my slightly-steampunk tripod lamp!

I'm soo excited to share my latest project with you. I made a tripod lamp out of a music stand!

I have to say that the current trend of lamps made out of vintage-y tripods is one of which I fully approve. Industrial-chic with a hint of steampunk? Yes please!! Soo I've had my eyes on making one for awhile...but the problem with trends is that it makes for scarce commodities...or maybe tripods were also already expensive. Both.

So when I saw this tripod lamp at The Painted Hive, a blogger in Australia that I follow, I was hoooooked. Isn't hers gorgeous?!

I swear I wasn't thinking consciously of her photo
when staging my table o'books...definitely subconscious!

Thrift shopping being what it is here in Oklahoma (aka non-existent), I'd been unable to find a vintage music stand like hers. Soo in the end I ordered a $16.99 music stand from Amazon. It ended up not being exactly what I wanted - the shaft has a cap on the end which would make it hard to stick the cord through. So I went on Amazon to return it - and looky what happened:

!? Um, okay! Thanks! Crazy. If you can't see the image, it says that I would be refunded but didn't need to return the stand. What. Apparently Amazon really wants to have awesome customer service reviews?

So I decided to keep the stand and try to make it work! (I love doing projects that are basically free...I am somehow more bold to do exactly what I want with them. You know?) Then husband saw the stand, heard the story, and suggested I switch him for his old music stand, since the one I bought from Amazon was sturdier. Yay! So then I had a stand that would work better!

The first thing I did was pull off the leg-stopper so the legs could come closer together. Which doesn't make sense unless you have a stand just like this one, but here it is. I pried off the thing with some pliers. V. scientific (ugly):

Gotta love the projects you can do 90% of while sitting on the couch. Watching Netflix.

I also cut down the stand to be smaller with a hacksaw, because I wanted the scale of the 'tripod' part to be a bigger percentage of the whole lamp. I did it when I needed to work out some frustration, and it felt great! Haha. And was not hard, surprisingly.

It was dark when I did this step...so...
 I'm sufficing this step with a stock image of a hacksaw.

I added a random adjustable-washer-like-thing that I had in order to keep the legs at the height I wanted, and then ORBed as usual! (That's spraypainted Oil Rubbed Bronze by Rustoleum, for the un-obsessed).

Then I had some additional fun with some acrylic metallic copper and antique metallic copper paints, to give more 'patina' to the finish. I brushed on little patches and wiped them partially off, to give it more burnished depth. I like the result, which is a bit subtle.

Next, how to attach the lightbulb! I bought a lamp head in the lighting department of Lowes for about $4, along with a random connector bit that took forever wandering around Lowes to find but was crucial for fitting the lamp head into the base:

I was pretty happy when I finally found this connector! Um, it's in the lighting section.
Right next to the lamp head that I bought earlier.

For the cord I bought a 9' extension cord ($2.49), cut the extender end off, threaded through the shaft, separated the two wires and connected one to the + end of the lamp head one and one to the - end. It's about as easy as electronics gets, since the two wires are even interchangeable. Just be sure you don't plug in the cord while working on it. And make the connections nice and tight so you don't have stray bare wires anywhere. It's quite similar to hooking up an overhead light, and youtube probably has a ton of videos about it.

The only other tool I used was a flathead screwdriver.
And yes this combination is cheaper than buying a lamp kit - those were $10! What.

Lastly, I wanted just the right shade for my industrial lamp! When I was wandering around Lowes (looking for my connector, remember?) I happened upon the perfect shade on clearance for $3.24! Seriously. It was grey with damask swirlies, which husband thought was a fine pattern (it was) but was not what my head was envisioning.

$3.24. I mean, come on. Look at that perfect size.

I love the Painted Hive original burlap shade, but our living room already has a lot of beige in it and I wanted to do something a bit more lively. I rummaged through my scraps and found a great burlap-y light blue fabric! It wasn't wide enough to go around with only one seam, but neither is my shade a drum shade that would do that nicely.

So I measured and sewed diagonal sides to fit the shade:

The arrow is pointing at my little pencil line of where I should sew.
I just hand-sewed since my machine's been acting up.

I ironed the top and bottom seams, and ironed the two side seams down to be as minimal as possible:

Then just turned the shade cover outside-right, fit it over the outside of the shade, and hot-glued inside the top and bottom to fix the shade cover to the shade.

And put the shade on the lamp, and....!

I love how it brings out the blue of Liz's sketch of our house and brightens up that corner. Now I think I need to make little moss balls and/or twine balls to add to the look. And possible refinish table. Hmm.

Project budget breakdown: music stand (free, but otherwise would be $16.99ish), shade ($3.24), lamp head ($4), connector ($2), extension cord ($2.49). Total with tax = $11.60!

'baby gate' from tornado wood

After my v. exhausting upholstery project, I really wanted to do a low-effort, high-reward project. And you know what that would be, right!? Hello happy tornado wood! In a few hours on Saturday afternoon, I built a wooden 'baby gate', so that the door to the sunroom went from this:

Those are the crates of our camping gear...

to this!!

Ahhh. I can't not use chunky hardware, right?

I'd been temporarily using the camping crates to help contain the kittens in the sunroom since they learned to climb the plastic baby gate - then yesterday I had this great idea!

It's barely a tutorial to explain because it was so easy. I measured and cut (roughly), sanded the boards a little, and screwed them together using my favorite wood screws with the cool heads:

I lined up all the screw head directions to be parallel-aligned when done screwing in. It was v. satisfying.

Then I did a quick stain - for the trunk I had used up my Early American by Minwax, but Lowe's was out of that when I went to grab some yesterday, so I tried Early American by Rustoleum since they claimed a shorter dry time (due to their 'nanopigments'...that made me laugh). I will give it another try, but overall I don't like this stain as well. While it did dry quickly, it didn't soak in as well as Minwax, and has more of a reddish finish to it.

I tried something new, too - I assembled first and then stained. It is much easier to stain one item than 13 items, but harder to make sure you get in all the cracks. Here's the drying product:

We had a huge rainstorm last night - so I was pretty lucky I finished this yesterday afternoon!

I would have worked on more coats or another stain, but I was seriously tired of the camping trunks and wanted this to be a one-day project. I can always work on it again another day!

Then I hung the gate using some chunky $2.49 hardware from Lowe's. Because that's how I like to roll!

I photoshopped out the litter box for you. You're welcome :)
I had to use this photo because of the cute leaping kitten!

I made the gate so that it opens into the sunroom. I have a latch to put on the gate, but so far the kittens haven't figured out how to open it, so I haven't bothered. I'm kind of curious to see how long it will take them to figure it out...

From the sunroom side you can see how I made it flat on the kitten side so they can't climb up it. And you can see the reddish tinge to this stain compared to the trunk of kitty things, and how the stain didn't take as evenly.

 I might pop it off its hinges another day to touch up that stain job, but for now, am relishing how easy it is to come and go from sunroom with kittens!

Note: I call 'tornado wood' the weathered wood from our fence that fell over when our house was hit by a tornado this spring. If you've missed my other tornado wood projects, you can check them out here!
Early American Trunk
Dark Walnut Kitchen Shelves
Distressed Cabinet Makeover
Whitewashed Beach Crate

ringo the club chair!

Soo my first chair reupholstery, sans instructions or previous fabrics as pattern, is complete! I definitely thought for the last week that I would be writing a this-is-how-it-failed post. But. Miraculously, Ringo the Club Chair, as he has been dubbed in our house, has succeeded to become a comfy and colourful addition to our living room!

Meet Ringo. He's a character.

He gets this one little wrinkle there on the back when I sit in him a lot.
I don't mind, it's like a smile wrinkle.

Is he a little too small for this corner??

Wooohoo. And here is the saga of his re-invention!

Tools Used

- Staple gun ($5.99 with coupon at JoAnn's - uses regular staples)

- Extra staple tools (flat screwdriver and needlenose pliers, for removing bad staples)

- Foam/batting (I used a foam slab from Hancock Fabrics)

- Fabric

- Spray adhesive (didn't really need in the end)

- Cardboard beer holder (yes....innovation at work....)

- Laptop/Netflix/Olympics for occupation while working!

1. Order Fabric

First of all....you guys did an amazing job voting for the fabric pattern!! THANK you! Actually Ringo and Onyx tied for the finish:

What to do!? But it turned out that Husband cast the last vote for Onyx at the last second just to be contrary. Haha. So he agreed that I should actually order Ringo, the true winner!

But then I got this v. sad email a couple days after ordering the fabric from Fabric.com.

In case you can't read it - they ran out of Ringo fabric and couldn't fill my order. To make matters worse, they were now shutting down their factory for the next few weeks in order to move warehouses, so even if I ordered Onyx it would be backordered for a few weeks. Bah.

By now I really wanted Ringo, but he was nowhere to be found except for $20-40 per yard! And I thought I needed 7 yards (the online estimate for a club chair reupholstery). Welll I remeasured and figured that if I was v. v. careful and didn't make any mistakes, I could maybe do the chair with 3 yards. So that made a $20 per yard price tag more feasible, especially since I got the chair for free. 

I found Ringo on housefabric.com for $22.95 per yard - still a bit steep but better than the other few places I had found it! Then I emailed Housefabric, told them my plight re poll results and subsequent fabric.com fail, and they kindly offered me a 10% off discount! At 3 yards, that made a $7 discount, which I rationalized was about the same as free shipping. And they were v. quick and professional in replying and then shipping me the fabric when I ordered it. Phew.

2. Prepare the Chair

I had received this chair for free from a friend in its already-stripped state, so the first thing I did was just remove any lingering fluff to prepare him to be covered by foam (she had given me a thick block of foam as well):

Sorry for the photo quality - I was doing it at night while watching Olympics!

This is the step where if you had fabric or old foam/batting, you would take it off carefully, noting how it was put together, and outline a pattern on your new fabric using the old fabric.

2. Cover with Foam and/or Batting

I wanted to use the big block of foam that I had free first, so I used a serrated knife (they work really well for this!) to slice it in half. One half made the seat, and half of the other half added extra cushion to the back. I made some somewhat graduated sides by cutting at an angle for the back piece:

Then I used a thinner foam slab that I bought for Ringo to cover the sides:

I cut triangular bits out of those two front corners of the sides to help the sides lay flat.

I stapled along these top edges and underneath the sides to keep the foam in place.

Using batting over the foam would give him a more stuffed look, but I was liking the slim-line profile, so I just used the foam.

3. Cover Seat with Fabric

Actually you can see this in the above photo - I measured roughly, cut seat fabric to size, pulled it snugly over the seat and over the edges, and stapled underneath. I used spray adhesive between the foam and seat fabric, which I'm not sure was necessary, but it does keep the seat nice and smooth.

4. Cover Sides with Fabric

I decided to make the sides separate pieces of fabric than the back of the chair, since I could see from the foam step that doing it in one piece would get wrinkly. I love how the front of the sides, at the wood armholders, turned out - I measured and cut the side pieces (generously to avoid mishap!), set the wrong side of the fabric backwards over the arm-holder pieces, stapled along and then folded over to make a gorgeously minimal front seam!

The steps so far went pretty quickly - one or two short evening study breaks with husband watching the Olympics. And I thought I was almost done! Hahaha.

5. Figure Out How to Make the Back Smooth

I thought I would do the back in two pieces sewn together. Remember how I'm trying to do the chair with only three yards of fabric? These are my last. pieces. big. enough. for the back. So I carefully measured the top curve of the chair and sewed a curved top:

Fortunately I used a big stitch size because I knew I might want to rip it out.

But. No matter how I laid the back fabric, I could not figure out how to make it smooth on both sides! I could make it smooth on one side, but then the other side would always hiccup up.

So yes, he sat like this in our living room for several days. I would rip out the seam (oh-so-carefully), measure, try a new seam, re-fit, etc. Fail fail fail.

Finally one evening I was googling around for ideas and I stumbled on Living Savvy's blog post about chair upholstery - and I saw this photo:

Ah ha! I could do the back and front as two separate pieces!

First the front - it went so smoothly this time:

And then the back, starting at the top:

I realized that to make a nice straight back edge, I could use those tack strips made for this purpose - but  then that's another $15 spent on the chair...hmm...turns out that beer carrier cardboard works perfectly! Thanks, Full Sail:

There's something poetic about having "30 years of cheers" imbued into my chair.

When I folded the fabric over, I had this nice straight top:

No. At this point I didn't even think about trying to match up the circles.

Annnd success!! I just have two little corners in the back where I had to use staples on the outside. I plan to replace them with some nailhead trim at some point:

6. Enjoy the Success.

Ahh.

I still want to put a coat of poly on the wood legs, but I think that can wait till I enjoy him for awhile with my tea and research books!

Budget Breakdown:

Chair: Free (thanks Leah!)

Fabric: $68 (3 yards, 10% discount. Had alarmingly little fabric left over!)

Staples: Free (already had)

Staple gun: $5.99 (will use for future projects!)

Foam: $9 (with coupon/sale)

Total: $82.99

Not bad, since the cheapest similar chairs I've seen sell for $100 on up, even with less-cute fabric! Will not be putting chair makers out of business any time soon, however. Must resume woodworking project next to help self relax! :)

flowers, mason jars, and driveway sales

So. Hello!! David and I took our last (hopefully!) qualifying exam on Thursday, and it was satisfying to finish it well (we find out official results by the end of this week). Prime example of ourselves walking away from test: me: "that plane wave question was interesting! my math said that it became left circular polarized after the perfect conducting interface. but I have no idea whether it was." husband: "oh, it was. my math didn't quite work out but I knew it should be left circular polarized after the interface, so I just explained it." me: "how. do. you. know. these. things."

Since that time, my brain has been recovering  in its own way...and have not forgotten about you, my bloggery friends! I've been working on finishing my chair reupholstery project, which I hope to share in the next couple days. It's taken longer than I thought, though, because the last step is eating. my. lunch. Seriously. If I ever accept a chair with no fabric pattern again, someone please remind me how crazy I apparently am. It is rather like wrapping a v. oddly shaped present. With one piece of stiff wrapping paper. And trying to keep that one piece of wrapping paper looking perfect. BUT I still have hopes that the chair will pull through, and I will celebrate by curling up on the perfect fabrics with a cup of tea.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share the randomness that was the Weekend After Daunting Exam 

(aka Weekend Without Brain Cells). 

Driveway Sale

For some reason, I thought it would be a great idea to have a yard sale the morning after the exam. This weekend was the only weekend of the year in our town that we don't need the $15 permit to have a yard sale, and assumedly the college students are back in full force. So I made some signs, added our address to the free list, and posted an ad on Craigslist that included this photo after I somehow convinced husband to get out of bed early in the morning and set up with me:

This is from the web cam on my laptop. I am that lazy.

(See some of my crafteries on the middle table?!) Umm yah. Somehow it looked like more in my head, before I got it all out there... o_0 My first two customers didn't buy anything and I believe I went inside and told husband it was a flop and no one was going to buy anything. I simultaneously realized that 'savers' have a distinct advantage re. garage sales over us perpetual cleaners. 

However, it turned out that Oklahomans just aren't early birds, (despite their 'Sooners' nickname??), and we ended up making about $150 on the sale! We sold almost everything the first day, and I reasoned (selfishly?) that it was not worth getting up on Saturday to sell the leftover bits, because if there's not enough stuff people just drive by without stopping. This turned out to be Decision of Century, because Saturday we had the first rainstorm we've seen in months!! Literally. Since tornado season.

Image from the Norman Transcript - these Oklahomans don't remember what to do when it rains :)

Yay that I didn't get up to try to have a yard sale and get rained out! Fortuitous woot :) Soo I learned the following from our first driveway sale experience:

• Random little kid toys sell surprisingly well, because said kids are out yard saling with their mothers, who give them a bit of $ to spend to keep them occupied
• As Pinterest suggested, having a lot of small items (10-50 cents) helps, because once people pick up one thing to buy, they're more likely to pick up more items
• College students will always buy tiki torches
• You never know what people will buy (or at least I don't), so might as well put out everything you can think of. Our random old closet bifold doors, and beer glasses, sold, while the tile cutter and other items I thought would sell didn't.
• Advertising is key, and not always cheap. I got on our free city's list this weekend, posted on Craigslist, and then invested $6 in foamboard signs that I put up at the main roads and such pointing to our house. I felt v. silly doing it and my thrifty self protested buying the sunny yellow foamboard, but it was totally worth it. You cannot sell the stuff if the people do not know you are out there :)
• Have change on hand! Yes, I somehow forgot about this. Fortunately a lot of our initial customers paid in $1's, and we had a change dish in our kitchen that husband pulled out. Phew.

My crafteries were not a huge hit (Oklahomans are cheap, and I was selling my crafteries for not-cheap, because I was curious if they'd sell but was not about to give them away if they wouldn't sell), until one woman from TwoHipChicks came buy and bought quite a few items! She wants me to make more tornado wood projects to sell in their store, so I might try doing that this fall. :) She bought my white-washed crate (I'm going to make another one for our newspapers pile again), a chevron pillow I made of leftover fabric, an apothecary jar that I'd done a mercury glass finish on, and a few other items.

In addition to turning clutter/crafts into a bit of cash, I managed to meet some neighbors (including a former student of mine - fortunately he doesn't seem to have bad memories ;) ), score a BBQ invite, get motivated into making kitteh greeting cards and taking them to a consignment store, and meet the 2HipChicks woman. Woohoo!

Shy Fluffies

And then there was this:

I know, I can't resist the kitteh photos!! Izzy is seriously the most patient mama cat we've had. This kitten fell asleep on her tail and she sat like this for seriously an hour, only, I'm assuming, to avoid waking the kitten. Haha. I realized the kittehs have gotten a bit shy since we haven't been home as much the last week or two, so I've been trying to socialize them a lot now. They love sleeping in baskets. Like, a lot.

photo uploaded at full resolution for the fellow kitteh lovers out there.

Hehee. And they are v. proud of themselves when they manage to climb up on windowsill.

It's kind of impressive how much kittens sleep and all the random places they decide are comfy.

I looove having the sunroom looking so bright and clean these days. And the tile floor is a.maz.ing. for keeping clean with kittens! Night and day. Crazy that I was only 50/50 on whether to tile the floor, since I looove it so much! (Don't worry, I put out lots of soft blankets for kittens to sleep on...although as you can see, they prefer their own spots. I think they like how the tile stays cool in the warm afternoons.)

Chores

Annnd then we tried to just catch up on all the life stuff that got neglected in pre-crucial-exam phase. My lethargic self has been slow on this, but when I went to buy groceries, I let myself buy these sweet flowers for our dining room table, and it has been brightening all my days so much! Look how gorgeous they are. It's the little things, people.

Look how OCD I am right now - I plucked off all the leaves because they were too crooked and fold-y.  Just letting myself be me :) And we are loving drinking out of mason jars like this one these days!! Have I mentioned?! We found that a brand of spaghetti sauce comes in these jars, and pesto sauce comes in little mason jars. So we are slowly getting a 'free' set of glasses...I love how much ice water they hold, and their simple rustic style. Love. (I have found the easiest way to get the glue off is to hand wash and pull off the label - don't put in dishwasher, because glue gets gummy and is harder to get off -then scrape off excess glue with small utility knife. Works like charm and is v. OCD-satisfying.)

Sooo that was recovery weekend, along with cooking and relaxing with husband. And watching X-Files for the first time(!). Annnd working on reupholstery *glares over at almost-finished, ornery chair*! Am determined to finish. And share. Is coming.