In wake of yesterday’s garage-cleaning insanity (and in light of the fact that excuse me those corners were terrifying and I cleaned them anyway), I thought I’d whip up a little present for my husband. “Generous” is baaaaaasically my middle name.
The hideous, bright-orange brick on the exterior of my house has always vexed me: what to do about it? I mentioned this to my friend Erin, and she said oh, why don't you try a German Smear?
...See, to me "German Smear" sounds like a porn that I don't want to see. (Or maybe that I really, really do, depending on my mood and whether I've eaten recently.) Or maybe an extremely delicious sandwich. But probably not something I want to have happen to my house.
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.
Remember Monday's post about potato-stamp Valentine's Day cards? The ones you can make with your kids minus the miserable stroll through the craft-store aisles? The inspiration behind it was what you see here: my daughter was napping and all of a sudden my son announced that he was willing to make Valentines for his classmates, and I had exactly two seconds to conceive of a doable plan before losing him to the living room rug, where the epic battle between Mini Cons and random dragon figurines that my mother bought at the Met had finally been put on pause for a moment.
And so this is what I decided to do: help him make school (of fish! whee, puns!)-themed Valentines that ticked all of my personal boxes: inexpensive (check), easy (check), witty (eh, sort of), and (seemingly) original (checkity check check check).
(It is not lost on me that I have an addiction to parentheticals. Moving on.)
