Painted Shutter with Picture Frames

My mother in law had this hiding away in their barn (along with our wonderful new dresser) not being used and said I could have it. I was very excited because I love decorating with shutters and I saw a picture on pinterest where someone had hung picture frames from their shutter and I'd been wanting to do this ever since.  Here is the shutter, fresh out of the barn still dressed for christmas and carrying lots of dust and dirt.

The wall on the right is the place I had in mind to hang the shutter.

 I cleaned it off and laid it down on an old sheet that I use to paint with (I would not recommend doing this if you care a lot about the rug underneath, there were a few paint leaks when I lifted the sheet).

Using my Valspar gloss black paint, left over from another furniture painting project, and my sponge brush I proceeded to paint the shutter one slat at a time. 

An hour or so later I was finished painting the top side, but still needed to paint the sides. I rigged up a nice little stand using from things around my design room (rolls of ribbon) so that I was able to paint the shutter sides without painting the sheet too. I left the back of the shutter unpainted since no one would be seeing that side anyway.

 After letting the shutter dry over night it was time to hang my picture frames on it by tying wire through the hangers on the back of the frames and the shutter slats. Here's the finished project. The black and white pictures are our parents when they were younger and the picture in the middle is of us on our wedding day. I'm thinking about changing that out to a black and white picture too. I'd also like to get a fun new knob to replace the silver one.

And here it is zoomed out a bit.

What do you think?

Baby Onesie with Pink Fabric Flowers Around the Collar-Available with white flowers

Here's a cute girly onesie to add to my collection of onesies. I made this for a friend to give to her cousin who just had a baby. It is available in any size onesie and has pink silky flowers attached.

To purchase this onesie click here.

Special Date Lumbar Pillow In Sage Green Burlap and Black

A new date pillow color combo!

To purchase this pillow click here.

"Sweet Caroline" Sage Green Lumbar Pillow- Available In Other Colors

I made this pillow for a friend who is giving it as a baby gift to her cousin who just had a little baby girl named Caroline.

To Purchase this pillow click here.

My New Dresser's Home

We finally got the new dresser into the house and now that I can see it with the wall collage behind it and the table top decorations I kind of like how it looks a little rustic and unfinished, so I have decided to leave it unpainted for the time being. Once I get bored with it how it is I'll paint it.

Here is how it looked before

And here is how it looks now. As you can see I added a few new things to sit on the dresser and I added an "A" to the part of the wall collage that used to be covered by the lamp shade.

DIY Roman Shades

This weekend I decided to add a little color to our mostly white bathroom by making a colorful roman shade to go over the window that was being covered by boring white blinds.

Supplies Needed:

Scissors

Ruler

Pen

Hot glue gun

Glue sticks

Vinyl Blinds

Sewing machine/Fabric glue/Heat and Bond

First I laid out my fabric on the floor and ironed it. When I have a giant piece of fabric like this I just iron it right on top of my rug, because nothing seems to happen to the rug (this is probably not true with all rugs so be careful!).

Next I placed my blinds on top of the fabric and straightened out all the slats. (Mistake I made: I should have placed it two inches lower, but forgot to allow for 2'' of seam allowance at the top).

Once the slats were nice and straight I traced all the way around the blinds 2'' from the edge.

Here's what my fabric looked like when I was finished.

I ironed a 1'' hem around the whole piece of fabric (fold the fabric over 1'' twice). Since I forgot to leave two inches at the top I had to do a 1/2'' hem at the top and bottom.

Here's how the back side of my fabric looked after ironing all the edges down.

I used the blind stitch setting on my sewing machine to sew down the hem, so that you couldn't see the stitching very clearly on the front side of the fabric. Here's how it should look on the back side of the fabric. If you're not comfortable using a sewing machine, or don't own one, you can use heat and bond or fabric glue.

And here is how it should look on the front. As you can see, there is much less thread showing than with a regular line of stitching. If you don't already know how to sew a blind hem stitch here is a video that shows you how. In the video she says you need to use a blind hem foot. This isn't necessary. I don't have one, but all I had to do was line up the fold with the middle line on my regular presser foot.

Now that my fabric was sewn and ready to go, it was time to cut my blinds. I cut the ladder like string on each side, being careful not to cut the thick string that goes through all the holes in the slats.

After I finished cutting the strings they were still attached at the bottom bar by these circular plastic inserts. I just pulled on the strings and they popped out.

I pulled out the thick string on the inside and untied the knot so that I could pull the bottom bar off.

My blinds were 64'' long and I wanted the folds to be about 8'' apart so I left 6 slats on the strings and pulled off the rest.

Using my ruler I spaced each slat 8'' apart.

I made a small and light mark with a pencil to keep track of where the slat should sit incase they moved while I spaced our the rest.

Here's how my shade looked after they were all evenly spaced out.

Next I glued down each slat (including the top and bottom bars) with my hot glue gun. I made sure not to glue down the space near the holes on the slats so that the string is able to move smoothly through the holes. I wasn't able to take a very good picture with the hot glue because it dried so quickly, but as you can see they are glued onto the fabric curved side down. I had to glue each slat one little section at a time to make sure the glue was still hot. I've read in other blogs that they used fabric glue, this might be easier because you wouldn't have to move so quickly. I didn't have fabric glue on hand so I just used my glue gun instead.

Next, I re-knotted the thick string so it wouldn't slide through the bottom bar anymore and cut off the excess string.

Finally it was time to hang them and see how they looked and worked!

To get the full effect, here's how the bathroom looked before.

 And here's how they look now (at night).

And here is how they look in the morning with sunlight shining through.

A view of the whole bathroom.

And this is how they look rolled up slightly.