Door Candy

I have a huge list of projects I intend to complete for my apartment. It's coming together, slowly but surely. Every month or so, I'll take a look at the (ever-expanding) list, figure out one or two big projects I want to tackle over the coming weeks, and a few smaller ones that I can use to break up the tediousness of the larger projects. Then I'll figure out all the supplies I'll need to complete those projects, and I'll make an order online for the supplies I need. For June, my big project was to recover the couch. I picked about 4 or 5 smaller projects. One of the smaller projects was a new wreath for my door.

I found the instructions and the feather pdf download for this wreath on the Etsy Blog called The Storque. It was fairly quick- the most labor intensive part was cutting out each of the feathers. And I was REALLLLLY skeptical that the glue was going to bind the paper to the metal, as they kept slip-sliding around- but leaving them under some books for a few hours helped hold them in place while the glue set.

New Couch (Sort of)

Well, the "posting every day thing" went well for a few days...but whatevs. I've had a busy few weeks. Lots of travel for work, a couple of vacation days, and mostly working like an insane woman to get my apartment in some semblance of readiness for a baby shower that I threw for Glenn's sister. I didn't get all of the projects that I wanted to have done finished before the day of the shower, but I definitely think the apartment was much improved by the date.

One of the major things I undertook was recovering all of the cushions on my couch. I am by no means skilled in reupholstering, but my couch has seen better days. It is the most COMFORTABLE couch I've ever sat or slept on, and is still very structurally sound, but years of living first with multiple dogs and kids at my parents house and then multiple young adults and Yoshi at MY house, the cushions are beyond being able to wash the dirt out. Here's a reminder of what it USED to look like:

So, keeping in mind that I can neither reupholster the entire sofa myself NOR pay someone an outrageous sum of money to do it FOR ME, I picked out three Amy Butler fabrics from Fabric.com, 4 yards each of 2 and 2 yards of 1, all for less than $80. Here is my "inspiration board" from Fabric.com:
I thought the colors were modern but would still complement the current fabric on the couch well, since I'll have to leave the body of the couch as-is. I planned to use the top left fabric for the main seat cushions, the blue-flower fabric for the throw pillows, and the green and lime fabric for the back-cushions.

My mom brought me my Grandmother's OOOLD sewing machine. Brought it to my office, and I carried it up- the thing must weigh 50 pounds at LEAST. I had to switch hands every five seconds carrying it out to my car. And then the stupid thing WOULDN'T WORK!! It's missing a part, and it's old, and I can't find the part, and I can't find an owner's manual- so, long story short, I ended up hand-sewing each and every cushion. Took me about 4-5 hours per cushion. But I finished at around 3 a.m. the night before the shower. OK, I'll admit- the seat cushions haven't been sewn yet and are currently only pinned on tightly- but I couldn't bear to have them showing in their former dirtiness with the bright clean cushions surrounding them. Here's the finished product:

Now I just have to find a way to keep Yoshi from licking himself on the sofa...