I think I'm going to have to declare this a garden oops

Planting a Mexican Orange here seemed like such a good idea. It's evergreen, pretty, and full of good-smelling flowers. But sadly, the color is all wrong for this area.

Screaming yellow Choisya ternata 'Sundance' in late November

Neon yellow just isn't playing nicely with the rust and orange here. I need a small, evergreen shrub that will play nicely with this warm color palate. I'd love to put in a Fothergilla 'Mt. Airy' but it's deciduous. But look how pretty. So pretty!

Image yanked from here.

I kind of want to plant it anyway. But I need evergreen elements! Maybe another daphne? Or maybe an Osmanthus delavayi? I was hipped to it by Loree and made sure to pay attention to it when I visited the Chinese Garden with my parents. Or maybe I should finally give in to Oregon grape. This is the corner that we look at from our bed, so whatever goes here needs to be beautiful in every season.

The Choisya is going to move to the other side of the yard where it will get morning sun and a reprieve from the hottest part of the day. This supposedly leaves them less screaming yellow. And you know what? I KNEW that it would turn that color in full sun and I planted it anyway, thinking that it would magically behave differently. Like if I loved it enough it would just caramelize or something? It's this same kind of thinking that makes me plant all of my shrubs too closely together.

And I think the Lonicera nitida 'Baggensen's Gold' is gonna have to go somewhere else, too. It's just not the right color even though it's going to be a pretty little shrub.

One of you knows the perfect plant to put here. Come on, give it up already. Lend a fledgling gardener a hand.

Happy new year to ME!

My hellebores are blooming! Oh happy day!

And then this happened. I'm assuming these are hyacinths that I planted last fall.

Though I'm kind of wondering where the rest of them are . . . it looks sort of dumb to have two random bulbs in a sea of brown.

And my daphne is forming buds!

Is it time to start gardening again? How about now?

2012 is going to be the year of little things

When I was looking for a house to buy my friends were knee deep in renovating their entire house. I was taking a tour of their kitchen remodel and my friend showed me how, three months later, they still hadn't glued on the countertop backsplash. He told me, "This would take me an hour tops but it's these little things that never get done when you own a fixer."

I swore I'd be different.

And yet, here I am, two years after I patched that mystery hole in the ceiling of my kitchen and I still haven't textured that spot or repainted the kitchen ceiling. My hallway vestibules still haven't been painted, even though it would probably take an hour to complete. My kitchen window sits unpainted, with forty different test colors ringing it. There a small hole in the baseboard of the bedroom that needs to be filled.

So this year I'm going to focus on the little things. I'm going to hang curtains. I'm going to look into toe boards (we have none in the house). I'm going to finally paint the kitchen door and the kitchen window and that spot above the door that never got painted for reasons I no longer remember.

And we have a couple of big things coming down the pike: we're going to replace the front picture window that is rotting and get the house painted. And I'm going to start landscaping the front yard, including another rain garden. I'm really excited.

Happy new year!

Why design matters

"What we crave in this life is an outer beauty that reflects the
gorgeous world inside us. I am speaking about the house within us.
What if the house inside you became the house you lived in? What if
you envisioned that your life could be just the way you imagine it?
Then you are en route to enlightened destiny, because each of us has
huge control over our lives. We don't always realize this because we
are, to a degree, defined by so many outside forces. But at the same
time, we do have the power to create our own environment--and our
environment, in turn, shapes us.

One of the strongest ingredients in keeping you who are you are, your
physical environment also keeps you in full awareness of where you
are. If you can find your way to live in the house within you, then
you not only create an enormous, broad, and lovely offering to
yourself, but also to your "pack"--your family and friends. You will
inspire anyone who has not yet been able to make this connection. Such
is the power of rooms."

--From The House Within by Bobby McAlpine.

Lots of pretty words like this and his architecture is freaking amazing.

Craft projects for homeowners

Do you own a house? Then you probably have a stash of wood scraps like this in your garage or your basement. I have a mountain of end pieces left over from when I put in the fences. Before they were just a fire hazard but now they are destined to be poorly executed crafts!

Have you seen this tutorial on Ready Made? You use gel medium to transfer a photo to a piece of wood. They are a little sparse on the details and you have to find the link to this video on YouTube that is buried in the comments.

Photo source: Ready Made

I found it a little tricky, so here's what worked for me. I did a couple of test runs using different photos, since I have a zillion pieces of wood in my garage. I went down to Kinko's because all the tutorials say that copies from an inkjet printer won't work; it has to be a laserjet image. I printed out copies of photos in both color and black and white onto standard printer paper.

You'll want your surface to be smooth. I used my hand sander to smooth the wood down, starting with 120 grit and moving up to 320 grit, except that first I started with 220 because I wasn't caffeinated. I couldn't get the deeper ridges out, despite an eternity of sanding. So yeah, go get a cup of coffee and start with the low-grit, dumbass. You could also do this with a sanding block. I didn't smooth the sides of all of the pieces because I'm an idiot. People don't like rough edges, so if you're giving these as a gift don't be so lazy.

Then you just paint on a thin coat of gel transfer using your brush (I used my trusty Purdy).

 

Then slap on the photos, and make sure there aren't any bubbles. I had some trouble with parts of images rubbing away and I initially thought that I hadn't painted on a thick enough layer of gel medium. Subsequent attempts were made with a thicker layer of gel medium, which looked terrible and didn't solve the problem. I think the key was curing time.

The Ready Made tutorial tells you to let it cure overnight but other places on the Internet say to wait 48-72 hours, and this really helps, though you will lose parts of your image. So just square your thinking away right now that this will look rustic.

Once it has cured you wet the paper on the wood block and start rubbing it away. Try to ignore how bad the grout on your kitchen counters looks.

You'll think you've gotten it all, only to let the block dry and find out that there's still so much paper left. If you don't remove it all your finished product will look like this, as if your friends' baby has sprouted white hair from her face. Not so good.

I thought I'd like black and white photos better but I definitely prefer using a color image. I used Instagram photos for that old-timey feel.

You could swear that you got all the paper last time but nope, you need to do more peeling.

Nope, you're not done. Keep peeling.

You can see that I'm losing small parts of the image. RUSTIC.

YOU HAVE GOT BE KIDDING ME.

Can you see what happens when you put down too much gel transfer?

So you're going to peeling a good long while. Toward the end I stopped soaking the entire image and instead put a drop of water on my finger and went after very small areas. This worked a lot better. I found that the longer I let the gel transfer cure, the easier the paper came up. Also? The harder the wood, the easier this part is. I had a scrap of 1 x 4 from Custom Cedar Products and the paper came up so much more easily than the pieces from Home Depot or Parr (whose boards are always flimsy in comparison).

Then let it dry completely and slap on a coat of Mod Podge.

Attach your hanger and call it good!

Now if I could do it all over again I would have stained a border around the images. I think that would have elevated the look of the project. There's probably a thousand different things you could do, especially if you were an art major and actually know how this stuff works. I'm going to keep playing with this idea, since I have eleventy million more pieces of cedar in the garage.

So, in summary:

1. Use the hardest board scraps you can find.
2. Start sanding with a low-grit sandpaper.
3. Use a thin layer of gel transfer and let it cure for 48-72 hours.
4. Be okay with the fact that it will take more than a few rounds to get the paper off, and you may lose bits of your image.

Also: keep in mind that your photo will be reversed when you transfer it, so if it features any kind of writing, you may want to reverse the image first in Photoshop so your project doesn't end up looking like this:

This was graffiti we found in Italy that looked so much like us our friends thought we painted it.

Yeah, pretty dumb.

In other life list news

   10. Successfully make a boule of bread (mine are always flat)

I think I'm going to cross "successfully baking a boule of bread" off the list. My new job allows me to work from home so I can do things like baking bread. Bread baking takes almost no effort but you have to periodically punch down dough in between rises. I throw the ingredients in the Kitchenaid mixer before I fire up my computer, then I punch down the dough while I'm making lunch. By the time I'm done with work the bread is ready to be thrown in the oven. I've been trying to make a loaf a week and I've been getting better and better at executing free-form loaves.

Behold:

This was a loaf of deli rye. This recipe is AWESOME.

And pumpernickel:

I've also attempted Jim Lahey's no-knead dough, which was incredible. Except for that time that I inexplicably effed it the hell up and the whole loaf was stuck in my pan. But that wasn't a boule!

Then I got on a roll and made pretzels and bread in loaf pans (I had no idea how these were rolled before this), and I've been making pasta from scratch, too. Basically, my house is a celiac's worst nightmare.

I guess I'm also trying to explain why I've gone up a pant size. It has nothing to do with Halloween candy or Thanksgiving or Christmas goodies. It is because of the 5 pound bags of flour that I go through so regularly. If you are bread challenged, as I was, I can't recommend Deb's recipes enough. She also has a write up of bread baking tips on Smitten Kitchen that are really helpful.

In my case what I needed to change was letting the dough proof longer, learning to properly slash the top and keeping a spray bottle of water to mist over the loaf during the first fifteen minutes of baking. Steam = a great crust and more expansion of your loaf. But I think really great recipes were really the key here. Learning to walk naturally in heels is going to be a LOT harder.

My SIL is a genius.

The boy's sister, who I will never stop pressuring to start a blog because she does stuff like this in her sleep, made us a chalkboard hanger for Christmas.

It's reversible!

I can't believe I showed a picture with a detail of how crappy the kitchen door looks. That's how much I love this.