Category: crafty

It is no secret that I love traveling and I love to make stuff. I have been pining away after a print of a hand painted travel map by Oliver Jeffers since seeing it on swissmiss. (BTW, if you don’t know who Oliver Jeffers is, you should go right away and check out his Creative Morning talk.) When I saw this DIY travel map I immediately fell in love with it. Thanks to the step by step tutorial I may get around to making one. I am thinking it would be nice to have a map of the world though since we have actually been to quite a few places already and have plans to get to many more.

I have an IKEA malm dresser to hold my clothes. Actually M and I each have one. You know the one. It is blonde wood, totally nondescript. I used to like that, but I think I am ready for something a little less boring. Today I read about wallpapered furniture and figured if there was ever a project that screamed DIY, it was this one. I had in mind a wallpaper I had seen that I loved. It should be easy for me to find again, right? It has birds and clouds on it, Google has to turn up something with those keywords. Nope. Ok, I bet I starred it in my RSS reader, let me search “birds” and “wallpaper”. Nope. Ok, I am sure I starred it so I will just search “wallpaper”. Scroll, scroll, click. Nope. Scroll, scroll, click. Nope. Sigh. Wait, is that it? It is! Yeah. Now I know where I can order it and get started on my brand new wardrobe. I also happen to love the yellow boots in this image. I am definitely going to have to figure out a way to work yellow into this project.

Thanks to Google street view I was able to find a picture of the original sign.

When I was little every Tuesday my noni would pick up my sister and me from school and take us to ballet lessons and then to her house for dinner. The ride in her car took us past a very distinctive Mack Truck sign which I am sure I was drawn to because it had a bulldog on it. Sadly that building and the sign have been torn down and replaced with a Walgreens but luckily for me one of my grandfather’s many many talents is that he is an experienced sign painter! For Christmas I asked for a replica of the Mack Truck sign I remembered so well. He was going to go ahead and make the whole thing for us, but then I had the even better idea that I wanted to have Grandpa teach me how to be a sign painter. The Mack sign just so happened to be the perfect first project. He set about cutting out the shape and giving it a coat of white paint. Over the course of a few weekends I have traced the design onto the sign from a picture we found on the internet and given the whole thing a first coat of paint. I even had help from my dad to paint the dog.  It has been great hanging out with my grandfather and learning a new skill. This weekend I got to paint outside and the weather was so beautiful and painting takes just the right type of concentration, it is almost like meditating.