She's Crafty

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I planned on stenciling some designs on the girl's dresser. Since I didn't receive my stencils until yesterday, I prepared for this project by giving the dresser a paint job. It's previous color was a dingy pale green and it took a surprising amount of paint to cover it. I chose just a solid white because I wanted it to look as clean as possible. Well once I had done that, I couldn't just slap the old, ugly drawer pulls back on, so I replaced them with brushed silver ones. Well, once I had done that I was so pleased with the way the dresser looked that I decided to stop. I just really love the clean lines and simplicity of it. I'm posting a picture of the end result, although since I had no camera available to take a "before", I understand if the picture is rather boring to you. You'll just have to trust me that this version is much nicer.
Well, then I got my stencils. The stencils I ordered are from the Lotta Jansdotter book, "Lotta Prints." Once I looked through the book, I got so excited and I had to do something with those stencils. Early in the book Lotta says,"You do not need any prior experience or knowledge to create the projects in this book." Check! That's me. I stenciled some tree like designs on the girl's door and I love the way that they came out. Even though I'm loving Lotta lately, I looked around a lot before settling on her stencils. Most of the others I came across were of very detailed, specific objects or animals. I like the Lotta stencils because they are a bit more abstract and goof-ups are less obvious.

Everything in the book looks super easy to do, and Lotta gives very basic instructions, which I totally appreciate. For example, she mentions how if you want to stencil a design, but want two different colors of it, then you need to make a separate stencil for each color. Something like that might seem obvious to more experienced crafters, but I wouldn't have realized it until it was too late.

There are a lot of other things in the book I want to try, from using the stencils to decorate clothing and linens, to stamping my own stationery and making homemade cards.(Which reminds me, my gal Ivy did a great post the other day about making homemade cards. She created one that is quite funky and fun. Do check it out.)

In the past week I did so much work to the girl's room and I'm so pleased that it cost me very little money. My biggest expenses were the green paint which cost about $25 and the Lotta book which was about $14 at Amazon. The white paint and most of the supplies we already had laying around. Even the new drawer pulls were only $2 a piece.

Now to get rid of that nasty grey carpet.