stef makes.art creative projects by stephanie paulantis

My Humble Abode

October 12, 2009

Five months and no posts! I can explain.In May I graduated from college. And then I did some crafty things but was busy packing up my stuff to move to Bellingham, WA. And then I did move, and then I spent three months living with my dad and I didn’t have pretty much any of my crafting things unpacked while there. I did a little knitting but didn’t finish any projects. While I could have taken some pictures of some of the things I had finished in the month between my graduating and my moving, I didn’t.However, I have now moved into my own apartment and have been super busy decorating! So this post is dedicated to what I’ve done so far. Some of it is crafting, and some of it is just decorating, but it all kind of goes together :) I still have some more things to do and I may end up posting them as I finish them, but this big update should do for now!First, the bedroom. In here all I really did craft wise was put some beautiful batik fabric on the walls using some fabric starch (so they’ll be easy to take down when I move out, and I can just wash the starch off the wals with water). I also hung a Klimt curtain thing over the bed as a headrest sort of deal.

Next is my little hallway collage, inspired by one that which resides at my dad’s house:

I plan on adding more pictures over time. There’s actually three hanging out on the floor below but I need to figure out how to hang them because they have weird frames.Onto the bathroom where, again, I mostly just decorated by putting fabric on the walls. I also have a floor mat. No shower curtain right now, just the liner. I thought I packed ours from California but I have yet to find it so I might just need to buy a new one.

I love this paisley fabric, and its kind of a good transition between the bedroom and the living room. Its got the colors of the bedroom, but the paisleyness of the living room, which has decorations based off these paintings:

Which were given to us by a friend. There is the fabric that adorns the living room walls. Here’s a wider shot of the living room, which is also my craft room:

(And there’s Franki, being a ham.) The futon is nowhere near being done as I need to get a cushion for it and make an actual cover, but right now that tapestry is doing a good job making it look at least somewhat a part of the room. I did refinish the futon, though! Previously it was unfinished and looking really dingy. I’ll get to the other parts of the living room that I crafted, but first I want to show off my craft area!

Pretty much everything here I already had, but I reorganized some stuff from how it used to look, and the chair I found walking home one day and painted so it looks nice. That dog crate there serves as the base of my cutting/drafting table for sewing patterns(its the perfect height and saves space too :)Now onto the living room projects. First, the area rug. Area rugs are expensive, so my interim solution was to buy a painting tarp from Lowe’s and do some printing.I made this stamp out of that rubbery vinyl stuff you can get at art stores:

These two stamps go to tie the rug into the paintings I refered to earlier to create this rug:

Its not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it. It serves the purpose of protecting the apartment carpet from the foot traffic of the dogs and us humans. I got the idea to do the prints from Printing By Hand, I absolutely love the style the author has in that book. Really great instructions too. I’ve done a little linoleum block carving before, but the book was very helpful. I may end up trying to do some more with it in the future because the cream color underlayer kind of bothers me, but I have to do some more pondering before it happens.These babies I’m excited about. I picked up two reclining chairs from the goodwill for about $13 a piece. They were pretty gross looking, one was sort of pinkish grey and the other tannish brown, but both were very very comfy. I went online to look up how I could slipcover or reupholster them and found an article from Threads. Much easier to make than slipcovers, and they look beautiful:<a

The one on top is a little more tucked in cause its the one my boyfriend likes to sit in more, and he didn’t like all the flowy drapeyness. I love the way the fabric pools on the floor so the one I like to sit in has all that going on.To make them I draped queen sized sheets over the chairs as the underlayer, and found some home decor fabric at Joann that had the same sort of paisley thing as the walls but wasn’t too matchy matchy for the over layer. Mostly its just a lot of hemming and in the process of doing all the hemming I, unfortunately, broke my sewing machine. After spending about two full days trying to fix it, I gave up and found an older machine at Salvation Army for $15 and finally got to finish the job.Here’s one last shot of the living room, in which you can see our desk. This desk was also picked up from goodwill, and it was previously white with light blue drawers. Kind of dirty and gross looking, and didn’t really go with the rest of the furniture so I painted it brown and put new drawer pulls on it:

Last on the home decorating front is the dining room. Here is where I found a table for $8 at goodwill, and four different chairs for about $3-4 a piece. While all the chairs are different, I tied them all together by rehupolstering them with the same fabric and they all look very nice.

The dining room and kitchen are where I’m still working. I have fabric I’m gonna put on the walls and cabinets in there, and the whole color theme is related to those chairs: chartreuse and red. All our pet stuff is in the dining area, and I have some projects I’m working on related to those things also. I’ll keep this thing updated as I get further along with those ventures.A final room here in the apartment, which I am not responsible for but deserves mention as it looks very nice, is the music room. Because my craft area gets to take up half the living room (where I can craft but also socialize and watch movies and such) my boyfriend gets this whole room to himself. Its nice because he has a place to focus on his music, and the instruments (which can take up a lot of space) aren’t scattered in every corner of the house. Because he does some recording its also nice because he doesn’t have to worry about the sounds from the rest of the house messing up his recordings. Eventually we’re gonna do some soundproofing work in this room, but thats going to happen over time because it can be an expensive venture! In the meantime he doesn’t play anything too loud and because it doesn’t have any shared walls besides the ceiling relations with the neighbors have not suffered :)

And that’s all for now! I’m working on some more projects and hopefully now that I’m settled I’ll be better about getting this thing updated. We’ll see!