Fabric Lined Drawers

Some of you may remember my post a couple months back about the painted turquoise desk.  Once I had finished the exterior, I began to focus on what I'd put in the drawers.  I looked at some of the different contact papers they carry at Walmart, but I was very unimpressed.  I even went so far as to look up specialty contact papers online and was shocked at how expensive everything was.  It seemed that my drawers would just have to stay unlined.

Then, the fabric happened.  I'd been playing around with some old quilting fabric scraps to cover cardboard shoe-boxes and happened to leave the fabric sitting out on my desk.  It matched PERFECTLY!  I knew I had to use it.

First, I lay the fabric in the bottom of each drawer and used a box cutter along the corners to cut it down to size.  (Some of the tutorials I looked up online suggested an Exacto blade, but my Exacto blade was pretty wimpy and I found the box cutter to be a lot sturdier.)  Once I had the fabric the right shape, I used a foam brush to coat the bottoms of the drawers with Mod Podge and pressed the fabric in place.  To make sure everything stayed, I went back with a couple more layers of Mod Podge after the first coat had dried.  Finally, the next day, I coated everything with a couple of layers of clear varnish.

The result is a really pretty vintage look that goes great with my desk.  One thing that I didn't expect is how the glue dulled and yellowed the colors of the fabric.  Fortunately, my fabric started out pretty bright, so it still looks good.  It might be a good thing to keep in mind though, when choosing your drawer lining fabric.  Another thing that surprised me was how rough it all ended up.  Even with the coats of varnish, it's still very rough to the touch.  This hasn't caused me any problems though, and it may even keep my things from sliding around my drawers so much.

Cheap Colorful Lamps

One of the first things we noticed as we moved into our apartment was the notable lack of light sources.  Neither the bedrooms nor living room have any overhead lights.  We knew right away that we were going to have to overcome this deficit with a large quantity of lamps.  Some of our lamps are unique, such as my roommate's twinkle lights (basically Christmas lights) from the wedding section at Walmart, or my string of Japanese paper lanterns I got on clearance ($6!) at World Market.  And some of our lamps were personalized by yours truly.

Since I was running out of money at that point in my preparations, I started where all good moneyless college students should start: the thrift store.  We're lucky enough to have several of these in my town, but one in particular has an amazingly cheap selection, so I went there.  The lamp aisle boasted a whole assortment of boring, wood or metal lamp bases.  I chose a couple in the $2 range, snagged a plain shade for 99 cents, and made out of there like a bandit.  I found a flowery shade to fit the other one at Walmart for $3 on clearance.  (Moral: clearance is a beautiful thing.)

Once I got these hideous objects home, I went to work.  Having picked up a can of bright yellow spray paint at Walmart ($3.50), I taped off the power cords and gave the lamp bases several coats.  It was a little frustrating because the paint kept wanting to slide down off the wood.  I wiped them down when I got them, but if you want your lamps really smooth, I recommend cleaning them even better to make sure all oils are off.

For my plain lamp shade, I took a Sharpie and wrote the cursive lyrics to a favorite song (Hidden Away by Josh Groban) around it in a spiral.  Something I didn't realize before I started was just how much room you have on a lamp shade; I ended up writing out the entire song three times just to fill it up.

Thus, we come to the finished products:

Finished products

The entire cost for both together was very low: $3.50 spray paint + $4 lamp bases + $4 lamp shades =  around $11.50 for two personalized lamps or $5.75 a piece.  Not bad.

I'm Still Alive!

Sometimes life just comes in and steamrolls you.  I fought my way through a particularly tough couple of exam weeks, spent a weekend at home kidnapping my brother for his birthday, and returned, only to get pummeled by the longest lasting stomach virus in the history of the world.  Oh, and I spent the whole weekend making a clay model of the larynx.

But, I have returned.  Ready to trade back the saltine crackers and EmergenC for my dear, long-abandoned, little blog.

I have a list of projects I'd like to put up in the coming days, so for today I'll just leave it brief.  Since I last updated, my roommate has discovered the secret to amazing apple cider caramels, I've diced raw chicken *and* fried it on the same day, I discovered that chicken soup left on the burner will eventually turn into a blackened mess, and nothing, not even bacon fires, can harm a $17 Orgreenix pan.  (Unfortunately, they didn't pay me to say that.)

I also learned that when kidnapping someone, driving up really fast beside them is good.  Making sure you have all the doors unlocked before everyone tries to jump out?  Even better.

TARDIS Door

There comes a point where fangirling gets out of hand.  And somewhere rather past that point exists that breed of fans who plan their decor around their favorite fictional hero.

Those fangirls.

My roommate and I were overjoyed when we discovered that we were both Doctor Who fans.  She enthusiastically allowed me to hang my David Tennant poster in the living room, as well as my 11th-Doctor-themed prints.  It was however, too much for my fangirl heart to believe when we simultaneously agreed upon a TARDIS-themed front door.  I'd seen them all over Pinterest, pinned them in my board for future house/apartment dreams, but never really hoped to have one so soon.

Since we aren't allowed to paint anything in our apartment, our first idea was to cover the door with butcher paper and color it blue.  However, something better presented itself when I realized my mom had given me some old white contact paper to line our drawers.  Original purpose forgotten, we covered the door with two long strips.  Since it was already sticky, we were glad not to have to mess with glue.

For the next step, we bought some blue acrylic paint from Walmart.  We ended up using about two containers, applying multiple coats with foam brushes.  The contact paper was slippery, so it took awhile to get the paint to actually look solid.  (When a little bit of paint spilled on our carpet, it came up nicely with nail polish remover - just something to keep in mind.)

Once the paint was dry, my roommate took a navy marker and outlined the rectangular indentions in the door to make it look less flat.  We found the "Police Telephone Free for Use of Public" sign here on DeviantArt, printed it out, and stuck it on with hot glue.  For the windows, we used 12"/12" squares of white cardstock and drew panes on them with a navy marker and ruler.  For the top black Police Box sign, we spray painted a strip of cardboard black, then printed off these letters to the scale we needed them, cutting out around each word and spacing them out.

Feel free to save and print.

Hot glue served us pretty well for most of this, but as it's fallen down, we've also had to resort to some super glue, especially with the heavier cardboard.  The top part was also a piece of cardboard that my roommate free-handed and we painted blue.

Now we're off for an adventure with The Doctor....

Some Lessons Learned

This has been a crazy week!  Between classes and jobs, it's been hard to juggle everything, much less update my poor blog.  Here's a brief overview:

1) Last night we made parmesan chicken and pasta with marinara for our boyfriends and had a movie night.  It all turned out well, except for the oven, which insisted on filling the air with smoke, and the fire alarm, which insisted on going off.  With all our doors and windows open, we sat down to our first relaxing dinner of the week.  Lesson: don't overwork your oven.  It will rebel.

Fire alarm: "nice meal... now let me sing you the song of my people."

2) The day before yesterday, we decided to try tea tree oil to get sticky grease stains off one of our cookie sheets.  The grease didn't budge.  The tea tree oil, however, quickly took over our apartment.  We both woke up smelling it the next morning.  Lesson: if you *absolutely need your space to smell like something other than it already smells like*, put out a bit of tea tree oil.  And if you already like your apartment smell, then don't.

Tea tree oil: "HELLOOOOOO"

3) Back at the first of the week, we were struggling with a horrible mosquito infestation.  People would come to visit us and leave covered in bites.  Deciding that violence was our only recourse, we found a cheap bug bomb to set off (only $5!).  And set it off for two hours.  After letting the apartment air out for 30 minutes, it only still smelled mildly of permanent marker.  It was worth it, however, when we started finding dead mosquitos lying around, on the shelves, windowsills (they were trying to escape!  Mwahahaha....)  We were elated with our success.  Then, they appeared.  Massive mutant mosquitos that had somehow survived.  We gave up hope of a mosquito free apartment.  Lesson: mosquitos don't die.  They only regenerate.

How I felt walking away from that bug bomb.