Speaking of fireplaces...

If you have been reading a while and you are super observant, you may have noticed that our fireplace has changed quite a bit.

I'm sure exactly zero people know what I am talking about.

In the background of one of our Halloween posts, you can see that our fireplace used to look like this...

Actually, it used to look worse than this because it had a giant brass glass door that I ripped out the first day we moved in. Let's zoom in on the weird mosaic broken tile.

I saw these tiles at Costco and thought they were beautiful.
I had ideas, but I couldn't physically execute them.

Enter our hero! Steve! He knows how to do EVERYTHING and does it all perfectly. I should start a little thing, "Stuff in our house that Steve has made awesome." Catchy, no?

We laid out the tiles on the floor and came up with a pattern that looked nice with the color variations.

And now, it looks like this!!

See how much nicer the floor tiles are? He made a new little molding threshold and everything.

Isn't it pretty?

Nail and String = Love

Wedding season is starting, and kicked off this weekend with a lovely bridal shower for my dear friend.

Here is the present I made for her. She lives in San Francisco in case you were confused. 

First I bought a piece of scrap wood and carpet tacks.

I liked the size, color, and shape irregularity of carpet tacks. You can use any nail with wide head, but keep the depth of the board in mind when selecting nail length.

Then  I printed an outline of California and placed a heart sticker I had where San Francisco is. I nailed down the corners of the state to keep the paper in place and to make sure we got nails in place at key points for the shape of the state. 

Then we just nailed right through the paper on the outline all the way around. And by "we" I mean Yannos. 

 

 

After the nail outline was done, I ripped the paper off and started weaving the thread. I just went from the outline nail to the closest heart nail all the way around. 

Then I used a different color thread to crisscross willy-nilly inside the heart.

 

Presto change-o! Nails and string = lovely art present.

Greeting card notebook

First off... 

HAPPY MARDI GRAS!  

Sadly, we are not in New Orleans right now. I've missed about 5 since I was born, and when I'm not there, I get really sad. I eat Popeyes and listen to Mardi Gras Mambo. Make king cake and watch the parade web-cam. Maybe this dog we saw last year at Lundi Gras will cheer me up.

Nope, he looks as sad as I am.

Ok folks, now that I'm done crying, let's move on. A picture of a wedding card book from something turquoise has been floating around Pinterest (follow me for loads of fun).

The picture doesn't seem to link to the project. So I just made one of my own. Here we go...