DIY Thank You Cards

With Thanksgiving being tomorrow, why don't you whip up some of these easy marbleized thank you cards and let someone know that you're thankful for them! They are so easy and fast and turn out GREAT!

I made about 200+ of these for church on Sunday. We passed them out to everyone with instructions to write to someone who has influenced your life in some way. Great idea for the week of Thanksgiving!

I got the idea from Alisa Burke with her tutorial on marbleizing for wrapping paper and ornaments. Check out her blog for instructions.

Supplies:

Paper (watercolor works best)

Spray paint

Rectangle-shaped bucket

water

Stamps (optional)

These photos are all from my iPhone so they aren't the best quality, but you get the picture.

Laying (or lying?) the pages out to dry in the garage. I got 8 cards out of a 12x18 sheet of paper

I used stamps from Michael's for the "thank you." They could be handwritten too, but when I was making 200+ that would have taken for-e-ver...

Happy Thanksgiving!

How to Get Color Run Powder Out of Your Hair

Beware blondes!

Color run powder/Holi powder will make you crazy when trying to wash it out of your hair! The pinks/yellows/reds aren't so bad--it's those blues and greens you've got to watch out for!

I did a lot of research before we had our colored powder photo session with Kelly a few weeks ago. Thank goodness for my sister-in-law, Jeana, who had mentioned the Color Run a few months back and how the powder stains blonde hair. I most likely wouldn't have even thought about it staining...but it does! Most of the research I did said to wear a hat to protect your hair if you are going to be around Holi Powder. Well, since I didn't want to wear a hat for our photos, I kept researching.  Here's what I came up with and did to protect my hair from being a lovely shade of faded blue and green.

The first thing I probably SHOULDN'T have done is gotten my hair highlighted that day. Oops. But I had the whole natural ombre/dark roots thing going on and I wasn't a fan. And as I've mentioned here before, I'm stubborn. I wanted my hair to look good in the pics and I would deal with the consequences later.

Also, the powder we used was the actual powder used in Holi Festival in India. It came from India! I think maybe that the Color Run powder is probably more...domestic than the stuff we used. Ha.

Pre-Color Powder:

There are two reasons I wore my hair up for our pictures

1) Hair up = less surface area to be stained

2) The research I had done said to put some sort of castor oil or coconut oil in your hair in order to prevent staining. This was supposed to coat your hair so it would wash out easily. I put coconut oil in my hair. I put my hair up because it looked really greasy with the oil in there if it wasn't up. Don't skip this step! Use coconut oil!

This was right after we got home from taking the pictures. About to start the process of washing out the blue and green. Yikes.

Post-Color Powder:

1) This is the worst part, but you have to rinse your hair with cold water. I just leaned over the tub and went for it. Burrrr.

2) First I rinsed out as much of the color as possible just by using water. Don't use any product on it yet. This got out a lot of the color. I had a huge blob of blue and green on the left side of my head that was refusing to rinse out. And so begins my frustration and panic.

3) I halved a lemon and squeezed all over the blue spots that were not rinsing out. The lemon didn't help AT ALL.

4) After the lemon, I used the shampoo for the first time. That wasn't helping either. 

5) Then I had Will sprinkle baking soda all over the stained spots and then pour vinegar on it. He was having way too much fun with this part. He kept saying he felt like he was making a volcano science project. And it FELT like a fizzing volcano on my head too! This process didn't work. Boo.

6) At this point I got in the shower and just started washing my hair with whatever shampoos I had. I was really getting nervous. Mane 'n Tail shampoo seemed to help the best out of all the shampoos I tried. Still didn't get it all out though.

7) Ok, this is when I broke out the big guns. When I said the cold water was the worst part, I lied. This is the worst. Ketchup. Yes, like Heinz Ketchup. I had read that this or tomato paste would help. I globbed it all over my blue stained hair and it got out a ton of the color. Besides almost gagging several times, I was pretty thankful for that ketchup.

I still had blue in my hair, but I decided to give it a rest for the night.

By Sunday morning and another round of Ketchup treatment, my hair still looked like this. Oh, boy. Luckily I could part my hair on the other side and cover it up for church.

Sunday night, I used Ajax and baking soda. That's what got the rest of the color out. And luckily, it smelled much better than ketchup. My last resort was going to be mayonnaise. GAG. So glad I didn't have to do that. 

All in all, I am still so glad we took those photos. The fun we had canceled out the stress of washing out the color stain. However, after washing my hair so many times, it really dulled down my freshly done color. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. 

Good luck! Hope these tips help you!

WILW

This past week has flown by! I feel like I just wrote last week's WILW post! 

Here it goes again! I'm loving a lot of things this week!

I really love these splash dyed shirts! They are for sale here on Etsy, but they cost muchhh more than I would want to pay so I NEED to figure out how to DIY. Looks like dye and bleach?  What do you think?

I love these bracelets. I'm been a little DIY jewelry obsessed lately and I'm sure I'll be making these soon!

Call me grandma, but I love this quilt tutorial and blanket. I need to learn to quilt and crochet/knit!

Another tank I love on Etsy! Will and I listened to Old Crow Medicine Show in honor of "loving" this shirt!

I love these accessories from Fossil. The studs are adorable and the bracelet is rose gold...need I say more?!

LOVE LOVE LOVE the Olympics! Will and I don't have cable (and never miss it), but I'm definitely missing not having the NBC Sports channel for constant Olympics coverage!

I've loved watching the U.S. Women's Soccer team! Makes me miss playing! I don't know who I'll be rooting for if they end up playing Brasil!

Who hasn't loved watching the Phelps & Lochte swimming showdown?!

I lovvvvve my new tattoo I got last week! I had been thinking of getting this verse for a few years and FINALLY went through with it! The verse is in memory of my great-grandmother, Mamaw, who I miss so much. She'd probably have a cow if she saw this tat though! All of the women in my family are such amazing women of God so I guess in a way this verse is for all of them. It's a reminder to me of the woman and wife that I need to be. The feather design is something I saw online and instantly loved. I gave it to the tattoo artist, Lawrence Pennington at No Regrets, and told him to redesign it a little just so it wasn't exactly like the one online. I think it turned out amazing!

"Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all."

Proverbs 31:29

Cody got a tattoo also! He's wanted one for a while too, but because of some Army rules, etc. he couldn't get one after getting sworn in and before going to Basic. His is a silhouette of Army soldiers with a verse on the bottom. His turned out good too!

"for the battle is not ours, but the Lord's"

2 Chronicles 20:15

So there you have it! What I'm Loving Wednesday! Hope the first half of your week has been great!

Old Door Turned Coffee Table

WARNING: This is a long post!

One of my best friends, Brooke ("Bennett") asked Will & I at the beginning of the year if we would convert an old door into a coffee table for her. We (obviously) said yes! We had never done this before but figured it couldn't be that hard. I mean, you've pretty much just have to slap some legs on it, right? Well, it ended up being more complicated than that and took much, much longer to complete than we had thought, but I think that the final product turned out great! First, we had to find a door. I know from being an antique store-aholic that I had seen old doors selling from about the $175 and up price range. Luckily, Bennett had another option. Her husband owns a property management company and he just happened to have some old doors lying around at his office. What's even cooler is that his office is on historic Broad Ave. in Memphis and the door that Bennett ended up picking out was the original door from his office building. So it was pretty old! Will did pretty much all of the hard work. I helped paint and re-did the fixtures, but Will worked so hard on it! Unfortunately we totally forgot to take a picture of the door before we started on it, but you can pretty much understand what an old door looks like. 

After finding the perfect door, Will ended up cutting off about 2 feet from the bottom. It was a really tall door and that part ended up being rotten wood anyway so it worked out. That way we were able to make the door even on all sides. Below is the first photo of the door that we took. This was after Will had sanded off a bunch of old, white paint. This took a pretty good while to do in order to get down to the original wood surface. We ended up not even sanding the bottom because you weren't going to see it anyway. We weren't going to paint the bottom either, but it turned out that you could see some of the bottom's white paint from the top windows. Another aspect that ended up being the most frustrating thing was trying to get all of the windows clean! It gets me frustrated just thinking about it!! It was so hard to scrape off all of that old paint from the windows.

Front of the door-after sanding

Bottom of the door-pretty much exactly what the front looked like!

After Will had done a lottttt of scraping on the windows

This is the paint we used. I probably wouldn't use it again if I had the option. It was some kind of Gel-Flow technology that I wasn't a fan of. 

Painting over the old paint on the bottom!

Working hard!

After spraying the door fixtures with primer--Forgot to take a Before photo of those as well. They were all yucky old brass.

After putting the legs on and in the process of painting the top.

Finished product!!

We ended up using cedar 4x4's for the legs and support beams. All we did was put 3 coats of Polycrylic on them so they will hold their color. I think it turned out great!

The knocker! After they were primed I used Antique Brass spray paint

My favorite!

 

Here it is in Bennett's living room!

This is a photo she sent me a few days after we dropped it off! 

So what do you think?!