Prints & Mats

Unbeknownst to most people who know him, Brian has a secret love for art. Every time we go to a decent-sized city, he inevitably seeks out the free museums, and we spend more time there than I thought possible. Whenever we visit the Met, for example, my feet ache so much by the end that I am just dying to sit down. I don't dislike art, don't get me wrong, not at all. I love art, but just not with the fervor that Brian does. His favorite form of art: prints. They're pretty amazing. These fantastic artists carve pictures into wood, then put ink on the wood and 'print' them onto paper. They are incredibly detailed, and the most amazing part is that the artist has to carve a negative of the picture they want to turn out on the paper. It is fascinating, really.
Anyway, we especially like prints that depict farm life, but we can't afford to get a nice copy of the print. So, Brian gets an electronic copy of the print and just prints it out on beige paper. It looks pretty good... so much so that you can't really tell a difference between the purchased print and the homemade ones in the picture above.

Mats and frames are expensive. We buy our frames at dollar stores or thrift stores and polish them up with black spray paint. Seriously a hideous frame can become beautiful with a little paint!
To solve the mat problem, we just use poster board to mat our pictures. In the case of the prints, we make a nice, torn edge on the picture, and place it over some plain black poster board. It looks great! I don't notice that the picture is on top of the mat, and it gives it the same effect. You could do this with other colors of poster board, but we stick with black. Other examples of pictures matted in this way:

Collages

This is the collage we made for my office. I had my office painted green (far less "clinical" than other offices, as one of my students pointed out). The color did make a huge difference, but my office still wasn't the haven that I wanted it to be. I realized that some things were unavoidable...such as the desk, computer, and filing cabinet, but the rest I could mess with. I have a nice, comfy chair in there that I take a nap in during lunch almost daily, which helps a lot. I decided I wanted to decorate my office like my home. In the past, I've decorated it with cast-offs, but I spend a lot of time at my office (WAY more than I would ever choose to), so it should feel comfortable. I hung up some prints (more coming about these in a later post!), but I had a huge wall that needed something to cover up its blankness. So, we made this collage. It's covered with pictures, words, and ideas all associated with a 'quaint' lifestyle, embodying the joy of all 4 seasons. I just love it. It hangs proudly on my wall, and I find myself staring at it dreamily when I should probably be engaged in my work.

I don't have any pictures of additional collages readily available at the moment, but this is actually a pretty prominent form of decoration in our home. We got a whole bunch of old magazines (either free or for 10 cents a piece), including Country Living and Martha Stewart Living. We are slowly working our way through the plethora of magazines, building up a huge catalog of pictures for collages. We sometimes cut edges, or my favorite thing to do is to tear them (licking the edges first makes for a great edge). Put the pictures together on the board/paper, then finish it with little pictures (to cover up holes), and words or phrases, and you're all set! I love collages. They are a feast for the eyes every time you see them.

Great Find!

 

This is our living room, or half of it. We enjoy a country style in our home (no surprise there), and even though it's a basement apartment, we have made it into a nice, cozy home. We love it there. It's only half-basement, because only one corner of the apartment is under ground. The rest is exposed. This is awesome, because we enjoy the comfort of a basement in that it never goes below 50 in the winter and stays nice and cool in the summer, but we also have a full back door and plenty of light. It's great. Brian is the mastermind behind our apartment's decoration and design. I can tell what goes together, but I can't position things in a room like he can. We're cheap (or "Thrifty", since cheap apparently denotes something negative), so we do most of the work ourselves. 

Brian and I are "Freegans"... I don't really know exactly what that means, but our friends consistently label us that way. Apparently there's a movement going on where people won't pay for any of their food. They dumpster dive, eat un-eaten food at restaurants, forage, and get food in any way besides pay for it. Brian was curious about it, so he found a "freegan test" online and took it, and ... drum roll please ... yep! We are officially freegans. Now, although I think free food is of course a great idea, I'm not willing to go as far as some people do. But we do get as much free food as we can, and our "freeganness" extends past food. 

We are always on the lookout for free anything. I think the biggest secret to finding good stuff free is to be willing to wait for it. Take our couch, for example. We had a little loveseat that we found at a thrift store that suited our situation sufficiently, but I hated it. It wasn't comfortable (Brian would definitely NOT agree with that statement), and it was ugly (Brian would agree with that statement). It was a terrible blue corduroy with other colors dispersed all over it. I tried to improve it by sewing a brown sheet over it, but that almost made it worse. We stuck with the sheet, however, because the blue didn't match a thing in the room. I could have gone to a lot of work to make a decent cover for it, but I didn't have any intention of keeping the thing very long, so I saw no reason to go to so much work. 

So we had that thing for a long while, until one beautiful day when we found the couch in the picture. I had just gotten off the bus at home, and Brian and I ran back to something I had seen only a few houses down the road. I had seen a fake leather couch with a huge, cozy chair to match. There was a sign on it, which I supposed would list a price, but to my amazement, the sign said "FREE"... music to my ears.  The chair was in perfect condition. We loaded it on top of our Subaru and Brian drove it home while I sat on the couch to keep our claim on it.

While I was waiting, I inspected the couch. It was great from the front, but the back was all torn out and ripped up. I ended up patching that up easily by tearing off some pieces from the back, patching the parts visible from the front and sides, and then I sewed a brown sheet (Yep, the same one that was on the loveseat) over the back so that it wasn't exposed. I wish I had some before and after photos. It looks great! We have it up against the wall, so you really can't tell anything was ever wrong with it. We love it!

Summer Recap

Before I move on to our latest projects, I thought I would give a quick recap of our summer. It was a wonderful summer. The weather was perfect, with some cool nights, but lots of warm, swim-worthy days. We spent a lot of time outside, mostly working. Brian and I probably spend more time hiking and such in the winter, because in the Summer we spend most of our outside time working, and we like it. I am actually disappointed when the weekend arrives and I don't have a to-do list in the garden. I am most happy when I am working outside.

Anyway, the grow box worked beautifully. The plants flourished in there, and were quite sad when we removed them to our stony garden. We added a grow box on the right side of the covered grow box. We planted spices in (shown), which did pretty well even though it was a late year.

We made a garden in our yard. You see that weed patch in the right of the first picture? Our landlords let us tear out those weeds and plant a little garden. It's about 16'x 16'. The ground is super rocky, and we didn't put much money into it since we probably won't plant in it again, but considering, it has been a good garden.

Something attacked our tomatoes one night, so we made our little scarecrow. He's wearing a tattered pear of overalls that our last scarecrow wore, an old long-sleeved tshirt of Brian's, two left-handed work gloves, and a milk jug for a head. The baseball cap really gives it a life-like look, and our dog starts growling whenever she sees it. I was skeptical about hanging pie tins from its arms, but it actually helped, although the flashes of sunshine on the tins always catches my eye from the other side of the yard. We got a decent crop of zucchinis and cucumbers. Our tomatoes were super late, but they are coming on nicely now. There is just nothing like the taste of a garden tomato. Yum.

Change is Good

As you may have noticed, I've changed the name of this blog. I've been thinking about making changes to this blog for some time. I've never wanted a blog that is just a listing of my thoughts, or a journal...I want a blog about something that I do. I live a simple life, with not many exciting excursions or adventures to tell about, so I end up just expressing my thoughts. At first I was going to cancel this blog altogether because I wasn't happy with the result of my random ramblings, but I've decided that I might just have something to say. I keep life simple by doing projects. Brian and I are pretty good at scratching a few pennies together to make a living, doing things ourselves or learning to do without, so that is what this blog will be about from here out. I plan to post about tea-making, furniture making/remodeling, the projects that accompany farm life, putting away food, etc...and I'm planning to make a wool rag rug this summer, so I'll be posting about that! So hopefully someone besides myself will find this useful.

Now, the name...We've been struggling with that a little. Brian and I have decided that Quaint is probably the best word to describe us. Quaint has 2 definitions: strange, odd; and old-fashioned, nostalgic...well, we are just that! Synonyms to Quaint: original, peculiar, whimsical,  antique, charming, enchanting, picturesque...all words that would express my feelings about our lifestyle. I love living life the way we do, figuring out how to get by, or learning to do it yourself. It's something I've always loved. So here goes: a blog about living simple and quaint.