The Apple Street Cottage

This is Project #2 from the same chair.  You may remember my Fairy Godmother visits that resulted in some wonderful goodies.   For this project I used pieces from one of the chairs and the old drying rack that I ended up taking apart.   Creating this was a lot of fun, but before we get started, let me welcome you back to the 'Do It Over' Designers blog hop.  We are a group of bloggers who love to recycle/upcycle/DIY.  I'm happy to host this blog hop and I hope you'll visit everyone to see what they have to share with you.  Their links will be listed at the end of this post. Here is the chair: It was nothing special and nothing I wanted to use in my house, so I cut the back off.   Ta-Daa! A piece of wood was attached to be a shelf. I cut 2 pieces from the old drying rack and screwed them to the back so it would have stability against the wall.   The arrows point-out the two pieces: You can see I stained the shelf and the bottom piece with walnut stain.  When it dried, th

Things have been a little quiet around the cottage but it's Spring and I wanted to say a quick 'hello'.  I've been dealing with a couple of medical issues and blogging has had to be put on the back-burner for a bit.   I was diagnosed this week with carpal tunnel syndrome in my right wrist.  Needless to say, typing and using a mouse is pretty uncomfortable.  I had it five years ago in my left hand, so I was pretty sure of the diagnosis even before it was official.  The down-side is that I've had it for a while and was told the muscle has wasted away and there is some nerve damage.  The surgeon was pretty surprised that I only recently started having symptoms.   The good news?  Surgery is scheduled for May and I'll be much better in spite of the nerve damage (I was told the same thing five years ago with my left hand).   The other issue is with my neck - arthritis, and compressed discs.  That's a tough one.  For now I'm on muscle relaxers, using heat/cold,

St. Patrick's Day is just around the corner and to be honest, I don't do a whole lot for the holiday, but, I had an idea.  I thought it would be cute, so I did it! I came across these little plastic tubes that had been languishing in a drawer for several years.  After picking up some Skittles, the project was underway... I started by sorting the Skittles by color.  It brought back fun memories of my teaching days.  Does anyone else remember sorting activities? After sorting, I added them to the tubes to form a rainbow of colors.  Sorry, forgot that pic! I made a couple of tags from scrapbook paper and stamps. They were attached to the tubes with Baker's Twine and the project was complete! I did make a change to one of the tubes - A space was left at the top and a few marshmallows were added to act as clouds.  Here's a side view to see them: That's my quick and easy St. Patrick's Day idea.   Before you say, "That's cute, Ann, but I don't have those p