No Wire Hangers Ever!

So I was looking for a cool way to hang these super old posters of mine and found all these tutorials for hanging your stuff really cheaply using hangers. But turns out these people were talking about wood pants hangers. Because people just have those laying around? I’m like, yeah, you do that, Rockefeller. I’m hanging my ancient posters from (count ’em) four apartments ago with the garbage I bring home from the dry cleaner and some binder clips.

Also, you should just believe me when I say that this photo is lousy because I have zero natural light in my bathroom and not because I have zero photography skills.

Rewriting on the Wall

Originally posted June 14th, 2014

Remember this Fail It Yourself?

When I painted this canvas blue, it was the first time I’d ever bought a canvas, brushes, or paint. I’ve bought paint a few more times since, including spray paint, which I swore before buying this canvas that I’d never use again (a vow that I have broken time after time). Once, I bought gray spray paint to refresh a lamp that I bought at Goodwill, and one evening, for no particular reason, I decided to paint this canvas gray with the leftover spray paint. Then I wound some twine around it and stuck some paper leaves on the twine.

It looked like this.

I don’t remember when I did this, and I don’t remember how long it stayed. I never really loved it. It eventually came down, and I replaced it with some frames that I spray painted black (with paint left over from this project). At this point, I’m a pro at finding new uses for old paint, and it’s a wonder that I ever buy anything at all. You have no idea how many things in this house are the exact same color blue as my dresser. And when I finally refinish my craigslist-purchased campaign desk, it will most likely be stained the exact same color as my coffee table. Because this has all happened before and will happen again, you know.

Moving on, though…

I’ve never been a fan of word-based wall art. I don’t know why, but I suspect that it has something to do with it rarely saying what I want it to tell me. The solution to this is, of course, to Fail It Yourself. So when a particular quote from a particular TV show pops into my head while I am simultaneously thinking about what to do with my displaced gray canvas, I toss my distaste for wordy wall stuff out the window. After all, writing is rewriting, and it’s time to revise this canvas (again).

So, I mobilize the materials that I have on hand. Paper, a printer, a razor, a brush, and paint. I already have many shades of paint from which to choose, and I probably decide to go with yellow because I haven’t used it for a second project yet.

I use Gimp to figure out how big I want my letters to be (and what font), then print out those letters in Word. Then I cut them out, and then I tape them together into one big stencil.

At this point, I should stop. I should go buy poster board, or vellum, and probably some spray adhesive, and actually make this, like, a legitimate stencil. But I don’t. I could say I’m impatient, and I could say I’m lazy. Either way, half-assing it is just how I roll.

So I paint with the yellow paint, and it’s a little sloppy, but I neaten it up before it dries and it’s not too bad. But I don’t love the color. It’s too much…yellow. It’s not enough…neon.

To Michaels! I finally make a new purchase to complete this project: neon acrylic paint. After tax, we’re talking $0.75, which is an awesome price because my change is perfectly shaped for the laundry machine.

When I get home, I notice how much bigger the tube of neon yellow paint is than the other tube of yellow paint. I inspect the other differences to find out why, and notice that the yellow paint is fabric paint. This would make sense, since I bought it to make my mother hand-painted dish towels for her birthday. Also, it’s clearly evident from the label. Since I’m literate and ostensibly can read labels, I probably shouldn’t make the same mistake twice. But I do. Ka is a wheel.

Anyway, I continue undeterred and paint over the fabric-paint yellow with the neon yellow. It takes four coats before I’m happy with the opacity of the neon. And then I rearrange the wire on the back, consult apartmenttherapy.com to remind myself how high to hang the thing (at least I’ve figured that out over the last two years), measure the wall, and find out that there’s already a hole from a previous picture-hanging project precisely where I want to hang it. Joy!

And with no further ado, the twice-revised canvas that just won’t quit…

Because a house is not a home until there’s a Deadwood quote on the wall. In neon yellow.

Off the Coast

Originally posted May 21st, 2014

I’ve wanted to paint on dishes for a couple of months now, but every time I look into it, I can only find paint that can’t come into contact with food. What’s the point of that? But whatevs. I decide that I’m going to make coasters for my coffee table, and I’m going to paint ceramics to do it. I go to Michaels and find blank ceramic squares, a roll of cork with adhesive backing, and, of course, paint.

Michael’s has a whole section of enamel paint, and I pick out a navy blue color and read the directions on the back. It says something about putting it in the oven to cure, which is totally cool, and while I’m reading this I also notice a really hot turquoise on the shelf and pick that up too. I also find a honeycomb rubber stamp and pick that up because I’m obsessed with bees and stamps. Also, I saw this tutorial online that shows you how to paint the enamel paint onto the stamp, then stamp the ceramic, so picking out a stamp was my plan all along. Because I can’t paint. I guess I forgot to mention that.

I am super excited to get started on this project as soon as I get home. I should probably wait and do it another day because I have to bake these things after I paint them, and it’s already 10pm, but I don’t wait. I start with the turquoise.

And I cannot get the paint to stick to the ceramic tiles. It sticks to the rubber stamp like, well, I don’t know, like I painted it onto the rubber stamp. The stamp sticks to the ceramic like glue every time, and then leaves almost no paint behind. I turn off my ceiling fan, thinking that it’s drying too fast. I work as quickly as I can, desperate to get a turquoise honeycomb pattern onto a square of ceramic, any square of ceramic! But I cannot. I end up with a couple of tiles that sort of have a shadow of the pattern on them, so I try to freehand the honeycomb cells a little bit. I am not very successful with this. Because I cannot paint.

So I switch to stripes, and I do a few stripes with the turquoise, and I decide to throw a navy stripe in there all sassy and diagonal-like. This is where I discover that the navy paint is totally unlike the turquoise paint. It’s much thinner and slicker, and it takes several coats to get my diagonal stripe to cover the turquoise stripes.

This gets me thinking: Maybe the navy paint will work on the stamp? I try the navy with the honeycomb stamp, and I am relatively successful with this. Relative success is marked by the fact that I’m not moaning, “why, why, why,” every time I peel the stamp off a ceramic tile and am only muttering, “whatever,” instead.

I pick out maybe seven of these things that don’t anger me too completely and decide that I’m going to throw away the rest. Then, I grab the closest tube of paint to remind myself of the rules for the whole oven part.

This tube of paint says nothing about curing it in the oven.

This tube of paint is not enamel paint.

And there you go.

So now it’s 2am and I’m practically weeping, but whatever. I put the navy ones in the oven and just let the turquoise ones air dry.

Blank

Originally posted October 7th, 2012

So I’ll just jump to the chase here. This is what I’ve been up to with my paints and canvases and stickers.

I sent this photo to my sister and she told me I can’t blog about this project because it’s awesome. She is wrong. I mean—she’s right, it’s awesome. But that doesn’t mean I can’t blog about it on Fail It Yourself.

Reason 1: I messed up plenty of times.

Reason 2: It’s not about failing, it’s about trying something out even when failing is a real possibility.

And there is no reason at all this project could not have been a catastrophe.

You might have noticed that I like to say I have no idea what I’m doing. But really. I had no idea what I was doing on this one. I am intimidated by Crayola watercolors on printer paper. I had never in my life purchased a canvas, a paintbrush, or tubes of paint. EVER.

But I have this horrible blank wall over my bed.  And real art that is unique costs lots of money. I decided I would do something on a canvas, but I stopped short of actually trying to paint “real art”  and bought the stickers.

So. I bought the cheapest acrylics from Michaels in pthalo blue and pthalo green because their names were similar and I supposed they would likely blend together well. I also bought the biggest canvas that I could get off a shelf without asking for help.

I went home, spread out some newspaper, mixed up some paint in a paper plate, started painting, and tried really really hard not to think about it too much. This is the only way I could have gone about it. If I’d looked at that blank canvas too long it would have petrified me.

When I got to the end of the canvas, I stopped painting, and that was that.

I couldn’t believe how easy this was. I loved the color I mixed up, and I liked the way the paint wasn’t entirely opaque on the canvas, and I had it done in an hour.

Tip to self: NEVER use spray paint again. Brushes, even small ones, are 1000% easier.

Okay, so then I realized something. This sticker set comes all cut up in pieces and you’re supposed to stick it to the wall in your own sort of design. I had planned to copy the design on the box, because that would be easiest. But I kinda forgot to find out what the dimensions would be for that design before I bought the canvas.

OOPS.

My canvas was too narrow to do the design on the box. So I had to come up with my own design. Okay, don’t panic. The sticker comes in 14 pieces so that shouldn’t be too bad, right?

NOPE.

Each of those 14 pieces breaks up into other little pieces. There are no less than 30 separate stickers in that kit.

So, I taped off a fake canvas on a chunk of wall and figured out my design. I started with a “spine” for the damask and then plugged in all the other little curly bits one by one.

The packaging and website for these stickers claim that they are “easy to apply.” What they mean is: “it will not be hard on the vinyl or the adhesive to apply, remove, and reapply each of these 30 pieces 30,000 times while you are getting your act together. Whether or not this is hard on you is not our problem.”

Okay, so this process took HOURS but I kept at it until I felt like I had a pretty good design. Then, I took a picture of it on the wall. This was a clutch move, because as I transferred the stickers to the canvas I had to refer to the photo about 30 times.

It is really hard to position these right. It really is. I mean, they are all curvy and weird and the slightest angle or shift just…ok anyway. The point is, I totally thought I was cheating by using stickers and it turns out the stickers were the hardest part BY FAR.

This experience reminded me a lot of working on some of the window displays at J. Crew. The designs were handed down to us by corporate, along with a lot of the supplies. The best projects were the ones where they would tell you EXACTLY what to do. “Hang the Christmas lights 8.5 inches from the top of the window. Copy the picture we’ve provided.” The worst was when they’d send you some materials and try to say something like, “be creative, make it your own!” When a company that insists on searching your bag for stolen merchandise before you can leave its store suddenly tells you that your creativity is valuable and your decisions have power, it’s absolutely impossible not to suspect a trap.

Anyway, this project reminded me of that because these stickers showed up in the mail and there was a picture that was kind of helpful, but ultimately I had to be creative and make it my own. It felt a little like a trap, but I tried to ignore the feeling.

It turned out to be ok in the end. I like my design and I’m pretty glad I had the flexibility to do my own thing.

So I am done with the front of the canvas. Then I realize I have no way to hang the thing.

Back to Michaels.

I bought a little wire hanging kit and watched this video to show me what to do with it.

The directions on the back of the kit said to place the grommets 1/3 of the way from the top of the frame. So I measured the width of my canvas, divided that by a third, then measured down from the top and placed my first grommet.

Weird thing is, it looks like a lot more than 1/3 of the way down. It’s almost half! And that’s when I realized that I had measured 1/3 of the width of the canvas, not 1/3 of the height. So I’m an idiot.

Luckily, the fact that there is an extra hole in the back of my frame where I placed – and then removed – the first grommet doesn’t really change the result.

Then, I had to measure where on the wall I wanted it to go.

Here’s the thing with hanging pictures. I know how to use a measuring tape and put the picture right where I want it. But, and this is the kind of thing that drives me insane, how do I know if where I think it should go is really the best place to put it?

There must be some kind of rule, a golden rectangle thing that the Greek mathematicians figured out eons ago and that I am just too lazy to discover. No, really. I didn’t even google it. I just hung the sucker up! Because I have no idea what I’m doing.

Anyway, here it is.

As a writer, I’m never afraid of a blank page, because if you don’t like it blank all you have to do is write all over it. YOU HAVE ALL THE POWER OVER THE BLANK. I guess the same thing goes for walls. And canvases.

So now what do I do about the blank wall next to my bed?????

Using Stickers Is Not Cheating

Originally posted Oct 4th, 2012

Last week I ordered these stickers for my wall and they just came in today.

Do really crafty people use stickers? Maybe not. But something’s got to be easy at some point, I mean come on people. Seriously.

I’m not going to put them on the wall though. Or…not at first.

Don’t worry, all will be made clear in time. I’m ready and willing to show you all my hair-brained ideas as I muck each one up, step by step.

But first…let’s clip these Michael’s coupons…