Mint green and The Adventure Orange

Over the weekend Matt and I went out exploring around the Quad Cities. We ran a couple errands and then headed down to the East Village of Davenport to check out Mint Green and The Adventure Orange. It is a funky, eclectic little store with fashion, accessories and gifts. They even had baby clothes!

I'm all about unicorns right now. 

I loved the hats!

I have a big head but this yellow hat fit nicely so I had to have it. There was so much more I would have liked to get if I had more money. A dress, a couple pieces of their jewelry, a sticker or two...you get the point :)

Mystery machine

Another project I worked on a while back but never posted is of this little golf cart my work friends and I got to turn into a Scooby Doo Mystery Machine. The city wanted a mystery machine to drive in the holiday kick-off parade since the giant balloon they had to carry in the parade was of Scooby Doo. Jean, Glenn and I were up for the challenge. 

Done!

It was time consuming and difficult at times but I had a lot of fun. Jean and Glenn are two of my favorite local artists so I learned a thing or two from them in the process. It was the first time I ever worked on a project like this. I would definitely do something like it again if the opportunity ever arises!

Painting a Princess Party Beanbag Toss

I had some posts I started a long time ago but never posted. This one is of a bean bag toss I painted for the children museum's princess birthday parties. It took forever to finish but I had a ton of fun doing it and absolutely love how it turned out.

Here are a few progress photos. When I first started I only had a vague idea of what I wanted so as the painting progressed the colors changed.

Done!

The Mineral and Crystal Museum

I started this post way back at the end of September after my birthday but never finished. It has some sweet pictures though so better late than never! For my 27th birthday I told everyone I wanted to go on a spirit quest and the destination would undoubtedly be The House on the Rock in Wisconsin. Woohoo Wisconsin!

Like all good spirit quests though, this one had some unexpected stops along the way.On the last stretch of road to House on the Rock we passed The Mineral and Crystal Museum. We had recently started collecting rocks again when my husband brought his childhood collection back home from his parents' house. It ended up being the perfect addition to my birthday vacation.

In fact, one of my birthday presents from Matt this year was this beautiful piece of celestite.

The Mineral and Crystal Museum was awesome. It definitely solidified my new interest in geology. Here are a few pictures from our visit-

House on the Rock was amazing as well. It is absolutely one of a kind and I took a lot of pictures there too, but THAT is for another blog post ;) Thanks for reading!

Necklace refashion

       A hematite necklace I got from the $1.00 bin at Fred & Ethel's in Rock Island.

                              Here is my refashion of it...

                                                     Yay! It is rad.

And here is my dog, Dinah, getting a puppy head massage. She's a creep but I love that little fur goblin <3 nbsp="" p="">

                                       Thanks for stoppin' by... :)

                                          

Jewelry and July

After that last shirt refashion I decided it was time to do something else besides sewing for my next project. I went with beading and made this really beautiful mint, pink and green necklace. The owl pendant used to be on a ring.

I love how it turned out! I think the shape of the draping that the double strands make is so cool. It actually looks even better when you put it on.

Besides the jewelry making I've been out celebrating Fourth of July. My husband and I rode bikes and met up with my parents and friends on the other side of the Mississippi. 

We rode our bikes over the Arsenal Bridge and as we were riding across a train was crossing too. We raced the train over the river and across the bridge into Illinois. It was quite exciting...And loud. 

 Matt took this picture of me while we were out riding and I really like how it turned out. I have a tendency to be overly critical, cynical, and what have you when it comes to photos of myself so its kind of cool to see a snapshot I genuinely like.

 Plus my bike is in the photo and I adore my bike. <3 <3 

 It was dark out during our ride but we still got a few fun photos anyway.

Matt was channeling his inner Abraham Lincoln for Fourth of July spirit. My insane and awesome (insanely awesome?) sense of style is rubbing off on him....excellent. Mwah haha.

We were quite a sight to be seen out riding our bikes that evening.

We painted our bathroom yesterday and I have a couple of spray paint projects and another necklace I'm working on too. That's pretty much it though. I'll post more results when I get some of these new projects finished up! Thanks for reading :)

Leopard print, button up, collared shirt refashion

While I had some time off work I tried my hand at another freestyle sewing project. This time I refashioned an old blouse my mom gave me because it was torn at some of the seams.

The first thing I did was mend the seams and in my opinion, everything about this fabric is fabulous. It's sheer, lightweight, LEOPARD PRINT.  However when I tried the shirt on the fit was just so so. It was calling to me for a refashion.

I cut off the collar of the shirt and the strips of buttons and button holes down the front of it all in one long strip. To use in a future refashion project perhaps?

I hemmed the front of the blouse and using 3 layered fabrics from an old dress of mine I fashioned a new mandarin style collar. I lightly traced a pattern for the collar using scrap pieces of poster board and another blouse I had with a mandarin collar. I made a cuff around the sleeves which I decided to shorten as well. 

Afterall, it's finally summer. And it's lumpin' hot out. 

I know. There's a lot of leopard print going on. It's pretty tacky but I've decided that's okay! It's tacky in the most gawdy, wish I was in Vegas, watching Wayne Newton, eating buffet and gambling my savings kinda way. 

Or perhaps Queen of the trailer park- smoking a cig, a can of Busch Lite close by, my hair is large, my makeup fierce. And I'm grilling up hotdogs in the yard for the 3rd time that week...

I don't smoke cigs but I do eat A LOT of hotdogs. Especially this time of year. 

Hotdogs are awesome....

Hotdogs lumpin' rule.

 Anyway, where was I?..Oh yeah! And the witness to mine and Matt's wedding was an Elvis in a shiny gold suit jacket. Who may have been botoxed...???

No matter. 

Point is I think this shirt and I are going to get along just fine :)

Peter Max and Painting the foyer, stairwell, and upstairs hallway

So after living in this house for 3 years or so Collison and I FINALLY repainted our foyer, stairwell, and hallway.  When moving in it was already painted this shade of beige that just wasn't doing it for us. I know beige is a popular paint color for the home and if you can use it and make it look good in your space more power to ya. For us though, well, we just didn't get it! We lived with the color for these past few years, partly out of laziness, sure, but partly out of lack of inspiration towards the space in general. 

Here is that most impressive shade of beige I was telling you about...

Things finally came together though and we found inspiration in our Peter Max paintings to finally take the plunge and paint...

WITH PURPLE

 TWO DIFFERENT SHADES OF PURPLE!

We kicked around some ideas for the stairwell/hallway area (grey maybe? what do you think of peach?) and even tried some different paint samples. Nothing clicked though until we thought about what we would be hanging on the walls. 

A couple years ago Collison and I went on a cruise through the Caribbean on Norwegian Cruise Line and we acquired these Peter Max paintings/lithographs. There were tons of events planned on board the ship that passengers could attend while at sea but, one of the coolest events for me was the fine art auctions they had in their art gallery several times throughout the week. They would talk about the life of the artists that had work being auctioned off and share interesting information/stories about the individual pieces and the time in which they were created. Going to the art auctions was like attending fancy art history lectures with complimentary champagne so YEAH, I thought it was pretty cool!

After each event at the art gallery they would give everyone who bothered to stay for the whole thing some raffle tickets for a grand prize at the end of the week. We made it to every art gallery related event and I won't lie, a lot of that had to do with the complimentary champagne. What can I say? We LOVE champagne! 

When the grand prize drawing was held at the end of the week one of our tickets was drawn. We won a set trio of Peter Max acrylic paintings and color lithography on paper. It was quite exciting. After winning we had to pay to have them framed in special glass to protect them from fading and UV exposure. Not cheap at all by the way but sooo worth it and they are framed fantastically. 

Here are some close-ups of the art. This first one is from his Woodstock series and was used in the stage design for Woodstock 99'. Of course no Woodstock could ever live up to or replace the original Woodstock (so I've been told) but very cool none the less. 

Here it is reppin' the 60's at the end of the 90's. Sweet, huh?

The next one is his most famous and iconic piece called Love. Remember this is not the original painting we have here. We have a lithograph of it that he painted on and added to. They would not just give us the original for free in a raffle prize after all!

And the last one and largest of the three is called Year 2250 on Blends

We were inspired by all the color in these works and thought the pieces would really pop on our walls if they were purple. By the way, if you've never heard of Peter Max look him up sometime. He is a famous, still living, pop artist and laid back, cool dude in general. 

Here is our upstairs hallway before we painted. Yup, it was a pigsty. So happy to share that with the world! yay! haha.

And here it is after painting. If you look closely you can see the wall displaying the Peter Max paintings is  painted a brighter shade of purple than the rest of the walls.  We went with a purplish/grey shade called Silver Frost by Pittsburgh Paints for the rest of the walls.

And yeah, that is a Sistine Chapel size portion of The Creation of Adam hanging above our stairs. lol. I wasn't crazy about it when we first got it but now it is one of my favorites among all our hand me downs! I'd love to see the painting in person some day. 

Anyway, that is what I was up to last week! I was so happy to take pictures so I could share them here and show you all what our stairwell is about now. lol

Til' next time folks :)