100th Post Giveaway

This is my 100th blog post! My very first post was on February 8, 2009, so I'm going on three years of blogging. This year I have blogged twice as much as in 2009 and 2010 put together. Since my blogging has been so sporadic, I haven't done anything for my ”blogiversaries,” but I thought it would be fun to mark the 100 post milestone with a little giveaway. Thank you  for stopping by here to see what I have to say, and thanks especially for taking the time to comment. I have really enjoyed getting to know people via their blogs, and have found blogging to be a great learning experience and creative outlet.

I'm giving away one knitted to order (meaning you can choose the color and texture) wash/dishcloth and a bar of Monastery soap. I have a few kinds on hand, so I'll let you choose your scent (or lack thereof). The monks aren't paying me or bribing me to promote their soap. :) I just like it.

To enter, just  leave a comment here by Monday, December 5 at 8:00 am Eastern Time. I'll randomly generate a winner and announce the results Monday evening. Since the prize is small and lightweight, I'll ship anywhere. Because I tend to write about a variety of topics, I'd welcome comments about the type of content on my blog that most interests you (but that's not required to enter). Thanks for reading!

Fast Food Friday: Pease Porridge Hot!

It hasn't been all decorating, all the time here lately. We've had all kinds of stuff to keep us busy so far this month. The first weekend of the month we took a quick jaunt to Ohio for my dad's birthday. I made this cake which was very well received. I strongly recommend it for all your festal chocolate cake needs. And that's high praise from me, because despite my abiding love of chocolate, I generally don't really care for chocolate cake. I made it by request of the birthday boy. The second weekend of November was jam-packed. On Saturday, I attended Holy Liturgy for the feast of St. Varnava of Indiana, as well as a very edifying lecture on the book of Revelation by Dr. Jeannie Constantinou, a Presvytera and professor who does an excellent podcast called Search the Scripture on Ancient Faith Radio. Then we went to a wedding on Sunday evening, which was lovely. We're having friends over for dinner tomorrow, and I need to do my shopping for Thanksgiving. Lots going on around here this month, and that's just the weekends!

It seems like the Nativity Fast snuck up on us, but here we are. We now turn our hearts to preparing for the joyous celebration of the Incarnation of our God and Lord, and attempt to humbly remember Him who humbled Himself to be born of a Virgin. During fasting seasons, I like to share recipes on Fridays, so here is one of my very favorites. (Do I always say that? I really do love fasting foods.) When it comes to split pea soup, I like it hot or even cold. I sincerely doubt it's ever lasted 9 days at my house, but I would probably like it nine days old, as well. Sadly, it's one of the least photogenic foods in the world. I felt obliged to include the picture of the view from our bedroom window the last week in October to make up for the image of pease porridge. The riot of red leaves has fallen, and the view is now almost as drab looking as the soup, so I'm thankful I have the picture to remember the brief glory we're treated to each year. 

Split Pea Soup

1 tsp oil (optional)
1 1/2 cups diced onion
1 cup diced carrot
1/2 cup diced celery
4 cups vegetable broth
4 cups water
1 lb dry split peas (about 2 1/4 cups)
1 tsp dried marjoram
1/4 tsp liquid smoke
Salt and pepper

Lightly brown your vegetables over medium high heat in a good sized pot. You can do this in oil or a splash of vegetable broth, as you like. Add in the broth, water, split peas, marjoram and liquid smoke. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium-low, and cover. Simmer for about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes, until the the split peas fall apart.  After 45 minutes check and stir occasionally. Add more water if needed or desired. I like my split pea soup good and thick in true pease porridge style. If you like it thinner, feel free to add more water. Add salt and pepper, to taste. It depends on how salty your broth is, and how salty your taste is.  My soup didn't need any more salt, and I like to give it a few good grinds of pepper.

Paneled Upholstered Headboard

I was really excited last week when Sherry of Young House Love and Katie of Bower Power are hosting another Pinterest Challenge, along with Ana White and Erin of House of Earnest. The idea is that you stop pinning, step away from your computer and actually make something you've pinned. Then you share what you've made, check out all the fun projects everyone else made, and start the pinning cycle all over. Last time, I had a lot of fun making a painting based on a TV quotation for my brother. The timing of this challenge was the perfect incentive to build a headboard for our bedroom. (Big surprise that I made something for the bedroom, right?)

My Pinspiration was this paneled headboard:

Source: allthingsthrifty.com via Sarah on Pinterest

I pinned it from Brooke at All Things Thrifty.  I combed the web looking at dozens of upholstered headboards before deciding I wanted to make a paneled one. There are instructions on how the inspiration headboard was made here, but mine was actually constructed pretty differently. For the base of my panels, I used canvases. I bought two packs of seven 11 x 14 canvases at Michaels. They are regularly $20, but I bought them with 50 percent off coupons (of course) so I got the two packs for $20 total. I only used 12 for the headboard, so I have 2 more for another project. I loved the giant headboard that Brooke made, but I wasn't going for something that dramatic, since I didn't want it to compete with my stencil wall. Also, although we have no plans to move, I've never lived anywhere longer than 5 years, so I guess it's in my nature to want my furniture to be portable. Canvases made our headboard much more lightweight than making the panels out of any type of boards. I can easily pick up the headboard and move it myself.

I bought the fabric ages ago at JoAnn Fabric. I don't remember how much it cost or how much I purchased, but I do know I bought it when decorator fabric was half off. It is the same fabric I used for the rocking chair. In addition to the canvases and the fabric, I used a queen sized foam mattress pad for the padding. I cut out 12 rectangles from the mattress pad, 15x18 inches each. Then I wrapped each canvas with the foam (bumpy side in). I used my staple gun to attach the foam to the inside of the canvas frame, and then I stapled down the corners. I found it was easiset to staple the short sides of the rectangle and then the long sides. Perhaps you could make it easier on youself and staple the foam right into the back of the canvas frame, but I thought it made things smoother to wrap it around, and I also l liked that I had fewer staples to avoid when I stapled my fabric.

After I covered all the canvases with foam, I moved on to the fabric. I cut out the 16x20 rectangles for the fabric. Then I ironed them all, and finally I got to round two of stapling. I centered each foam covered canvas on the fabric, stapled the short ends, stapled the long ends, and then I stapled the corners. I tried several ways of stapling the corners before I settled on the method I used. I liked the smooth, rounded corners, but in retrospect, I would have chosen a method that gave me corners closer to right angles, since the rounded corners don't meet up. Apparently I got really focused on the project during the fabric stage and stopped taking picturss. The only one I took was to demonstrate the corner folding method:

Once I finished covering all the canvases with fabric. I went to bed. It was a tiring project! I turned it over to my husband at that point. He bought four 6 foot 1x3s, and cut them to length (around 54 in.)  They are not quite as wide as the headboard, which is 58 in. It is just about exactly as wide as our queen size bed. Then he laid out the panels and used the 1x3s to attach them together. He screwed them into the frames of the canvases. Obviously, you want to make sure your screws won't protrude through your panels, so he used 1 5/8 inch screws.

And here is the final headboard!

How did we mount it, you might wonder? Confession: It's just leaning up against the wall for this picture. We've got some flush mount brackets to use, but it turns out the screws that came with them aren't long enough to go into the studs. So currently the headboard is leaning up against the bookcases in our bedroom, and we'll have to install it later this week. I'll post an update with daytime pictures once we get it hung. I'm so excited to be finished with the construction, though! This is the first headboard we've had in eight years of marriage. Yay for the Pinterest Challenge to inspire us to get the headboard constructed. And I still have quite a bit more up my sleeve as part of the bedroom overhaul, so I should have some more Pinterest inspired projects to share in the next few weeks.

Edited to add: Click here for a headboard update.

What a corker

After three years of waiting, we finally replaced the floors in the bedrooms. It would have been relatively cheap and easy to just buy new carpeting, but we knew that wasn't what we wanted. One of the reasons it took us so long is that we didn't want to put in more carpeting. We wanted hard surface flooring, since it's more durable, easier to keep clean, and much easier on the respiratory system. We save up for our home improvements so that we can pay cash. (OK, actually we use credit cards because we rack up major rewards points with the big ticket purchases, but we pay the monthly balance in full, so we have to have the cash before we spend.) Floors got pushed back on the priority list for a while, but this summer was finally the time.

Some of the downsides to hard floors (besides that they are usually pricier than carpeting) are that they can be cold and not very acoustically friendly, which aren't great qualities for the bedroom. Our solution to this was to install cork flooring. Thanks to its natural insulating properties, it's warmer, quieter and easier on the legs than most kinds of hard flooring. The flooring we chose was an Apollo Brown floating floor made by APC Cork. We bought it at Menards, which is a Midwestern chain similar to Home Depot or Lowes. (We have those around here, too, but we have Green in addition to Orange and Blue)

This project was pretty much all James, though I did help a bit with the underlayment. He tells me the floating floor was fairly easy to install. It seemed to go quickly and smoothly. First he took out the carpeting, by cutting it into strips with a box knife and rolling them up. Luckily there is a carpet recycler just a couple of miles from our house, so James just loaded up the carpeting and hauled it there. We had to pay $20 bucks per load, but that was well worth it to keep it out of the landfill. James took out the tack strips with a crowbar. Then we had to clean up the floors, scrape away bit of glue and drywall mud and whatnot so we'd have a smooth surface to install over.

The process after that is to put down a strip of underlayment, install the floors over it, and then move to the next strip. James used some special tools to snap the pieces together. There's no glue or anything. He used spacers along the walls to leave a small gap so there's room for the floor to expand and contract. Once the floor was all in, he covered the gap with quarter round, which we bought pre-finished. That's pretty much what I know about it. If you have questions, ask away, and if I don't know, I'll try to get James to come field them.

We love the results. We think they look great, and they are so nice and warm underfoot. We can definitely feel how they have more give than the bamboo in the main rooms. It was a pretty big project, since he installed the new floors in all three bedrooms, and it's fantastic to be done. We've been shuffling the contents of our house around for a few months now! The floors are completely in, and things are mostly back in their places finally. We've been trying to purge and organize as we go. I've taken bags of stuff to Goodwill, and my closets are starting to look pretty good.

A quick comparison--before:

Now:

I've got quite a few more projects planned, but it feels great to be done with the big stuff. Now it's time to start adding the fun details.

Blue on Blue

Since we decided to use two different colors of paint in the bedroom, we had to figure out how to incorporate them both. For a while we considered doing a chair rail and putting the lighter color above and the darker color below. I was thinking about going with a faux board and batten look, but then I decided two colors might make the room look too choppy, since the ceilings in the bedroom aren't very high. And I started seeing all these great wall stencils, so I suggested stenciling an accent wall. James was down with the idea. He gave some input, but he pretty much left the decision of what stencil to choose up to me. Now, my friends and family will tell you that selecting among an array of options is not my strong suit. I dither. One of the great things about being a vegetarian is it makes it much easier for me to order from an menu.

So it took me a few weeks to decide. There are so many gorgeous choices, like this from Cutting Edge Stencils and this from Olive Leaf Stencils. Eventually, after much agonizing, I settled on this damask from Royal Design Studio. Criteria I used to help narrow it down included: not too girly (read floral), not too geometric (I have an upholstered headboard planned that will be very geometric and I wanted contrast), not to much negative space in the design, so as to incorporate a good amount of our darker color into the room, and something more classic than trendy so that we won't quickly tire of something that took hours to do. The 10% off coupon code for this seller from Young House Love (YHL10) didn't hurt, either.

Compared to deciding which stencil to use, actually stenciling was a breeze, despite the fact that it took about eight hours to finish. I did a fair amount of googling about stenciling before I started. I wanted it to be as easy as possible. The most important tip I found was to use repositionable spray adhesive. I bought the adhesive seen above at Michaels. You spray the back of the stencil, and it keeps the paint from bleeding under the stencil. It worked like a charm. The edges came out really crisp. I took the stencil out to the back yard, laid in the grass, and gave the back a couple of thin and even coats with the adhesive.

The stencil I chose was 21 x 24.5 inches, which helped move the process along, so I shudder to think of how long it would have taken with a smaller stencil. I started in the center of the wall at the ceiling, which is recommended if you are doing one wall to make sure it comes out evenly on either side. The process was to position the stencil on the wall using the guide marks and the level. The stencil has extra little floating cut outs outside the main design that you use to match it up. You can see them in the pictures above. I used a level each time I repositioned the stencil just to make sure it didn't get wonky. Then I would roll the paint on in a couple of thin coats using a small roller, like this. I just used regular, full strength latex wall paint. I didn't worry about getting absolutely perfect coverage, since you with a pattern like this you really notice the big whole effect more than the tiny details. We bought a quart of Smoke Screen, which was more than enough for this project. Over time, it did gum up the stencil, so halfway through I washed it off with warm water, and then reapplied the spray adhesive. You could probably avoid the washing step if you thinned the paint, or used craft paint instead of latex. You'd still need to reapply the spray adhesive, because it wore off after a while.

I was able to do the bottom of the wall and the corners by taping the baseboard (or opposite wall, for the corners) and bending the stencil. You can see that above the previous paragraph. That didn't work for the top of the wall, though because gravity worked against me. Even with tape, the stencil wouldn't stay stuck to the ceiling, so after I had finished nearly everything but the top, I cut the stencil. Above you can see the parts I needed to cut the stencil to do. The bottom corners didn't really work that way either, because two folds was too tricky.

And here you can see the stencil after I cut it. I wish I would have taken a picture of how I marked the stencil to cut it, because it worked well but is hard to describe. I stuck the stencil on the wall, matching it up to one of the designs I had already stenciled.  Then I took my level and lined it up to the tops of the designs on either side and marked the line straight across the stencil with a Sharpie. I peeled the stencil off the wall and cut it with a regular pair of scissors. I had no plans to use the stencil again, so I didn't mind cutting it. It made it far easier to finish the stenciling.

I absolutely love the results. It really adds a lot of interest and gives a whole different feel to the room. I'm pleased with the colors and the pattern. It was well worth the effort.  I was surprised that even though it was fairly time consuming to do, it actually went really smoothly. I didn't really have any trouble. I just turned on some music and cranked it out. Next time I'll talk about installing the new floors, which you can see a bit of here.