Halloween Birthday Party

Well, like it or not, #1 finally turned 4! I say *finally* because this girl has been talking about her birthday party forEVER. At least since her 3rd birthday I am sure. And this mother hen isn’t too thrilled with her little girl turning 4. It just passes by too fast . . .

*sigh*

BUT if there is something good found in all of it . . . it’s the party :) Like I’ve said before, I adore Halloween. And thankfully for the past 4 years I’ve been able to gently persuade her to have a Halloween themed party. She’s never complained . . . until the day of her 4th birthday . . .

Yep. Right in the middle of all the spooky preparations she said, “Mom, I don’t want to have a Halloween party. I want a normal princess party like Madison.” (her friend)

“Ummm. Say what?”

“I just want a normal princess party.”

“Well, honey, it’s still your birthday party. And you still get to be a princess. This party is just for you. It’s a special Halloween birthday party.”

“Okay!” As she runs off . . .

Huh. I might have to work on my pitch before next year ;)

Sooooooo here are a few of the things I put together for the party. Before things got underway I of course had to do a few paint alterations . . .

I just bought this cupcake stand for #2’s birthday. I can’t explain why but the shiny metal was bugging me. Don’t ask me why. Maybe because it looked too new and I hardly buy anything new :P Loved the stand, just not the color . . .

So out came the white spray paint.

After it was dry, I antiqued it with some steel wool . . . Oh and the girls grabbed a few rocks from the yard and helped out too! :) Then I finished it off with a brown glaze . . .

I’m sure to most of the “normal world” (aka people who don’t see everything through spray paint glasses) that it looks the same. Ha ha! But it was just the vintage look I was going for . . . And the perfect backdrop to the birthday cupcakes . . .

Cupcake and frosting recipe found over at Our Best Bites

Then I found this spider at Michaels (using my 40% off coupon of course)

The size and shape were perfect, but it was a little too grey for me. So again I pulled out some black spray paint and gave it a few sprits to cover up some of the grey . . .

Then this little guy *guarded* the treat bags . . .

I also picked up some creepy cloth from the Dollar Tree to put over the table. It was a really light grey and I just wanted it a titch darker. So I grabbed some black dye from Wal-Mart . . .

I wasn’t concerned about it being perfect. So I put the creepy cloth in a bucket with some hot water and the dye and just let it sit for awhile instead of stirring it for 30 mins. like they tell you to. Don’t have a before but here’s how it turned out . . .

Had to make a birthday banner of course . . .

Simple black and white cardstock (Carnevalee Freakshow font) . . .

Popcorn buckets from Target

The candy popcorn was a big hit! I got the recipe from my sister.

Love these pumpkin buckets!

The black candelabras were generously given to me by my sister-in-law Brooke. So I just grabbed some black candlesticks from Hobby Lobby (50% off) to top them off.

The candy corn dish I got from Wal-Mart years ago at 80% off (I think I paid $2). It’s still one of my favorite things! And the vintage silver platter I found at the Goodwill ($4).

And that’s it!

Of course we had lots of fun playing games, watching Scooby Doo, hunting for ghosts (aka tissue-covered suckers) with glow bracelets, eating popcorn and cupcakes, and just being silly . . .

And even though she said she wanted “just a normal princess party” . . . I think she ended up pretty happy being the princess at the center of her very own Halloween birthday party :)

xoxo

Savers message board makeover

I found this cute little message board at Savers awhile back . . .

Blue tags happened to be 50% off that day, so this guy came to just $3. Like a lot of things I buy at the Goodwill or Savers, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do with it. But I loved its look and the sturdy all wood frame.

Fast forward to about a month ago. I’ve mentioned here and here before that I’m lucky to have some pretty awesome friends here in Arizona. Unfortunately, I had to say good-bye to one of my best friends just recently . . . she’s trading in the sun and palm trees for the fall and snow.

Tricky trade-off, huh? :(

Well, I wanted to send her along with a memento to remind her just how much I love her. And in trying to think of something fun, I immediately remembered the message board I’d bought months earlier. I thought it would be perfect and I just knew she was the person for it.

So I busted it all apart and gave it a good cleaning and sanding. The previous owner had been generous with the hammer and nails, so I used some wood filler to smooth everything out . . .

I asked what her favorite kitchen colors were, and she told me red, black, and cream. I’m a neutral gal myself . . . so my standard go-to colors are often cream or black. But it’s also fun to have a punch of color here and there, so I decided to use my favorite red spray paint . . .

The chalkboard itself was also looking a little dingy, so I pulled out my chalkboard paint and gave it a new surface as well. . .

Much better, right?

Once I had it all put back together, I did a soft distressing and a brown glaze . . .

Turned out just how I wanted :)

Love you Karalee!

xoxo

Halloween Decorating

It’s officially October! Yay! October has always, always, always been my most favorite month of the year. I love fall and I LOVE Halloween, so it’s just my perfect month. Unfortunately, it’s not quite the same here in Arizona (okay, really, like not even close), but I’m still giddy over it.

So naturally I started pulling out Halloween decor even before September was over ;)

I had fun rediscovering some of the little treasures that I got at 80% last year after Halloween. Love when that happens!

Two other things I added this year are a witch silhouette:

And this BOO sign:

The witch silhouette was an idea I came across on Robyn’s blog.

She sketched out a silhouette of a witch and then filled it in with craft paint. She kindly provided a download for her sketch, so I just used Photoshop and filled it in with black and then printed it out.

I dug out an old frame that I picked up at Goodwill forever ago on 50% off day ($2.50) and spray painted it black. Then I popped out the old sunflower pic and added the witch printout.

Not as crafty as Robyn’s but I still think it turned out cute ;)

Then nearly TWO years ago, I came across this fun Halloween project by Joy:

She used a frame from the dollar store and just added her letters printed out on newspaper.

Easy, right?

Well, not if your Dollar Tree doesn’t carry the frames :( Dang it! So I gave up on that little craft . . .

Until I came across this guy at the Goodwill . . .

This is something I usually wouldn’t have even blinked at, but right away it reminded me of Joy’s craft from years earlier. It was 50% off that day too so it came to a whopping $1. Hey, that’s as good as the Dollar Tree, right?!

The main frame was already black, so I just needed to spray paint the 3 little inside frames . . .

Then I tea-stained some regular lined school paper and printed out the letters (Century Gothic font).

Simple things that add some fun variety to my old Halloween stuff.

Have you started decorating yet?

xoxo

Bathroom Stool

Ever since girly #1 was potty-trained, we’ve been on the look out for a good sturdy stool to go in the bathroom. You know, something they can get up on and play in the faucet to overflow the sink and get water everywhere wash their hands.

Eventually, my husband came across this one at Savers for $10. It was more than we wanted to spend, but still a decent price for a solid wood stool. . . .

It definitely needed a good cleaning, and the hardware inside for the open top was broken.

So I opted to just remove all the broken hardware and have my husband secure the top down with a few nails and some wood glue.

After the glue was set, I went about stripping the stool of its thick coat of poly . . .

I did this with my handy palm sander and 60-grit sandpaper. I knew I wanted to stain the wood, so I needed to use the extra rough paper to make sure I got down to the bare wood. Then I went over it with 100-, 150-, and 220-paper to make it nice and smooth (didn’t want the girlies hitting any rough spots with their little feet :).

Once all the poly was off and the wood sanded smooth, I just used a bit of provincial and dark walnut stain all over.

Then I sat back at let it dry for a day or two. When it was good and dry, I did a couple of coats of Danish Oil to seal the wood, cause I am sure this little stool will see it’s fair share of water. My girls are the WORST at keeping the bath water IN the bath :P

I loved the look as is, but to give it a little more character I decided to use a few tacks along the steps to make it look even older . . .

And I was done!

Just the look I was going for and much better than before!

xoxo

P.S. Some Halloween decor *might* have crept out over the weekend. Is it too early?? ;)

How I did my numbered chairs??

Since my post on my farmhouse table, I’ve had a lot of requests for a tutorial on how I did my painted number chairs . . .

Honestly, I’ve hesitated doing a post on them cause it was one of those things that didn’t turn out right the first time. So I hummed and hawed over it (for about a year!) and then tried something else. Fortunately that worked out and I really liked the finished project.

Thank goodness!

However, I would never say the way I went about it was the best way to do it. Nor the least cost effective . . . unfortunately. But I’ll show you what I did and if it helps someone else out, then great! If not, then at least you’ll know how to not go about refinishing your kitchen chairs ;)

So I started out with simple wood and white farmhouse chairs . . .

I had seen lots of similar tables done in black, so I decided I would keep the wood natural and just spray paint the backs and legs of the chairs black. I decided on spray paint because I knew I wasn’t going to actually be “painting” very much surface area. This is where you can learn from me. If I knew I would have ended up painting the entire chair, I would have brushed on the paint . . . much cheaper than the 12 cans of spray paint I ended up using! Yikes!

Also, I don’t know if you can see, but the backs of the chairs have lots of little (annoying!) spindles. And in order to keep the spray paint off the seats of the chairs, I had to meticulously tape off everything that wasn’t white. Wow! That was quite the job!! Did I mention how ANNOYING that was?! One would have been bad enough, but then times that by 6. Bleh.

Especially since in the end I painted the seats anyway!

Can you tell I’m still a little bitter about that? He he . . .

Okay so I taped off everything that wasn’t white with blue painter’s tape and newspaper, sanded down the white area, and then went over everything with a deglosser just for good measure . . .

At the time I was not planning on distressing the chairs, so I went ahead and used a grey spray primer as well. Again, if I knew I’d end up distressing the chairs, I would not have chosen to use primer at all.

Then I sprayed everything black.

Waited for it to dry and took off all the tape and black newspaper . . .

………

*crickets*

………

Um, let’s just say I was not in love.

I didn’t take any intentional after pictures, but I dug through my family pics and came across this one where you can *kind of* see what they looked like . . .

Don’t be swayed by the cutie patootie playing on it either! She was enjoying St. Patrick’s Day :) But I’d even tried distressing the black a bit to see if I would like it any better. Well, it only made it worse. The original white paint showed through way too much.

I tried to convince myself that I would love it in the end. So I went ahead and finished all six chairs. But it never was meant to be and all six of my chairs sat for a year and a half while I figured out what I was going to do with them now!

I really only had two choices . . . spray them all black OR strip the black and start all over. I felt like I’d already invested so much time getting them black that I would just stick with the black. Then one night while I was lying in bed (random, I know) I thought of painting numbers on the seats. I liked the idea right away and went for it!

So I bought another 4 more cans of black spray paint, prepped the seats and finished spraying all the chairs.

Next I painted the numbers on the chairs. I used the same method that I did for my painted canvases. I just print out the letter/number in whatever size I need, tape it in place, then trace around it using a paint marker. For the chairs I used the font Roundslab Serif that I downloaded from dafont. It’s one of my favorites!

Since painting the canvases, I also learned another helpful trick. When printing out your letter/number click “Outline” in the printing options. That way just the outline of the number prints out and you don’t end up using up all your black ink!

Then I just filled in the number with vintage white craft paint using some simple brushes I picked up at Wal=Mart.

I chose to go ahead and antique the number and distress the edges of the chair as well. But they would look good left as is too! I did a brown glaze over the number, but for the edges of the chair I just rubbed in some provincial stain and then wiped off the excess.

This helped because after distressing the edges, some of the original white paint of the chair showed through. After staining it, the white turned more cream and looked better with the rustic look of the chairs.

And last but not least, I finished everything off with some wipe-on poly.

As I’ve said before, I’m not in love with polyurethane, but in order for the black to not chip off and for the painted numbers to not come off when wiping up lots of spills, messes, crumbs, and sticky stuff (the life of a mom :) . . . I needed to use it. I chose the satin, and it’s held up well so far.

So there you have it! How I did my painted number chairs . . .

xoxo