Moving Aftermath

Apparently I forgot a Friday post, so here's some filler until my real posts start for this week.

First up, the towel rack that holds all my belts and scarves. That horrible wallpaper is a summer interior decorating project that has been in the works for ten years now.

Next, my messy craft corner. I'm partway through making a shirt, and it's also just not organized. Very limited space but so far it works.

And my maps. I love maps, and whenever I find them for free I grab them. That narrow flower painting on the floor is by my grandmother. She used to paint a lot until her nerves started acting up.

This is what I've been up to. I'm still working out how to put an apartment into a single room but so far so good.

Spice up an old bulletin board

Props to Libbie Grove Design for having such an awesome craft/interior decorating blog! That is where this craft comes from. While cleaning out my closet, which had become the place my parents threw stuff while I was in college, I found an old bulletin board I had in middle school. It was getting a little torn up but was still usable. Remembering that I had just looked at the Libbie Grove Design blog which has a post about refurbing this very type of thing, I decided to try it. Original how-to here.

It's a fun and fairly simple project. Finding the right fabric and tacks took less time than putting it all together. Here's my result (still tweaking the lace):

Brown matches my room, pink and blue are easy-to-match accents, lace because

I'm girly like that, and bulletin board because of grad school this fall.

It's not hung up yet because I'm not sure where my tools are packed (still not done unpacking, I'm missing about half of my sewing stuff too). When I do put it up, it'll be right over my desk to add a little color to my room. :)

Joplin, MO Red Cross

As I was sitting in the tornado shelter crocheting a runner around midnight while my Dad roamed around telling us about the destruction in Joplin and checking for tornados, I decided I'd bring it up here.

Some background:

Yesterday evening Joplin, Missouri was directly hit by a tornado that completely destroyed 30% of the city, including a major hospital, the Walmart, Home Depot, some schools, and many other important buildings for a rural city. So far, a little over 12 hours later, around 90 people are dead however no one's sure how many are missing, and with all the destroyed buildings and debris it'll take them awhile to determine that. The emergency crews from the Alabama tornados last month went up to help out, and the Red Cross is taking doctors and donations to help out.

Although I am not in Missouri- I'm just south in Arkansas- we had to ride through the same storms and had no less than three tornado warnings ourselves, and it was scary. I grew up in Tornado Alley so I know what to generally expect, but this series of storms was pretty nasty. The damage at my house was negligable, but the farther north you go towards Joplin the worse it gets. And even better, it's supposed to do the exact same thing tonight- storms, tornados, hail. This will not help the Joplin folk or search and rescue teams.

So if you have some dollars to spare, it would help quite a few Missourians if you sent them over to The Red Cross.

Update (later same day):

It just felt wrong not having a few photos on the blog, so I figured I'd show you a storm photo and what I've got done on my dresser runner I'm working on. Since there's at least a day and a half more of these severe storms on the forecast I imagine I'll be able to get quite a bit more done.

Rising floodwaters and a downed tree at a nearby bridge. 5" of rain today alone.

4 inches thick so far, about 3 feet to go.

The Brick

I just made the move from New Mexico to Arkansas, and right before I left I went to a bunch of the antique stores that I'd known of but never gone in. Among the things I purchased was this impressively heavy old camera in kind of bad condition:

Originally I got it so I could work on restoration and maybe get it to work (assuming it doesn't, I haven't tried yet). After a quick Google search I discovered that it is an Argus C2, produced from 1938-1942 and referred to as "The Brick". My grandfather, as it turns out, took my mom's prom photos with one of these and greeted it like an old friend.

Also, I am (in theory) receiving a new camera as a graduation present from my parents. I've narrowed it down to the Canon Eos Rebel series, and within that to either the T2i or T3i.

The Canon Eos T3 with a lens on it.

I have a Canon Powershot that works okay for what I want- the photos of the Brick were taken with it, but the little camera cannot do what I want it to do to the extent that I want it to do it. I generally have to go into photo editing software to get the images to come out the way I want them to, whereas if I had a camera capable of just taking the photos right it would save time and editing.

We will see how this works out. A storm arrived that's progressively getting nastier so I'm going to cut this blog short. I'll be back later but blogs will remain erratic for probably another week as I finish unpacking.

Paper Dolls

If you're not into Lord of the Rings, elves, paper dolls, or men dressed as women skip this entry.

For those who stayed, here are my paper dolls I made during our annual Hobbit Society movie night tonight!

The top row is Elrond modeling several of his outfits. Yes, that last one is a dress- Hugo Weaving, who played Elrond in the movies, was in an earlier film called "Priscilla Queen of the Desert" where he starred as a drag queen. The bottom row is Arwen, Elrond's daughter and Aragorn's wife. She got more dignified outfits until you get to 80's Skating Arwen on the right.

I made the dolls and all of the outfits tonight with scrapbook paper, Sharpies, and tape. I was a kid during the 90s so I didn't have to play with paper dolls (they were beginning to include machinery in dolls at that point), but I'd always liked how easy it was to design new outfits for them or fix them if they tore.

Pretty Jars

I was looking for more craft blogs, and clicked through enough links that I found this: Poppytalk!

These jars are so cute, and casts my mocha problem into a positive light since I tend to have exactly these jars on hand in excess! I got right down to it, making three- one for a friend who is moving to Philadelphia not long after I move to Arkansas in a few weeks, and two for me.

The tutorial/how-to on that hyperlink explains the process pretty well- peeling stickers off is not hard (although I did have to break out the rubbing alcohol for the sticky patches left on the bottles). Also, the lids take at least three coats to completely cover the Starbucks logo.

Look at the little lid-drying stand I MacGyvered! Lids are currently drying the second coat of paint.

This is an easy, cheap, fun craft. When I finish off the rest of my bottled mochas I may have to make more for my other friends as well!

The white one that says 'friends' on it is for a friend of mine as a going-away present. We're both moving from New Mexico to different states this summer, so tomorrow night we're having one final get-together. All of this is leftover candy from Easter (that's why I'm shifting some of it onto a friend. If anyone asks I paid full price :P )