Card

Woo-hoo!  My little brother and his sweet girlfriend are engaged!!  I'm so excited by their happy news, I broke out of my regular habit of sending a text to congratulate and actually made a card.  I was inspired for the design by one I saw on Etsy.

And because my hand writing is soooooooooooo bad, the envelope as well

My wall of photos

Renovating the spare bedroom took a turn out the door and into the hallway.  After I had finished painting all of the frames, my husband/consultant took one look at them and said they would look great in the hallway.  I decided to hang them all with 3M picture hangers, which ended up costing about $30, more than the frames, paints and pictures!
In the end, I decided that was totally worth it because I can take them down whenever I want and swap the picture over, and if I ever get sick of the navy (how could I? The color combos are endless!) then I can taken them down and paint them a totally different color!
Now I had ten more photo frames than before, I had to decide what to put in them.  I've made a little collage of my mum, included pictures of my grandparents when they were young, and put up some memories of our recent trip to Europe and the UK.  Still a couple more to fill, but nearly finished now!

Revamping the spare room

Our house is a 1960's shell that has been renovated to be all white with down lights in most rooms.  I love that it looks so clean, but lately I've been seeing what other people are doing, like my friend Alex on her blog "Hello from Tassie" and on Dwelling Gawker, which is similar to one of my favorite craft sites Craft Gawker.

So I decided it's time for a bit of color, and I've given myself a budget of $200, just to be a bit of a challenge as well. I have started a furniture project (but that's for another day when it's finished) and that has cost $25.  I moved some things around in my wardrobe, which is of course free until I find some more shelves to go in it.  And I pulled out some old photo frames and bought $8 more worth so I now have 10 frames in total.  Finally I bought three sample pots of paint for $28 dollars.  The brushes and cleaning supplies brings the grand total so far to about $70.

The paint I bought is snap-shot (navy), go alpha (jade) and meniscus (light grey).  I'm set on painting stripes, but I'll wait until I've tried a few things out before I go crazy on them.

This weekend I plan to paint all of the photo frames and decide what to put in them.  They look great so far.  Then I need to fill them with pictures of our families, and memories of things we have done as a couple.  I pulled out all the Europe mementos, program from Wicked and magazine from Port Arthur.  Such great memories.