Badaboom Badabing Fabric Artwork!

The Mego Cave is officially under way! Wondering what the heck a Mego Cave is? Well, it started during Design Night a few weeks ago. Eric and I were having our Saturday date night in front of HGTV watching Design Night. Seriously, call us lame, but it is a favorite for us. So the new and delightful show Mom Caves was playing. All of a sudden Eric goes, "Why don't you make the carport room your Mom Cave?" Ding ding ding! Light bulbs are just popping everywhere! That crazy, almost useless room immediately had purpose and potential. I think I shot off of the couch and did a little wiggle dance. I knew I married this man for a reason. Then, after calling it a Mom Cave for a few days I realized how silly it was since I am not a mom (if you don't count the stuffed animals) so we changed the name to The Mego Cave. So much better, don't you think?

Ever since that moment, I have been in a flurry of excitement planning my new room that is all mine. That means it can be completely sparkly and girly,  but in a grown-up way and not a teeny bopper sort of way (much, I'm still a teeny bopper sometimes). As I was thinking of colors and design, I new immediately the inspiration for the room. It started with a fabric piece my mother-in-law gave me. You can see it right here on the couch where it goes perfectly with the couch.

You can also see that above the couch the picture was not gelling with my style or vision of the Mego Cave. Although it is a beautiful picture given to me by my friend Cait's mom, it wasn't in the right place. Eric eagerly snapped it up for the basement since that boy loves everything snow!

Since the fabric was the inspiration piece, I thought it would be fitting to make it a showpiece by making it a huge piece of artwork above the couch. The space is between two closets and I really felt it could handle a large piece of artwork. My goal was to build a wooden frame that I could stretch the fabric around. Then I thought about how I could work smarter, not harder (can I get an amen?!). So my thought process moved on to just finding a big ole second hand frame. One weekend I went to Estate Specialists who has really nice items upstairs and then a really exciting and smelly basement where you can find stuff if you dig. I did know that they actually have a cage of old frames so off I went to dig around in the dirty basement cage. What a find I got - a step up from even a frame. Check out this $5 find!

Duh! Why didn't I think of that before?! A canvas stretcher! I hadn't really measured the space and just left it up to eye ballin' it in the store. So I eagerly ran into the carport room Mego Cave when I got home to try it spacially.

Perfect! So after a little gussying up (sure was dirty in that basement) it was time to work on finding the perfect pattern to stretch across the frame. Easier said than done. This pattern can easily be so symmetrical, predictable and well, it can kind of look like body parts when it gets all straight and centered. Use your imagination. I worked on all sorts of ways to lay the fabric. It actually took quite a long time for me, as I would lay it out, step back and ponder it for a while. After a few hours of pondering and just a few minutes of actual work, I hit upon my pattern.

So here it is all laid out and ready to be cut. I cut around with a few inches leftover so I could wrap it around the frame. Next it was time to break out the tools. A staple gun is definitely one of my favorites! It feels powerful but it easy to use (just make sure you have the right size staples for your project). When you get to this step it is really important to stretch your fabric really tight so it doesn't ripple and bunch when it is hung on the wall.

One side stapled and a few more to go. I recommend starting with the top and bottom, getting the fabric stretched tight in the frame. If you just started on the top and then the sides, it may bunch up easily. Also, I made clean corners by wrapping them like a Christmas present. Here is its  backside all stapled, trimmed, and ready to hang!

Since I got lucky and the canvas stretcher already had a wire on the back for hanging, all I had left to do was to hang it. Drum roll please!

Perfect! Love It! Couldn't be happier! It just immediately brightens up the room and sets the mood for the new Mego Cave.

And now a before and after for the full effect!

How's that for a $5 project! So have you ever made fabric into artwork? How have you handled it? Inside frames? Wrapped around something else? I would love to hear your ideas since this one was so easy, I might want to do a few varieties of fabric artwork!

House Tour: The Carport Room of Shame

Alright! We have made it to the end of the house tour posts! Our final post has a reason for being last. Do you have a space in your house that has no real purpose and is the catch-all space for just random stuff? Well that describes perfectly our "carport room". Why is it called the carport room? Well, it used to be a carport that the previous owners converted to a finished room. Aren't we brilliant with naming things? [Sidenote: Eric and I joke that our first born will just be called Boy One or Girl One, as we like to name things simply. For example my stuffed animals (yes, I still have them and love them) are called Dolphin, Brown Bear, Turtle, etc. No more explanation really needed, is there?]

So our carport room is one very long room (enough to fit a car obviously) that is attached to our kitchen/living room.

As you can see, it acts as a formal dining room. Aka, a room that we don't often use since we aren't the formal dining room people all that much. Actually, from what I hear and see in my own life and on HGTV I don't know many people who are. If you are one, please let me know how to get more use out of mine! Also, for you to really see how this room is purposeless thus far, I didn't pick up after ourselves. This isn't the easiest thing for me to put that out there since I am Ms. Organization. So let me take you through our room that has no purpose.

As you can tell from the state of our kitchen table it serves more as a craft table, RC car work area, fabric holder, hair dryer holder, etc.

This is a beautiful cabinet that we were handed down from Eric's parents. We don't have anything fancy that goes in there but its drawers do serve as great storage for craft supplies, stationary, extra kitchen stuff, etc. One day maybe we will use it for its purpose. This picture also shows one of the favorite parts of the room: the exposed brick wall. When the room was finished from a carport, this wall was left with just the external brick of the house. Love it!

See how long it is? Long rooms can be challenging to stage, hence the modge podge of the room.

This is a moveable gas fireplace also put in by the previous owners. It is not really our style, so it is on its way out. It works and gives out great heat, but is taking up valuable wall space. Actually, at this moment, Eric and my father-in-law are disconnecting it from the house. Contact me if you would be interested in buying it!

So here is the other side of the carport room. This is where the Goodwill piles go, the large recycling pieces go, where we do our ironing, and random monkey balloons (still hanging in there from February!) live.

Pay special attention to this area below. See that beautiful fabric draped over the couch? That is the beginning of this room's makeover. Stay tuned for Wednesday's post to see what happens with this fabric!

Now here is Eric's area that has lots of tools, RC car stuff, car cleaning supplies, etc. What was I saying about this room having no purpose? Look at all junk stuff we have in here!

So there it is folks! The final house tour room! It lools like a hot mess but really all I see are endless opportunities! When at one time all I saw was a long narrow room that had no purpose, now I see what will be the future....Mego Cave! Yup, there are man caves and there are even mom caves now, but I will be introducing the first ever Mego Cave! I will leave that for another post, as there are many fun projects going on in that room currently, (slowly) transforming it into my Mego Cave! Can't wait to show you my progress!

Also, here is the house tour recap for you if you are interested.

• Living Room
• Kitchen
• Guest Bedroom #1
• Guest Bedroom #2
• Master Bedroom
• Master Bathroom
• Basement

House Tour: Monkeying Around in the Bathroom

Let the house tour begin again! I left off in the master bedroom so naturally it is time to move to the master bathroom. I LOVE that we have a master bathroom. It just seems to make life easier. The evolution of this bathroom takes a little bit of explaining. When Eric and I were registering for our wedding, we ran across a shower curtain that began what we like to call, "The Monkey Bathroom".

Hey, why not stay a kid your whole life? Eric fell in love with the monkey thing and I thought "Sure, why not?" So we really embraced it. I even think that after our wedding people were fighting over who would buy the monkey accessories!

Also, like I talked about in my guest bathroom tour before, this bathroom was also "Rebathed" to cover ugly brown/pink tile on the wall and shower. You can really see this in the shower.

A few goals for this bathroom are to change out the mirror and lights and add some artwork/shelving on that bare wall.

Fun monkey accessories!

This is another project that I need to get on: window covering! I am thinking either a nice simple green valence or a bamboo roman shade. Any thoughts?

So there it is! Another room tour to add to the list. Only 8 months into the blog to get here!

PS: Here are the other house tour posts if you're interested

• Living Room
• Kitchen
• Guest Bedroom #1
• Guest Bedroom #2
• Basement

Wedding Bells are Ringing in Cleveland!

The other weekend Eric and I took a road trip to Cleveland, Ohio (hence the lack of posts last week as we regrouped after the trip) to see one of my best friends marry, well her best friend! It was so fun, not only because it was just an absolutely gorgeous wedding, but it was almost like a college reunion where I got to see a lot of good friends from college. That can't happen enough! We were fortunate we were able to get some time off of work (yahoo!) so we started are mini-vacation on Thursday afternoon. We started our winding journey through the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia to reach our half-way point at Charleston, West Virginia. It was definitely a fun stop over. We stayed in a sweet suite and got to explore the beautiful downtown a little bit. It is right on a river and has a nice mall...that is mainly what I can tell you about Charleston. Sigh. Eric and I do love to shop.
Friday took us the rest of the way to our destination of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, childhood home of Hillary and the spot of Hillary and Tom’s wedding. Our first stop was to check into our “hotel” if you can call it that. The place we got was called The Alcazar and it full of quirky charm. It was the “it” place in the early-ish 1900s (Bob Hope even had a suite there!) but now is more a residential rental place for mainly older folks. You can read a bit more about it here as it does have a pretty cool history and it seems it used to host some pretty great parties there. The architecture and design is unique though and I totally loved it!

After we checked in we were then on to the wedding rehearsal and rehearsal picnic (absolutely perfect as it mimicked the couple's favorite date), had a little time for exploration of the cute walking area around the Alcazar (which I always say quite dramatically in my head), and then an amazing girls night with the bride herself and all her close friends. Many desserts and funny You Tube videos were shared, including some incredibly hilarious wedding proposals (the good, the bad, and the ugly) and a showing of Marcel the Shell.
Saturday morning (wedding day!) we were free to be touristy, so we saw the early morning to head downtown Cleveland. I was all excited to see Lake Erie, as I had never been to any states around the lakes. Our destination was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (aka Eric’s Mecca), since Cleveland was the home of rock n’ roll.

(It was just a little bit sunny!)

It was beautiful on the water with lots of neat things around it, like a science museum and a football stadium.

Inside was pretty neat too, although they didn’t allow pictures in most places. They did allow them in the lobby and we were able to snap these beauties.

Yup, that's a hot dog car!!

I was all excited to stand by Michael Jackson’s giant hand replica and his inspired giant guitar because I got stupidly silly excited over seeing Michael’s Jackson’s authentic glittery glove. I also got into Elvis’s bedazzled suit and all the handwritten notes and lyrics (written all over napkins, scrap paper, whatever could be found). I loved seeing the process that the songwriters went through on their way to huge hits. Overall it was definitely a cool stop and a must-see in Cleveland!

Then it was back to wedding preparations! Man, was I excited for the couple. The amount of time and love they poured into wedding preparations was so evident in every detail of the wedding. I could just feel the love between the couple, their families, and friends permeating the air. Here is the sweet couple.

I was honored to be a part of their ceremony and was able to share some pretty amazing readings on love and grace along with one of Tom’s friends. In this picture we are either smiling over the beauty of the day or the deafening helicopter that flew directly overhead during my readings. I’ll let you pick.

Their ceremony was beautifully thought out with inspiring poems, readings, music and singing, and wonderfully written vows. This also may be weird, but they had one of my favorite wedding kisses. Hillary was adorable when she just pulled Tom in for the kiss! Can’t you just tell from the pic?

Then we were on to party it up at the reception. It was hard to get action shots of the couple, so I thought I would share some of the individual flare they put on their reception. First of all, the guest book was the best idea I have ever seen at a wedding! They had this sweet little Polaroid camera. Everyone was able to take pictures and then basically help create a scrapbook guest book. There were all these different color pieces of paper and stickers and glue to go wild and put in your picture, decorate it and write a note.

Their decorations were beautiful too with these sweet little handmade rocks with notes on them. Apparently each table had a theme, although we couldn’t really figure our table's theme out. It tied in well with the centerpiece and beautiful paper (I am thinking that it was to represent the flower, the ground and the rocks…bringing it all together?)

You could also bring home the rocks in the cute little bags as your favors. Love it! One is now nesting in my miniature collection.

Their cake was also fabulously chocolate! Don’t you just want to reach into the picture and eat it? I also love how they celebrated their parent’s marriages by framing their wedding pictures by the cake.

They also had a cute little sweetheart table that was in the center of the room.

All-in-all the wedding and reception was perfect and perfectly represented the couple! It was full of good food, good memories, good friends, good music, and so much love.

Thanks so much to this couple...

...for allowing this couple...

...to share in your big day! So let’s end this post with a toast to the beautiful couple! Cheers!