier I had been to Michael's Craft Store and bought a whole bunch of the new Martha Stewart Craft Paints.  These paints are supposed to be good for glass, metal, ceramic, plastic, wood, paper and probably more. They say on the bottle they can be used for outdoor stuff. So, I grabbed some colors and began painting all my old faded pots and added some color to my terra cotta pots.

It was instant better color and it made me happy. The above pot was a taupe color. I covered it with a light pink. Here are some more that I painted. It's a bit hard to tell with the hydrandgea taking over everything, but it looks way better than it did.



Then I painted my little table that had gotten so worn out in the sun. I happened to buy the exact color. Here's what it looked like last summer:


And here is what it looks like now. Even with the pretty Geranium covering it you can see how much better it is. It basically looked brand new. It did scratch when I put something on it though. But, that is to be expected. It wasn't sealed in anyway.

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Since I painted these we've had some hot days and a number of rainy days. The pots still look really good. I'm excited to use these paints for other things. There are lots of great colors. 

Hope you have a wonderful Memorial Day Weekend. I'm gonna finally plant some veggies this weekend. Here are a few more pics of the potted plants.



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Tuesday, May 22, 2012

a few days at the beach

I spent some time at the coast last week. I took my parents and we had a few days of sun, sand, great food and some gambling. It was great. It was beautiful most days and it made me wonder why I don't go more.

I grew up in a beach town. It was 10 minutes to the beach and you parked and just walked out to it. After that I lived in the Bay Area, which was surrounded by water and you could be at the ocean in less than an hour, usually. Driving 2-3 hours to get to the beach seems like a long time to me now, but I really need to do it more often.



This was taken from my room


My parent's dog, Abby. This was her first time seeing the ocean and she loved it.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Vintage Color Palettes - Boat House


On a sunny day in spring, the world can actually look like this postcard. The bright blues and spring greens. So lovely. Lately in Portland spring days like this come in about one hour increments between rain and wind. Maybe in Chicago it's different. I would like to be at this boathouse.

These colors are a great combo of you want a refreshing and bright vintage color palette for any project. The color hex codes are from left to right: 0f5193, c2cb2c, f5040c, ff8373

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

May

When I was a kid all I knew about May Day is that it was a day to leave flowers on people's doors. My sister and I gathered flowers from the yard and put them in empty strawberry baskets, probably decorated with construction paper or pipe cleaner handles and left them on our neighbor's doors.

They looked nothing like this fancy one at the left from Martha Stewart. Every year when May Day passes I say I will do it next year and of course I don't. Maybe if all my friends lived in my neighborhood I would.





The last few days I haven't been able to think about flowers. I've been copying, collating, stapling and pasting postcards into 100 zines.

The majority of these are for the Independent Publishing Resource Center. They have a club called Zine of the Month Club.  Subscribers get a new zine every month from an IPRC member. Coming soon they will be featuring Paper Crush #4 as their zine of the month. Yay!

a random selection of postcards that are included in each zine
all ready to head off to the IPRC


Happy May!

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