Refurbished Window

The homes in my neighborhood were built in the late 50's early 60's and all of them had these 1 pane windows and fortunately for me, a friend of ours who lives in one of these homes redid their windows and I benefited from it!  I have seen these windows go for $30 in some stores and online and I was blessed to receive a few of them for FREE!!!

 

The wall in my kitchen has been pretty bare for the past 7 years, so I thought it would be a great place to hang an idea I saw on Pinterest.

 

Here is the original idea...

Cute, right?!

 

Step 1 was to clean up the window; rinse off the cobwebs, cut the wire off and clean up the paint flaking off. That's pretty much all I did! I liked the way it looked without additional paint or distress touch ups.

 

Step 2 was to distress the wood I was going to use for the shelf. My mother had told me about a mixture that would distress redwood and cedar using water and baking soda. You can find that resource here. The instructions said to add 1 cup of baking soda a gallon of water, but since I didn't need that much solution, my intelligent husband figured the ratio I would need is 1 tbsp. of baking soda and 1 cup of water.

Step 3 is to paint the baking soda solution onto the board and let dry. You can repeat this step until you get the distressed look you want.

 

Step 4 is to add the brackets. Initially, we drilled on 1" brackets, as seen in this picture, but after the window was hung, we felt 2" brackets were safer since I wanted to put things on this shelf.

 

Step 5 was to hang it on the wall! That's where my handy husband came into play, again! As mentioned already, our house is old!!! So old that all the walls are plaster, which makes it tricky when hanging things, especially heavy things. We have invested in a lot of wall anchors!

Step 6, and the final step, was to decorate the window! I only had to buy a few things to decorate this window. The blue Ball jars were given to my by my mother-in-law, the decanter was handed down to me from my husband's grandmother, and the pictures I had already printed, which are of my family. So all I purchased was chalkboard contact paper and chalkboard pen. I found those items on Amazon.com.

For the water pitcher, I used my Cricut to cut out the letters. This was an idea I saw in one of my favorite restaurants Brooklyn Girl Eatery.

So far, this is one of my favorite creations, and what's better is that it didn't cost me much! One piece of advice I was given by my mother was to "use what you have" and on this project, I pretty much did!

 

 ~ Kerri

Julie's Craft Room

Today I am going to share with you my 'Craft Room'! I have to say, "this one project was the reason I considered creating this blog".  This room is in our basement and was originally my oldest son's (Tim) bedroom (he is now married and starting his Senior year in college), then it turned into my second son's (Tyler) bedroom (he moved down there within a week after his brother left for college)!  When Tyler moved out to go to college we told our daughter (Madi)...NO!  We were not moving her room down there!  She was fine with that (it was a boy room anyway).  I could not find the original picture of this bedroom, so the before pictures you see are of the 'junk room' we created after Tyler moved out!

(I am sorry for the quality of the first 2 pictures)!

When we moved into our house we knew it was going to be a work in progress for a LONG time, that was 6 years ago and we are still working on it (post to come)!  This bedroom had indoor/outdoor carpet!  My husband and I scraped and sanded the floor and left it as you see!  It has an industrial feel to it!  Back to the story...as we were cleaning the 'junk room' out, my husband told me that I should make this my craft room!  (I think he wanted the office back).  He knows me so well...I already had that in the back of my mind!  Who wouldn't want a craft room, especially one that you can close the door and leave the mess (even when you have company)!  Well needless to say (to all of you crafters out there), my wheels were spinning!  I had the colors picked out & where I was going to place everything, how I would organize the closet...it was perfect!  Craig (my husband) also saw the wheels turning & put a screeching halt to my ideas!  Well kind of...he told me I could paint if I used the 15+ gallons of paint that we had out in the garage (that was the paint I was going to use anyway)!  The next day I got started! I am sure you can only imagine how excited I was to get this room finished!  It only took me 2 days to complete the room and it was FREE!  

When Tim created his room, he wanted Dodgers colors.  We painted the entire room gray and then we added the blue and red stripes.  We were told Dodgers don't wear red, but if you are a die hard Dodgers fan you know on their home jerseys the number is in fact red!

Room in Progress!

Here is the room as I worked on it!  I painted the stripes with paint from our daughter's room (the aqua color) and the other paint is from our office! Oh and of course, a craft room wouldn't be complete without chalkboard paint!

Our house had an intercom system built in, so every room has one of these UGLY holes!  In each of the rooms we have strategically placed a picture to cover the unsightly hole.  You will see how I hid this one in the finished product! 

As I said earlier this room cost $0 to transform, because I used everything I already had!  I have a storage room in my basement and when I get sick of using or seeing something, I put it away for a while then bring it back out when I need it or miss it!  So everything you see in this room, I either had in another room or it was hiding in my storage room!  Some day I will share those treasures with you guys!

Organized closet...I still have plenty of room to fill it up with future projects!

 I wanted a change in my eating area, so I brought this table downstairs to have more room to spread out my creations!  Plus I have to have room for Tabatha!  I love the addition of it!

 All of our doors are these hollow core doors with no style!  What better way to add character than chalkboard paint? I didn't do fancy lettering because I wanted to get the post done and I need to practice!  When you come back for another visit, you never know...there might be some fancy writing!

Thanks for visiting my craft room!  I still have a couple of things to fine tune in this room & as I complete them I will be sure to share them with all of you!  

There are many more projects in the works, so make sure you come back and see our 'Snippets of Creations'!

Mixed Berry Cheesecake In A Jar Recipe

Hello Again! Today I want to share with you an amazing recipe I used for Father's Day last month. I signed up to bring dessert to our family gathering, so I went to my #1 resource - Pinterest!!  I have a board called Recipes & I had pinned 50 Different Foods You Can Put In A Jar. The recipe I chose was Mixed Berry Cheesecake In A Jar & it was AMAZING!!!

You can find the recipe here: http://www.mybakingaddiction.com

I followed the recipe to a 'T' but I decided to serve them in Ball jars, so I had to double the recipe to make sure I could fill them up 1/2 way!

I also added baker's twine & a spoon on the side!

 

Step 4 of the recipe mentions placing the jars into a larger pan and pouring boiling water into the pan until halfway up the sides of the jars; here is how that looks

This dish was a hit & so tasty!
Enjoy!!! ~ Kerri

~ Kerri

Vintage Spoon Key Chain

Welcome to Snippets of Creations! We are excited to begin this journey of sharing our ideas and creations of projects, home décor, food, and gifts. 

For our first post, I (Julie) want to share this fun project with you.  I saw a post about 'How to make a Vintage Spoon Key Chain' on Facebook.  It was from Eclectically Vintage (one of my favorites).  So I thought...I think I will try this, seems easy enough!  Well, I am one that does not read instructions, so I just jumped in and had issues with the first one I made. 

Of course I had to involve my partner in crafts...Tabatha (she also happens to be my best friend).  We headed to one of the antique stores in town & bought some spoons!  My daughter was getting ready to leave for Baking & Culinary school soon, so I wanted to make her something special!  Since my kids were little we have always said, "I love you to the moon & back," so I thought this would be a great way for her to remember that her mom will ALWAYS love her to the moon and back!  This first picture is of her finished spoon. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be (maybe because I didn't read the instructions) & by all means, it is not perfect, but is still special to her!

  

When Kerri and I decided to create a blog together, we wanted to have an easy project for our first post and what's easier than pounding on some metal?  So here it goes!

 First of all, you have to get some antique spoons, or any kind of spoon you like! 

 

Tabatha and I headed to the antique store for more spoons.  They are only $2.00 each at one of our local antique stores!

 

Next we gathered our tools: spoons, sledge hammer, regular hammer, metal stamp letters, some sort of masking tape, sharpie, key rings, and ribbon (if you want to decorate them).

 

Here is a picture of the spoons I found for our 'Snippets of Creations' spoons (Kerri & I wanted to represent our blog by having matching key chains)! 

The first thing you need to do is pound out the roundness of the spoon.  I am lucky because my new craft room has concrete floors, so I don't have to go outside (in the heat) to pound on the spoons!

See the difference of the regular spoon and the flattened spoon.

Then you need some type of tape (I used the blue paint tape), to make a straight line for the words. This also helped keep the spoon in place while I stamped the words on the spoons.  I wrote out the words so I wouldn't misspell them (hence the stolen paint card with our blog name on it)! 

After you are finished stamping the words on the spoon you have to use the sharpie marker to darken the letters (I forgot to take a picture of this step...rookie mistake).  Then I sprayed a little glass cleaner onto a rag and wiped off the excess ink. 

Next, you need to bend the handle to make your loop for the key ring.  I had to go out in the HOT garage for this step!  My husband has a vice grip attached to his workbench, which I found to be the easiest way to start the bend in the spoon.

 Once you get the bend started, you can take it out of the vice grip and finish bending the spoon with your hands and a hammer (to flatten the bend).

You can see here how the spoon's handle tip is flat and pressed up against the spoon.

After you have finished bending the spoon, you need to attach the key ring (another picture I forgot to take...sorry!).  Then you can put ribbon on it to add a little detail! I put a little dab of hot glue to help it stay.  Mine is the one with the mustache ribbon and Kerri's has the green ribbon (Kerri's ribbon fell off, even with the hot glue).

 

 I hope you enjoyed our first post and come back for more 'Snippets of Creations' in the future!