how to paint stripy steps without loosing your marbles: a tutorial

It's been a long time since I've written a tutorial. Not because we haven't been up to lots of things around the house but, well, they haven't been very tutorial worthy. What can I say about a wallpapered piece of plywood other than, um, wallpaper a piece of plywood? For the most part our projects these days involve either planting veggies or flowers in the yard or painting. We're on our second round of painting. In theory, all the rooms that didn't get painted last fall will get paint now. Except for Briton's room. Which we are not allowed to change. Whatever. If he likes half painted walls and a rug over plywood, so be it.

But the stairs. They took some serious thinking and planning. So I thought I'd share. Plus I love them. It makes me smile every time I look at them.

Our stairs are, barring the you may not change this floor in Briton's room, the only raw floors left after the great carpet removal of last August. The living room floor is painted, awaiting hardwood flooring someday, and the upstairs is bamboo floored. But the stairs were a little bit of a problem. At some point we'd like to put new treads in. Nice, solid hardwood ones that will match out kitchen floors. Except man, treads are expensive. Plus since the rise of the steps is also rough plywood, that will have to be replaced as well. Which makes it a big, expensive project. And not really one at the top of the priority list. I've had this stripy steps idea in my head almost since we moved in and the plan has gone through lots of possibilities. Carpet? Too expensive. And also too hard to find in stripes we liked. And also I hate carpet. Canvas runner? Too trippy. I can just see one or all of us falling down the steps when it gets worn and baggy. I almost went with the kind of tape they use on gym floors. Bright, colorful and practically permanent, but in the end, paint seemed the easiest option. And as a result of our many, many painting projects, and painting ideas, we had lots of little cans of different paint colors. Blue from the kitchen, pink that almost was in Evie's room, yellow from the bench, green from, actually, I have no idea where that green came from.

The big challenge, however, is how to get nice, neat, straight lines without going nuts. As it turns out, it's not as hard as it looks but I'll warns you, it is tedious. This is not a one day project. There is much sitting around waiting for things to dry, and then adding another coat, and then waiting some more. But that's good, Because while one stripe is drying you can still walk on the other parts of the steps. Which, unless you have two sets of stairs in your house or you don't need to get up them, is necessary.

So, here's how you do it.

First paint the edges of the steps with your base color. I used the white trim paint we are using all over the house. Sebring White from Benjamin Moore if anyone is interested. It's our go-to white for flat and glossy paints. I decided that I wanted the border to fall 8 inches from each side of the steps and used a ruler to mark that out, then painted about an inch over that mark. After the third coat had dried, it was time for.....another coat. Except this one is special and it's the secret to really neat and clean stripes (I wish I'd figured this out long ago)

Using regular masking tape, no need for the fancy painters tape here, I taped off the line at the 8-inch mark and then painted over the tape with the white. Why? Well, if you've ever tried to use tape to make a perfect line you know that, inevitably, no matter how much you smooth it down, paint is going to leak under. By painting the stripe line first with the white the paint that leaked under is the same as the base and the tape line is sealed in. Once the white was dry I added yellow on one side and dark blue on the other, painting out, again, slightly further than I wanted that particular stripe to go.(It's easier to see on the yellow, but obviously I did the white first)

Again with the paint several coats, tape, paint another coat (hint, don't just paint on the raw side of the tape, otherwise you'll have a weird line in the middle of your stripe and have to go back and touch it up. Lesson learned) then add a new color, until you've filled the space.
There is a lot of dry time needed here but since I chose not to use floor paint (too expensive, takes too long to dry and, in our experience, didn't hold up any better than trim paint) it wasn't too painful. I will recommend shutting your animals in a bedroom or outside each and every time you start to paint and leaving them there till that stripe is dry. Unless you want little yellow kitty footprints on your kitchen floor.

Just sayin.

A little note on cleaning. Because we've lived with painted plywood floors for almost a year now, I've had plenty of time to try out different cleaning methods and have finally struck on something that works. Most of the time my painted floors just get a good sweep and vacuum and then a once over with a Bona mop and wood floor cleaner. But about every three weeks I use a long handled bristle brush and give it a scrub with a mixture of hot water and just a little washing soda. Just a little. Otherwise there is a white film when it dries. I use an old pan and put about a teaspoon of soda in with the water. I follow up with a dry towel to wipe up the water (no standing water on wood floors!) and the floors look almost new. Since the part of the stairs people tend to walk on are stripy and not white, the steps stay pretty clean and have, so far, just needed sweeping.

So there you go. Stripy steps. Not the craziest thing we've done. Probably not even in the top ten (not even close to the time we took a bus and then a train and then another bus to that sketchy IKEA in London when Briton was a toddler. Geesh that was one long, slightly frightening day. )

and some color

We have a blue piano.

 I've wanted to paint a piano forever. Well, a piano or an antique sewing machine table. The piano landed here first, and in desperate need of some kind of rehabbing, so a piano it was. We wanted something bright and shiny and colorful for the room, something that reminded us of the beautiful blue door on the Georgian row house we lived in in Ireland. So now we have a blue piano (The color, naturally, is called Blue Suede Shoes).

Before any musically inclined readers out there freak out, I should say that this piano is the kind of piano you can paint. It's neither fancy or rare. It was a lower end piano even when it was made and was listed free on Craigslist partly, I think, because someone, at some point, tried to refinish it. Or that's my guess given the difference between the inside finish and the outside finish. I suppose that could have been age, but whatever it was, it wasn't good. (Like the weird green streaks? What were those?). If this had been a precious, vintage, fancy-schmancy piano, I would have gone with the sewing cabinet. But it's not. It a plunk away while you learn to play kind of piano. It has pieces of wood that have fallen off and a few lost key tops. But it keeps its tune and provides endless fascination with it's music holder front that magically pops out when you flip open the key covering (clearly I have a great deal of knowledge on piano parts. Key flippy uppy thing? Slam down on your finger thing? What is that called?) And now it's blue, and it think it loves it! I'm going to have to give it a name so I can stop calling it, it.

Luckily for me, this piano came apart in ways that made it fairly easy to paint. And the only part that would have been tricky, right up around the keys (foldy backy thing? Seriously, I need to figure out what that's called), was the only part that had a decent finish on it as well as the brand lettering. So I left that alone and painted the rest.

Although this project wasn't necessarily hard, it was time consuming. Mostly because for the first time in my life I actually followed the rules and sanded down the surfaces between every single coat (and there were several) To help keep the dust out of the piano, I used a wet sandpaper with a fine grit (220).

After the first round of sanding the old finish, I painted the entire thing with an oil based tinted primer. At the end of that coat I freaked out just a wee bit on the color. I had originally intended to go with something a little darker, but Will talked me into the bright (which I'm glad of now) the primer, though tinted, was much lighter than the final coat so if you attempt this, keep that in mind.

So, sand, prime, sand, prime a little more, sand and then the paint, which was a water based oil paint (I'm not really clear how that's possible, but whatever, I trust my paint guys at this point) Three coats, sanding between each, plus touch up. Like I said, it was time consuming. But oh so worth it. When it was dry (more waiting, I hate waiting) we moved it back into the living room and Will added a "C" below middle C for me with a porcelain pen.

Evelyn, who is our pianist in residence, loves it. We're waiting for a space to pop up with a local piano teacher but in the meantime she's been composing her own songs and tinkering with a  five finger book piano book I ordered for her a few weeks ago. Music music all the time.

Color, nice and bright and fun. But help me out here - should I leave the bench black or paint it blue to match (it was too stained with something red to refinish the wood)? I can't decide.

and green shoes to match

I'm not really much of a fashionista. I like clothes, don't get me wrong. And I try to look as if I put at least a smidgen of effort into getting dressed in the morning, but I'm not especially good at that all pulled together look. For one thing I've never been able, or had a strong desire, to spend a lot of money on clothes and for another, I don't have a really strong sense of my own personal style. It depends a lot on my mood. Sometimes I like girly, sometimes I like sleek, sometimes I like jeans and t-shirts (actually my default is jeans and a t-shirt. What can I say, I've been at home with my kids for ten years)

But living in New York has given me the opportunity to observe a lot of fashionable, and not so fashionable people on a daily basis. Who can forget the tights are not pants phase which, now that the weather is warming up, I have to tell you, is back. And while black is definitely the color of choice here - just check out the racks in the thrift stores with their acres of black pants, tops, sweaters and shoes and you'll see it's true - I've noticed a trend in the outfits I like as they pass on the street. The name of the game is coordination. Specifically shoes that match your jacket or sweater.

This is perfect for me because I love a good cardigan. I hate weather that makes layering uncomfortable because I feel strange in just a shirt. I want a cardigan or a sweater or a something over it. It's so ingrained that I regularly step out with a sweater on when it's way too hot to wear one and end up spending the day overheated. So this has become my new thing. Cardigans and matching flats. Because heels bother my ankles after a while and flip flops are disgusting in the city. Unless you like black grimy toes.

Being on a wife-of-a-grad-student budget means that I can't go crazy with this. I started with one set. In red. From Target. Which was cheap, but not cheap enough to add in multiples. But since then I've done some thrifting and TJ Maxxing and have gathered myself a few more cardigans and shoes. It's become a sort of a uniform, but I'm ok with that. Less thinking in the morning is always a good thing.

My favorite color is green and I've been on the hunt for a green duo for a while. I scored a sweater a few weeks ago but green must be out of style because there were no green flats to be found. At least not of the as cheap as possible while still being comfortable variety. So I decided to make some.

I found these canvas espadrille type flats on the clearance rack at Marshall's. Actually I found a blue stripy pair first and then when they turned out to be ridiculously comfy I went back and found the plain white ones.

Using masking tape, I blocked off the rubber sole, wrapping the edge around to cover where canvas meets rubber and smoothing it down with my fingernail.

I mixed up equal parts acrylic paint that matched my sweater and fabric medium. I'm really liking the new Martha Stewart mediums, they seem to do a good job and are easier to find than some of the other brands.

While I could have gone with just plain green, I wanted something a little more fun so I tried my hand at an ombre effect. Starting at the bottom edge, I brushed the green on, letting it fade out as I went up.

Once I'd painted around both shoes, I added a little more medium and some white paint to the mix to lighten up the color. This I painted on from the top edge down.

Before the lighter paint dried, I rubbed the shoes down with a damp paper towel to blend the colors where the paint meets. This way there is no "line" and the colors simply fade into one another. Once they were dry, I set the paint with some puffs of steam from the iron.

I'm hoping the paint holds up in the wash, we'll see in a few weeks when, inevitably, they will get grungy from walking all over the city. If not I suppose I can repaint them. Although so far my experience with using the fabric medium has been great, so I'm pretty sure they'll be in it for the long haul. Which is good, because I love them.

So now I'm set. With green shoes to match.

more fun with porcelain pens

These pens a a little bit addictive. Several times this weeks I've caught myself looking at my perfectly good and pre-patterned dishes thinking "I could add a little something something to this." Mostly I've resisted, other than finishing off my white mug project.
Yesterday I hit up the HomeGoods store in search of more mugs (see, addictive) and wound up instead with a plain white cake stand from the clearance rack that was just begging to be doodled on.
A cake stand has been on my when we have a house again list - along with chickens and a spinning wheel - ever since I broke mine before Christmas. I know a lot of people would call them a waste of space but I've found that even a plain, unfrosted cake seems fancy and special if you put it on a cake stand, so I've been missing mine and this one was too good, and too cheap, to pass up. So home it came and while Briton worked on an adventure story about Egyptian Gods in red disco suits, I doodle a doily on my cake stand.
As I said before, I'm a terrible artist, and I do not have much of a steady hand, but this style lends itself well to that. It's easy to cover up any mistakes with more swirls, bumps and lines. See this ugly wobbly line?

Looks fine now, right?
I think the key here is to start from the middle, work around on that level, and then add a new circle.
I used a roll of tape and two plates to make the ever larger circles and then just added little details to each as I worked my way to the outside edge.
Then if there are spaces that look blank, you can add in more once the work you have done is dry to the touch. I had planned to continue but Briton looked up and said "You know mom, the key to art is knowing when to stop." So I took his very good advice and stopped, and really, I love it.
Now I just need to bake a cake to put on the doodled doily.
Or I could just run down to the bakery and buy one. There was an awesome report card in the house today. I think we deserve cake!

flower mugs:a tutorial

Round about Christmas a tutorial for personalized initial mugs went flying around the crafty blogs. I remember reading it and liking the idea, especially as a teacher gift, but at the time I didn't have time to hunt down the special pens and try it out. And then when I finally stopped long enough to search them out, they were sold out just about everywhere. Oh well, mugs with letters on them weren't really my style anyway, I figured. But just for kicks, I put in a order for one pen to come whenever they did get them back in stock. And then I sort of forgot all about it.
Imagine my surprise when a package arrive a week or so ago with one box of porcelain pens in it. Six pens, not one. I'm still not sure who made the mistake, the quantity was a little ambiguous so one could very well have meant one box. But I'm getting off topic here.

If you've been reading this here little ol' blog for a while, you may remember my Keep Calm and Carry On Mugs that Will made for me a few winters ago, before Keep Calm was everywhere. (You can see them here, hanging in my pretty kitchen, sob, sob) I have loved those mug, the sentiment on them is perfect for my life, but I don't love that it's so common now and I really don't love that the paint is chipping away from them in droves every time I wash them. They are starting to have a bit of a battle distressed look. I'd like to replace my mugs with a collection of handmade ones but that's going to take time, and in the meantime I picked up a set of plain white mugs at Homegoods last time we had visitors. Can't have people fighting over their coffee cups now, could I. So when the pens came, it seemed like a good opportunity to try them out.
Before I start, however, I should tell you that I can not draw. I'm terrible at it. But I can, if pressed, sort of look at a drawing and copy it in a very very basic way. I probably should have had Will do the drawings but as he is mired down in mid-term projects at the moment, it didn't seem quite the time for it. The dandelions are both inspired by some clip art I used in my planner last year and the other flowers (mums maybe? dahlias?) I saw somewhere and saved on my desktop.

It's a little hard to call this a tutorial, since mostly what you are doing is drawing on a mug, but here are a few things I figured out in the process that I didn't really get from the original tutorials.

1. Clean your mug really, really well. Because you are going to bake these things, and you don't want to end up baking on a coffee stain.

2. If you make a mistake wipe it off pronto. The ink dried quickly and is hard to get off once it does so wipe away right away and if you need to scrap any residue with your fingernail.
3. The pens goop up. I stopped in the middle of my first mug to attend to some kind of kid crisis and when I came back to it the pen wouldn't work. At first I thought it was out and spent some time grumbling about crappy pens and also thanking the gods of misordering for sending me some back ups, but then when the second pen stopped working when I paused to decide how many dandelions I wanted on the second mug, I realized that it was just clogged. So have a piece of paper handy that you can use to wipe the tips. Just drag the nib sideways along the paper, twirling a little as you go, to pull off the dried up ink and you are good to go.

4. The directions say to bake at 150 once you are done to set the ink. I don't know about your stove, but my crappy apartment, ten degrees hotter in the back than the front oven does not go down to 150. 200 is the lowest temperature, but that worked fine too. And don't forget that you have to wait 24 hours after drawing before you bake to let the ink dry. I'm not actually sure why on that one, but that's what the directions say, so best to do it.
And that's really it. I like these pens, the end result looks pretty darn good and it's really a fun little project. I'm on the hunt for some plain egg cups right now to decorate for the kids, or maybe with the kids and I have some ideas about a cake stand with a doily drawn right on the top, but that one will probably have to wait till I have, you know, room for a cake stand. And an oven that doesn't hate me so I can start baking cakes again.

in print

The new issue of Living Crafts Magazine is out with the official (and revised) Eliza Pattern inside.

Evelyn was pretty tickled to see her baby smiling up at her from the pages of a magazine, and I have to admit, I was too.
I also had an article in their fall issue but there was a mix up with my copy and so I'll have to share it when it lands in my mailbox in a week or so. While the Eliza pattern has a few of my photos (for the hair tutorial) most are by a professional photographer. The other article is all my photos which is pretty exciting. I can't wait for it to arrive so I can see it in person as well!

little pretties

I am indecisive about my hair. I think I always have been. Long. Short. Up. Down. Bangs. No bangs.
I'm assuming here that I'm not the only one. I've always been a little jealous of people who have the same hairstyle year in and year out. They've found what works for them while I'm still looking in the mirror trying to decide if it's time to chop it all off, or lamenting that I just chopped it all off. Or wondering if I wouldn't look better with brown/red/really blond hair.

This year I've been letting my hair grow out. In part because I've spent the last few years with it shortish, but mostly because if I'm letting it grow, I don't have to pay for a New York haircut. A plan that was backed up by Briton's worst ever haircut (it was really, REALLY awful) for which we paid $50 and then had to come home and fix with clippers and crossed fingers.

I did, however, have bangs cut this fall, and I really love them. Except when I don't. See. I told you. I'm indecisive.
All this indecisiveness has led me to a new love of bobby pins. Other than securing buns, I've never really been a bobby pin girl. I'm not very adept at making them disappear into my hair, so there they sit saying "I can't control my hair, so I put five hundred pins in it to make it look slick even though it doesn't, because there are five hundred pins making it look not slick."

Then along came Pinterest and it's hair tutorials and I suddenly figured out bobby pins were pretty useful, especially if they were nice looking bobby pins. But I'm cheap (see growing hair out to avoid hair cut costs) and they are bobby pins. They get lost.
So here are my three varieties of DIY bobbies.
The first, and the fastest, is to paint regular old bobby pins with Nail Polish. I know! Easy, right? I used the super fast drying variety and even with three coats I think these took all of five minutes to make.
Next we have the bevel variety. These larger circles have a small edge to them which means you can fill them with something. I've tried beads, paper circles and glitter and all have worked well with the addition of some Triple Thick Glaze to seal it all in and make it look resin-like.
Finally we have the bejeweled style. I keep an eye out for good deals in the ever expanding bead aisle of my local Michael's and usually find something pretty in the under a dollar range. Some of these are actually beads, some are meant to be mounted and the green ones started out as clearance earring (99 cents). I used wire cutters to nip off the posts before mounting them.

The trick with all three is to have the pins stay relatively flat while they dry and the best way to keep them flat is to slip them onto cardboard, a small box is best but some heavy duty cardstock will work almost as well.

I still have gobs of the blanks, especially of the bevel variety. Any ideas for what I should try next?

little felt collar: a tutorial

We got a letter home a few days ago from Evie's school reminding us of the uniform policy. I suspect there has been a bit of a mid-winter rebellion when it comes to the uniforms, some of the girls in her class have started wearing pink and purple tights, especially toward the end of the week when clean uniform pieces are thin on the ground. I know I've been tempted. But Miss Evelyn loves her uniform, for whatever reason. I'm not sure if it's the ease of not choosing in the morning or the "this is my school costume" thing or the fact that when she isn't in her uniform, we let her wear whatever she wants, which she really loves (striped tights, plaid skirt, flower shirt, color block sweater! Whew! We are into patterns!)But whatever it is, she has no objections to putting on her uniform each morning.
But when I looked over the note I realized that we had, without knowing it, been breaking the "rules". Light blue collared shirts. Collared was underlined. Woops. When the cold weather hit I picked up some long sleeved t-shirts for her, which, since they are t-shirts, have no collars. I'm not super stressed about it, we could always layer up the T under her collared shirts, but when I saw this on Pinterest I couldn't resist.

The original pattern was far too big for my little bitty girl, so I thought I'd share how I drafted a pattern for one her size, just in case your little girl needs a pretty felt collar. I used a heavy, 100% wool felt for this because it's what I had in the house. But if I had it to do again I'd probably go down to Purl Soho and get a sheet of the nice soft wool felt they have. Its thinner so I think it would drape a little better.
You'll need to start with some kind of collared shirt or dress that fits well in the neck - not too loose or too tight. For Evie's, I used one of her party dresses with a Peter Pan style collar. Pin one side of the collar, as flat as you can, to a piece of paper. Use plenty of pins so that it stays smooth. Trace around the outside of the collar and then use the pin to prick through the fabric into the paper along the inner edge. When you unpin, connect the pin pricks to make the half collar shape.

It's less crucial that the outer edge of the collar is the shape you want, that's easy to alter, what you really want is the inner curve and some idea of how wide you want to collar to be. In a pinch, you could even use a t-shirt to get that inner curve and then just play around with the shape of the collar itself.
Once you have the basic shape of the collar down, you can add that cute scalloped edge by tracing the curve of a teaspoon along the edge. Start at the back and work toward the front, this way you can add a little to the front edge as necessary to make the curves end evenly. I left a little tail where the fronts would connect, but you could bring the curve right to the edge if you like.
Try the paper pattern on a few times to make sure its the right shape and then pin to your fabric and cut the two pieces out.
Evie and I went button stash diving and came up with a few possibilities for the front and the back button, somehow I knew we'd pick the flower as soon as I spotted it in the bag.
Stitch the front edges together firmly and then sew the button on.
Instead of a ribbon to connect the back which would, frankly, be a disaster with a five year old, I used a shank button and a loop of elastic.


She likes.
Now, whether it will stay on all day is anyones guess, but at least I sent her to school all uniformed up.