Burlap Lamp Shade

So Ella had this lamp when she had her own girly girl room.

But when we moved, the shade broke. It was way too girly for Peyton and Ella's new shared room anyway. 

Poor Peyton already has to deal with Giant Dollhouse:

Tinker Bell Table:

And the huge beautiful wall hanging that Ali made for Ella before she was even born:

And those are just a few of my favorite girly things in their room. There are a lot more. There are a lot of boy things, too. It's just that those things seem not to be so massive. Honestly though, it doesn't bother Peyton at all. The kid is cool like that.

Back to the lamp!

I found this DIY lampshade on clearance at Joann Fabrics for $2. It has this removable template that you can pull off to measure your fabric. And underneath the template the shade has been pre-adhesived. The template and the adhesive are handy, but they're not anything I couldn't have done myself. It was the $2 price tag that got me.

I wanted to make the new shade gender neutral-ish, so I ended up choosing burlap because I knew it would give the lamp a clean, fresh look.

Here's the template the shade came with:

Did you know that you can grab onto one thread of burlap and pull it all the way out to make yourself a To Cut line? I just learned that neat little trick so now I feel super smart.

I cut around the template, leaving myself plenty of extra room because I'm craft-accident-prone.

I wrapped the burlap around the shade. I told you that mine was already pre-adhesived (I can make pretty much any word into a verb because I'm awesome like that), but I'm sure you could use spray adhesive or fabric glue, or even your trusty glue gun to get it to stick. 

Then I  trimmed my burlap a bit more to make it all nice and neat. 

Then I used my glue gun to burn myself repeatedly while I wrapped the burlap around the edges of the shade. Because burlap has lots and lots of holes. Yay.

It was worth it. 

I didn't want the inside to look unfinished, especial since burlap is the master of fraying. So I lined the inside edge with some extra twine I had left over from my kitchen memo board.

Look how neat!

Then I glue gunned on some ribbon. Since it is a boy/girl room, I chose colors that I knew Peyton and Ella would both like. 

I worked really hard to get the ribbon to not ripple. It was an impossible task, but I'm okay with how it turned out. 

I really love it.

Here it is in their room with the dinosaurs I painted for Peyton a while back:

It lets a lot of light through, too!

And Peyton and Ella love it! They really like it when I make things for them. I think it makes their world feel a little more special and loved.

How long do you think the top of that dresser will stay that neat? My guess is about 30 tiny minutes.

Kitchen Memo Board

As a shape, I think the oval kind of gets a raw deal. Triangles and squares and rectangles - now those shapes have power and strength. And circles - they've got movement on their side. But an oval! So sad. You put it upright and it will roll over on its side and stay there. Helpless. Which might be why, when my husband brought home an oval-shaped medicine cabinet from the sale table at Lowe's, I was all, "meh." 

But anything is better than keeping your toothbrushes in a cup in the cabinet underneath the sink in a poorly designed master bathroom in Iowa. Right? But seriously! Who does that? Who designs a bathroom without a proper toothbrush storage area? Probably someone with an oval-shaped brain.

Anyway! When we were packing up to move, the mirror dropped out of the oval medicine cabinet and shattered. So we tossed the medicine cabinet part of it and kept the frame:

The frame itself is kind of pretty. Which makes up for some its general ovalness.

And it still had the mirror backing, so I came up with a plan. 

Look at me, trying to be the boss of my project. This is when I was feeling all cocky:

I glued on some cork board which isn't even thick enough to properly hold pushpins. Is that not the sole purpose of cork board? Why can't I find cork board that wants to fulfill its destiny? It's ridiculous.

And my sweet husband, James, spray painted the frame white for me. 

I could have left it like that, but where's the challenge? 

So I hot glued on some pretty blue fabric:

The blue is pretty, right?

I could have left it like this. But as I said before, I bought the cork board just to waste my money since the cork is too darn skinny to properly hold up its end of the pushpin deal. 

So I came up with a better plan! My Oval would have a meal planning section and a crisscross-ribbon-to-stick-stuff-in section. I would hang it in my kitchen and it would be AWESOME. 

Remember before, how I was all cocky with the tacky glue? That whole three or four minutes of "Take that! I'm totally the boss of this Oval!"?

Well. My Better Plan is when my downfall began. The fabric has a pattern which may or may not be diagonal or horizontal or vertical. I can no longer tell. When I was hot gluing it on, I thought I was laying it out straight, but maybe I wasn't paying attention, or didn't care, or maybe I was drinking wine. It's all a confusing crafting blur. But now that it's attached, the pattern is kind of diagonal. 

Combine that with the fact that if I try to stand The Oval upright, it will roll over on its sad little side. How can I possibly make the yellow ribbon that is the divider for my meal planning section look level in this situation? One second it looks level, and the next second it looks completely slanted. And, yes! I even used an actual level! In the end, I crossed my fingers, hoped for the best, and glued with abandon. And it worked (I think)! Suck it Oval!

I got these cute little wooden alphabet letters to represent the days of the week and I tied them onto some twine. It was going along nicely.

But then I did the crisscross ribbon section. I laid out the ribbons and then adjusted them to make the diamond shapes bigger. And then adjusted them again to make them smaller. And then again to make them who knows what. 

And then I had to walk away because The Oval was winning. There must be an easier way! Finally I came up with an acceptable grid. I measured out the individual ribbon areas with a piece of paper to make sure they were consistent. I imagine, if you were using a REAL shape (that's right - I said it) like a rectangle or square, you could just measure and mark and glue and then skip on down your flower and butterfly path of life. Stupid Oval.

Here's what the back looked like before I trimmed all the ribbon:

Back to the meal planning section!

This next step took some time to figure out. But only because I wasn't sure how I wanted to attach my meal planning papers. Wooden clothespins? Mini clothespins? Clothespins mod podged with fancy paper? Bull clips? I was driving myself crazy. I was worried the clip on / clip off process might cause some wear and tear on the fabric. And I knew the weekly meal planning display needed to be a simple task or this whole Oval battle would just be a waste of my time.

In the end I cut the tops off the 2" x 3" zip top bags that you can get at your local craft store. I glue-gunned them onto the blue and tan paper. Then I slid a coordinating piece of scrapbook paper into each one. That way you can't see the glue on the back of the bag. And it's pretty! 

I pre-cut a bunch of white cardstock. Each week, when I do my planning, I can write our meals on the papers and slide them in. Easy peasy mac n cheesy! I also made two bottom slots for extras like desserts or snacks I want to make. 

I tied little pieces of twine onto our initials and glue-gunned them on. This is my kids' favorite part of the board. It's so sweet - anything that helps bond us as a family, even little wooden alphabet tiles on a kitchen memo board, means so much them!

And then I added some bright yellow flowers from the Dollar Tree that I embellished with pearl centers. I mostly just stuck the alphabet tiles and flowers wherever I messed up with the glue gunning and ribbon crossing. I'm pretty sure that is why embellishments were invented.

TA DA! 

I love how happy and bright it is!

Good game, Oval. Good game.

'Flower' Room

Remember Peyton's 'Under the Sea' room? When Ella was very, very little, she got an extra-painted room, too. But hers was a little more subdued. 

First we painted it pink. I knew I wanted her room to be pink and brown, but I also wanted some extra color, too, and lots of flowers and butterflies.

So I went around and painted simple and colorful flowers all the way around the base of the room. It was easy! If I can do it, ANYONE can do it.

The white one is my favorite because it looks like it's dancing.

Ack! Uncovered outlet! Uncovered outlet! What the heck is going on in this picture? CRAZINESS!

I stuck some colorful flowers into white Ikea pots. Then I glued on some pretty coordinating ribbon.

And I stained some inexpensive Ikea frames and filled them with flower pictures. See the cute little butterfly? I nailed a whole bunch of those colorful butterflies around the top of the room. I don't have any good pictures of them from this room, but you can see them in Ella's Plink Room.

James had just put in the beautiful moulding and we were still in the process of painting when I took this picture. But look how little Peyton and Ella were! The cuteness! Does it count as a walk-in closet if kids can walk inside? I think so.

Right now Peyton and Ella are sharing a room, and it's super temporary, so I'm making zero to very little effort to cuteify it. 

But I CAN'T WAIT to see how their next rooms turn out!

Colorific

Do you remember how I told you that we recently moved from Iowa back to California? And how, in Iowa, we had 2 kid rooms and 1 basement space worth of toys? And how now all that nonsense needs to somehow fit nicely into 1 small apartment room?  Lordy.

One of my favorite storage solutions is this white cube organizer from Target. What's actually going on in this picture is two 8-cube organizers and two 2-cube organizers. We've been collecting them over the years and I love them, although I'll totally admit that they never actually look this organized unless I'm prepping them for a dang picture. 

Anyway. Check out the books!!! Do you see how they're all sorted by color?  

This is the first time I've ever done that. I've sorted by size, by Ella's books/Peyton's books, and by size again, but they always looked messy. I love that my kids have tons of books, but the disarray-look wasn't working for me. And, more often than not, when it was time for the kids to put their books away, they would shove them on top on the others horizontally and it just about drove me bananas.

And then I had an epiphany! I've had my books in my room sorted by color for years because I like to be all grown-up and fancy like that. Why can't my kids be fancy, too? I had an hour to spare, so...

I love it. The kids love it. Our kid library no longer drives me to drink. 

Wait. What? Never mind.

The only bad thing about these cubes is that they can sometimes be a little small for the big stuff. Our biggest books don't fit, so they have their own basket under the bed.

Anyway, back to the not-freakishly-large normal-sized books. I started the color-coded awesomeness by dumping out all the books into one horrific literary mountain. Then I took a deep, cleansing breath and started tossing the books into loose piles according to the color of their spines. And then I had to figure out how to make those 8 or 9 color piles fit into the 5 cubes I had available for them. 

And, yes, I do know that you could figure out how to organize your books by color if you wanted to. Because you're totally smart like that. But in all honesty, after I had those books sorted by color, I wasn't quite sure how to work it all out so that they looked good. And if I can save you a little bit of figuring-it-out time, then my job here is done.

I tried to do it rainbow-style first - you know - "Red, orange, yellow, green, blue. Don't forget, there's purple too!" Thanks Mickey Mouse Clubhouse song, for taking up that valuable space in my brain.

But the rainbow scheme didn't really work as well as I'd hoped because of the colors we had - mostly blue, yellow, and white, and hardly any purple or green, so I went from dark to light instead. It totally works. 

And it looks AWESOME.

And it's totally educational because I'm pretty sure that's how libraries organize their books. 

Well, it's how libraries would organize their books if they wanted to look amazing and be cool like us. Losers.

I'm just kidding! I love libraries! (I don't want the library people to come after me.)

At bedtime, when it's time for the kids to pick out a story, I make them choose by color. "Tonight you have to pick a yellow book!" They think it's totally fun.

And when it's time to put the books away, they know they have to do it by color and height. "Color and height! Color and height!" I'm drilling it into their heads. It's much easier than our system before. Which wasn't a system at all. It was a bibliophilic disaster.

But now! Now it's all color-coordinated gorgeousness.

And our kid library has looked like this for an ENTIRE WEEK!

I know! That's like an entire year in kid clean room time.