Weekend Bag

In celebration of my upcoming vacation, I decided to makeover my travel bag.

I got this bag fo free from my mom, who got it from a friend. BC calls it an Oach bag.  I'm not really a fan of the color tan/beige, but I took it because I like the size of it and it was free (remember... I'm a hoarder).

I had two choices: dye it or paint it.  I decided to paint it because 1. I can get the color I want (or lack of color since I settled on black). 2. it would be a little more precise. 3. I wasn't sure how dye would affect the trim. 4. I already had all of the supplies for painting it.  

first coat of one side

I used a fabric medium 1:2 ratio with paint.  I took some of my lessons I learned from the Painted Chair project and watered down the mixture a lot! (probably a water to paint ratio of 1:2)  I also made sure to dampen the fabric.  I painted messily and the paint just rubbed/washed off of the trim and hardware pretty easily.  I put 2-3 coats over the entire thing.
Here is the final piece:

I love the final outcome!  Florida, here I come!!!

Painting & Dog Park

Life has been pretty busy lately.  I've been trying to fill all of my free time with decluttering my place (slowly), hanging out with friends, playing with Clove, and enjoying all of the nice weather.

My grandpa is leaving for Wisconsin this weekend, so we had our last Saturday play date last weekend.  We spent the morning driving around town and working on his latest bird, great blue heron.  Pictured on the left is the sketch and before of the heron.  On the right, are pictures after I did the black detail paint.  This is the first bird I did any kind of detail on so I was extremely nervous, but Boppa said it was pretty good.

As always, I took Clove to the dog park.  She is normally very indecisive with who she should play with.  She'll play with a dog then ditch them after a couple minutes.  This puppy was different... He looked like he could be Clove's brother.  They looked similar and played the same way.  It was so cute!  Here are some pictures of the two:

This week was the final exam week for University of Cincinnati students, which means DAAPworks!  The design graduating class is the class I started college with and got to see all of my old Industrial Design studio mates' awesome capstone projects.  Also, the Graphic Design group killed it this year!  I also really enjoyed the Fine Arts gallery.  There was a lot of beautiful and inspiring pieces in the show.  I wish I had gotten some pictures.

Anyway, this post is all over the place, but I'm hoping to have some fun projects to share soon.

I'TS FRIIIIDAAAAAYYY!!!

Chicken Spinach Pasta Dish

continuing with my really good food pictures...

I had spinach, pasta, and chicken and just googled the three and adapted the below recipe from this recipe.  Here's what I did:

1 lb of pasta
approx 6 tablespoons of Olive Oil
6-7 cloves of garlic (I like garlicy foods)
1/2 tablespoon of red pepper flakes (or two packets from a pizza place)
2 chicken breasts cut up
12 oz. of spinach (I used frozen and just thawed and drained it a little)
Parmesan cheese

1. Cook pasta normally
2. Put the olive oil in a bowl.  add garlic and red pepper flakes.
3. Heat olive oil mixture in microwave for 1 minute (to absorb flavor)
4. Put 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil in pan to cook the chicken... cook chicken
5. Add spinach to the chicken pan until spinach is heated up. (2-3 minutes)
6. Put spinach/chicken in bowl with pasta.  toss in rest of the olive oil mixture.
7. Top with desired amount of Parmesan cheese

Enjoy!