DIY Striped Burlap Curtains

I've been trying to decide on curtains for our living room for awhile.  I loved the big striped curtains I saw all over pinterest.  I wanted the striped look on burlap to get the natural beachy feel I was going for for the living room. 

Some great things I discovered about working with burlap.. a.) It's super cheap, b.) It is very easy to cut a straight line with since the whole thing is like one big grid.  

The width of the burlap straight from the bolt at the fabric store was perfect for each panel so i just had to measure how tall I wanted them.  I got them cut at the store but they were not cut straight so I had to re-cut the bottoms and tops.  

To make cutting a straight line super quick and easy just remove a strand of burlap in the direction you would like to cut and it leaves you a perfect line of where to cut.  

After cutting I added fray check to the edges to ensure it wouldn't unravel...  which I later discovered was unnecessary if you will be painting the edges the paint will do the same job and you can skip that step.

Then you have to make your measurements and decide on how many stripes, do a little math and come up with how wide each stripe should be.  I marked mine with pins so that I could get a straight line (again following the grid of the fabric).

Then I put painters tape down and took out the pins.

I started out using craft paint mixed with Martha Stewart's fabric medium to make it into fabric paint but quickly realized that would get SUPER expensive (I went through $40 worth of paint to do one stripe!) to get the paint coverage I was looking for.  The burlap sucked up the paint and the fabric medium made it runnier and then it offered less coverage.  It looked really patchy until I did about 20 coats of paint!

I ended up switching over to Glidden Gripper and Primer that I had left over from my coffee table project.  This paint gave me a LOT better coverage and I wasn't going to be snuggling up with this fabric so I didn't mind if it made the fabric stiff.

After several coats I peeled off the painters tape and reveled at my beautiful stripes!
I decided to hang mine with cafe clips and it was super easy and I could just mold the top of the painted burlap to stand just how I wanted it.

I wanted the curtain panels to have a nice uniform wave to it, so I clipped them up with pool noodles under the waves and left the clips in place for about a day to give them their shape.

I love how adding curtains makes such a dramatic difference to the look and feel of a room.

Before curtains

After curtains

Family Weekend #1...spending less & bonding more

From the series.. Spending Less & Bonding More.

Weekend #1:  

Us lucky Texans enjoy sun and 70's in January, so we thought a picnic at the park would be an easy enough outing for us to handle.  The girls were pumped!  The girls played on the playground and got some energy out and we ended up running into some friends and got to chat with them for a bit.  

Picnicking outside on a blanket was equally exciting for them.  There is just something about eating outside that is so relaxing.  $0 spent and family bonding accomplished!  We will be doing that a lot more often over the next few months that we get great weather in Texas.

Do you have any great ideas for spending less and bonding more with your family?

Spending Less & Bonding More

Starting this new year we want to get away from so much excess in our lives.  December seems to easily become a month of spending and splurging and justifying it all until you're blue in the face.  We did no less and were left taking a huge chunk of money out of our Emergency Fund, not so fun and exciting as those trips to Starbucks on a whim seemed at the time;).  It made me sick to think that we could have used that chunk of money we spent frivolously on nothing for a family trip to Disney (I know it takes a lot to go to Disney... I'm telling you we really know how to spend $).  Now it is done and over, and really its probably the best thing we could have done because it gave us some major motivation to really be intentional about managing our money better this year!

The first couple of weekends in January we thought, every time we leave the house we spend money so I guess we just have to stay at home...  this quickly turned into feeling like a long house arrest sentence with 2 energetic toddlers and 2 stir crazy parents!  The truth is pretty much every time we left the house on the weekends it would be for a trip to target, the mall, some other kind of errands and/or out to eat.  None of these activities were ideal dream outings for two toddlers and the money we spent doing them added up very quickly.  Our mission was born....  it was time to be intentional about how we spend our family time and our money in the process, luckily I think that working toward both goals could go hand-in-hand.

I am looking so forward to sharing our journey of filling our weekends with activities that are engaging for the whole family, ways of making some fun memories for the girls and ultimately spending less while bonding more.

Here is a working list of our weekend activities each weekend to spend less & bond more:
1.  Picnic at the park

(There will be a short post about each outing you can click through to read the whole post.)

DIY Coffee table redo

I've been on a coffee table hunt for awhile.  I knew exactly what I wanted and could not settle for anything that didn't fulfill the dream coffee table I had in my head:  a nicely distressed barnwood top with white legs that had some sort of interesting shape to them.  Then I came across this perfect gem at the Habitat for Humanity Restore for $20, my day was made!!

I knew I could transform this into just what I had been looking for.  First I had to sand the top.  Since I don't have a power sander I manually sanded it and got a free arm/back workout in the process ;)

Then I re-distressed the top a little bit by using both ends of the hammer to add some dents and grooves. 

To finish the top I stained it with Minwax Classic Gray Stain and then dry brushed over it with some charcoal gray and turquoise craft paint, going in the direction of the wood grain.  (Tip- When dry brushing start light with just a few strokes and then you can go back and add more and more layers.  While it may be tempting to put more paint on your brush at a time if you go too heavy it will take a lot of extra time & energy to undo.)  Then I white washed over it with a mixture of white paint and water, this is how it looked just after that, although the white wash lightened up over time.

Since I did not want to sand all the curves on the legs I did some research on paint/primer that would adhere directly to the lacquered finish.  I decided to go with Glidden Gripper White Primer/Sealer.

As you can see my kids were enjoying some fresh air in the backyard with their ball while momma was working, win-win!

I could have just done a couple coats of this to achieve that distressed look on the legs, but I went all perfectionist and did about 5 coats to get almost a pure white finish.  I may go back and sand a little more character into the legs with a fine grit sandpaper at some point.

The finished product....I'm in love!!