Rediscovering Rosy...

Those that know me personally know that I'm a pack rat. So when my husband and I were cleaning out our rental property after tenants left and I found our old bench just thrown in the backyard, my husband rolled his eyes. He knew what I would say next. :-) In usual form he gave me an argument for throwing it out, but I just couldn't. I have had this bench for a really long time and it was really nice once. Sure, it was in bad shape now after the tenants just left it to rot in the backyard, but I knew I could do something with it. The metal had fallen out and the wood was really bad. Honestly, even if I could refinish it I wasn't sure where I'd put it. Do I really need a bench? Sure...I'll find a spot for it. After some thought I decided to make it a planter for our front garden. So off to Lowe's we went to get new wood, some flowers, potting soil and containers to hold the flowers. My husband started by cutting the wood to size and replaci...

While working on refinishing another piece of furniture (Post to come once finished), we decided to work on my craft room work desk top. Along time ago when Spiegel used to sell furniture, I purchased a great desk on clearance. Over the years my kitty cats used it as a bed, a scratching pad and a playground. Gotta love cats! The top work area was completely scratched and it was looking sad. My husband began sanding the top but the previous coats of stain made it impossible to sand properly. We decided to give the paint stripper a try. It was added to the top with a brush and we let it work for at least a half hour. Then we proceeded to remove the top layer with a spatula. There was still some stain left, so another coat of stripper was added.   I gotta say, though, had I known what a nice color removing one layer of stain would give, I would have stopped there. Unfortunately, since we had already sanded a spot (the clear spot on the top), w...

Cooking and baking has always been something I love to do. I love creating and inventing dishes when I'm not following recipes. One of my favorite things to do is open up a cook book to a ramdom page and give it a shot. Unfortunately, I haven't done it in a long time, but it may be time to start that up again. On Sunday mornings, my husband usually cooks a big breakfast and sometimes I join in. Anytime he makes my favorite breakfast dish, eggs benedict, I try to stay away and wait to be called down. Yep, I'm spoiled like that. But every so often when I'm helping out he makes me do the hollandise sauce. It's from an envelope so it should be easy, but dear me how I hate it so. Today was one of those days. There is something about adding a powder that might clump up if not stired often that just gives me the willies. So today as I stood there stirring I had a brilliant idea. I need to learn how to make this from scratch. Any good Top Chef fan surely has h...

Recently I got the idea from Pinterest, of course, to do a personalized throw pillow. I would love to have throw pillows that express sentiments that mean something to me. Something that gets me inspired or my creative juices flowing while working. A heartfelt and sweet pillow showing some lyrics from my wedding song... etc. With that in mind, I set out to try out some ideas. I apologize in advanced for the picture quality. I had a random basic pillow just laying in my craft room that was plain enough to experiment on. (ignore the mess all around it) :) First I needed to print what I wanted to paint on the pillow. Once printed I had to make a stencil pattern out of it. Using an exacto knife I cut out the pattern leaving a stencil. I laid that over the pillow with pins to hold in place and be able to trace with a fabric pencil without it moving around. I traced the entire stencil a few times just so that the entire pattern would be visible on the fabr...

So part of rediscovering myself is clearly getting back into shape. I swear, I once was! :)  I will be again! I've been reading a blog of a guy who lost an insane amount of weight running and documented it all in a blog. Reading it, I got inspired and started a whole separate blog for just the fitness part. Not wanting to stray from my mission, I named it Rediscovering Rosy - The Fitness Diary. Here's the link, if you are interested in following me and keeping me accountable. http://rediscoveringrosy.tumblr.com/ This past week I've also been trying out new things. I started crocheting (? is that how it's spelled?) again. With the left over yarn from my first scarf (see previous post) I made a single strand bracelet and embellished it with a flower. I think it's super cute. I think I will play with this more and make a few more bracelets. They are so much fun and so easy to make. Maybe tomorrow the day will be nice and I can take pictures of some new i...

It's time to get started, yet again. January was full of unexpected things. My mom's heart problems became heart disease and we were faced with an emergency. That was trying on my nerves, to say the least. Thankfully, she is doing good which puts me at ease, somewhat. It's hard to be away from her and my dad. I worry about them daily. During that time, the hubs and I had to get the rental house ready for the new tenants. Our previous tenants left the house in a bit of a disarray. After lots of work, we finally got it ready and rented. Now we are hoping these tenants will be good and last for a long time. I hope all renters would take care of the property they are renting and pay on time. And now on to new things. I finished my first scarf! YEAY! So I ended up starting it like 8 times, but finally I gave up on trying to make it perfect and just go with it. There are a few mistakes at the start of it but by the end of it, it looks good. Here's a bad picture of it. ...