Epic Fail

Just so you know, I hate the phrase 'epic fail.' But I feel like it accurately describes my attempt at crafting tonight. So I busted it out for this one occasion.

I decided to decorate my kitchen in more cheerful colors. It's been a challenge for me since I normally use dark red, black, brown, cream... you know, those normal colors. I've been loving teal lately so I went for it. I'm also using red and yellow. Klay keeps telling me he doesn't want it to look like a circus. Oh ye of little faith! I've been shopping at Savers and Goodwill like crazy. There are so many great thrift and consignment stores here! I buy whatever catches my eye and throw a good coat of spray paint on it to make it work. After all, it's usually less than 5 bucks. Can't go wrong with that. Well, tonight didn't go over so well.

I have a quote that I love in my kitchen, "Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have." I'll admit, I need that reminder every once in a while. It no longer matches with the new decor so I decided to make a new one. I thought it would be super easy to make a stencil using my Cricut. That way I could sand it down a bit and it wouldn't be quite so... vinyly. Yeah, I suck.

(I've tried uploading this picture FIVE times and it keeps coming up sideways. It's staying that way folks.)

I didn't cover up a tiny little strip of the board so now I have to flip it over, paint the back, recut the word, respray paint it (being more careful to cover the entire thing), and then finish it up.

I found this amazing wooden tray for 5 bucks! I love how it turned out after a little paint and some white glaze. This time I decided to use craft paint for the letters so I didn't get spray paint all over the place. It was going great until I pulled the vinyl off. Hmmm...

I suck again. So then I started crying on the chair.

Just kidding. For some weird reason, right after I pulled the stencil off I got this intense stomach ache. I told Klay I was getting an ulcer from all these projects gone wrong. I was sitting on our rocking chair and asked Klay to take a picture of the tray in all it's ugliness. For some reason he decided to take a picture of me curled up in pain.

But wait, it gets worse. I tried to sand the letters on the tray and thought I had done a great job. I went to my shop (aka: the garage that no longer fits either of our cars from so many projects taking over) and sprayed away. It's almost like the new paint got under the old paint and started making it bubble up.

At that point, I knew I had reached my craft disaster limit and stopped for the night.

To make myself feel better, I took some pictures of some projects that actually turned out to post. I covered these plates with fabric and love how they turned out.

I also found this little thing at Savers. It was super ugly black and red with sick white knobs. Paint, glaze, and 50% off knobs from Hobby Lobby did the trick! Now it has a new home above the pantry. (That's an awful picture! Bad lighting and a bad angle. I promise the knobs really are cute. But I'm writing this in bed and I'm not getting up to take a new one. So that's what you get.)

Ok, that was really long. I'm going to bed. Maybe I'll try to fix all my craft crap in the morning. We'll see how it goes.

*And a little shout out to Kari, the grammar queen. This post is FULL of bad sentence structure. I thought of you as I was proof-reading it and thought it was funny and I would think of you cringing at all the bad grammar. I'm not fixing it. Come to think of it, I know you like posts with more pictures, less words. So maybe you won't even get this far. We'll see...*