my friend Carroll

A new mid-century portrait has joined my collection, and it's of someone who was actually quite dear to me! When I was 10 years old, I played Annie in the musical Annie. The man who played Daddy Warbucks was a really sweet older gentleman named Carroll. I loved Mr. Carroll and he was always very kind to me:) He even bought me and my husband a wedding present when we got married, even though he was a widower and getting on in years at the time. He passed away last year, and his estate was recently sold.

My precious Aunt Becky and Uncle Mike went to the sale and bought me the most amazing gift: a portrait that was painted of Mr. Carroll when he was about 18 years old. Isn't that just the most perfect gift? I'd love it even if I had no idea who it was a portrait of, but the fact that it's of someone I knew and cared about makes it so special:)

They also got me several theater posters from plays that he either directed or acted in, most of which were signed by the cast and crew. It's so fun reading what people wrote on them! Thank you again, Aunt B and Uncle Mike, for the incredibly thoughtful gifts! I love ya'll!

Speaking of the guest bedroom, I've just about finished my credenza that I made for free using pallets. I'm still working on making a sketch with the dimensions so you guys can make one of your own!

My favorite part is the mason jar knobs.

And last but not least, a quick shout-out to some recent visitors:) Danica and her hubby Jason stopped by our place last weekend during their Comic Con trip.

And my husband's little sister Giselle and two of her sorority sisters spent a full week with us earlier in the month, and I had so much fun showing them the sights of SoCal:)

Happy weekend, everyone!

an end table make-over and an upholstery decision

This little fella is another one of my roadside-rescue projects. I didn't let the fact that I was out jogging and the top of the table was completely missing stop me from snatching it up and taking it home!

I've been experimenting a lot lately with what I like to call "mixed-media furniture", so weaving a top for the end table made for great practice:) Add some sea-green paint and a bit of light distressing, and I ended up with an end table that would look right at home in a beach cottage.

And now for a before/after project that is still very much in the beginning stages. The last time you saw this half of my living room, it looked like this:

Well, I sold those chairs, and in their place we have this chair:

and this chair:

Step one was to sand the original finish off of the armchair. Time had not been good to it and it was a little rough-looking in places. I'm almost done with the sanding, then I'm going to stain it to match the chair above. The question, then, is what to do about the upholstery! I'd like to re-upholster them in matching fabric, or at least color-coordinated fabric.

Right now it's just covered in this red vintage table cloth, but I've narrowed my options for a more permanent upholstery job down to these three:

 A) Wool Blanket: Something stripey like a Hudson's Bay blanket, inspired by the chair above. The smaller chair could then be upholstered in the leftover blanket material, or in a solid fabric that matches one of the blanket's colors.

B) Neutral: This is the route I usually go with furniture, because I prefer to let the accents like pillows and throws "do the talking" (i.e. be colorful and bold). I have a lot of white linen fabric that looks similar in texture to the chair pictured above.

 C) Whimsical: I love this chair from anthropologie, and I found similar, Monet-inspired fabrics that I think would look really cool.

 It might be a little much to do both chairs in this fabric, so I'd probably just do the bigger chair in the Monet, and the smaller chair in a solid, color-coordinated fabric.

So should I go for A, B, or C?

vote! vote! vote!

I'm just mad about: primary colors

Lately I just can't get enough of blue, red and yellow. At the rate I'm going, my house is going to look like a kindergarten classroom by the time fall rolls around. 

I had some trouble getting the self-timer situation under control, so these pictures aren't that great, but here's some fun primary color clothing for you.

Check out those vintage shoes! They came as a set with this handbag ... an adorable gift from my mama:)

And here's another place where some bright yellow has popped up recently. I started with this rough-around-the-edges coffee table.

It was rusty and the plywood was a bit moldy.

I Oxy-Cleaned, sanded, and stained the plywood, then put on several coats of shiny polyurethane. 

I primed the metal part of the table with Rustoleum Rusty Metal Primer, then painted it a glossy, bright yellow.

Ta-daaaaah!

I think it makes a very happy, summery addition to home:)

the latest changes

I realized yesterday that it's been a while since I showed some of the changes I've made in the master and guest bedroom. With the constant flow of furniture going in and out of this house, things change weekly, if not daily! Our sea victory painting is now over the bed, I hung a vintage lamp from the ceiling, and those "end tables" are really just old cabinet doors on top of TV tables. Ha! We're building brand new end tables this weekend:)

My office/studio has really evolved into something useful for me, that works well for my needs. This week I put up a floating shelf above the desk, to serve as a place to put all my visual inspiration. My small inspiration cork board just wasn't cutting it anymore!

Doesn't the bullfighter look happy in his new home?

The wall above the bed is currently empty, so I'm working on creating some sort of wall art out of all these counter samples. They're from the 70's, and I can't help but love all the tacky burnt orange and moss green!

As I predicted, I never was really able to give up my habit of using the couch and the kitchen counter as a "desk", so this desk never gets used for office-related things. Lately it's just been used as a sort of work bench, which is working out pretty well. Look at all these awesome furniture pieces I found while I was in Tennessee!

I've been experimenting a lot lately with upholstering furniture in custom-dyed/painted fabric, so I also hung up a little clothesline for my samples, so I can keep track of what I've created:)

PS I've been having sooo much fun pinning with you guys! If you're on Pinterest and we aren't following each other yet, add me!

PPS I've updated my house tour.

laundry, lamps, linen, and line drawings

First of all, thank you from the bottom of my hardwood-floor-loving heart for all of the helpful advice I received in the comments of this post! 

Option A (our current home) won the votes in a landslide, and I think we're actually going with the votes on this one. On Tuesday we measured all of our "must keep" furniture, like our sofa and our bed, then went to the house and marked out with tape how much actual space in the rooms our furniture would take up. We were willing to part with more than half of it, but even putting less than half of our furniture in there would still make for a VERY tight squeeze. Like, turn-sideways-and-shimmy-across-the-wall-to-get-into-bed tight. And hearing so many of you say what a frustration it is having to go to the laundry mat definitely got me re-thinking giving up having a washer and dryer at home. So, long story short, we're going to pass up on this little place and pray that something else equally charming, old, and hardwood-floored comes along. Only this time an extra bedroom and laundry would be nice:) I can't say I'm not a little sad to let go of the idea of moving into that place, though. It was just SO DARN CUTE!

In other news, I recently realized that I never posted about that lamp makeover I mentioned! Well, it didn't turn out that great anyway. I started with the turquoise and floral lamp you see above, which was already a makeover of the original lamp.

I painted the base white and re-covered the shade in ikat, but I'm sorry to say that my lampshade re-covering skills are um .... improvable. I couldn't help but laugh at myself when I got it all finished and realized how horribly lopsided the fabric is. Why is it so much harder to recover a lampshade than anything else?

I'm lazy and I don't want to waste any more fabric, so it's staying as-is for now. Another little project I did recently is the art above the bookshelf.

All you need is scissors, a pencil, a marker, card stock, 8x10 matted frames, and a computer to look up Picasso line drawings to copy, and you too can have your own little Picasso art gallery:) I even forged his signature on them so they'd look extra official.

And one more thing before I go! I've been intending to blog about this forever ... check out this gorgeous mid-century chair my parents bought me when my family came out to visit for Easter! Isn't it fabulous? I can't wait to get it all fixed up.

I think I'm going to have it recovered in some sturdy white linen, to coordinate with our sofa. I just love the look of wood and white furniture, accessorized with colorful throw pillows or blankets.

The stain and finish are pretty worn, so I think I'll strip it and stain it to match my other mid-century chair.

I think that's all for today! Jemima says "hi"  :)

A new pair of chairs have joined the white waxflower household! These funky little guys used to be decked out in some really unfortunate fabric:

The seats were a scratchy, metalic-ish, blue fabric, and the bottoms were a scratchy, leaf (?) patterned fabric.

After searching far and wide for the perfect fabric, I ended up resigning to the fact that I was never going to find exactly what I was looking for, so I hand-painted my own. I love the way the pattern turned out, but I think next time I'll use a different type of fabric, because when the paint dried it made the fabric bunch up and wrinkle. Not a big deal, but the perfectionist in me is annoyed by it!

For fun, I added a quirky touch to the backs of the chair seats ... the primary color of the fabric changes from turquoise to navy to match the navy fabric on the back of the chairs.

Oh, and because I don't want to make a separate post just for this painting, I'm throwing it down here at the bottom of this one:) Check out the little birdy I painted! 

Hope you're having a happy Tuesday!