Give up the funk

Last week was a stupid bad week for me. It was not marred with terrible events so much as I just had a crappy attitude about it. Jake got in a fight at school with a boy that ended with his anger being taken out on a little girl. And his third detention. Suspension could follow with the next incident. I hated my job, well, more accurately, I hated that I (and Corey) have to work as hard as I (we) do to maintain this standard of living to which we have all become accustomed. I'm driving around in a wrecked car after I got rear-ended AGAIN on my bi-weekly morning commute. The good news was that it was a three-day weekend and the boys were going to Beaumont for the duration. 

I have found that the best way for me to combat The Funk is 1) to make sure I am taking my meds accurately 2) white knuckle it until the boys have grandparents' weekend and 3) plan and execute a home decorating or craft project. 

Enter the silhouettes. Growing up, my mother had small black silhouettes of Cydney and me hanging on each side of the sink in her kitchen. They were there for all my life, until my mom renovated her kitchen. For a while now, I have been planning to do large-scale silhouettes of the boys for above our bed. But I knew that I did not want black silhouettes. I wanted color or pattern or texture or both, and I wanted it to tie in with the colors in our room.

From justcallmechris.blogspot.com

From jonesdesigncompany.com

From http://www.tobifairley.com/

There are many artists on Etsy who do these on different backgrounds, but most of the silhouettes are black or white. I decided that I wanted to do my silhouettes on canvas with metallic paint, a turquoise mat and a copper frame. I also pondered it enough to decide that I would make stencils of the silhouettes by blowing up pictures into poster-sized prints and cut out the head with an exacto knife, leaving a poster-sized stencil.

I used picnik.com to play with different color treatments to the photos to get profiles that were the highest contrast to the blank wall behind them, then printed them on the cheap at vistaprint.com. It may have been overkill, but I am not so great a tracer, so I traced the profile with a Sharpie to help guide my cutting. I taped it to the back of the three-pack of canvasses I bought to protect my tabletop. 

Corey has gotten oddly attached to the heads.

I ended up needing Jake to face the other way, but took this picture to show how the silhouette cut came out. Look at that mouth. Those are his dad's lips. Based on experience I will tell you that those lips will be the downfall of many a high school girl.

When I cut them out, I only cut the head and neck. I wanted the profile to be isolated on the canvas, so I did not cut shoulders and torsos into the stencil, though they are present in the photograph. See, here's Landen.

I used metallic paint in a pot that I picked up from Michael's and dabbed the edges with a sponge. I remembered when I failed at stencils before that it is very important, in fact, I'd say critical to the entire project, that you use your fingers to hold down the stencil edge at the area you are sponging or the paint will seep underneath the stencil and ruin your line. My paint washed off my fingernails with soap and water.

And when it was done, it looked like this. I bought double matted frames on sale at Michael's and painted the mats the same color as our front door (there's a lot of paint left) and spray-painted the white frames with copper spray paint. Corey loves them. He says this is his favorite project I've ever done.

At some point in this project, he asked me how I knew how to do this. I told him that I've discovered that everything DIY is not about whether you know how to do something. It's based on the idea that you don't know you cannot do something. I did not know that I could not make a stencil and paint silhouettes, but I did not know that I could not. So you try it and if it doesn't work, you throw it away and try something else. As my idol Barbra Streisand says to the stage manager in Funny Girl after a disastrous stage performance on roller skates when he questions why she said she could skate, "I didn't know I couldn't!"

I also have to share my furniture score. I have an antique pedestal table on one side of the couch that was a gift from Emily Williams a couple birthdays ago. The table on the other side of the couch is a wood-and-metal table from Hobby Lobby - adorable with lots of functions but destined to be replaced by another antique table. For two years I have been looked for a long and low antique table. Yesterday I spent the afternoon with my friend Amelia and her daughter at the antique stores in Denham Springs, and scored the perfect table. FOR $55!

The finish is pretty beat-up, and I do not think I can stain it because the top is laminate. The tag said it was from the 50s. I put it down to live with it for a while, but I'm leaning toward colormatching it to one of the couch throw pillows and painting it red.

The best part is that it has a drawer that works smoothly and fits our cameras, laptop cords, hard drives and Corey's gaming equipment in it perfectly. There's been an ongoing battle about the storage of the ginormous mouse and the headphones for many, many months. Problem solved.

Corey was so stoked about the new storage solution that will keep him from being constantly fussed at that he put it down outside and hugged me. Then he told me that I was batting a thousand this weekend - for the silhouettes and the table.

Funk lifted.