DIY Chinese Calendar Wall Art

It's a new year, which means just like kuzoos, glitter, and novelty crowns, those freebie calendars are bound to turn up. Free calendars from dentists, calendars from your doctors, and sometimes, if you're lucky, calendars from your local Chinese restaurant.

Perhaps I'm just a little bit of a hoarder at heart, but I always felt bad throwing away the freebie Chinese calendars. Sure, you can't really write your appointments or friend's birthdays onto bamboo, but they have an artsy and exotic vibe to them which I just adore. So, I thought -- why let them go to waste? Why not upcycle a Chinese calendar into a free piece of art?

DIY Our First Christmas Tree Ornament

In a budding relationship, there are so many important little moments to remember: the first date, the first dance, the first holiday. In all the hustle and bustle of such life-changing events, I love finding little momentos to cherish and save the story behind the memories.

On our first Christmas as a married couple, my husband and I joined my parents and my brother's family for a tractor ride out to Strathmeyer farms, braced against the cold with the comfort of free apples, to search for our first Christmas tree. We made our cuts and waited for the tractor's return to carry our trees back, as my little nephew helped by carrying his own little evergreen branch. My husband marked the trunk with his initials, now a part of my initials, so that our tree would not be lost among the others on the back of the wagon. When my husband trimmed off the bottom of the trunk, I saved the little disc with his initials and turned it into a Christmas tree ornament to commemorate our first tree.

DIY Stuffed Hobbes: The Rebirth of A Childhood Friend

How ever were children of the 80's and 90's to learn a good dose of fantasy, sarcasm, and an impressive vocabulary without the stories of Calvin and Hobbes?

Hobbes was a part of so many of our lives growing up, and that homocidal psycho jungle cat is just as cool now as he ever was.

As children, my brother collected all of the books, and together we mourned the tragedy of the comic's discontinuation from the local funny papers.

Now that my brother has little sons of his own, I felt the time had come for them to have their own adventures with dinosaur-flying spaceships and suicidal snowman while accompanied by their new best friend Hobbes.

However Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, chose not to license his characters for distribution, so you won't find a Hobbes doll sitting on the shelf at your local toy store. So the best option is to make your own*.

DIY Dining Chair Makeover

The garbage, it's not just for raccoons and feral cats anymore.

Let's face it. It's generally easier to throw out furniture and decorations when they go out of style rather than renovate it or even bother to sell it. Most sane people just don't want to be bothered with all of that work.

But there is a lot of hidden potential hiding in yesterday's decoration.

All it takes is a little creativity to take curbside rejects and turn them into something brand new and beautiful.

Visiting Tried & Twisted today is my talented mom, "The MommaBar", who recently put a little time and effort into a lucky roadside find to make a spectacular new chair for her sunroom.

DIY Antique Framed Memo Board

A lot of great creative projects start with a challenge. And my challenge — how to hide that hideous phone jack on my kitchen wall?

Due to the limitations of living in a rental, I couldn't tear the jack out, so I resorted to hide and seek. What do you think of my solution? The phone jack hasn't been found since!

Before and After Envy Series: Basement Blues

Oil to Fireplace...

Welcome back to the final Before & After Envy series post for this month!

I've had so much fun sharing all of these talented home makeovers that I would like to extend an open invitation to any other readers and bloggers out there who would like to show off their renovations. The Before & After Envy series can be an ongoing series whenever new rooms and makeovers are available. Contact me if you're interested in joining the party. Because every home makeover deserves a little chance to be envied.

Today's post comes from my sister-in-law, Lisa, and my brother's basement renovation inspired by an energy bill crisis and developed into a gorgeous, comfortable family room.

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Hanging Salad Garden

Last year, I began a quest to turn my black thumb into a green thumb, or at least an evergreen shade of black.

This would take some time. Time to earn the plants trust again, to prove the dead philodendron was a fluke of bad lighting or that it wasn't my fault that I forgot to water that peace lily for three weeks.

So far, my efforts at greenery whisperer have started to pay off. For the first time in my life, I gardened. I was the grower of my own food, and it was glorious!

Everything tastes better fresh. Even my least favorite veggie was so tasty that I found myself pacing the garden in the backyard, watching, waiting for that moment when it would stop being a plant and start being food.

Since last year went so well, I got ambitious and expanded the garden by adding a hanging salad garden.

Before and After Envy: 5 Tips for Home Renovation

The Classy Man Cave...

Welcome back for the next entry in the Before & After Envy series, where I stare admiringly at the amazing renovations my friends have pulled off in their homes. Last week, Shannon talked about how to update a half bath from the 80's look to a very modern style.


This week, April will be joining us to share 5 tips she has learned while updating her basement into a lovely, casual family room and Penn-State-themed man cave with her husband. April reminds us that on home projects, your mindset and expectations can be just as important as the hammers and nails.

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Before and After Envy: Half-Bath Remodel

The Ugly Duckling...

When decorating a home, there is always a risk that your look will one day become dated. This problem is only made worse if those decisions were made by the previous home owner and if those decisions involve white ducky wallpaper.

Today, we're joined by my friend Shannon Hemauer as she shares her journey of ridding her half-bath of the dreaded duckies.

Before and After Envy Series

You may not be all that surprised to hear. It is a common affliction among us late twenty-somethings after all.  I have a case of house lust.

My husband and I live in a cute little rental with our very own garden and creek in the backyard, which certainly could be all we need in life, but I can't help longing for more.

It's not just because I want more space or because I want to invite more than 10 people into our house at a time without ticketing them at the entrance. I really long for the house projects.

Month-long DIY projects gone awry with floorboards torn up, drywall spackled, paint splattering everywhere! (Did I mention that some people find me odd?)

You see, I have helped family members and strangers alike to renovate, redesign, and rip the ever-loving pieces apart of their homes to remake it into the masterpiece that suits their needs and their aesthetics perfectly. Living in a rental where we aren't even allowed to paint the walls gives this level of freedom a fuzzy optimistic glow.

While I'm sure the suffering of tip-toeing through storage boxes, wading through dust, and driving to the nearest friend's house for running water aren't nearly so glamorous as they sound, renovation still has the appeal of brave trial and error, experimentation, and a side of practical, creative expression that I very easily obsess over.

So while my house lust may not be satisfied for a few more years, I can still dream and drool over what my creative friends and family have done to their homes.

Which brings us to this month's series: Before and After Envy, featuring people I know and the beautiful ways they've destroyed and recreated their homes! Join every Friday this month for a little featurette of their before and after.

DIY Manly Gift Bucket

 

If you are looking for a gift basket idea for a man in your life, perhaps even for Father's Day, might I suggest the Gift Bucket. 

I admit they can be a little corny and cliché, but sometimes a gift basket is still the best option for a personalized gift for an occasion somewhere between a simple gift card and a new car.

Recently, my big brother turned 30. Gasp! We are, like, almost adults now or something!

My brother already has pretty much anything he could want, right down to the last Tiki mask, and our family doesn't traditionally give gifts on birthdays, so I was a little out of practice finding that one perfect thing.  It was too much pressure putting all of my bets on one gift.

Enter the gift basket. Tons of random things! Some he may enjoy and others he may feed to the cat, but at least I double my chance of an enjoyable gift.

Gift baskets weren't really designed to be "manly" though, so my hubby and I headed off to the hardware store to find a new solution.

Myth or Miracle Cleaner Series: Scrub Your Bath Tub Like Martha

I grew up in the generation that associated Martha Stewart less with domestic perfection and more with Saturday Night Life sketches and jailbird punch lines. I'm thinking that I may perhaps owe her an apology...

At the beginning of the month, I asked for suggestions for a Mystery Homemade Cleaner to be featured at the end of the month and Kim Vealy from the Soliloquy of Food & Such was good enough to suggest a bath tub scrub made from baking soda that she learned from Martha Stewart. 

Since I had unfinished business with my old rental bath tub with 20-some years of stains that weren't quite eliminated by a basic homemade cleaner, I thought I'd give this heavy hitting bath scrub a try.

So, I put Martha's scrub to the test to see if I can't clear away that yucky stain without calling an exorcist...it was considered my final option.

Myth or Miracle Cleaner Series: Shower Head De-Clogger

Little problems are sometimes the most annoying. Noisy neighbors, a spot of mold growing underneath what was a perfectly good head of lettuce, clogged shower heads. 

Keeping it in perspective, most little problems come with an easy fix. While a clogged shower head certainly isn't a dire problem, there's no reason not to remove the little annoyance of errant water streams sputtering into my face interrupting a relaxing shower when the fix is so easy.

For this next post in the Myth or Miracle Cleaner Series, where I give homemade cleaners a try to find out if they are too good to be true, I'll tackle my sputtering, clogged shower head with a soaking method suggested by Frugally Sustainable. Let's give it a try!

Myth or Miracle Cleaner Series: Clean Dreaded Toilet with Baking Soda

Welcome back to this month's series on Spring Cleaning using ingredients and supplies in your kitchen cupboard.

Cleaning the house with baking soda, vinegar, and other items from the pantry claims to have the advantage of saving money from all the household cleaners you won't need to buy and to be greener and more environmentally friendly than the toxic chemicals found in the average cleaner.

While most of the all-natural cleaning methods worked wonders, today I'll share about a dud: cleaning the toilet with baking soda.

The claim, according to blogs like Life Hackery, is that you sprinkle 1 cup of baking soda in the inside of your toilet and voila! It's shiny white, clean, and odor-free. With no scrubbing, you'll be able to wash away stains, grime, and dirt.

Such a claim just had to be put to the test!

Myth or Miracle Cleaner Series: Shine Your Stainless Steel Sink with Baking Soda and Vinegar

Step 1: Remove all dirty dishes so you can actually see your sink.
Step 2: Shriek at the grime and mess in your sink!
Step 3: Return all dirty dishes to the sink and walk away. Perhaps open a bottle of wine and pretend you don't have a sink anymore.

The kitchen sink is like the eyes to the soul of the kitchen and shows a very public face for guests. It should give a good first impression.

But evil things grow in the sink.

The kitchen sink takes a lot of abuse and if you have an older stainless steel sink, this abuse is very evident with smudges, hard water deposits, coffee stains, scratches, and sometimes rust stains that make you want to run screaming from doing the dishes to update to your tetanus shot. You don't have to call an exorcist, break out the bleach, or even buy expensive cleaning products to chase away the demons.

Today, I tried out a recipe for a DIY homemade stainless steel sink cleaner that claims to buff and shine the steel like new. Our sink has seen better days, since our older rental hasn't always received TLC, so it will be the perfect guinea pig to test out The Happy Home's tutorial for cleaning and bringing the shine back to a stainless steal sink.

Myth or Miracle Cleaner Series: Clean Your Bath Tub with Vinegar

Hello, my name is Sara. And I am a Pinterest addict.

Pinterest lists tons of cleaning shortcuts and homemade remedies: dozen uses for vinegar, clean your kitchen with baking soda, etc. I've often wondered if these DIY cleaning methods work, if they are better than store-bought cleaner, and if it's worth the extra effort for a little savings in money.

One of my goals here on Tried & Twisted is to test out new projects and to share if it's worth your time and effort. This month's series is all about DIY cleaning methods.

The first challenge for my Spring Cleaning series: Homemade Bath Tub Cleaner!

You may have seen a graphic floating around on Pinterest promising dramatic results by a simple cleaning method of combining vinegar and dish soap. Just spray on, spray off, no scrubbing, and the shower is instantly clean. It will even take soap scum off of shower doors, so it claims. Let's see how that theory works out in practice.

Myth or Miracle Cleaner: A Series for Spring Cleaning

Life doesn't always work out the way you'd like. There are disappointments, broken expectations, dashed dreams.

Much like cleaning products. The infomercial promises amazing results, the before/after images astound, and then you try it on your own house and it doesn't quite work out like that.

It's disappointing experiences like this that cause trust issues.

Being a skeptic has made me curious about the all-natural, money-saving, DIY home cleaning methods which circulate on blogs and Pinterest like a good meme. They promise a simple process of mixing together a few common items from your cupboard to create an instant clean!

Do they work? Are they better or more convenient than store-bought cleaners? Can you actually save money in the process?

This month's series is all about DIY cleaning methods. Not a glamorous series -- certainly not as appetizing as macarons or as pretty as a craft. But part of the purpose of my Tried&Twisted blog is to test out new projects and to share if they are worth your time and effort.

So in preparation for Spring cleaning, allow me to test out these "great" ideas for you so you can save your own time, money, and a little elbow grease.

Check in with me every Friday this month as I put a new DIY cleaning project to the test.

• Vinegar Bath Tub Scrub
• Baking Soda Toilet Cleanse
• Vinegar and Baking Soda Stainless Steel Sink Scrub
• Vinegar and Baking Soda Shower Head Soak
• Mystery Topic?

You may have noticed that I listed a mystery post. Here's your chance to get involved -- tell me what DIY cleaner you've seen on blogs or Pinterest that you'd like to see tested out. I'll pick a tutorial from your suggestions for the end of the month.

Update: The winner for Mystery Topic is Bath Scrub!

See you on Friday!

DIY Custom Etched Glass Gift: Invite Design to Wedding Gift

Creating Unique & Personalized Wedding Gifts Thru Etched Glass: Part Two

Yesterday, I shared how my friend Suzanne introduced me to DIY etched glass gifts with a unique twist. For a more traditional wedding gift, the bride and groom's name and wedding date are often etched into glass.

To make the gift even more special, why not incorporate elements of design from the wedding invitation? The bride and groom put in a lot of effort picking out the invite or designing it themselves, so it deserves to be commemorated and, luckily, you already know it is an embellishment they'll like!

DIY Custom Etched Glass Gift: The Baron Samedi Rum Bottle

Creating Unique & Personalized Wedding Gifts Thru Etched Glass: Part One

April showers bring May flowers and wedding season! If you're an average twenty-to-thirty-something woman and not a hermit hiding in a mountain cave, then chances are that you know someone getting married this year. The odds are in your favor.

Searching registries for the best gift becomes second nature, but after a while, all the matching towel sets and Pyrex blur together and I become bored with my own gift. Which is a sad predicament, indeed, because I want to give something that screams my enthusiasm for their important day, rather than yawning like a pair of Christmas gift underwear. 

So I'm often torn between my desire to give the bride and groom something practical that they need, but also to give them something memorable, so they can laugh at our inside jokes and know that we cared to add a special touch just for them.

Lately, my solution to this dilemma has been custom etched glass gifts. I was introduced to this craft on Make It & Love It. By adding a creative element to a practical gift, no piece of glass is safe! Any bottle, vase, or Pyrex can become classy or hilarious in less than half an hour.

DIY Flower Pot Wreath

Last month's feature series was all about baking macarons and, after so many recipes, I nearly forgot that I also share crafts here on Tried & Twisted. It was my ambition to have a grand craft ready to share with you all today.

But as is often the case here on T&T, expectations don't always work according to plan. Some technical difficulties arose after dropping my camera in batter. Oh, the troubles of a food blogger! My latest craft is now locked in limbo, like jpegs in purgatory.

Wait, don't leave yet! I have a volunteer from the audience. Today's craft comes from Faye, my Momma and crafting sensei. She just finished a new wreath for her front door which is perfect for springtime and surprisingly easy. Let's take a look!