The Lady Beekeeper

You already know where one of my bedroom wall decorations came from if you read my article on the Wine & Paint night.

Dog silhouette wall art (aka Dany art)

The rest of my theme was based on dutch delftware (painfully obvious I guess).

Close up of the new wall art over the bed

The hanging plates above my bed came from inspiration from a old Martha Stewart Christmas book that my mom or I found at a thrift store.  (Did I mention I’m working on a full collection of old Martha books?)

Look at how young she is on the cover! And you can see the plates I used as inspiration hanging above the fireplace behind her. The plates are actually held up by invisible plate hangers (these ones are awesome and removable) and the ribbon is simply taped to the back to give the illusion that they are hanging from it. I discovered this website for ribbon during my wedding and use it every time I need a large amount of ribbon.  The plates around the room are mostly from thrift shops, but of course when you need to find something at a thrift shop you just won’t so I gave up and bought the two small ones above my bed from the Christmas Tree Shops.  (Don’t tell anyone, but I worked there throughout high school.  I really I wish I still got that employee discount…)

Oh and I thought I’d mention my earring holder – I actually made this in high school but fixed it up recently.

Gotta love that a grown woman has bat earrings in her line up.

I took an old frame, some old screen and fitted a piece of screen to the back using tacks.  I then added some padded stand offs (the little felt ones you put on the bottom of chairs to prevent them scratching your floor) so it would sit far enough away from the wall so I could hang my earrings with ease.

Please do a better job than me nailing the tacks in…

And finally my zen corner…

Meditation Corner

I started meditation a couple years ago when my work life became extremely stressful.  If you’ve ever tried meditation, you’ll find it is necessary to sit/kneel/etc with good posture.  Since I usually sit in some form of lotus pose (legs crossed) it is helpful to prop myself up on a pillow to allow my hips to tilt forward a bit to force me to straighten my spine.  They call the little cushion you sit on a zafu and the mat below your knees a zabuton.

I used this neat little pattern and old scraps of fabric to create these buckwheat hull filled zafus.

They all have a zipper along the bottom so I can add/remove buckwheat as needed or wash the covers. Since it seems to be a question on many meditation forums I have to add that the buckwheat hulls are from buckwheathull.com which were a great price and quality – and as an added bonus they are a nonprofit that provides jobs to disabled adults. I used 6 lbs of hulls per zafu. The big pillows you see on the floor are from IKEA – pillowcases and all. I was going to make my own zabutons but these serve the purpose just as well and were much less expensive. For perspective the first hit for “zafu and zabuton” is this set on amazon that sells for $97.95 + $16.00 shipping. The zafu cost me about $18 to make which was mostly the cost of the buckwheat hulls. The “zabuton” pillows were 2 “ÄRENPRIS” King pillows for $13 each, and a 2 pack of pillowcases for $10. This brought me to a grand total of $54, less than half the cost of the one on amazon.

The rest of the zen corner consists of a little woven chest (have I mentioned I love baskets in all forms?), a real orchid (this is version 2 – version 1 was shaken apart by Dany the dog one lonely day), a yard sale find lamp and a fun little hour timer I found on the clearance shelf at home goods (though I have yet to meditate for an entire turn of the timer). If you’re interested in learning about meditation there are lots of free books out there to get you started!

Since I finally revealed the master bedroom I thought I’d post some additional info on how I created the details.  First up are my curtains!

I already mentioned how I found the fabric in my last article, but the creation of my curtains was another example of procrastination. Between buying the fabric and beginning the cutting and sewing process, 6 entire months elapsed.  This is long enough that by the time you go back to the fabric store, all records of the fabric existing are gone and you’d be hard pressed to even figure out the name of it again (but that’s another story…). Luckily I had bought extra yardage this time so I didn’t have any excuse for the procrastination. And I was planning to make ordinary panel curtains so I didn’t have to work up any courage there. I honestly think that just the mere thought of cutting fabric and lining down to size for 6 panels was exhausting.

It really was exhausting, especially working to ensure perpendicular cuts. Luckily I had purchased a giant right angle ruler from harbor freight (which is conveniently next door to the fabric shop) to make the job much easier. For my last set of panel curtains I didn’t use a pattern, but I had recently acquired a “Window Treatments for Dummies” pattern at the thrift shop for a quarter so I used some of the instructions to make sure I finished the lining as suggested.

I cut the lining an inch and a half thinner than the width of the main fabric, then stitched the lining to the main fabric right sides together down the length of each panel.   I flipped the panel right sides out and pressed the edges so the main fabric had a 3/4 inch border from the lining.  I then pressed up 2 inches on the bottom of the fabric and then rolled a half inch under and stitched this to form my bottom hem.  For the top I followed the same instructions except I pressed 5 inches up, a half inch under and stitched both along this time and up an inch to from a pocket.  Regrettably I didn’t create mitered corners, but I guess who will ever see those anyway?  (Oops shouldn’t have shared picture below.)

Embarrassing lack of mitered corners.

I intended to make the curtain rods myself using finials and dowels and these great instructions, but when pricing it out at Home Depot they didn’t have any small unfinished finials for curtain rods, and it was actually comparable in price to buy this Martha Stewart version!  As you know I can’t turn down a Martha product!

Martha Stewart finials!

For the tie backs I couldn’t find anything I liked, so I bought some decorative braid and tied an ordinary overhand knot into it. I then added a cup hook into each side of the window to hold the tie back.  This was pretty, inexpensive and effective.

Simple tie backs using an overhand knot.

Hidden cup hooks hold the tie backs.

Next time join me on my discussion about my bedroom wall decor and next the zen corner!

So in keeping with the Doctor Who Halloween thread I figured I should post on Will’s costume of the 11th Doctor.  This one was super easy – we just bought a $10 tweed jacket from Savers, some suspenders and a bow tie that were on sale at Kohl’s, then made a fez out of scrap fabric, and Will added some aluminum foil (or aluminium foil for our British friends) to his battery operated toothbrush for a sonic screwdriver.  (I thought this was incredibly clever because it is indeed sonic.)

We weren’t going to make a fez for Will’s costume, but at the first party we went to someone told us how disappointed he was that Will was imitating the 11th Doctor without a fez.  So the next night (after drinking too many pumpkin beers) I decided to math one up.  I was really excited about it until I realized I did not remember how cones worked.  Luckily we found a website that made all my high school and college math classes obsolete!  There are lots of tutorials on making fezzes out there – but here is mine with some math!

I started with this picture of the doctor in his fez:

I then used paint.net to determine the height of the fez, and the diameter of the top and bottom of the fez in inches (not to scale).

I then measured my husband’s head to determine the size of his fez (it was 24 inches):

He looks happy to be having his head measured.

From there I made some equalities from the picture:

Then I used my favorite 2nd grade math formula to find the circumference of the bottom of the fez (aka my husband’s head; C).:

I then solved for D and got my husband’s equivalent fez sizes:

Then here’s where things get fun.  The trick is to find the arc of a really large diameter circle that you can use to roll up into your fez (which is a cone with the top cut off). If you don’t want to know the math to do it, this calculator does it all for you… just plug it all in and skip to where you stop seeing equations.  Otherwise nerd out with me and the magic is below…

Here is a picture of the really large circle that you will cut an arc from and then roll up into a fez.  You ultimately need to find the value for R and l.  C, the arc length, is the circumference of my husband’s head, the only value we have established right now in this picture.

You can visualize the fez as a right cone with the top cut off.  You see here that the length of R from the circle is the length of the cone sides here:

You can then visualize that cone as if you are viewing it straight on.  A cone in 2 dimensions is a triangle, so here’s what that looks like with the measurements transposed.  In this picture we have D and h already calculated.  I’ve also added an angle B that we’ll need to find R.

So first you’ll need to use the small (blue) triangle where we have two side values established to find the value of L the hypotenuse.  We can use the Pythagorean Theorem for this one:

So now that we have the value of L we can work on finding the value of R.  From the triangle picture we can see that the angle B forming the triangle containing L and h is the same angle as in the larger triangle containing R and D/2. So we solve for B using trig:

Since we have B, we can now use more trig to solve for R!

Then plug in and you’ll have your two values of interest, R and l!  Once you have those, you can measure out a string of length R and draw out part of a circle with it, and from the same focus you draw an arc using the shorter length l.  If you have a protractor you can use the following equation to figure out where to cut, but I just measured the arc length since I knew this value was the circumference of my husband’s head.

The rest was easy!  I cut out stiff fusible interfacing to the exact specifications of the arc segment pattern, and a circle with a radius of d/2.  I cut scrap fabric out 5/8 in larger than the two interfacing pieces and fused the interfacing to the wrong side of the fabric.

Then I sewed the cone segment (right sides together) down the side to form my fez, and attached the top (right sides together).  I snipped the top and and bottom fabric up to the interfacing to make it lay flat.  Finally a sewed a hem around the entire bottom of the hat.

That was it, about a 20 minute sewing project!  The math took more time than the sewing and cutting!

The Doctor

For the last 3 years I have been using a kitchen microwave cart that I got when I was in college. It was a functional metal and wood structure that could hold my oversized cookbooks and quickly became the kitchen junk table. After redoing the backsplash of the kitchen, I’ve been itching to change other things. After my cookbooks started falling through the wire shelves I decided a bookshelf for my kitchen was at the top of my list.

I originally intended to buy something, but I couldn’t find a piece that had everything I wanted. My requirements included a drawer (for all the junk that collected on the counter), ample shelf space for my cookbooks (including the 14 inch oversized ones), and a wide countertop. Surprisingly the only results for “kitchen bookshelf” were built ins (I fully intend to change this). After scouring the internet for weeks I finally stumbled upon this amazing blog. She does beautiful modern updates of outdated classics. The below dresser -> kitchen island transformation became my inspiration.

Beautiful dresser turned kitchen island from Heir and Space

I searched craigslist for weeks and finally came across this chest of drawers that had the right dimensions and was the perfect countertop height. (Remind me to add “people who include dimensions in their craigslist postings” in the list of my favorite things). After a busy weekend entertaining Will’s family, I picked up the bookshelf for $25. One of the drawers was broken but obviously that did not matter to me in the least!

Perfect sized dresser from craigslist

The first step to refinishing the cabinet was to remove the drawers and lightly sand the sides to accept paint. Then I needed to remove the center drawer slats to make room for the oversized bookshelf. When I got rid of the drawer slats I was left with a 1/4 by 1 inch groove in the frame that drove me crazy. At first I thought I would leave it as an accent stripe by painting it with a different color. Eventually I decided that idea was terrible and tried to mitigate the problem by adding thin wood slats. Well these didn’t look right either because at the time I didn’t own a proper saw (now I do, thanks Mom & Dad for my birthday gift – a circular saw!!). Instead I decided to use this wood filler. This stuff is AMAZING. You mix it up, apply it and you can sand and paint it within an hour! I’ve used it for several home repairs since!

After taking care of the drawer slat dilemma I went to Lowe’s to purchase a counter top and wood shelves. The depth of this piece was 16 inches which is larger than your ordinary hardwood board. I began fretting over how to create a piece of wood with the right dimensions using wood glue, wood clamps etc. Luckily while browsing through the Lowe’s hardwood section I discovered they have large sized hardwood boards in all sorts of thicknesses, pre-glued-together. I chose a 3/4 in piece for the shelves and a 1 1/2 inch piece for the countertop. Regrettably they only had 1.5 inch boards in the largest size so I have a ton leftover that I’ll have to find something to do with. Another great thing about buying these boards from Lowe’s is that even without any proper saw of my own I was able to have them cut to my dimensions with their industrial cutter!  (One great advantage to being female in a hardware store is most employees are extra helpful!)

Being a perfectionist I wanted the kitchen island counter top to have beveled edges like the counter tops in the rest of my kitchen. Luckily my best pal and her husband own every tool in existence and they let me borrow their router and a round-over bit. The router was super fun to use. Once you get the bit properly set in the router you really can’t screw it up. Check out these beveled edges…

After sanding, staining and polying the shelves and countertop, then priming and painting the base and top drawer-front my new kitchen cart was nearly complete. I got a little worried when I could see the white primer after applying the first coat of black paint, but the second coat covered everything up evenly. The back of the chest of drawers was particle board and not solid wood like the rest of the piece, so instead of attempting to paint this uneven surface I simply wallpapered it with this peel and stick wallpaper from Target.  I then gently inserted my shelves with a rubber mallet (the dimensions were spot on) and screwed the counter top to the dresser. Here’s the finished product:

Finished Kitchen Bookshelf

Before and after – kitchen bookshelf