Did that title get you! to look!?

I have been in a cleaning/purging spree the past few weeks…at least in my craft room.

I knew this was going to happen when we came back from Utah. Actually, I had been planning this since mid-Summer, when I knew I was going to be leaving my 9-5 job (oh let’s be real…it was more like a 5 to 9 job!). I had a to-do list on what I was going to get accomplished each day and was sure I was going to be completely finished in a week.

Bahahahaha! Good one Stacy!

Ok, so, it wasn’t super horrible and only took two weeks once I got going. Of course, we had a little ‘life event’ with Miss Ginger and her surgery, and that has slowed me down this past week because I have had to watch her continually – hard to do when you are going from one end of the house to the other all day long!

At any rate, it’s done. I purged a ton and now all I need to do is have the items I’m donating picked up by a few charities. My philosophy on most of the items I gave away…if I haven’t used it in a year, I don’t need it (most things…there are a few tools that I cannot get rid of because I know I will use them). I also didn’t waste time trying to find boxes behind the grocery stores…I spent $30 and went to get a good selection of good boxes at my local U-Haul. I was very happy with that decision.

I put the finishing touches on everything in the craft room as well as our formal living and dining room (where I had put everything from the craft room…and where I have been sewing for the past 6 months!) this weekend and I really couldn’t be happier. The photo above is my IG pic of blogging tonight from my creative space…makes me so happy. It’s so much easier to make and stick with a plan and to-do list when the places you spend most of your time are in relative order!

I wanted to share one of the little projects I did in the midst of the cleaning and purging.

I thought it would be sweet to have a pretty chalkboard to put fun quotes on through the year. I have one in the living room on our sideboard and I put seasonal quotes on it to greet our guests. This one I wanted to have creative and inspiring quotes on it as we go through the year.

I have had a picture frame from Ikea for years. It is the Ung Drill frame, and is GREAT for photo shoots. However, I’m not heading that direction with my photography anymore, and I didn’t want to get rid of this great frame. So, I found the glass that I had tucked away and came up with a plan!

My particular frame started out black. While my craft room is ivory, pink and black…I didn’t really want the frame to be black or ivory (or pink!). I found a great hammered metal paint from Krylon (of course…my favorite spray paint company) and chose the silver. I also used chalkboard paint from Krylon for the glass.

And this is how it came to be:

I painted the frame with 2 coats of the hammered metal paint (so pretty).

I painted the glass with 3 coats of the chalkboard paint. I don’t know if I needed that many coats, but because it was glass, I wanted to get several coats on there to give it some ‘tooth’.

As with any chalkboard project, once you have prepared the surface with the chalkboard paint, and it has dried the allotted amount of time, you need to ‘prep’ the chalkboard surface by rubbing chalk all over the area, and then erasing it. I was in the kid’s section at the craft store and bought a box of Crayola chalk. It worked great, but I’m sure any generic chalk would work as well.