paper dolls :-)

paper dolls

Getting married next October means that I’m starting (very slowly) to plan our big celebration! One of the very first items on my checklist was to figure out a way to gather my 8 best friends (yes 8!) from their various homes across the country to come down to Raleigh to party, play, and pamper with me. I wanted to make a very special invitation for them since they are such important people in my life and almost automatically I remembered the most precious DIY invitations from one of my favorite wedding blogs, Once Wed. Using that as my guideline I put my own little twists on it and my sister and I had so much fun making them!

See more photos after the jump!

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doggie bed

resting

My latest project is for my precious puppy, Cole. I’ve been wanting to make him a doggie pillow for a while now and just got around to it this past weekend. Since Great Danes have all kinds of bone/joint problems as they age I wanted to start early trying to keep Cole’s long legs as comfy as I can. I know how expensive doggie beds (especially for his size!) can be so I decided to try my hand at coming up with a cheaper yet still functional solution. Read my step by step instructions after the jump!

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m&m house

colors!
Oh what a can (or 6) can do to a home for a pretty affordable price!

My fiance and I bought our first townhouse fully equipped with white walls in every room upstairs. Both of us, having lived in white-walled rented spaces for years, were ready for some color! Our house is flooded with amazing sunlight throughout the day so we decided to go with a vibrant color palate that could soak in that sun. After gathering countless color swatches and spending hours pacing in the paint aisle at our local hardware store, we came up with this…

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finished mosaic project

complete!

After three coats of sealer (I don’t want ANY mold getting in!) the tile is complete!! The total cost for this whole project was only $78!!!!! With a little resourcefulness and willingness to get dirty an extremely custom tiling job can be done anywhere!

Enjoy the final pics after the jump:

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actual work in progress

first panel

Well, it is actually happening… there are tiles on the wall!! What a journey I’ve had with this project. Laying tile is not at easy as it may seem. Follow the steps I took to lay the tile after the jump!

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step by step…

cole
my faithful and trusty sidekick cole!
After doing so many panels of this mosaic I’ve found some “best practices” that would be helpful to know at the onset if you ever want to do this type of tiling. I have been using self-adhesive drywall tape to stick the tiles to (this lessens the time it would take to put a drop of glue on the back of each tile). The tape I found came in a 3″ wide roll so I cut 1 foot long pieces and stack 3 on top of each other (as you see after the jump).

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gardening in the rain

before
(above) the before…

after
(above) the after!!

My parents are coming from PA this weekend to visit so Thomas and I decided we needed to spruce up our back patio a bit. Our poor dying rose bush was taken out and two beautiful planters were put in. We went to the store not knowing what we wanted and came out with a beautiful array of lavender and gold flowers.

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progress (little, but still some!)

flowers

As promised, some pictures of Thomas’ beautiful landscaping in our backyard…

left side

right side

flowers

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new pictures to come!

tiles!
I’ve been slowly working on some more of the tiles and will be posting pictures tonight! I’ve had some trouble with trying to figure out how to lay everything out and cut everything correctly, but I think I have it under control.

Also, a few months ago Thomas did a little bit of landscaping off of our back patio and our little bushlets (as my friend Emily from work calls them) are flowering!! Its so exciting! I’ll take some pictures of those as well and post them tonight. Be on the lookout!

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preliminary stuffs

layout

Okay, so here is my idea. I want to tile a 6″ border around the tube to give the bathroom some personality. Some would argue that its orange paint job is all the personality it needs, but I want a little extra something. Here is my plan (ignore the bad quality, I need to perfect my “blog-picture-taking” abilities)…

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