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.

Harry Potter Laundry Art

We’re pretty passionate about Harry Potter in our house. Insult our grandmothers, by all means, but don’t call Hermione a Mudblood. I’d been trying to come up with something to brighten up the laundry for months – frankly, hanging up a sign along the lines of ‘Wash, Dry, Repeat’ seemed more like a cruel taunt than cheerful wall art. I was deliriously excited when the idea dawned on me, and texted a friend immediately.

ME: It’s not weird to hang your used socks on the wall and call it art, is it?

HELEN: Yes.

However, my approach to criticism is pretty much the same as it is to measurements: I find out it’s not going to fit, and I do it anyway.

To build the frame I followed the same process as I did for the e.e.cummings wall hanging. (Afterwards I realised that I’d been sawing, drilling and hammering outside close to midnight, and if my neighbours had had a voodoo doll handy no doubt I’d be dead or at least severely maimed right now.)

I laid the sheet over the frame and taped out where the edges were, then took it back off and arranged the socks in a vague sort of order so I knew where my letters needed to go. If you’re confident, it’d be quicker to do it with the material already stapled, but I’d already spent hours removing staples from my craft chest until my fingers sobbed for mercy, so I wasn’t taking any chances.

For the stamps, I bought a packet of those foam letters from Chickenfeed and glued them onto cardboard backing so I’d have something to press them down with. In hindsight, this was a mistake, since once you’re finished stamping you have to wash the paint off. Cardboard, like cats, does not enjoy being bathed. A better idea would be some sort of thin plastic, or springing for actual stamps, you cheap bastard.

To figure out vaguely how many words I’d need to fit in per line, I measured how tall the letters were and divided it into the total length of the frame minus the socks. Once I knew I had four lines, I counted up the number of characters in the words (since some words are longer than others) and divided them roughly evenly. (See, high school maths was useful for something after all. Well, primary school maths, anyway.)

                            

Once the paint was dry, I safety pinned the socks on, and lost several fingernails and a good chunk of sanity to the cause. Plus, two months later I’m still stepping on safety pins bent like Twisties that I cast aside in rage. It depends how thick the material is as to how easily they’ll pin, but a decent roll of duct tape will do the job just as well.

Please note that washing the socks first is not essential, but may be advisable. What are you, some kind of greasy Slytherin?

Plate Proverbs

Everybody who’s ever watched Play School knows that it’s important to have a theme, and plates and kitchens go together like, well, plates and kitchens. I’ve seen some amazing plate wall arrangements, but I wanted mine to make a more literal statement. They glare down from their lofty perch, warning of the dire consequences to come if you eat that third piece of sticky toffee pudding with cream on top.

                                                                                      

I tried writing on them with a porcelain marker, but it didn’t ‘pop’ enough, so I went to Plan B (sadly, Plan B became a recurring theme of this project). If I had the patience of Job and a spare decade or two, I would have cut the letters out individually, but since I have neither I hacked them into strips and glued the whole thing on with Mod Podge.

Using the tutorial for hanging with paperclips from In My Own Style, I tried roughing the gluing-spot up with sandpaper as advised, but they resolutely refused to oblige, perhaps because they were imported from the tip shop rather than from China. I went ahead and smothered them with hot glue anyway, and hung them on the wall. Whether it was the type of glue or the type of plates I don’t know, but they lasted even less long than Francis Michael Forde did in office – one night, in fact, and they went down fighting.

All I can say is that my first reaction was not “Oh, bliss, what a terribly exciting opportunity to learn how to replace a tile”.

But now that they had smashed up my kitchen, I was even more determined to have something to show for it, so I found a different tutorial from Attempting to Be Domestic for hanging plates, with wire this time. I tried it with a clothes hanger just because they’re cheap, but as I am neither the Incredible Hulk nor a rampant steroid abuser, it didn’t work. It was vastly more successful with 18-gauge wire, but I must have been doing something backwards, because for the plates to hang properly my frames had to be upside down. I blame it on being left-handed.

And yes, one of the plates is hanging from a panda bear suction cap, since that was all I had. Don’t judge me.

Pot Rack

Our kitchen cupboards would make Martha Stewart weep tears of despair. Hell, they’d make Ozzy Osbourne weep tears of despair. They were like one of those cartoons where the kid’s mother opens his bedroom closet and an avalanche of toys come flooding out. I really wanted one of those old-bed-frame-hanging-from-the-ceiling pot racks, but given our real estate agent’s strong feelings about Blu-tac, I suspect she wouldn’t be handing out lollipops for hooks in the ceiling. I went to the tip shop with $5 in my pocket, and as usual it obliged.

I didn’t bother taking a proper ‘before’ photo, since I was fairly certain there’d be nothing that would warrant an ‘after’ photo anyway.

This is why I don’t measure things: because even when I do, I still get it home and discover it’s THREE CENTIMETRES TOO WIDE. We ended up tearing the entire thing apart with a crowbar and a very large hammer, sawing a few centimetres off the shelves and rebuilding it, which also allowed me to pick the heights of the shelves to suit the implements. 

The advantage of having torn the side off was having extra bits of wood, so I measured and sawed them to the length between two of the shelves and nailed them in as cooking-tray dividers. I placed the cup hooks through the technical method of holding the pot approximately where I wanted it, marking the spot with pencil and screwing the hook in. I also put three on the side facing the oven so I wouldn't have to wrestle with the drawers every time I wanted a spatula, which often literally do not open because they're so crammed with every half-melted kitchen implement my mother no longer wanted.

The pot lids are sitting in some kind of plate drainer, but balancing them in there is like playing a particularly delicate game of Jenga, so eventually I’ll have to find something wider. The back of the rack has no bracing: it’s sandwiched in so tightly it doesn’t matter, but if it was standing alone, it’d crumble like a nail-studded pack of cards.

The first time we dragged it into the kitchen, we discovered that we couldn’t actually open the kitchen cupboard to the left of it. I cheerfully declared that we could drink from Tupperware containers from now on, but Lawrence suspected my housemates wouldn’t share the sentiment, so we dragged it back out and hacked off most of the uprights of the top left shelf. The part that remains used to hold our mixing bowl, back in the happy days when we actually had one.

Martha Stewart can now redirect her wrath to the hideous 1950s browny-yellow shagpile carpet in the living room.

TARDIS Tissue Box

For the weeks leading up to the anniversary of my aunt’s death, I was miserable and wishing I’d told her I loved her while I had the chance. I needed a distraction, and it seemed like the appropriate way to honour her would be to pick ten people and make them gifts or cards or ridiculous acrostic poems covered in glittery confetti. This was meant to be Lyndon’s Christmas present before I got bored and decided to watch Big Bang Theory instead, so I already had all the materials and had found a tutorial from g33k, which I then proceeded to sort of follow.

 I don’t know why I always photograph Lyndon’s presents outside. His room isn’t hopelessly untidy, I promise.

I made it to the actual dimensions of the tissue box rather than square (which I suppose means Lyndon is stuck with the same brand of tissues for the rest of his life, or until this thing falls apart in a month or two). I was concerned that it would get saggy and wrinkly if there was excess material on the sides, but it also meant that I had to change the size of the windows and the squares, so pick your poison.

                                                                                            

It didn’t occur to me until afterwards that I could have done the letters a lot more neatly if I’d chalked them on the material and stitched the outline. But given that the chalk was in the next room and my bed was warm, I probably wouldn’t have bothered anyway.

The only thing I significantly changed was the top. I tried sewing two pieces of material together and stuffing it with wadding, and it was epic, epic fail. It looked like the TARDIS had taken up reading Cleo and discovered that berets are trendy this season. I ended up cutting four small strips of cardboard and gluing them together in a square then gluing a flat piece on top and wrapping the material around it. I ran a bead of hot glue around the inside of the cardboard strips to attach it to the rest of the cozy.

(Of course, the first thing Lyndon did was pick it up by the top, and I had to confess that that really wasn’t a good idea.)

Don’t think you can skip the lining because it’s on the inside anyway and nobody’s going to see it. Know what happens when you wriggle a hard-cornered tissue box in and out? It eats all those vulnerable exposed threads for breakfast. Also, don’t use a bent piece of cardboard for the base just because you’re lazy and Lyndon is coming home soon. Just don’t.

When I got up, I found Lyndon had slipped me this note under my door as a thank you.

It's on my project list.

Fabric Wallpaper (Is Better Than Sliced Bread)

 That door was kind of like having an enormous dog turd hanging out in the corner of your bedroom. It had to go.

I used the impeccable tutorial from How About Orange, but since my cooking skills are such that I literally cannot boil water unless I’m using an electric jug, I had trouble with the paste-making aspect. I stirred and stirred and boiled and stirred and boiled some more, but it just wouldn’t thicken. After three sing-throughs of the fire-burn-and-cauldron-bubble song, I got bored and took it off the heat, and within a couple of minutes it was as thick as Homer Simpson. It was also lumpier than the three-week old milk I found in the fridge the other day, but that was fine – as you smooth down the fabric, the lumps squish away.

I didn’t brush the paste on the entire door before I started since it does dry and I work slower than an arthritic tortoise, but it is easy to add more, and you definitely won’t be short of it. I kept the excess in the fridge for the next couple of days in case any touch-ups were needed, but it stuck on perfectly. I don’t trust my measuring skills, so I cut the fabric slightly bigger than necessary. Once it was glued I cut off the excess by running a razor blade along the edge, which ensured it was a perfect fit. 

In a tragic turn of events, it poured like the apocalypse was coming a few weeks ago, and the moisture soaked up the first twenty centimetres of the material at the bottom of the door, leaving an unsightly stain. My suggestions are:

1. Don’t do it on an outside door.

2. If you do it on an outside door, cut the edge off along the bottom of the door, don’t tuck it underneath flat against the floor.

I loved it so much that the first night, I went to bed with my light on so I could look at it until I fell asleep, power bill be damned. In fact, I loved it so much that I repeated it with the paint-scratched rusting laundry cupboard as a well-it-can’t-get-any-worse experiment. It sticks just as well on metal as it does on wood.

e.e. cummings is rolling in his grave

I no longer want to scratch my retinas out when I look at it, so I suppose that’s progress.

The enormous blank wall in the dining room drove me crazy, especially since the room itself has no interesting furniture, but we had nothing to hang. We’re uni students. The closest we come to wall art is flow charts on the constitutional status of the industrial relations power. So there were two main mission targets: make something big, and make it cheap. Alisa Burke’s tutorial on creating large paintings full of text was perfect, and coincidentally used the same poem I had in mind.

I started by measuring the wall to decide how big to build the frame for my ‘canvas’ – I decided on 2 x 1 metres. I built the frame out of radiata pine (not ‘radiator’ pine, everybody knows that…thank you, Google). It has two delightful attributes:

1. It’s light, so it hangs easily, and;

2. It’s about 80 cents a metre, so you could build the Great Wall of China out of it and still have money left over for lunch.

The first step is, obviously, measuring and sawing the wood to size (remember to subtract the width of the top and bottom pieces when you’re measuring the side pieces).

This photo serves no useful purpose, and I’m not actually sure why Lawrence took it. Was he staggered by my ability to hold a measuring tape and a pencil in the same hand?

I then drilled two holes about three-quarters the length of the nail (which was 10 cm), right through the top piece and partly into the side piece. It’s okay if it’s a little bigger than the nail: that last quarter you hammer in is the bit that holds it in. Don’t place the hole too close to the edge of the wood, or it’ll split and you’ll have to make the Walk of Shame back into the hardware store. I didn’t actually take a photo at the time, but this is the x-ray version of the finished product.

Repeat three times, once for each corner. I also added a piece of wood down the middle, since otherwise the middle of the material would sag. One advantage of this type of frame is that you don’t have to add picture hangers: you can just rest the edge of the top piece of wood on top of the wall hooks, provided you don’t live with people prone to kicking walls in frustration.

I’d bought a king size bed sheet from the tip shop for a dollar, so the total cost of the project was less than ten dollars. Stapling the material on is mostly easy, as long as you start with a couple of staples on each side before stapling along the whole length. But the corners are my Kryptonite. I hate it when tutorials say to staple the corners like you’re wrapping a present, because I wrap a present by putting it in a gift bag. The method I eventually came up with was something like this:

I didn’t wash the sheet before I used it, of course, since there was no way I could wait another day. I’ve given up on telling people not to stand too close or sniff it, since the friendly advice invariably gets me strange, slightly disgusted looks. And, well, anybody who goes around sniffing other people’s wall hangings probably deserves whatever they get.

My biggest mistake was painting it freehand: it’s such a personal poem that it felt too mass-market made in China to stencil it. The problem is that I have incredibly unattractive handwriting, and nobody told me that it wasn’t going to become pretty cursive script just because I was using a paintbrush and not a pencil. The frame wasn’t long enough and was too wide, because instead of sizing it according to what I was painting, I sized it according to HIDE BORING WALL PAINT.

Maybe it looks better from a distance.

 

Nope.

Lyndon convinced me not to take it down: he said “Not everything has to be perfect, Rach”, and I suppose he might be right. However, if anyone asks where it came from, I fully intend to lie and tell them that Lyndon did it.