I am super aware that this does not look easy. It is so easy. I whipped this arrangement – which is nice and low, so you can put it on your dining room table without completely obliterating your view of your fellow diners - up using exclusively grocery store-bought flowers, and in about ten minutes. (Okay, my son helped. But still.)
Step-by-step how-to is below!
I am literally bouncing up and down in my chair right now because I'm scrolling through the list of half-finished post drafts sitting on my Wordpress dashboard, and I cannot wait to show you all the cool stuff I've been up to lately. In the past three weeks, I have redone the exterior of my entire house. I have made over my kitchen. I have planted all the plants, have learned how to do something called a German Smear (omg just wait until you see it), and have identified the cutest and least crazily priced drawer pulls a person can find. And, oh yes:
I HAVE CREATED A FOUNTAIN.
FROM SCRATCH.
You know those little charms that you can hook onto your wineglass so that everyone at a party can tell which glass is theirs? I've always thought they sounded like a nice idea, but there are two problems with this: 1) Most of the charms I've seen around are a little on the cheesy side (although these are kind of cute); and 2) I usually use tumblers for wine instead of traditional glasses, and wine charms are made to hook around the stem of a glass.
Those aren't the biggest problem, though; the biggest problem is that owning something like wine charms requires forethought, and forethought is not something that I typically possess. The only times that it has ever occurred to me that I might like to own some wine charms has been when I am mid-party and suddenly discover that I have no idea which glass is mine. Over Thanksgiving weekend, this is exactly what happened, and so do you know what I did?
Broke out my crafting box, of course. A little twine, some jewelry clasps that I have hanging around from a bracelet project I did with Michael's, and a few fake berry branches leftover from a photo shoot, and BOOM. For real, if you have some string (twine, Christmas ribbon, cooking string, etc) laying around, you can do this...and you can use anything as an identifier - a couple of beads, a dried flower, a leaf, whatever. It's totally something you can do in five seconds. And it's fun. And free.
I told you I legit couldn't stop crafting.
I think it's because I've decided that I don't care whether the end result is especially spectacular. I mean, it's nice if what comes out of an hour or two spent in the company of a paintbrush and some bad reality TV is a beautiful addition to my home, but far more important is having a little fun with it. Because if it's not fun…what's the point? If you just chill out a little bit about the end product and let your freak flag fly, what crafting ends up being is free therapy, and ain't nothing better than that.
OK, so check out this footstool/bench thing that I found at a thrift store on the Saw Mill. Now, that is an ugly piece of furniture. Pukey color, tattered (albeit glittery) seat fabric, et cetera et cetera. But I was really into those curved arms and had a sneaking suspicion that with a little TLC it could be really beautiful, so home with me it came.
You know what no one buys at thrift stores?
The artwork. Seriously, no one: in every thrift store that I've ever been to, the corners are piled with stacks of forlorn-looking faded prints of, like, fruit. Maybe some dancing kids, or a vase of flowers. And because nobody buys them, ever, they're usually in the realm of a buck or two each.
I generally take a peek at the stacks of paintings and posters to see if any of them happen to have really good frames that I can repurpose…but then I saw the below photo on Pinterest and was all: OOOH.
