Pinstrosities, Pin Spins, and a Pin Win for the Wall

While most everyone gets the cleaning bug in the Spring, I for some reason don't feel the urge to clean and redo my house until the Fall. Cameron too oddly...neither of us are Spring Cleaners, we both feel the itch to clean and create in the Fall. I just love the feeling of the Fall air, the light, the colors, etc., and it makes me want to bring that all in my house. However...I don't want to bring that all into a nasty messy house so then I finally get the motivation to deep clean and to put rooms back together. We're one room away from having the house completely clean (left the laundry room for last...ew) and it feels so good. We're looking up Fall and Christmas decor ideas to add to the house and I even put on the cinnamon apple wax scent block things to fill the house with yummy odors. This is the one time of year I feel domestic, so I'm taking advantage of that. I feel like I'm backward from everyone else...anyone else a Fall creator rather than a Spring Creator?

We received an email early last month from Sarah with a submission of projects she did for phase 1 in her bedroom decor and reorganization project. She got the bug to redo her room, decided to jump on it, and ended up with 2 Pinstrosities, 2 Pin Spins, and a Pin Win. 

Here's her story:

Hey Ladies!!  I haven't submitted anything in a while (since the two 'contests' you did a while back), but lately I have been in a very crafty mood (meaning I've actually been doing some of the projects from my Pinterest board!)!  It started with my need to decorate.

You see, I'm fairly comfortable with the amount of decorations we have up in our apartment.  I feel like our living room, bathroom, and kitchen/dining area are fairly cozy.  But I have never much liked our bedroom.  Here's why:

Gross, right?  It's just so blah and thrown together - mismatched pillow cases, my plastic bin as a nightstand, nothing on the walls - I hate it.  So after months of searching, we finally agreed on a bedspread!!  It wasn't girly, too boyish, and was a relatively gender neutral color (orange), but bright enough that it didn't drag the room down.  Plus, we waited so long to buy it that by the time we did it was on clearance!

I have been waiting an entire year (since we got married) to decorate that room, and now that we had a real bedspread (and thus, a color scheme to 'design' around), I could finally start!!!  With my Husband being gone on Tuesday nights for his GRE Prep class, and me needing to fill my time up with something besides perusing Facebook and watching 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch' (although to be honest, I think I still had it on in the background.  I don't like to craft in silence.) I finally had time to get crafty.

I used these three pieces as my inspiration:

Links here for the Glitter wolf, and here for the Idaho print. The last one is all over Pinterest, but I couldn't find the link.  Especially annoying because I know I've been to the site before.  It's some Swiss (I think) company (in Switzerland) that sells these for like $300(USD) each.  Yikes!

Once I figured out what kind of glue to use (rubber cement), the white on white canvas was easy.  If you want to do this project, I recommend painting all of the letters white before gluing and spray painting - I definitely would have missed spots with the spray paint and my letters would be brown on white - not nearly the look I wanted.  Here's how it turned out:

The Idaho was pretty easy too.  I used painter's tape and painted the blue lines on.  For the actual state I just printed out a picture of Idaho, taped it onto some foam board and cut it out with an exacto knife!  Then painted the whole thing white.  After some trial and error, I used rubber stamps for the words, and carefully painted the orange onto each letter and hand-printed the words!  I used rubber cement on this one too:

It doesn't look it here, but the lines are Navy blue

(Fun fact - did you know that rubber cement is intended to be put on both objects you want glued together, then dried for a few seconds, and then pressed together?  It works much better that way.)

I wanted a third piece to kind of even things out a little, so my husband and I planned we would craft for Date Night (I had to twist his arm a little).  We took inspiration from the glitter wolf (above), and really wanted to do a glitter R (for our last name).  The 'tutorial' on the website seemed easy enough, but when we gave it a try, it turned out like this:

               

Terrible.  I really wanted to do white stripes on the white canvas (to tie the three pieces together), but did not anticipate the glitter sticking all over it.  I used a lint roller to see if I could get the glitter off, and the parts that were painted were actually way easier to get off - the actual canvas will have glitter stuck to it until the end of time.  When we were filling in the R with glue and glitter, we kind of came to a crossroads right there where the top and the tail meet the line, so we figured we would just let the whole thing dry overnight and fill in the middle once we could get the excess glitter off.  Well, you can see how that turned out for us.

Needless to say, this third canvas was a HUGE disappointment.  The next day I embarked to make another version - this time painting the R onto the canvas.  I had this great plan, but in the end my second attempt looked like this:

Another HUGE disappointment that I was NOT going to hang on our wall.  The hubbs finally convinced me to do the same thing I had done with the Idaho canvas and cut the R out of the foam board and glue it on.  I didn't really want to do that because I wanted all three canvases to have a different texture to them.  But in the end, this was actually the easiest way to do it.  Only two failed attempts were able to help me see that.  Here is our final R:

And here is our finished wall display:

Not too shabby if I say so myself!  So we have one pin spin, a pin win, two Pinstrosities, and... I guess another Pin spin!  :)  I'll try and update you when our room gets finished.  Last week we bought cuter pillow cases, bought some upholstery fabric, and I sewed pillow shams!  I'm trying to keep good track of them so that I can submit it!!  :)

I love how the colors pop! These complement each other so well! Thank you Sarah for sharing your projects with us. It makes me want to go home and get working on the fall decor ideas we've come up with. I'm so tired of working on baby stuff, working on new fall items just sounds like so much fun. What projects have you done to decorate your home with? Send them our way! We'd love to see them.