Christmas, Crafting, and Kicking the Cleaning Habit

"You are so creative!  Wow!  I wish I could do that, but I'm not crafty..." I hear this from party guests at least twice a party.  As I am a "good hostess" I smile, shift the "creative blame" to one roommate or another, and bite my tongue.  A lot. I hate it when people label themselves "not crafty."  Dig a little deaper and you hear things like "well, I can't draw, so I must not be creative" or "I could never think of those things on my own" or "Mine never turn out like that."  Usually I smile, gently encourage and turn the conversation away from the other person's discomforting self reflection.

What I really want to do is yell "BULLSHIT", call a life foul, and coach them back into the game!  There now.  You too can now interpret my smile and nod. :) 

That may seem a bit extreme, but you must understand that I am very passionate about freedom, and in this case,  the freedom to create. I realize I cannot actually shake my house guests or start yelling at them, even if I think it is for their benefit.  I mean, seriously, who would come to our parties?  But I can share my experience as my roommates and I make creativity a practical reality in our lives.

The more I create, the more I realize that a key part of our process is simply about learning to tolerate working in a mess.  Not a "mess of a life" or a "beautiful mess" as the song says. I'm talking about building up tolerance to being surrounded  by the crap your creative process has generated. For some, this will be more organized and tidy than others.  For Laura, Lisa, and I, it looks like a summer twister hit our craft area and threw in some empty take-out cartons for good measure.

True story.

Lets try a little activity.  It's a picture find.  Can you find all the possibilities listed in the the picture below?

                                                                                            

           Finder list:

           1. Toulle Ballerina Halloween Costume

           2. Dinner

           3. 45 Bean bag heating pad tags

           4.  Yesterday's Breakfast

           5. Porcelain

           6.  Markers

           7.  Fabric markers for labeling tags

           8.  Bean bag innards

           9.  Bean Bag Assembly Elf

           10. Bean bag fabric

           11 Pottery tools

           12. (1) cake pan

          









13. Bean Bag Assembly Elf's filing system for multitasking while waiting on next influx of material

14. Portal to all B movies from the 1990's on.

15. Marketing Tools

16. Unfinished clay ornaments

17. Fuel

          

Did you find them all? Scroll down to see the answers.

Finder list:

1. Toile Ballerina Halloween Costume

2. Dinner

3. 45 Bean bag heating pad tags

4  Yesterday's Breakfast

5. Porcelain

6  Markers

7  Fabric markers for labeling tags

8.  Bean bag innards

9.  Bean Bag Assembly Elf

10. Bean bag fabric

11 Pottery tools

12. (1) cake pan

13. Bean Bag Assembly Elf's filing system for multitasking while waiting on next influx of material

14. Portal to all B movies from the 1990's on.

15. Marketing Tools

16. Unfinished clay ornaments

17. Fuel

Now granted, we don't live in this on a daily basis.  Our business, ee.larual, is in full holiday boutique production.  The first boutique is next Tuesday at Capella Tower.  If you are in downtown Minneapolis next Tuesday between 9:30-1, come and visit us! (click here for a map)

My second piece of advice is this:  Limit your time.  Set boundaries around when you will allow yourself to be messy.  It is WAY easier to talk yourself out of panic mode when you know there is a time limit.   Once this time is done, take stock of what you have accomplished and celebrate!  I sure am! 

Let's hear it for the Bean Bag Elf!

Laura's pottery is being fired this week.  Check back later this week for the latest update.

Here's a sneak peak at my winter line of heating buddies:

Patios and Pansies part 1 - redoing a fire pit

It has been a while since our last post.  We will have a few more in quick secession so stay tuned for more exciting do it yourself craziness from Lisa, Laura, and me.

What have we been up to you ask?  Well, doing life, having parties, and being crafty!  Oh and lots of prep for Camp Victory's Camp Store.  Lisa has run this store for the last few years and and Laura and I kind of "own" it through osmosis...or maybe its the hours and hours of help we get wrangled into each year. See Lisa's upcoming blog post...though this may be in retrospective...say in September...She is one busy girl!

My ongoing theme this spring has been "patio prep".  I have dreamed of making the lovely concrete slab out side of our house into a cozy patio where my roommates and I could enjoy our friends, our morning coffee, and the brief summer MN has to offer.

Bonfires are a quintessential part of summer in MN. While my roommates hate the smell of bonfires, we all enjoy smores, and the laughter and chats that often take place around a fire. (Can you tell we are all camp counselors at heart?)   Patio fire pits can be expensive (not to mention forbidden by our landlord), and we are thrifty so I started searching Craigslist for low cost fire bowls.  I found a $15 dollar fire bowl with a cracked mosaic around the rim.I jumped at the chance. " I can fix one crack!  Grout and I are on good speaking terms."  This was my rationalization.  So, I borrowed a truck and trekked out the outreaches of a wealthy Minneapolis suburb to pick up the fire bowl.  In the pouring rain.  When I arrived, I found that there was not 1 crack but several and half the mosaic had fallen off as the previous owners had moved it from the front to the back yard.  OK.  So this was going to be a bit more work.

Once I got the fire bowl home, the first thing I did was remove the remaining mosaic from around the rim of the fire bowl. To remove the mosaic I simply broke the remaining pieces off with the hammer. I good hard smack to tile will shatter it. .

I was particularly careful not to twist the wire mesh layer underneath the mosaic. This wire mesh layer is what the new grout will adhere to.  It helps to try to let the vibrations  from the hammer shake loose the dust and old grout from underneath the wire mesh.  Not all of it will come out, and that is OK, the cement/grout be strong as long as most of it has something to adhere to.

I sprayed the whole thing down with the hose at high pressure to get all the dust off and let it dry as I organized the rest of my supplies.  I purchased a case of tile samples from a coworker a couple of years ago and it provided me the tile portion of my fire pit redo. Tile can be found at any local tile shop. If you don't want to pay full price, call a few weeks in advance and see if floor samples or other inventory samples will be thrown out or discontinued. It maybe a hodge podge, but it could also be a great conversation piece! Also, I am not an expert about what type of tiles can be used with what type of heat.  I used porcelain.  We have small fires as it is a fire bowl and not a fire pit, and the tiles seem to hold up well.

After taking stock of my supplies I was completely stumped as to how I wanted to organize the design of the tiles. The only problem with samples is that there is one or two of EVERYTHING and the colors do not always look the best together. I decided to start with the small vertical lip that ran around fire bowl.  I put together smaller strings of colors I liked, and then would find a way to transition between them.

Once this was done I used the outside ring to inform the larger color blocks around the flat part of the mosaic. I moved the whole thing onto two cardboard boxes and laid out the tiles around the fire pit.

Next, I set about mixing my "grout".  In reality it is high heat concrete - type S specifically.

I have to thank my local home depot for help with this one.  I know they are a mega chain and all that, but they are seriously awesome!  I called into the store at 4pm to ask a question about the possibility of  some sort of "high heat" grout.  Super Helpful Home Depot Guy Paul said he would look into it and call me back.  Who knew they did that?  Well, Good ole' Paul called me back an hour later and gave me the 411 on this concrete mix (its holding up beautifully by the way) by 5:15 that day!.Oh, and did I mention the entire 40lb bag cost me $4??  Granted I now have about 36lbs of type S concrete I have NO idea what I'm going to do with, but I'll come up with something I'm sure. :)


Now for the fun part. Grouting and placing the tile. I suppose professionals would use spacers and other "official things". I used a trowel and my fingers.   Essentially, I plopped some grout down on the lip of the fire pit and snugged in the first little tile - getting a good suction established. I placed the next too it in the same manner, keeping roughly the same space between each tile. I moved the tile around until the grout became compact between the two little tiles and acted as a spacer in and of itself.  It doesn't have to look pretty at this stage. It just needs to be kind of secure..

I worked in this manner around the fire pit until I had a whole section secure - I would then take a wet paper towel and wipe down the tiles a bit. You are effectively sculpting the tile and cement together into a unified whole and you can better see if there are uneven spots by wiping down the tile now.  This also help later with clean up.

Once the last pieces have been snugged into place, take a paper towel and wipe down a final time taking care not to disturb the tiles. Let this dry for 2 days prior to use.  It maybe advised to seal the cement. I haven't and its holding up quite well.

My fire bowl was really rusty and it looked rough.  I stumbled upon a high heat Rustoleum spray paint that was meant for engines and grills in the spray paint section while shopping for another project. The can said it was good up to 5000 degrees.  Excellent.  I sprayed the bowl, cover grate and legs with this spray paint. I left the cooking grate as is, just in case we do cook on it.

Turned out pretty cute!

Because Free is the BEST - usually.

Thriftiness is an art.  One that Lisa, Laura, and I try to practice whenever we can!  What do you expect from an accountant and a couple broke artists?  We extreme coupon, reuse materials whenever we can, and put our craftiness to work to make old things new. That's why April is like Christmas for us.  Well, for me. Lisa and Laura just don't know it yet.

Lisa, Laura, and I currently reside in the city in which I grew up.  We have lived here about 6 month and love it! Every spring the city coordinates a fantastic event called "city wide clean up".  Each weekend from mid -April through May, residents put all their unwanted belongings out on the curb, quadrant by quadrant. Things begin appearing Thursday evening and pickup occurs Saturday.  Its a thrifters DREAM.  Free stuff  everywhere.  Some of it is absolute crap - broken appliances, rusty furniture, crappy rugs, broken wood pallets, etc.  But there are those diamond in the rough that can be found no where else and at no other time.  FOR FREE.

On Wednesday, Laura and I took a stroll around our neighborhood - about a 6 block square. We left some  fun things for other scrappers to find, but we managed to come back with some excellent finds.

Items included -
A working patio umbrella (the really nice, but well loved kind)
A patio chair
A patio rug
3 medium planters
A steel pole (this is WAY cool because of its importance in a later project)
And a wheel  (also for a later project)

This will probably way more impressive when I post before and after picts of our patio after it all comes together, but for now - go find a recycling or re-using center that will let you paw around in their stuff.  For those in the MPLS/ Twin Cities area check out the following places:

http://www.greeninstitute.org/programs/reuse-deconstruction.htm  - The ReUse Center

http://www.tchabitat.org/restore - Re-Store for building materials and paint etc.

http://groups.freecycle.org/freecycleMpls/posts/all

http://www.twincitiesfreemarket.org/


*Please note that we can't vouch for any of the information listed on the websites above - so use your discretion.

We would LOVE to see what you come up with, so post your comments and re-using stories here!

The Beginning in the Middle

Welcome to our blog!  I (Melissa) have been trying to figure out how to begin this blog with a bang!  I think the most interesting blog posts are ones that document real people doing cool stuff. The hard part is taking time from doing all that cool stuff to blog I guess.

Who we are:

Laura Lee Ernster is one amazing lady and one of my biggest inspirations.  It is rare day when this beautiful blond is without a project.  She is currently building a website to sell some of her more sought after work.  Among these are her crayon drip paintings.  You may have seen the original inspiration on Pinterest.com. Oh yeah, I should mention, we are Pinterest CRAZY!  More about this in the future.

Lisa Ernster's is undoubtedly a large part of the glue that holds our bigger ventures together.  This girl could organize a wedding and funeral at the same time and theme both so that the decorations could be re-used in an efficent way.  And it would be fabulous. And fun.  (see our upcoming party blog post for pictures and reviews....don't worry, the party is neither wedding, nor funeral themed....)

(Pointing the way home)

Me - Melissa Lundquist - I like art and crafts and people. I'm currently on a sewing binge and am really stoked to start party planning. (Again, more later)


We've been friends for a while and family for what feels like forever.  We get in trouble (mainly my fault) and then we get organized (mainly Lisa's fault), and then we get excellent (probably Laura). I look forward to sharing our adventures!