Personalized mason jar glass DIY

Today, my friend Emily announced the dates for the next Flourish retreat. In her post, she also included the contents of the last retreat's welcome bag, including the personalized mason jar glasses I made.

I've been working on a post about my journey to Flourish (I went to the first retreat--yes, I am one of the women who took a leap of faith and traveled across the country to spend a weekend with people I had never met), but for today, I'll share with you the details on the mason jars glasses.

After the first retreat, I knew I wanted to do something to contribute to the second retreat. My mom, my dad, and I have been to Via de Cristo retreats, which are based on Spanish Catholic Cursillo methods, and have retained a lot of the Spanish influences, one of them being the concept of palanca. Via de Cristo retreat participants receive symbols of palanca throughout their weekend in the form of notes and/or trinkets, but palanca is really prayer for the participant. So these mason jar glasses were my palanca for the women of the second Flourish retreat; I prayed for Emily, KK, and all of the women who were going to be at Flourish as I made them.

I also knew that I wanted to do something that would be useful for the women while they were at the retreat. Since we mostly marked our names on disposable cups at the first retreat (with the exception of Emily's grandmother's awesome vintage peanut butter glasses), I thought it would be useful to do personalized, reusable glasses, and since the retreat has a rustic/vintage/shabby chic vibe, mason jars were perfect. 

So. I'm sure you've seen 1,001 types of mason jars and 1,001 things you can do with them all over Pinterest. If you're buying them new at the store, they generally come in packs of 4-12--they usually have the brand name on one side, a picture on the other, and then measurements somewhere in between, so they're kind of busy to begin with. Therefore, I opted to go for Ball quilted jelly jars, which are sold individually (at least at Joann's, which is the only place around here that I've seen them). 

For the personalization, I used Martha Stewart Crafts Glass Paint, which is supposedly cured and dishwasher safe after 21 days, or by baking in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes (I opted for the second option). I used the gloss opaque finish in Pool, Camelia Pink, Arrowhead, and Vanilla Bean (color not pictured below). Since I have perfectionist tendencies, I also opted for the Martha Stewart Crafts Adhesive Stencils instead of going freehand; I used the typewriter script and fair isle dot sets. Martha Stewart Crafts also makes a ton of other tools and accessories to go with their glass paints, including squeegees, pouncers and daubers, brushes, and scrapers, and I did actually buy a set of assorted pouncers, daubers, and rollers, but honestly liked the generic pouncer I already had (pictured below) better because it was more stiff and dried faster. I bought all of this stuff at Joann's or Michael's [with coupons].

The process was pretty simple: apply adhesive stencil to glass, dab the pouncer in a little bit of paint, dab it on the stencil, and remove the stencil before the paint is dry. I washed my stencils with water right away, and they held up through many uses.

I'd basically do the first letter one day, let the glasses sit for about 24 hours (Martha Stewart Crafts provided no guidance regarding how long the paint should cure before placing an adhesive stencil over it), do the second letter and the first accent the next day, and then do the final accent the third day. As I said above, they sell scrapers made specifically for removing paint from glass, but I found that a metal dental scraper worked just fine :) 

Another thing Martha Stewart Crafts would like to sell you is patterning tape. I did find that I wanted to cover up certain parts of the stencil designs, so I cut up pieces of the adhesive border on the film the stencils came on (see above).

Here's how the personalized mason jar glasses turned out:

 

Finally, let me say that the opinions on products mentioned in this post are my own, and not influenced by any sponsorship whatsoever (though if anyone wants to send me products to review, I'm game. Just saying).

Outside: Then & Now

When I introduced my Our house: Then & Now series last week, I said I'd be doing it throughout the next few weeks. At this point, I'm going to amend that to say that I'll be doing about a post a week over the next several weeks, as that seems to be a realistic pace for me with the [tidying up the house and waiting for some good light for] photography, editing, and writing involved. 

This week I'll share with you what you'd see first if you were coming over our place for a visit: the exterior.

The Front:

You can't see it, but the garage door was the same dingy white color as the front door. We also got rid of that car, too.

Then: Dingy white front and garage door, muddled grey siding and shutters, gold accents galore, overgrown bushes.
Now: Red front and garage door, grey/brown shutters, "brushed nickel" accents, and trimmed bushes.

And if you're really good at those "what's different" picture puzzles, you may have noticed that there are no shadows from tree limbs across the front lawn and driveway in the 2013 picture, and that's because [despite our opposition] the city came and cut down our boulevard tree last month (LG watched, saying "bye bye tree" and "uh-oh" every time a branch fell). And if you also noticed that there are less branches in the upper right corner of the 2013 picture, you're right, and that's because we [begrudingly] had to have the big black walnut tree in our backyard removed in 2011.

 Front details:

One spring day in 2011, AD decided that he could no longer deal with the fact that some of the red pavers that made up our little porch were cracking apart and falling off around the edges. So he did what any man would do while his wife was out running errands: he started ripping out the porch. During the process, he determined that the pillar was decorative, not structural, so that got ripped out, too.

So we picked out some grey/brown pavers, and he redid the porch and extended the pavers down the drive and back over to the house to create a flowerbed where there used to be grass weeds and mud. It doesn't look super attractive in the picture below, but we have daffodils (thanks Aunt N & C!), tulips and grape hyacinth (from my Nana's house), creeping myrtle and hostas (thanks to the Dubs next door), and lavender. 

 

The Back:

Back details:

Then: Dingy grey aluminum siding with patches of mismatched paint, AC unit, satellite dish, wires everywhere.
Now: White vinyl siding, no AC unit or satellite dish, small fraction of the wires. Plus rain barrel, baby swing (thanks to AD's mom & dad), and playhouse (thanks abcDe!)

AD discovered last year that part of our roof needed some repairs that would require him to remove siding. So, AD and his dad fixed the roof, and AD did the siding on the entire second floor of the house. 

I have to say, there's probably no way we could have afforded some of these projects if AD wasn't such a handy guy and we had to pay a contractor to do it. 

I'll try to post some pictures of our backyard later in the season when everything is [hopefully] nice and green--not brown and yucky, as it is now.


Up Next: 
AD would like to do redo the roof in a dark grey architectural shingle.

Our house: Then & Now

Yesterday was our third house-iversary. AD and I celebrated with Jimmy John's and getting our taxes done. Exciting, right?

What is exciting, in my opinion, is looking around our home and seeing how far it’s come in three years. Of course, if you asked my husband, he'd look around and see all that's left to do.

Taking both of these perspectives into consideration, throughout the next few weeks, I'll be doing a series of Then & Now posts to show what we started with, what our house looks like these days, and what’s left on our [never-ending] to-do/wish list.

For today, I’ll give you a bit of background information. AD and I moved out of the house we were renting and into a one-bedroom apartment in May 2009 to get serious about saving up for a house. In November, we started looking. And making offers. And getting turned down. That cycle went on for a couple of months. By the time we found our house, we’d looked at over forty houses and made six other offers.

At first, we weren’t even looking at houses in our city because we’d heard it had certain regulations for rental houses, and we wanted to be able to rent out our house if we ever needed to. But the other cities we were looking in didn’t have much left to offer in our budget, and time was running out on the first-time homebuyer tax credit, so we expanded our search.

Our realtor arrived before us and had basically written the house off before we even stepped inside on that first tour. It was a foreclosure, and in the upper range of our budget. There was a puddle on the hardwood floor in front of the kitchen sink. It had appliances, but they were ancient. It had two bathrooms, but one of them looked like it needed industrial cleaning before it could be used (or so we thought). And the whole place was filthy.

But… it had four bedrooms, two baths, a somewhat open floor plan, a fireplace, lots of storage in the kitchen, a basement, an attached garage, a fenced yard, it was in a nice neighborhood with a variety of older home styles and old growth trees, and we were willing to put in the work it needed. So we put in an offer and the bank eventually accepted.

However, the inspection revealed that one of the bathrooms needed more than a good cleaning—the shower had been leaking for years and some of the studs in the wall behind it were rotting. With this damage, the house would not qualify for a FHA loan, and in order to rip out and redo the shower so that we’d be approved for the FHA loan, we’d have to do a 203k rehabilitation loan in conjunction with the FHA loan. Which meant more paperwork, work, deadlines, inspections. But we were game.

The day we closed, the crocuses in our front yard were blooming, and AD was in short sleeves. Yesterday, we had a high of 28 and my bulbs were poking up through the snow. Last year, we had a high of 75. Crazy Michigan weather!

We would not have been able to complete any of the work on our house without:

AD's dad, who came up from Maryland to play the role of general contractor

My parents, who worked their wallpaper stripping, spackling, and painting skillz

Our old roommate, the trim-painting princess

Stop back soon for my first Then & Now post!

What is wrong with me?

Well, this post was originally going to be about Father's Day; that AD was not here for us to honor him in person, but that last year we had a nice day picnicking and scouting possible campsites. I was even going include some pictures of our picnic.

But there is something else going on with me lately that I need to acknowledge in more than a passing comment to my mother or a coworker, and that is that I have no physical energy or motivation. On one side of the coin, I seem to have a lot of mental energy; that is, ideas and plans. Like, concrete ones. Things I want to do. Things that I can do because they don't cost (much) money. Things that will make my everyday life function better. 


A few examples:

- As mentioned in my first post, I am have been working on revamping some frames to display the influx of artwork that comes home with LG. I am redoing a shelf to hold his 3D creations and want to do a silhouette of his beautiful little toddler head to hang on the wall with the frames and shelf. This vignette will go on my living room wall next to my secretary, which is our drop zone for keys, mail, etc, so I have also been looking for solutions to make that zone more organized and efficient. What's standing between me and a cute wall and useful drop zone? I have to decide if I want to leave my blue frame with a satin finish or go over it with a gloss, put corkboard in the frames, glaze the oval frame and make the silhouette to go in it, put hangers on all the frames, get some fine grit sandpaper and fix a couple of spots on the shelf and then decide if I want to embellish it, and then hang everything up. For most of these tasks I have the materials ready to go, just not the motivation to seal the deal.

- I have a basement but it's not very big. Currently, the big square room is kind of broken up into zones: a holiday decoration/overflow kitchen/childhood crud/sporting goods/ETC storage area, laundry area, utility area, kitchenette/homebrew area, my desk/craft/wrapping area, and then a 5x8-ish dog pen in the middle of it all. It is kind of messy, really dirty in some areas, and definitely not child-friendly.

There are big bins stacked nearly to the ceiling in the storage area, and the idea is to clean up about a third of the basement to include the desk/craft/wrapping area, lay down some foam tiles, and stack up the bins to create a bunker, if you will, that can corral LG so tasks can be accomplished in the basement. I call this the basement bunker project.

However, my perfectionism and need to do things the "right" way is definitely slowing this project down. So far, I've torn SG's pen apart and cleaned it and the floor under it (she is cute, but she is also a disgusting creature), and moved everything out of the bunker area and scrubbed the floors. At this point, I really could just stack up the bins and throw LG in there, but I want to scrub the floor between the bunker and kitchenette area, place the bins in some orderly fashion, clean and lay the foam tiles, and bring some toys down (I just scored a wooden stove and sink for free from LG's daycare this week, which I am really excited about. AD says to just clean them up and take them down there; I was thinking there might be some sanding and sealing first...). Then there will be glorious file and craft organization, and hopefully contented playing. 


With both of these projects, I am almost to the point where I can start using them for their intended purposes, even if they aren't "finished" to my liking. The problem is that after a day of work, getting dinner ready while LG is whining at my feet, bathing and getting him to bed, taking care of the garden and yard, and doing whatever else needs to be done, I just don't have the energy or motivation to throw at these projects. So, the nights on the weekends are my time to get stuff done. But this weekend, nothing towards these projects got done. If I didn't already feel bad enough about that, AD has been complaining that the other parts of the house are dirty and cluttered. Ugh.

Tomorrow is going to be like Christmas morning

Well, hello there. Though this is my first post, I'm going to skip all of the introductory stuff for now (don't worry, I'll muse about myself, my family, and the purpose for this blog soon). I am a perfectionist (which is a theme I will actually address in this post) and because in my mind there are so many elements to a good blog and I haven't really worked any of those out, I've put off starting this thing. And while I don't have any pictures to complement this post, or a custom-designed layout, tonight I have something to write about, so tonight's the night.

Today was Mother's Day. My second as a mother, and probably my first not spending at least part of the day with my mother. She's alive and well, just on a trip to Savannah with my "aunt" (second-cousin, technically) and my great-aunt to see my "cousin" (third-cousin, I think?). I would have loved to have gone, but:

a) there would have been no one to watch my son, as my husband is a regional airline pilot based out of another city and works every weekend, and my dad, while adoring of his grandson, simply does not have the patience for a 17-month old for six days, and

b) with aforementioned husband's work situation and aforementioned son, I really should be saving the remainder of my unscheduled days off for when my son is sick and can't go to daycare.

Therefore, this Mother's Day was kind of anti-climatic, but that's okay with me. I made my son and dad this new french toast recipe that I found, took a nap during son's nap (I stay up way too late on the weekends), went out for an early dinner with son and dad, took son for a long walk around the neighborhood, and played/weeded/picked up dog poop in the backyard with son.

Once sonny was in bed, I spent another hour and a half outside. I made a diagram of my front flower bed so I will know where to plant bulbs to fill in the gaps this fall, which I've been meaning to do in some capacity for the two years we've lived in our house. You will notice this a recurring theme as this blog develops; there are a lot of things that I want/mean to do, but don't always have the time. Case in point: there are probably gaps in my bulbs this spring because I planted them last fall (2011). Yes, fall is the appropriate time to plant bulbs, but the problem here is that the bulbs were given to me as a housewarming gift (by the aunts mentioned above) in the early fall of 2010 but did not get planted that year. In my defense, though, I was in the last trimester of pregnancy and also live in Michigan, where the weather is unpredictable (can't remember if winter-ish weather came early that year, though...). 

Proof that I am getting better with these type of things is that after I diagrammed my front flower bed this evening, I actually potted the overflow herbs we bought last Thursday that did not fit in our garden bed. In the past, these herbs may have withered away in the little plastic containers; another personality trait of mine (and my husband's, too) is that everything should be done "right." In this situation, doing it "right" meant I needed to pull down my ceramic pots, clean them out with water and let them dry completely, bake them in the oven for an hour and cool completely, and get potting soil--because what's the point of planting these herbs if you're not going to give them a fighting chance with a sanitary pot and fresh soil? A lot of times, my need to do things "right" means things don't get done at all. My husband is much better than I am with completing tasks.  

One related thing that is very much on my mind and hopefully becoming part of my routine is the garden mentioned in the last paragraph. We have planted a garden each of the past two summers and have had mixed results. The first summer the garden did just okay, no thanks to me; my husband started the seeds, prepared the bed and planted everything, and was working a job with regular hours in town, so he also watered and weeded. I didn't help much getting the garden going last year, either, but then my husband got his new job and was away at training for two months, and I was left to tend the garden. The garden did not get watered, weeded, or harvested as much as it should have, and my husband was very disappointed with me. He still talks about the amount of strawberries we'd have this summer if I'd only watered the plants last summer. Once again, in my defense, I had a 8-month old that I was taking care of by myself (with a lot of help from my parents). I will say, though, that my son did have some squash, peas, and carrots that were grown in our yard and prepared in our kitchen last year. So, we planted our garden last Thursday, this year from plants bought from the nursery. We went to get some herbs and tomato and pepper plants, and came home with: herbs (basil, parsley, cilantro, dill, sage, rosemary), vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, peas, sweet potatoes, okra), and flowers (marigold, begonia, dahlia, snapdragons, citronella, and some flowers that remind me of Super Mario Brothers) because the place was so cheap and had such a great selection. This year, I am determined to make my husband proud of my garden tending, and am doing well so far. I think the fact that my son stays down once he's gone to bed (and the fact that I'm not breastfeeding/pumping this year) will help tremendously.

The last part of my day, the part that lends itself to tomorrow morning being like Christmas morning for me, is this frame project I've been working on. I got these ornate wooden frames from my grandmother's house (that situation is a whole other post in itself) and wanted to paint them up in funky colors and put a pin board in them so I can very easily and very often switch out the boatload of masterpieces my son creates at daycare. It took me almost a week and several hardware stores to decide on the colors for the frames; I went with coral and periwinkle. Once spray painted, I was planning on brushing a complementary color on freehand, but the periwinkle one turned out well enough that I may just leave it alone. Not so much with the coral one. So yesterday I headed down to Hobby Lobby and picked out some acrylic paint in complementary colors, along with a bottle of stuff to give a crackle finish, and sponged one some Alizarin Crimson over top of the coral. They actually had a bunch of ornately framed pin boards in funky colors at Hobby Lobby, and part of me (the economical side, maybe?) thought that it would probably be cheaper and easier to just to buy a couple there and stick the frames in our upcoming garage sale, but I reasoned that these frames have meaning, because they came from my grandmother's house, and when people complement me on the frames (hopefully), I can say that I made them. Tonight I brushed on the stuff that's supposed to give acrylic paint a crackle finish, and I'm hoping that when I get up tomorrow morning, the red paint will be crackled and the coral will be showing through. So far, nothing. 

While I was brushing on this crackle medium and probably killing some brain cells from the fumes, I was thinking about how good it feels to be working on some creative projects again. Growing up, my grandfather would cut santas, easter bunnies, etc. out of wood and my mom would paint them up and sell them at craft shows. She kept a lot of art supplies around, and my brother and I would sit at the table and make something up while she was painting. I always enjoyed art classes in school, and I would say my creative projects peaked in college. But then came grad school, moving, getting married (though my paper craftiness blossomed and peaked during this time), moving, teaching/working, moving, looking for a house, buying a house, moving, getting pregnant, having a kid, taking care of the kid... and time for projects just evaporated. 

That, maybe, and that perfectionism thing. It is frustrating when you put time and money (however little or much, money's money, and I don't have a lot of it) into something and it doesn't come out how you want it to. Maybe it's easier to just buy what you want, instead of making it yourself (though maybe not for me, as I have been known to spend months and miles and miles on the car shopping for the perfect thing). 

But while I was brushing away, I thought, I am going to be okay with however this frame turns out, and I am going to hang it up. Maybe a little bit of the perfectionist in me has evaporated with all of the living and moving I've done over the past eight years or so. So I'll end this post with a hope and a quote. My hope for today: that I can keep at it, so that one day, maybe on a Mother's Day, my son (and any other future children) will think about me and remember me working on creative projects and maybe reflect that I helped foster creativity in him/them.

A quote: 

"we get a little further from perfection 

each year on the road 

I guess that's what they call character 

I guess that's just the way it goes 

better to be dusty 

than polished like some store window mannequin 

why don't you touch me where I'm rusty 

let me stain your hands 

when you're pretty as a picture 

they pound down your door 

but I've been offered love 

in two dimensions before 

and I know that it's not all 

it's made out to be 

let's show them how it's done 

let's do it all imperfectly

oh, let's do it all imperfectly" 

- Ani DiFranco