Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit

This year, the bunniest of holidays (Easter) falls on the funniest of holidays (April Fool's Day), so first off... "rabbit rabbit rabbit!" Second, all the critters hanging around our place are getting in on the hijinx!


Rabbit Ramon would not stand for the other household t-rex getting all the giggles, so he insisted on his own set of custom bunny ears.

Looky! Dino scales in the ears! And a more color-accurate photo.

Rabbit Mavis is going for redundant ear-age.

I couldn't let it lie, so amped up the ridiculous with a pink nose and front teeth.

Rabbit Dale... er, uh... where did Dale get off to?

Springtime In The Rockies: Rabbit-based Decorations

jazz hands!

I've been focusing on trying to use up my rather... let's say "thorough"... stash of craft supplies. I've already completed a few rather intense sewing projects (not shown) with my cotton print fabrics, but what I feel compelled to share here are a couple of seasonal decorations I pulled together entirely from various supplies stashes over the St. Patrick's Day weekend.

First, Easter T-rex dares you to hunt Easter eggs.

Second, weird pile of bits arranged in a bleached & dyed bottle brush tree sprouting out of a rabbit head mug.

Third, I repaired this yarn doll rabbit that Betty roughed up once in a fit of separation anxiety... within hours of my finishing making it. Now that Betty has left this mortal coil, I guess it is safe to bring back Mr. E. Rabbit.

Before the "accident":

What was left:

Post surgery:

I added a hat to cover the sprung eyeball situation.

I couldn't face making new polymer clay eggs, then painting them. So one row of felt grass and one large egg from a box of wee bits & bobs I scored at the 50-mile Garage Sale last year.

With the doe rabbit the inspired the project in the first place, made my my grandmother.

Finally, this super cool jackalope ornament that was a birthday gift from one of my besties over at Fizzy Party!

He fits right in with the faux chocolate jackalope I made last year and Dale, our resident jackalope, but he doesn't fit quite right on the cabinet handle. I'm still on the search for just the right spot.

Take Cover, Chair!

Once I got going with all the other projects in the guest room, I decided I really didn't want to live with the 1980s dusty blue upholstery on this chair. The chair is perfectly serviceable otherwise and not without its charms, but the upholstery is just too not-right.

I don't have the skills to truly reupholster it and I'm committed to cheapskate-ing this guest room update project to the bitter end... hence, the quick-n-dirty slipcover.

I scoured the small selection of upholstery fabric at JoAnn which is the only place I know of to buy upholstery fabric around here and came up with this as the least offensive of the cheap options. Only later did I realize the herringbone texture echoes the the pattern on the window shade fabric which is also the fabric used on the back of the duvet set. So there!

That's right, in order to get enough fabric to make both window shades from the fabric I had already, I had to orient the herringbone sideways! What's the world coming to?

This just needed to be quick, easy, and done.*

Although I steam pressed that crease out most of the way, it's obviously still there. Hopefully it will just kind of diminish over time. As it faces the wall most of the time and is a clean crease rather than a messy wrinkle, I'm not going to worry about it.

I got to use some of these great buttons that were a gift from my friend, Tiffany, over at Fizzy Party.

On my last post - Loads of Fun Laundry Room - I added a Real ________ Room Situation photo at the end so I wanted to do that here, too. But first a reminder of the recent work I've completed in the guest room.

 And now for the Real Guest Room Situation (RGRS) ...

Apologies for the blurriness. One has to act quickly with photographing Delia as she doesn't have time for such nonsense and will take measures to avoid the camera.

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For this part of the guest room update project all I needed to purchase was 2 yards of fabric. 

    OUT OF POCKET COSTS:

      $  7.98 - clearance upholstery fabric
      

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*In the interest of full disclosure: I am not quick; I spent about five hours making this, not including sourcing materials. It wasn't hard-hard, but it did take some time planning in order to not waste materials or have a bunch of weird seams. I have no amendments to "done," because it is. Done, I mean.

A Loads of Fun Laundry Room

The next steps for updating the guest room and taking care of some other projects upstairs are kind of intimidating - they're just big and/or uncharted territory, not really difficult. So, I decided to do some other, simpler projects that I have had in mind & partly sourced for awhile... to decorate the laundry room. Well, it's really more of a glorified closet than a room. Now that I think about it, it's probably smaller than the master closet which is big, but not glamour-big.

I actually painted this room in the first couple of weeks of our moving in five-and-a-half years ago. It had been a sort of 1970s baby blue with hyperlink blue on the fuse box and washing machine outlet box. Why someone would want to call attention to those things is a mystery to me... especially if they're going to do a sloppy job of painting them. So I made sure to cover it with an equally distinctive, but more contemporary color that is more my jam before we got the washer and dryer in there. Sadly, I didn't have the time to replace these 1980s looking peel-and-stick vinyl floor tiles, but I do have a plan in mind when I feel up to disconnecting the water heater for a day and struggling with shoving around the stacked washer/dryer.

Oh, hey, look! There's also some probably-original, 1976, faux brick-ish, sheet vinyl under the water heater! Sigh.

I had picked up these vintage flash cards at various vintage markets over the last few years with intent to frame them using thrifted frames. But digging around in thrift store frame piles - and aren't they usually just horizontally oriented piles? - is something I find really easy to put off until next time... the next-time-that-never-comes, apparently. So I set out to look specifically one afternoon and luckily found three that were close enough at one shop and for under $8.

Not sure why I am so attracted to these things, but I am. Obviously, because I made these xmas decorations with some, too.

I'm still committed to trying to use up stash materials whenever possible and feel like what I got from my scrapbook paper stash worked pretty well to mount the flashcards on, both for colors and for sort of a fabric-inspired theme.

Here are the frames with the glass and "pictures" out, ready to be refinished. On the two oak ones I used the old pickling treatment and the black and "cherry" I used house primer and paint. Spray paint probably would've been faster, but I'm not a fan of how spray paint looks on oak and I already had these other materials on hand, anyway.

Once they were dry, I thoroughly cleaned the glass and got them all put together! 

The reason I chose white? I painted them all white to coordinate with... this laundry soap jug diorama! I had saved the pin that inspired it years ago and was able to make this whole diorama with materials in stash and on-hand.

The washer/dryer set is vintage Fisher Price Little People stuff... which I LOVE!

Most of this is "merely" assembled, but I did make the little clothes rack and the wee hangers on it. I'm trying to come up with just the right thing to sit on the shelf, but am considering this done-enough.

YAHOO! This is where we're at now; just a bit cheerier and a lot less plain. It will feel a little nicer to go in there now and it feels quite nice to have a couple long-simmering project complete.

And now for some REAL TRUTH! The photo below is closer to the Real Laundry Room Situation (RLRS)... at least the RLRS after a good cleaning and de-cluttering. The Real Real Laundry Room Situation (RRLRS) is TOO REAL for public viewing.