Category: just stuff.

Imagine my delight on Christmas Eve when I found this under the tree!

Well, it wasn’t quite ‘under’ the tree because it’s a little too big for that.  This guy is a bit over 3′ tall.  And seriously heavy.

My sister got it for me.  She saw it way back in August at the Grand Opening for Eye Candy ReFind, and she decided it would be the perfect Christmas gift for me.  How fab is that?  I’m so touched that she remembered it and went back for it later.

Of course, it needed a little ‘quandification’.

First of all, as I mentioned it was really, really heavy.  And the Q was mounted on some pretty unattractive plywood.  It was a no-brainer to start with removing that backing.  I thought this would be easy.  Ha, silly me!  It’s never easy, is it?  There were about a dozen screws holding the Q to the plywood and every single one of them was rusted tight.  After attempting to loosen them up myself and failing miserably, it was time to call in the professional, my handy neighbor Ken.

He started by attempting to drill out the screws from the back.  No dice, the drill wouldn’t stay on the screw.  Next he decided to just drill the plywood all the way around each screw.  Once he’d done that, we were able to pull the Q away from the plywood and then go back with a vice grips and remove all the screws.

Once I had the Q free from its backing I painted it with a base coat of Miss Mustard Seed’s Flow Blue.

I suspected I wouldn’t get much chipping.  I’m not really sure what kind of material the Q is made out of, but it’s not real wood.  It seems sort of like layers of hardi-backer board glued together.  Whatever it is, I had a feeling it would absorb the paint, and it did.

Once the Flow Blue was dry, I rubbed hemp oil into it wherever I wanted to get chipping after applying the final color which is MMS Linen.  I painted three coats of Linen, and then since I wanted lots and lots of chipping I got out my trusty blow dryer.  I have found that adding heat usually results in more chippyness.  Here is how that starts to look as you’re blow drying.

Once I lightly sanded, vacuumed off the chips and then added wax, the finish looked like this.

Initially I was going to stop here.  But the more I looked at my Q, the more I realized it needed just a tiny touch of something more.  Like maybe some stencils.

After I added a couple of stencils, I hung it in its new home in the Q Branch.

And I just love it!

After hanging it, I realized there were a couple of other small details that I needed to finish up in the Q Branch.  I’ve got those all pulled together and later this week I’ll share an update on those.  Check back on Wednesday as well for a fun announcement.

I was digging around out in the carriage house a few weeks back and came across a pair of abandoned table leaves that I forgot I had.

I believe they came off the table that I’m using for a desk in the Q Branch.

Obviously it was time to turn these into some signs!

I had already painted a base coat of blue on one of them using paint leftover from farmhouse dresser no. 5, so that gave me a head start on that one.  The second one got a base coat of Boxwood (dark green).  Once dry, I rubbed some hemp oil around the edges of both pieces and then added two coats of Miss Mustard Seed’s Linen.

I had a feeling I would get some great chipping on these since I had also gotten gorgeous chipping on the table-turned-desk that they came from.

And sure enough, much chippyness ensued.

The sign with the blue background chipped a bit more than the one with green, but they both got good and chippy.

Do you sometimes feel like your kitchen has a revolving door?  Is it nearly impossible to keep your pantry stocked?  Do your kids eat the groceries before you can even get them out of the shopping bag?

I don’t have any teenage boys in my house, but I have plenty of friends that do and they all tell the same story.  They can eat you out of house and home.  I was thinking of them when I decided to go with “24 hour grocery.”

I cobbled together four different stencils for the wording on the sign.  The “grocery” stencil is from Donna at Funky Junk, the “2” and “4” are from Maison de Stencils, and I cut the “hour” stencil myself on my Cricut.

You know, there are really a limited number of ways to take a photo of a flat sign!  I staged this one over my farmhouse table and filled the table with some typical pantry items.

I was wishing I could hang this in my own kitchen or pantry, but I just don’t have a wall large enough.  These signs are 42″ wide by 15″ tall.

How about you?  Do you have the perfect spot for one?  They are both for sale.  If you are local and can pick it up, leave me a comment if you’re interested in more details.

My sister and I visited the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory at Como Park last weekend to check out the Poinsettia display.

We happened to go on the one day of sunshine we were allotted for the month of December.  OK, maybe that’s a little bit of an exaggeration but we have had some dreary grey days of late.

There weren’t very many people there, except for that one lady who simply would not get out of my shot!

But the poinsettias were beautiful, and I loved those succulent balls (that sounds really wrong, especially on Christmas, but what would you call them?) that are floating above the water.

Here’s wishing you and yours a festive day with family and friends.  And if you aren’t one who celebrates Christmas, here’s wishing you a relaxing day watching old movies and eating take out Chinese food 😉

(see, I’m telling you, that lady was in every. single. shot.)

Merry Christmas!

For my birthday this year my sister gave me this book.

We were out shopping one day and I happened to see it and mention to her how much I would like to have it.  And then I believe I handed it to her and she put it in her shopping basket.  LOL.  Yet another benefit of having her live nearby!

She wrapped it up and gave it back to me on my birthday.

 I have quite a few chalkboards around my house.  I still love them.  I know some people consider them to be so ‘yesterday’ and they are over them.  Not me.  But my biggest problem is that I’ve never been happy with my attempts at making ‘chalkboard art’.  They have been pretty lame, to be quite honest.

Last Christmas I even resorted to ‘faking it’ on the chair chalkboard in my kitchen.

Which was a total failure when the double sided tape I used to attach the printed ‘chalkboard look’ art wouldn’t come off and I ended up having to repaint the chalkboard itself.

I also tried using Martha Stewart’s liquid chalk and a stencil, which was also pretty much a fail.

Now that I have the book, I’m determined to improve my chalkboard drawing skills.  I started really small with adding this little flourish underneath the ornament wreath on the chalkboard door in my Q Branch.

Don’t be fooled by the chalkboard design above the wreath.  I accomplished that by printing the design on paper, rubbing chalk on the back of the paper, placing the paper over my chalkboard and then going over the entire design with a pencil.  Thus transferring the design to my chalkboard door.  Then I went back over it with a white chalk pencil.  Rather time consuming and putzy, but it looks pretty cool.

But the design under the wreath is free hand and drawn using some of the hints from the book.

 I next moved on to the chalkboard in the kitchen.  I tried a couple of different lettering styles on this one with another free form flourish at the bottom.

Not too bad.  Still not gorgeous, which is what I’m aiming for, but OK.

So I’m going back to the old adage, practice makes perfect.  I need a lot more practice.  But luckily, as I mentioned, I have quite a few chalkboards to practice on.

My sister Debbie is quite serious about her holiday baking.

This is no small undertaking.  She bakes more than a dozen different kinds of cookies, plus various quick breads.  Then she also makes fudge.  The crazy part is that she did all of this back in New Jersey in a kitchen the size of a small walk in closet.  Seriously, I don’t know how she did it.  She has a much more suitable kitchen here in Minnesota and I know she is enjoying it!

She sets aside an entire weekend for her baking.  Since this is her first Christmas here it was also the first time I got to see the production first hand.  Her small dining table was piled high with supplies …

… nearly disguising my niece’s white tabletop Christmas tree.

Luckily Debbie’s new apartment has a good sized island which became the cookie cooling zone.

It was also the measuring zone.

I usually have to throw flour away at my house because it goes past the expiration date.  Yes, it’s true, flour has an expiration date.  I bet Debbie doesn’t even know that.  I believe she went through several jars of flour in one day.

For the first hour or two I was fairly useless as a ‘baking helper’.  My main job was to retrieve supplies from the table as needed.

Debbie did all of the complicated stuff, like rolling these Stained Glass Cookies into long rolls and then slicing them into cookies …

and spreading the dough out for Simple Sugar Cookies …

sprinkling them with colored sugar …

and then slicing them into delicious diamond shaped cookies once they were baked and slightly cooled …

I think these were my favorite cookie that we she made.  They had a faint almond flavor and were perfectly crisp.  Yum.

In addition to supply gathering, I was also given the task of crushing party mints which involved a hammer (since Debbie couldn’t find her rolling pin).  I’m pretty good with a hammer.  However, soon after my sister mixed up the Party Mint Cookies I found my niche.  Rolling balls.  Turns out, I’m good with balls.  Sometimes my balls got bigger than they were supposed to be and Debbie would admonish me to rein it in a little.

But just look at the Snicker Doodles that resulted from my mad ball rolling skill …

Once Debbie had observed my ball rolling talents, she had me rolling balls for the rest of the day.  I produced a serious quantity of balls, like as in 100’s of them.  Balls rolled in blue sugar, balls rolled in green sugar, balls with a milk dud stuffed inside.

Turns out Debbie’s least favorite part of baking a million cookies is the ball rolling!  So now I have an official function in the cooking baking operation.  I hope to be rolling balls for my sister for many years to come.

How about you?  Is there a holiday baking tradition at your house?

I always try to tell people that I’m not a collector.  I don’t really collect anything in particular.  I don’t like a lot of clutter.  And all of that is totally bogus.  I am clearly in denial.

 As I sit here typing this post I can look at the cupboard next to me and see my collection of vintage silver salt & pepper shakers, behind me is my collection of tiny dressers.  And right next to that is the tree that contains my vintage Christmas ornament collection.

I’ve been hoarding collecting vintage glass ornaments for many years now.

Long enough that I have been able to refine my collection to mostly pinks and aquas (oops, that’s kind of bogus too, the silver and gold ones are just in the dining room).  I really love the hand painted versions.  They are so charming with their little painted flowers and flourishes.

I have a couple of strategies for adding to my collection each year.  First and foremost, I visit a little second hand shop called La Garage in North St. Paul.  This shop is like a garage sale in a store.  I believe they get most of their inventory from estate clean ups.  Each year they close up for the week preceding Thanksgiving and they completely revamp the store for Christmas.  They open back up on Black Friday with tons of ‘previously loved’ Christmas decorations.  I’m always able to find quite a few vintage lovelies on their trees.

I don’t do much shopping in antique shops anymore, but I will make an exception for this collection.  I can find ornaments a few dollars each, which is a pretty affordable splurge.

In the case of my ornaments, I even have a sub-collection.  Vintage glass Christmas tree toppers.  A couple of you noticed these in the background when I posted about the sweet little mini dresser on Monday.

I was able to add that tall silver one to my collection this year.  I found it at an antique shop for $15.  A splurge for me, but worth it I think.  Isn’t it gorgeous?  Prior to this acquisition, obviously the little aqua and silver one was my favorite.  Now it has competition for the top spot.

In case you are wondering, those tree toppers are not just precariously balanced on that window ledge.  I have added a little Stick Um Candle Adhesive to the bottom of each one so it is securely held in place.

This year my silver tree is in the Q Branch.

If you look really closely, you can see a bunch of little reflections of me with my tripod taking these photos in the ornaments.  Ha!  Thank goodness it’s blurry because I’m pretty sure I was wearing paint splattered clothes and I hadn’t put on any makeup.

Come back next week for a full tour of my house all decked out for Christmas!

Linking up with:  French Country Cottage and Making Broken Beautiful at the Curator’s Collection.

 

Last summer my sister Debbie picked up this little oak sleigh on the cheap at a garage sale.  I think she only paid a dollar or so for it.  I didn’t get a ‘before’ snap of it, but it was basically that 80’s pale oak with a shiny poly on top.  Debbie painted it with Miss Mustard Seed’s Tricycle way back then and then it sat up in my carriage house for a few months.

Both Debbie and I were keeping our eye’s peeled for the perfect stencil for it.  We saw a couple that we both liked, but they were either too big or too expensive.  Finally Debbie picked up an inexpensive snowflake stencil at Michaels, and I suggested we try cutting our own stencils for the rest using my Cricut machine.

We started with “Brrr…” on the side.

And then we added “No. 25” on the front …

The beauty of cutting our own stencils was that we could size them precisely for this project.

Once the paint was dry, we sanded lightly and then waxed.  We used hot glue to adhere some floral foam inside the bottom of the sleigh.  The we gathered up some things Debbie had been stocking up on to use inside.

The birch logs were gathered by the roadside when we were up north for our scrapbook retreat.  The single spruce top was free at Home Depot.  They don’t sell them singly, but when Debbie asked the garden center manager if she could buy just one he said “oh, just take this one!”  Some of the other greens are also free ones from Home Depot.  Did you know they keep a big bin of the branches that have been trimmed from the Christmas trees and you can just help yourself?  Jeesh.  Wish I had known that before I bought all the greens for my front window box!  Debbie did purchase the red and white candy decorations and the red twigs, as well as some of the nicer greens.

All in, I think Debbie spent under $25 for everything needed to make this darling Christmas decoration.  She’s going to put it on the balcony of her apartment.  Unless she decides it just too darn cute to be outside!

I have so much to be thankful for this year, but I’m sure you all know what tops the list.

I’m so thankful to have my sister Debbie and my niece Kris living here in Minnesota!  I honestly can’t even remember the last time I spent a Thanksgiving with them.  But I do have one very vivid Thanksgiving memory.  The year was 1986.  I was living in South Carolina with my parents and the three of us drove up to New Jersey for Thanksgiving.  At the time, Debbie was pregnant with Kris.  She was very, very pregnant, yet she put on a huge Thanksgiving dinner at her house for both sides of the family.  I still clearly remember getting up the next morning and finding Debbie cleaning up the kitchen.  She made a comment to me about how she thought maybe she was going into labor.  She said it so matter of fact-ly.  My only experiences with child birth were what I’d seen on TV, so I was pretty sure she should have been writhing in pain and rushing around to find her overnight bag and speed off to the hospital.  But no, she was very calm.  Several hours later, sure enough, she and Kris’ dad went off to the hospital where she gave birth to my niece.  It was pretty fabulous timing since it meant that my parents and I were there to greet the new addition to our family!  I’m pretty sure this Thanksgiving won’t be quite as eventful, but I’m very happy to be spending it with family.

In addition to Thanksgiving, I have one more thing to celebrate today.  It’s my blogiversary!  How appropriate that it should fall on Thanksgiving Day this year.  I’m so thankful for all of you who read my blog and occasionally take the time to leave a comment or two (or many!).  I’ve been blogging for two years now, but it weirdly feels longer.  It’s strange to look back at some of my earlier posts and to see how much my blogging style has changed.  And it’s hard to believe it was only two years ago!

As a way of showing my gratitude to all of you who follow q is for quandie and to celebrate my two year blogiversary, I’ve decided to host a Thanksgiving Giveaway!

Here’s what is included:  the November Jeanne d’ Arc Living magazine, a bag of MMS milk paint in Bergere, a jar of Fusion’s Mathew Mead Studio Metallics in Bronze …

Some Miss Mustard Seed brush soap (I swear by this stuff!) and a pretty vintage glass …

A lovely vintage soup bowl that just wants you to believe …

And because I want the whole box to smell fabulous when it arrives at your door, I am also throwing in a bar of Thymes Frasier Fir soap.  This stuff smells amazing.

All you have to do to enter your name in the drawing is leave a comment on this post telling me what your favorite part of q is for quandie is.  Are you a fan of chippy pieces painted in milk paint?

Or maybe you love just seeing the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pics.

Are the garage sale ‘find of the day’ posts your fave?

Or perhaps you really enjoy the gardening posts.

Do you get inspired by the room make-overs the most?

Or maybe you love the quick and easy makeovers like these stenciled buckets?

Whatever it may be, leave a comment and your name goes in the hat for the giveaway!  You have until Sunday, November 29 at 6 pm to get your comment in.  The winner will be announced on Monday.

Mr. Q and I are off now to pick up Debbie and Kris and head out to my in-laws for Thanksgiving.  This year we’ll have quite the feast since my sister is adding 4 dishes to the mix.  I’m bringing my favorite sweet potato casserole (shared here last year).  I’m also bringing my camera because I want to get some pics of my father-in-law’s amazing workshop to share with you guys, so check back next week!

Do most of you know who I’m talking about when I say nnK?  nnK stands for ‘new neighbor Karen’.  She moved in … gosh, I’ve lost track now, 8 years ago maybe?  At the time I already had a neighbor named Karen, so I had to distinguish which Karen I was talking about and thus she became ‘new neighbor Karen’, then shortened to nnK.

Even though the original neighbor Karen passed away quite a few years ago, nnK is still and always will be nnK.

You may not realize it, but you have seen plenty of nnK’s home here on q is for quandie.  It provides the backdrop to all of my driveway staged photos.

Yep, that’s her house with the blue door directly across the street from me.  You’ll see that distinctive blue door in quite a few of my photos.  Sometimes I have to yell at her to duck when she’s out working in the garden and I’m trying to stage some photos.  She does love a good photo bomb.

I featured her backyard water garden in August 2014.

Before nnK moved in, my gardens were the ones that turned people’s heads as they rode by on their bikes or walked their dogs down our street.  But one of her early projects was to add a curbside garden along nearly the entire frontage of her property.  It’s a rock garden filled with lower growing alpine plants.

Now passers by are drawn to her bright flowers that are right there next to the street.  They don’t even glance in my direction.  Seriously, it’s quite comical.  All I see are the backs of people’s heads now as they ride by.

Not only is nnK a great neighbor, but she has great family too.  I recently posted about the table her dad pulled out of a trash pile for me, and I’ve also posted about the time her mom let me drag a really dirty old farmhouse table home in her convertible!

But really, the best part of having nnK around is that she loves to cook, and she frequently invites Mr. Q and me over for dinner.  You’ll probably have noticed by now that I do not love to cook.  You aren’t going to find any blog posts about cooking on this blog.

nnK frequently gives me a hard time because I never publish any blog posts on the weekend.  She seems to think that it would be nice to relax in her p.j.’s with a cup of coffee and a blog post to read.

I have a pretty good reason for not doing blog posts on the weekend and it is simply that I know I’ll be too busy to read comments and follow up with a response.  I like to respond to comments the same day that they are left.  Plus, I also assume that others are out having fun on the weekends, not reading blogs (that’s probably not entirely true, or is it?).

Well, anyway, nnK recently celebrated a birthday and her birthday wish was to see a Saturday blog post on q is for quandie.  So here is your birthday wish come true nnK!  Hope you enjoyed it with a cup of coffee!

In addition to my usual furniture painting, garage saling and gardening, I have another hobby too.  Scrapbooking!  I don’t do nearly as much scrapbooking as I would like.  In fact, these days about the only time I work on it is when I can get away for a retreat weekend.

So last weekend my sister, my friend Terri and I headed off to Lindstrom for a weekend of cutting, glueing and goofing around.  Usually we go in February when the world outside our window is frozen solid and there is nothing better than holing up in a big room with a wood burning stove and all the scrapbook supplies you’d ever need in one place.  I’m not sure how we ended up going in November this year, but there was space available for three so we took it.

I was working on two projects.  The first was my photos from our recent trip to Duluth.

I tried to focus on letting my photos be the stars on the page instead of the embellishments.

Which isn’t to say I don’t love to add some fab embellishments!  I use quite a lot of October Afternoon products.  All of the paper on this page is October Afternoon.  I’ve added some Tim Holtz rub-ons, a travel quote rub-on that I found at Hobby Lobby and some October Afternoon washi tape.

This is one of my favorite pages from the weekend.

I print all of my own photos, by the way.  I talked a little bit about this when I posted some scrapbook pages from my Danube River cruise last year.  I’ve begun using a matte photo paper instead of the glossy stuff.  I love the results.  I did a little research on the matte paper and discovered that photos printed on it will last longer than those printed on glossy paper.  I’m not particularly interested in archival quality with my scrapbooks though.  I’m just prefer the matte paper for aesthetic reasons.  The other thing I like about printing my own photos is that I can vary the sizes.  This photo was perfect for a long, skinny print …

My second project was working with photos that my dad took back in the 60’s.  When my dad passed away a few years back, my sister and I went through his boxes and boxes of slides and tried to pick some out that we wanted to keep.  I had them all turned into jpeg files so that I could try and clean them up with photo editing software and also so I could print them.  I’ve been slowly printing some out, and then scrapping them when I have time.

Some of them are quite hysterical, like this one that I have titled “the original selfie” …

Get it?  My dad is taking a photo of our reflection.  He seems to have his camera on a little stand that I’m assuming was placed in front of the mirror (or whatever reflective surface it was) for precisely this purpose.  That’s me on the right.  I can’t believe my mom dressed me in yellow, I’ve never looked good in yellow.  My sister is tucked in the back at my dad’s elbow.  The tall girl in the striped shirt is actually our baby sitter (not my mom) Kris.  She traveled with us a couple of times, and my niece Kris is named after her.

The “selfie” is cut out of October Afternoon paper using the Cricut.  After I cut out the letters, I outline them with a fine point black pen to add definition.  This is really easy to do and it doesn’t have to be perfect to look good.

This next photo is not the greatest quality, but on close inspection I just had to share it because the clothes crack me up.  This is me and my brother.  Dig those nifty threads?

I have to say, I think those striped pants I have on would be cutting edge stylish today.  They’ve come full circle.  I’m not so sure about my brother’s pants 😉

I have to admit, what I loved most about this next photo is that fantastic pink sofa that my Aunt Barb is sitting on.

When designing this page I looked through my embellishments and pulled out anything in that dusty rose color.  I was so happy to find a use for my pink typewriter chipboard (also October Afternoon).

The illustration behind the pink slide frame is from an old children’s book.  I love to include vintage items even in my scrapbooks.

We had a great time on our weekend, and I finished up quite a few pages.  I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing some of them!