Better After

65 In Uncategorized

Original Art & Fabulosities Giveaway! (GIVEAWAY NOW CLOSED)

(giveaway now closed)

Halloween is pretty much my favorite holiday, for several reasons:

1. I love to dress up! I will gladly partake of any occasion that allows me to wear a costume and make a fool of myself.

2. No pressure! I don’t have to battle crowds and scour the stores on Halloween Eve, looking for the perfect gift for my great aunt Ida, or worry about sending so-and-so a Halloween card, just because they sent me one.

3. Like that wasn’t enough, there’s free candy!

So, I’m really excited about this giveaway from artist extraordinaire and Queen of Halloween herself, Kelley Smith!

Understatement alert: Kelley likes Halloween. If you are lucky enough to see how fantastically she decks out her home for Halloween, you will stand there gaping for hours, and then come home and curse all your own pathetic decorations.

Here’s an example: This year I hung up a paper skeleton from the dollar store. Kelley, on the other hand, hand-painted these porcelain dolls into the creepiest altered-art you’ve ever seen, named them, and WROTE THEIR BIOGRAPHIES! And that probably isn’t 1/100th of everything she’s done. This week. The woman is amazing.

These dolls, complete with their accessories and stories, are available in her etsy shop, Kelley Smith Original Art and Fabulousities.

If those are a little too freaky for your taste, and make you nearly wet your pants in fright, don’t worry, she also makes the coolest jewlery too!

And today she has kindly offered one of her handmade Halloween jewelry creations to one lucky Better After reader!

You could win this darling Halloween charm necklace and be a Halloween Queen yourself! Features a vile of “bat blood,” skull with crystal eyes, assorted beads and an altered-art witch in the Starry Night sky on an 18″ black velvet cord.

Enter to win!

To enter once: simply leave a comment here!

For an extra entry: visit Kelley Smith Original Art & Fabulosities, and come back and leave another comment letting me know you did so!

And, if you’d like to see more of Kelley’s art, not to mention the insanely awesome portraits she did of my three children for my birthday (seriously, I have won the friend lottery), visit her Art Blog.

Good luck, I hope you win! Have a great weekend!

October 15, 2011 By Lindsey @ Better After

13 In decor/ fashion

Fashion Friday

Hey, it’s Friday! You know what that means: a little fashion re-mixin’! I didn’t actually intend to create a “fashion Friday” feature, but it seems to be happening kinda regularly, so we shall go with it. If you have anything to submit, go ahead and send it my way!

So, today’s fashions went from straight out of the drawer into straight-up fashionable decor! First Wendy from Craft Goodies took a pile of white t-shirts that she didn’t want to just throw away and decided to make a rosette pillow instead. Similar pillows in the stores can cost – hold on to your hats – over $70! And she didn’t even buy dye for the cloth, she just soaked it in watered down paint!

I love this next idea, and it’s perfect for fall. Just an old cable-knit sweater from the thrift-store sewed into a pillow cover! I saw some sweaters just like this at Goodwill the other day, but they were like $9 apiece, and I didn’t feel like paying that much. Oh man, I’m so cheap. Do you think I’m cheap? Never mind, don’t tell me.

From the ever fabulous Nikki at Grand Design Co.

Do you feel bad for the great big fabric chain-stores of the world? Because us DIYers are totally scamming them, since they would charge a hefty price per yard for this fantastic fabric, whereas we just use a .99 thrift-store skirt instead? I sure don’t! From Emily at Of Seeds and Thorns.

Thanks Ladies!

October 14, 2011 By Lindsey @ Better After

9 In decor

Going Faux

Do you desire to dream and conspire by the fire, but bummer alert: you don’t have a fireplace? It doesn’t make much sense to chop a hole in your wall, brick around it and add a chimney just for a little ambiance. So fake it! All of the look and none of the mess! And none of the scary ghost noises coming from the chimney when it’s especially windy outside.

From Derek and Whitney at The Rooster and the Hen. I love the stacked wood look, which reminds me of one of my favorite posts on the most hilarious blog ever, Catalog Living.

October 14, 2011 By Lindsey @ Better After

5 In bathroom

Dispel the Motel

Melissa’s before bathroom is giving me flashbacks of every cheap motel I’ve ever stayed in, all rolled into one dreary whole. All that’s missing are the plastic cups wrapped in plastic. But the after … hello Beverly Hills Hotel! It’s so glam! Even the toilet got a makeover, and good thing too. I bet the earth wept every time someone flushed all 47-gallons of water in the old one.

Fabulous job, thanks Melissa! Lots more to see on her blog Living Beautifully.

October 14, 2011 By Lindsey @ Better After

46 In chairs/ottomans/seating/ tables/dressers

Undressed Dresser

Don’t be so quick to pass by an old dresser missing half its drawers. Who says it was only meant to be a dresser anyway? Maybe it is secretly yearning to be a bench. A fabulous bench with storage built right in!

After blogging for all this time, you would think that ideas like this would occur to me once in a while, but you’d be wrong! From the always inspiring Catherine from Freddy and Petunia!

October 13, 2011 By Lindsey @ Better After

8 In tables/dressers

We’ve got the right stuff!

Soooo, how’s your week going? Yeah, mine too. It’s fall break up in here, (and 98 degrees out, awesome) so we are kind of holed up in the house and going stir-crazy. I’m just telling you now, I cannot be held responsible for my actions if I have to hear the Wonder Pets theme song one more time.

Maybe looking at this fabulous dresser makeover by Nicole at Scrap Me Baby will soothe my soul. Ahhhhh, yes. Graphite and gray, I feel better already.