Still waitressing, don't want to talk about it.
I may be moving into an actual office, which will hopefully spring me into the thick of my profession! Will keep you posted....
Now down to business. For Christmas I got crafty this year, a euphemism for frugal, which itself is a euphemism for cheapo. So I made the Fiance's niece and nephew a puppet theater out of the hideous giant medicine cabinet that actually hung in our tiny bathroom (shrinking it even smaller) when we moved in. We removed the monstrosity and hung a flat mirror in its place. Hey, we don't have children yet, we have plenty of room to choose form over function. On with the puppet theater.
I took this thing, which only would have hit us in our heads in our tiny bathroom, and removed the doors and hinges. I washed it (it had baby powder on it - eewwww) and primed it.
After priming, I painted it with chalkboard paint from Home Depot (they also have dry-erase board paint!) on the sides, front, and the "display area" top (which was the bottom in the yucky powder vanity). Then I painted the bottom insides and very top part light blue (left over from painting our kitchen). And then, handy Fiance removed these little curtain rod holders from above the kitchen windows (where we now have wide-slatted blinds), and screwed them into the top front of the puppet theater, into which I fit the gold curtain rod that came from either the kitchen or some other formerly curtained window in our home. Then I cut some felt into the shape of fake grass and water and glued it to the bottom of the theater. I recoated the chalkboard paint twice. Then I rested. For a bit.
Then came the part I dreaded and put off, literally until Christmas morning: I cut some red velvet velour fabric I've had for years into two panels, the approximate shape and length I desired (as you can see, a tad too long, but that's better than too short). I turned the fabric under on the inside and sewed to create an inch long loop. Then I slid the panels I'd cut and sewn onto the rod and popped it back into place. Voila!
So it's a terrible picture (below), but here's the final product. In between sewing the curtains and touching up paint, I made a batch of caramel brownies. The bag of caramels contained popsicle sticks to make candy apples, so I took the popsicle sticks, cut some felt into heads and glued them to the sticks, slapped on some googly eyes (love those things!), and twisted pipe cleaners into arms and legs (gluing to make them stay put on the stick). So I had puppets for the puppet theater. These took me about 30 seconds each to make, and surely would take only twice as long to destroy, but they were more presentation than anything else. On that middle chalkboard slat (just below the stick puppets), I wrote "___ and ___ 's Playhouse" in chalk (of course), cut off those pesky white threads hanging on the curtains, and we were on our way, brownies and puppet theater in tow. Don't you think that on that crazy crafting planet where Martha Stewart is president, I would be McGyver? I mean, come on, taking the unused sticks from the caramels and combining them into my plan to make little puppet people?? So I rode to Christmas dinner with a satisfied, accomplished glow. And the kids loved the theater. And after two minutes, one said "What happened to your puppet's mouth? It's not there anymore!" Yes, my stick people were not going to last.
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR! More to come in 2010!
