I am SHER-locked!

So I already know the British make some good television. After watching The Office, Spaced, Black Book, Extras, The Mighty Boosh etc. I now got to see the great Sherlock Holmes redo Sherlock. Martin Freeman as Watson caught my eye mostly, I hadn't heard of Benedict Cumberbatch so far, but he sure is a brilliant Sherlock!
I'm actually glad I'm a little behind on this great show cause this way I got to see season one and two without a nervewracking break.
Anyone who hasn't seen this show yet (or any of the above mentioned) I greatly recommend it!

And one scene of this brilliant series inspired me to try my luck with stenciling on fabric. I had bought fabric paint awhile ago, but never got to use it until now.
My first stencil was made from cardboard, but the letters were a little hard to cut out.



So I tried to connect the letters, so that it was a piece stencil. Not the best looking outcome.



But good enough for the door mat! You can kinda tell what the letter in the boxes are saying, but only in the flashlight... The message is clear, anyways. The door is locked!



Next try with an adhesive foil. That looks much better! We'll try that on a t-shirt then!



I mixed blue and red fabric paint with silver acrylic paint. I hope it'll still stay in place after washing. The important part is to iron it before wearing it for the first time.



I think this turned out very nice! Nice and shiny.

PS: Check out all these funky geeky crafts at the Nerd'n'Geek Linkparty <3

Green & Blue

All of our furniture is either from the used furniture store or picked up off the street, just cause! I don't really see the point in buying new furniture when there's so much good used stuff lying abouts.
So here's the story of a dresser and a shelf. The dresser was an ebay-find pretty close to us. Got the thing for like 8€, transport was a bitch though. I thought my man and I could easily transport it a couple of streets, but it turned out to be a pretty heavy piece of wood. But one "please don't steal"-note and an adventorous misuse of a shopping cart later we were able to heave it up to our apartment.

The top was a little scratched, but we were planning to paint it anyways.



And here's the funny bit, the man wanted to paint it green and blue. To be specific robot green and robot blue. Luckily I could talk him out of it. I just don't really like green too much, plus couldn't even start to image that the colour combi would look good in out bedroom.



We agreed that black and blue would look much better, well, he agreed more or less...



Working man, roughening up that wood.



This is the shelf now, painted with the same colours.
We really needed some more space for DVDs, so we picked up a shelf from "Weißer Rabe", a second hand store near Donnerberger Brücke in Munich. 4€ for that, sorry I don't have a before pic, but yeah.. looked like a wooden shelf.

And here's the results:





The dresser was decorated via stencil & spray paint by the man.

Also: Sneak Peek at our DVD library and I am not ashamed for the Buffy & Angel collection!

File my curtains.

I decided to get some curtains for the kitchen, cause at night when the light is on you can look inside. Especially cause there's a tram station right outside the house and people walk by all the time.

I got the curtains from a second hand store called ReSales close to Stachus (Munich poeple will know where that is). And the idea of filing the curtains came from here.

Since I work in an office and we just threw out a bunch of old ringbinders (and I hate throwing away stuff that's still usable) this was my new project:



I needed 4 ringbinder clips to attach to one window. Sprayed them white first.



Then pink.



I cut out some cardboard and painted it pink to glue to the back of the clip for a better grip on the window, since I couldn't really screw it on.



And then clip clip clip clip... filed curtains!

Build me a castle

I made a castle. I don't know what I'll use it for, maybe plant a flower in the middle. And there's room for stuff in the towers too.

Here's how I did it:
I used 4 used up toilet paper rolls, 4 plastic cups, 1 plastic fruit container and lots and lots of paper towels.



To put all the ingredients together to build the shape of my castle I used painter's tape, because it's mostly paper. Then to put the little pieces of paper towel onto the shape I mixed a bowl of wallpaper paste. I put about four layers of paper to shape it up just fine.



I let it dry for about a day or two. And then I coloured it, castle colours! Using an edding for the details and finishing it up with gold and silver paint.



Just a silly little side project :)

Window balkony

I like planting things. It makes me feel like I'm creating life.

Since we don't have a balcony in our apartment and our window sills are very slim I had to take matters into my own hands.

First I drilled holes into the window sill, 2 for each balcony flower box.



Then I screwed the water collectors on to the window sill.



After that I put the flower boxes in their place on the water collectors. Since the window sill is kinda uneven I attached a strong string going through some holes in the boxes and under the sill. The ends of the string is held by the closed window, so there's no chance the boxes can fall down!



View from inside with the windows closed:



I planted various herbs and some vegetables, though my mom said I'm silly for planting carrots in a box.

Projects from the past: Kitchen Buffet

March 14, 2011

This Project was originally posted on Craftster here.

When I first saw this kitchen buffet at our local thrift store I instantly fell in love with it. And my boyfriend instantly hated it!
It took a couple of weeks and several visits to that thrift store for me to ask if they would lower the price on it. The price tag said 99€ and it's been at the store for a while.
So they were willing to sell it to me for 50€ plus 20€ for transportation (because in Germany no one my age owns a car, especially in the city).
When they shipped it to my place one of the feet broke off, so they reduced the total price to 50€... deal!

This is what the bottom part looked like after screwing off the first door to see how the paint would turn out.



Top part:



Notice the lovely keys.


Also some weird symbols on the back of the top part.
A fellow Craftster mentioned, that there could have been wallpaper, kitchenpaper or something on it that etched acid paint into the wood.



Here you can see my lovely boyfriend scraping away the paint, actually only roughening it up so that the new paint would stay on.

He still hated the thing, but I had promised him that when we would be done he'd love it!



And here he is painting the skeleton of the cupboard. We chose grey for the skeleton of the cupboard and a light purple (indian rose) for the doors, well, I chose it ...



Almost finished! We still needed doorknobs and space in the kitchen to put it.



Notice the Alien gift paper wrap on the top shelf!



Got the doorknobs at a hardware store and moved our ikea cupboards to the basement and here it is!



Took two weeks of work and alltogether cost about 100€.

I love it and my boyfriend likes it now...