Gold Fingers.

I am someone who relies heavily on technology every day of my working life. Be it emails, photoshop, my phone or excel, it is safe to say I need technology at some point every few minutes of my 9-5 post. (Technically 8.30-5 post but it didn't scan as well.) Which can leave me exhausted and my eyes weary from constant focus.

Don't get me wrong. I *love* my job but by the time I get home the last thing I want to look at is pixels. So I have turned to DIY as a sort of 'departure therapy' from a stressful day in the office.

And it's working quite well. On any given night of the week it is not un-common find me, needle/paint brush/wallpaper paster in hand, some sort of radio podcast blaring out and a huge grin on my face. I love DIY/craft/upcycling - whatever you want to call it. And one website has fuelled this love like no other - Pinterest.

Now that Spring appears to have arrived my design aspirations have turned to my tiny back yard. OH and I don't own the house we're in so any 'improvements' (IMO) I make have to be removable when we leave which is frustrating but it's also become a fantastic time to focus on building a beautiful base of decorations for our home that we are going to love when it is our bricks and mortar surrounding us. Anyway... I digress.

With the Bank Holiday looming (last week) I took to my beloved Pinterest to get my creative juices flowing and within minutes a new board had been created and I was off on my next project.

Now, a little know fact about me is that I adore bees. And butterflies. Not in a cutesy way - Lord knows I would never have anything 'themed' in my garden based on them but there have been a lot of reports recently about the decline of both these beautiful creatures in the UK so after reading into bee and butterfly friendly plants I got shifting towards my local garden centre, armed with my list of ideal plants to help the local animals thrive. (Not you, cats, you can stay out of my yard!)

I also knew I wanted an explosion of colour so picked a bright palette and got purchasing.

OH and I appear to have inherited a heck of a lot of terracotta pots, which are fantastic but I'm not really a terracotta kinda gal so the first garden DIY I am going to share is my new plant pots. (I know, brace yourselves, it's a lot of excitement for a Tuesday.)

Deciding on my old faithful - gold spray paint - I set to work scrubbing the pots clean with normal washing up liquid.

And gathered my resources.

I used PlastiKote spray in 'brass' as I think it's more of a 'true' gold - their golds seem a bit yellow-y to me and I prefer a bronzed tone. I've used this spray for indoor DIY jobs before but not in the great outdoors and I didn't fancy its chances up against the famous Manchester rain so I erred on the side of caution and also fished out my clear lacquer enamel from Wilkos (this is a matte spray so won't leave a shiny finish.)

Now, if you've never spray painted before here are a few tips:

- Make sure you have a large(ish) area to do it in. And cover it in newspaper. A lot of newspaper.

- Preferrably do it outside as the fumes are somewhat extreme after only a few short minutes.

- Do it on a windless day - nobody likes back spray, especially when it's gold and permanently damaging to clothes and shoes.

- Hold the can about 20cm away from what your spraying - this helps keep the coverage even. (I learnt this the hard way - by ruining two mirrors. Rookie.)

I gave my pots 2 coats of gold and finished it with 1 coat of the clear laquer to keep them water proof and, after today's rain I can confirm this has worked a treat.

Another tip - spray the inside of the pot 2/3 inches deep - this means when planted the top section that isn't covered in soil will still be a golden dream.

And here's my first completed, potted plant.

I have a lot more but we'll get further into the makeover in time. After this I was rudely interupted by a summons to the pub so that's where my DIY-ing halted and the Sauvignon Blanc started. Whoops!

And look, it must be working because I found his guy tonight when I went out to check up on things... Not quite a bee or butterfly but we're getting there. More soon!

How A Stapler Became My Friend.

So... It's been quite a while since I've been on here. My life has been somewhat hectic these past few months and my poor blog felt like the straw that was breaking the camel's back so I decided it had to take a back seat until I could create more of a work/life balance for myself.

Honestly, I've still not really worked that part out yet but what happened a few months ago helped. OH and I moved in together! We're just renting right now which is great but frustrating since we're in my dream home and all I want to do is tear walls down, change layouts and generally put my stamp on it. But, alas, these ain't my bricks and mortar to manipulate so I've had to find another outlet. And boy, have I?

This is the story about how this guy...

...became my new best friend.


I've wanted to start upholstery for some time now and looked into several courses; but at a few hundred £'s each they seemed a little unreasonable so I decided there had to be a better way. And there is - Youtube. After watching a couple of videos I decided that it couldn't be that hard and promptly found myself weighing up upholstery guns in my local B&Q.

I opted for a mid-range model for just over £20 - same one here - bought the accompanying staples for around £5(the back of the packaging on the gun explains these to you) and hot-footed it to my local fabric shop.

OH accompanied me since my first project was one of our dining chairs. We bought mis-matching chairs some time ago from various flea markets, vintage shops, old warehouse sales, etc. and they've been sitting with cushions and throws on them ever since because my fear of a guest being bitten on the behind by a creepy crawly lurking in the age old fabric on them has haunted me. Well, no longer!

Now, please don't be expecting some sort of technical explanation here as I am very much a 'job's a good'un' kind of DIY-er at the moment so this is a guide for those people who, like me, take a more relaxed approach to upcycling (buzzword alert!) and actually view it as something to enjoy rather than endure to the nth degree of accuracy.

This is how the offending article originally looked. I'm sorry for the useless quality of photo - the lighting in our new place isn't too amazing at night and flash wasn't working out well for me either.

First I unscrewed the 'cushion' area from the chair frame.

It wasn't the easiest of jobs as the chair is very old so it took some elbow grease and patience with a large screwdriver but the plus side of things like this is that you know the quality is so much better than anything you could pick up for £10 at IKEA, Home Sense, or any of the other budget interior stores these days.

 

Next I laid the gross cushion/seat on top of the fabric I'd chosen and roughly cut its shape out of the fabric, leaving enough (probably a bit more than enough) to staple to the underneath.

Once cut out I pinned it all in place and got my staple on. It only took about 5 minutes to staple it all but be sure to keep a constant eye on the tightness of the fabric so that it is kept taut and you don't discover any saggy bits when you've finished.

The corners were a bit difficult but some tricks learnt when wrapping presents over the years helped me - a basic corner fold and a staple sorted them quite well.

Then I remembered I had to re-screw the cushion area back onto the chair frame - hence the hacked out corner sections. They were just to allow me to get a clear run at the original holes; next time I'd take this into acount and maybe just snip small holes in the fabric itself to keep the finish looking a bit smoother. That said, nobody will probably look at the underside of this chair for some time now so I'm not too fussed about its appearance as long as the top looks good...

Which it did!

We chose a really silly elephant print fabric that I think was more angled towards childrens rooms but we want our chairs to look traditional with a twist and both fell in love with this print as soon as we saw it. OH actually found it so I do need to give him the credit for this one. I totally adore it.

And here's the finished article. We decided not to treat the wood at all because we actually quite like the worn quality of it contrasted with a fresh fabric cushion and I hope you agree that it looks quite good.

For my fist upholstery project with just some loose Youtube based training I have to say, I'm very pleased with my efforts!