Quick and Easy Craft #1- Ombre Striped Tea Towels

While I am soaking up the rays in Florida (while wearing SPF 50 and a big floppy hat), I will leave you with 4 days worth of quick and easy crafts. You may have seen some of them multiple times.  Some may be new. All with be easy, fairly quick and inexpensive ways to entertain your friends. Enjoy!

How do you entertain two of your favorite people during a cold (and spitting snow) day in April?  You make them do crafts with you.  And then you take them to look at the flooding Mississippi river.  What can I say?  I know how to entertain.

In the middle is my best friend from my days at the University of Northern Iowa, Amanda.  I helped Amanda pass Physics.  Amanda made sure I didn’t study for 4 years straight.  Equally important.  On the right is my best friend from childhood, Melissa. Melissa and I share a love of Adam Sandler, Sangria and talking about the good ol’ days of being nerdy high school kids.  Neither of these fine ladies thought they were good at crafting.  I disagree.

Our first adventure was ombre striped tea towels.

I love tea towels.  They remind me of the summer days I spent painting them with my brother and Grandma when we were little.  Memories.  Painted mice/day of the week towels are cute but my tastes have slowly evolved over the years.  Thankfully.

Here’s what you’ll need to paint my ombre striped tea towels.

• Tea towels (You can find them at Target, Wal-Mart, Joann’s, etc.  I got a pack of 4 from Target for $4.)
• Fabric paint or acrylic paint plus fabric medium. 
  • As my supposedly non-crafty friends learned, fabric medium keeps any paint from feeling crusty on fabric.
• Painter’s Tape
  • I’m not brand loyal. I use whatever we have around.  The blue.  The green doesn’t matter.
• Paint brush
• Something to place under your towels.

You will start by taping off your towel.  My type A personality makes projects like this hard so I handed this step over to Amanda.  She tells me the secret to her taping success is that she “just doesn’t care.”  Write that down.  It’s a very important tip.  She did a fantastic job.  She tells me she is available for hire.

Place your professionally taped towel on to something to protect your table.  We used cardboard.

Next you will need to pick your color.  We decided to start with coral.  Who doesn’t love coral?  My paints were all acrylic so we picked two parts paint to one part fabric medium.  We added some white painting to the coral for each stripe to create the ombre effect. Take your paint brush and cover the striped areas!

Keep adding white paint, fabric medium and painting stripes.  When your painting is complete, remove the painter’s tape.  This part was terrifying.  Luckily we had little bleeding and it looked pretty darn awesome.

We hung the completed towels to dry on my laundry rack.

The towels will need to be heat set with an iron and then washed. I’m excited to add a little striped cheer to our kitchen.

Are you a striped tea towel fan?  Do your force your non-crafty friends into crafting?

Elusive Plans

Nate and I leave for Florida on Sunday.  We. Can’t. Wait. We plan for this trip to be a relaxing one.  Lots of reading on the beach.  Eating. Strolling.  Sun.  Warmth.  Hurry up Sunday!

Ike will be vacationing with his grandparents.  Which is basically his equivalent to going to Florida.  Poor thing works so hard.  He deserves a vacation.

The blog may be quiet next week.  I may have an update house tour.  We’ll see.  It depends on many factors including my motivation, Nate’s motivation and we need the gloom and doom to disappear from Iowa.  Not looking good, folks.  Hey, maybe I’ll just post vacation photos.  Who knows!

We do have good stuff coming. You keep talking about these elusive plans but what exactly are they boring blogger?  I’m glad you ask, dear reader. 

(All of these photos are courtesy of my phone.  Because it’s important for before pictures to appear as horrible as possible.)

I am super duper extremely close to finishing up the craft room.  Good bloggers post final reveals.  You get me.  I’m so excited with how this is turning out.  I’m just not excited about the amount of time it’s taking.

Our dining room is getting a new table.  We potentially have some awesome barn wood lined up.  Our current table is fine.  It’s just not us.  And we’re afraid to use it because it scratches easily.  That’s no way to live.  I might remove the dying flowers someday also.  Maybe.  That’s asking a lot.

One of the projects were are most excited about is our master bathroom.  We are partnering with an awesome company that rhymes with Smile Bop.  Okay, it’s the Tile Shop and we are beyond excited to replace these builder grade mirrors with some walls of tile.  I don’t squeal but I’m squealing over this one.

I should probably add replace light bulb and get dressed before 5 PM to the list as well.  And probably pick up Ike’s beaver.  My life is falling apart, I tell you.

We are partnering with the Home Depot to beautify our outdoor space.  Those posts should start soon after we return.  I can’t wait to get my hands dirty and plant some flowers!  If it’s not snowing…

When it turns 95 out and we start whining about how hot it is (even though we promised ourselves we wouldn’t beings this is the longest winter known to man), our attention will move to our office.  The walls will be getting a new coat of paint.  This brown just doesn’t do much for me anymore.  I should probably straighten up a little too.  There will also be a new sectional if I can ever weasel Nate into going to Ikea in Chicago with me.  My husband manipulating skills are lacking lately.  As is my ability to take a straight photo.  And be organized.

There you have it.  Big plans.  Big summer ahead!

What are your summer plans?  Vacation plans?

Zombie Run

You’ll have to excuse my lack of DIY posts.  I’ve been busy.  Running from zombies.

I learned two things this week-end.  I might survive day 1 of a zombie apocalypse.  I probably wouldn’t survive day 2 because I wouldn’t be able to move.

Two of my favorite pharmacy school friends and I ran the Zombie Run this past Saturday.

The Zombie Run was a 5K Cross Country run with proceeds going to the Special Olympics.  Did I mention that I hadn’t ran since October?  It was also freezing cold and spitting snow.  Good work, Iowa.  Good work, silly blogger.

We started the race with 8 flags. The goal was to “survive” the race with at least one flag. If all of your flags were removed, you were infected with the zombie virus.

The race was on Credit Island.  It was a super gloomy day.  The island is creepy and full of old military buildings.  The setting was quite perfect for a zombie apocalypse. It has been raining for the past two weeks which made the entire course a giant puddle of mud.

Because running a cross country race through mud away from zombies wasn’t enough, they also added obstacles.  Like hay bales covered in plastic.

And plywood slides that were super hard to climb with muddy shoes.

Luckily the zombies left us alone on the obstacles but we were zombie fair game after we got off.

I made it to the last obstacle with two flags.  And then a zombie kid took both of them at the very end.  Note to self, avoid children during a zombie apocalypse.  Darn zombie kid.

Anna and I became zombies. 

Megan was still a human but was nice enough to drive us home.

Are you into the zombie hype?  Do you think you’d survive an apocalypse? Who wants to bring me some ibuprofen for my sore muscles?