What Happened to Me...

So I'm sure you guys noticed that my last post was July 11...and that it is now Sept 17. I know when a blogger I read regularly just stops writing for a while, I am always curious what happened in their life. My answer to that question is simply "a whole lotta normal things."

1. I started painting Emerson's room. 

It looked like this before:

Then it looked like this:

Today it looks like this:

Notice the nicely made bed. We only spent the whole summer trying to make that a habit. Obviously it was very effective. On a brighter note, she can now clean her own room because we took so much stuff out of it. And this is a wonderful thing.

I didn't ever post about it because it's not finished yet. There are bags and boxes of things to be sorted, re-homed, or donated. And butterflies to be repaired and placed. And art to hang. But since you were wondering, this is where we are right now. I promise to I'll give you beauty shots when I have them.

2. After I finished painting Emerson's room, but before I finished putting it back together, I started painting Sarah's room.

This is before:

This is today:

Lovely, isn't it? That step stool with the drapes on it has been there for 6 weeks. She has started putting her alarm clock on it. I know. It's just that something more exciting came along about the second day I started painting Sarah's room.

3. We got a dog. Meet Harper the Minion.

This is a great thing. A fun thing. Something we had prayed for over the course of more than a year. And she is wonderful. But the timing was horrible. And you can't leave her unsupervised. So imagine me trying to paint with my kids coming in every 5 seconds asking me if someone else can be in charge of the dog and can they go to the neighbor's house and what is there to eat and can you take us to the mall? Yeah. That pretty much destroyed any kind of efficiency or continuity. Somehow, I eventually finished the painting. But stopped there, even though all of us, including DK, were home for the better part of the month of August.

4. I had to leave for Girl's Camp. I had volunteered to be a "Mom" at our church's week long camp for girls 12-18. So I cleaned my rollers, packed my duffel bag and drove to West Virginia for a week of fun, frivolity, and tubing down the Potomac.

The coming of Girl's Camp was not a surprise to me. The fact that I still hadn't finished either girl's room yet was. And it wasn't a good surprise. I knew in the pit of my stomach, that it would be months before I got the rest done. Sadly, I was right.

5. At that point, I pretty much gave up on finishing or blogging until school started. There just wasn't time somehow. And then school started, and there still wasn't time. 

Until today.

Today I started cleaning out the basement.

My office area got a substantial reduction in kid's stuff. 

You couldn't see the floor here earlier.

The rest of the room is pretty much in the "During" phase. Just like the kid's rooms. But I have been reading a bunch of posts lately about people's projects in the middle, so I'll add my "Keeping it real" photos to the pile.

Here is what the rest of the basement looks like today. Keep in mind I have already donated a carload to a local thrift shop:

While going through all this stuff, a wonderful thing happened. I got the idea to move the jungle gym outside and to replace it with a vintage table for the kids to do crafts and art on. They are currently using my dining room table, which means we never use it for meals because it takes so long to clean up all the glitter and bits of colored paper and who knows what else is stacked on top of it.

This is the table I"m thinking of:

If you are in the DC Metro area and looking at Craigslist today for a table and chairs...hands off! This one's mine...I hope.

Here it is with the leaf in:

So wish me luck that DK approves and I have time to get it before someone else does.

I have also miraculously started a few projects here and there in the last week.

This one is top secret. Can you guess where I'm going with it? I bet you can't. 

Let's just say it might represent a whole new direction for me as an artist. Very exciting!

Here's another little sneak peek:

I had a few minutes to work on the French Dresser the other day.

And here's one last project that's been burning a whole in my pocket:

They are solid wood salt and pepper mills that my dad sent me. Perhaps I'll do a tutorial on how to freehand a chevron design on a round surface. There's a trick to it. See the dots?

Anyway, it's all normal stuff, but that's pretty much what happened.

How was your summer? Is school life treating you better?

In any case, I'll talk to you soon,

CM Shaw

PS: This post was the merging of two great ideas from two other great people. Showing what I have been working on, even though it's not done was DK's suggestion when I started whining about not being able to blog one day. The basement "during" ideas was the suggestion from my sweet friend and defacto therapist, Barbaralee. Thanks for the help, guys!!!! It's so nice to be unstuck.