Australian Flag Washing Machine

At one point, I was getting so carried away with artistic fervour that I was basically painting everything that stood still long enough. (Though not quite to the extent of my former housemate James – I woke up one morning to find a live mouse in the humane trap in the kitchen, with a note taped to it saying “Do not release – gone to buy paint”. But I digress.)

It started life as just plain blue, but if you’re going to paint your washing machine, you have to go all out, you know? No point going to Woodstock but not getting stoned and dancing naked on a table. And, well, for someone who wears fluoro green and gold shoes, nothing is too patriotic.

                                                                             

My first stop was the Union Jack. I blew the dust off my measuring tape and figured out the dimensions of the machine lid, then found an image online, pasted it into a Publisher document and sized it to the same dimensions as the lid. That told me how wide the stripes needed to be, so I chalked them out and then masking taped the edges of the lines.

Pretend this photo is of the tape for the white, not the red. You get the idea. 

It’s easier to paint half on top of the tape, because if you’re running the brush along the edges then the paint is more likely to work its way underneath.

While I painted, instead of singing along with my Banjo Party record like I usually do while crafting, I had a chat with my conscience that went something like this:

INNER VOICE: So, hey, remember that time in second year when you failed your open book exam because you watched movies all night and showed up on no sleep with no notes?

ME: Yeah, so?

INNER VOICE: You have an open book exam in two days, Rach. Have you written any notes yet?

ME: ….What’s your point exactly?

INNER VOICE: Oy vey.

After more layers of paint than the Golden Gate Bridge, I repeated the measure-tape-paint process with the red stripes. (I found them harder to measure on the computer since they’re slanted, so I printed them and went old-school ruler on them.)

Embarrassingly, the process for the stars was much the same: measuring the front of the washing machine, sizing the Southern Cross and printing the stars individually. If I’d tried to paint them freehand they would have come out looking more like white-capped waves, so I stuck the print-outs on poster board and cut them out with a Stanley knife to make a stencil. 

In hindsight, I would have moved all the stars up a few centimetres, because even though they’re perfectly even, you can only really tell that they’re even when you’re sitting on the ground. I don’t spend much time on the floor of my laundry room, especially since nobody’s vacuumed in there since we moved in.

Now my only problem is how to hide it when Nan comes to visit. Suggestions?

Extension Cord Tree

You know something is wrong when you tell your friends “sorry, I can’t, I’m decorating my extension cord tonight” and they say “oh, okay” without looking even mildly disconcerted.

The weird outdoor powerpoint in the roof finally got its chance to shine.

I plugged the end in and propped the power board against a brick so that the cord hung in midair and I could paint the whole thing at once - plus it had the benefit of being outside. (I was going to say that if I breathe in any more paint fumes while painting indoors I’ll go loco, but, um. I’m painting an extension cord.) Once it dried, I put a couple of cord hooks on the wall and snapped it in so it dangled in a vaguely tree-like shape.

I was originally going to print and stick paper leaves on it, but that seemed a little ‘who let a class of six year olds loose in your bedroom?’. Then I remembered the pillow I made Zoe for Elli Day.

I cut out another pile of fabric leaves and doused them with fabric stiffener, then snipped off a bunch of ten centimetre sticks of twenty-gauge wire and Mod Podged them to the leaves. From there, all I had to do was wind the end of the wire around the cord and bend the ‘stem’ until I liked the angle. 

 My favourite is the little owl hanging out on the knothole of the tree, though.

I suppose the advantage of never buying anything new is that hey, everything matches!

Now I only have to come up with seven more projects using leaves to finally get rid of that weird material with exasperated-looking angels on it.

Poky Little Puppy Letterbox

When Zoe came home from the tip shop with a dingy brown letterbox and I asked her if I could spruce it up a little, she regarded me long-sufferingly. “Sure, Rach,” she said, and went off to post WANTED: UNARTISTIC HOUSEMATES advertisements online. So, with the public dignity and reputation of our entire household on the line, I chose to decorate it with…the Poky Little Puppy. 

                                                                                  

Here was my reasoning:

1. I’ve always wanted of those Golden Book birdhouses.
2. A letterbox is shaped kind of like a birdhouse.

 And, well, that pretty much sums it up.

I started by spray-painting it red, which was fairly unnecessary given that I then proceeded to cover it with paper. (Open Golden Book to the middle, lift staples, stab finger with sharp edge of staples, find Bandaids, tear off paper along the binding, find the flat edge of the staples and extract them with fingernails or small flathead screwdriver, remove pages.)

Any kindergartner will tell you that Mod Podging is easy. Once you’ve figured out the placement of the elements of your artistic masterpiece and cut the pages down to size, glop some glue on and start sticking. If you like it straight then line up the top edge and work your way down, smoothing out air bubbles as you go, or if you’re of the bags of character school of thought, just stick and hope it’s not upside down. When I’m gluing large sections, I tend to Mod Podge the object rather than the paper, since you can get the glue right to the edges without also getting it all over the table you eat off – but that’s just my preference. 

Once the glue had dried, or at least stopped oozing out the edges, I sprayed it with two coats of Arbee Crystal Clear Handcraft Spray Varnish to prevent the ink bleeding, then painted it with four coats of polyurethane. It’s survived miserable winter, my handyman skills and obnoxious friends leaving beer bottles inside it, so it’s safe to say that this stuff creates armour like a tank.

I was about to nail it to the post when Lawrence pointed out that the opening lines of the Poky Little Puppy probably wouldn’t help the mailman figure out which house he was delivering to, unless the letters were addressed to the local Lunatic Asylum. Two wooden numbers from Spotlight, more spraypaint and some superglue later, it was ready for the grand erection.

Don’t try to bang nails into a letterbox – the angle is all wrong, it won’t work and random men walking past will point out that you’re not hitting it hard enough, little lady, not seeming to realize that YOU’RE HOLDING A GIANT HAMMER. Use a drill instead. It’s easier, and you get automatic cool points because it’s a power tool.

It’s totally meant to be crooked, by the way. It’s a post-modernist comment on individualised methods of viewing the world.

                                                  

…Yeah.