Crafty?

So I know a lot of people in Utah and the East have been trapped inside due to cold weather these last few weeks....here in sunny california Walter and I have been trapped inside due to the heat (and no car, but that is really inconsequential right?) So I have tried my hand at decorating our apartment, cooking new things, and doing a few crafts.

So we have slowly put our apartment together the last couple of weeks it still isn't finished but who knew it would take so long to decorate a small apartment. We do not have a truck so we have been making multiple trips to ikea to purchase different pieces for our home. Having a small car has really helped us stay in budget and be really conscientious of where we are putting things.

As far as food goes, I am not the best cook and I feel like seth makes dinner a lot which consists of curry, and curry, and curry but we love it. So recently I have tried my hand at apple pie and it is my most proud cooking moment. I took a bite and exclaimed: "This doesn't taste bad! it actually tastes amazing!"

Now for those of you who are thinking "well of course you are going to think your food is awesome" Seth took a bite and he said the same thing. We then went to a friends house and shared our pie with them...they loved it too. So now I have a renewed determination to keep cooking......or to at least keep cooking apple pie. I made another one last night and it was equally delicious. And yes I made everything from scratch. *applause

As far as crafts go I have had four big boxes from the crib we just purchased for Walter and from two thirty pound mirrors. I hoarded them, I know. but I finally did something with them. I wanted a place for Walter to play because he often takes his toys and spreads them all of the apartment. my thought was that if I could centralize his toy play area we would have less of a mess. 

What to make? I needed something masculine and yet easy to make out of a square box.....castle it is!

So I went to Michaels and spent about two dollars in craft paint and a brush.  My biggest fear with crafting is spending a lot of money to make something that doesn't look that great when you could spend just a little bit more and get a good solid product. So 2 dollars was all I was willing to spend for this first one.

I started early in the morning and finished in the afternoon. It was a lot more time intensive than I thought but that was mostly due to Walter climbing on the boxes and getting into the paint. So this is definitely a nap time project or a project to do with older kids. I did have walter help me paint in areas that didn't really matter but that was kind of a big mistake because when I told him it was mommies turn he went and grabbed a pencil and drew on the front that I had just finished, doh!  Here are the pictures from beginning to end. 

 I didn't measure or anything so that is why it isn't perfect but remember I am not the craftiest. After painting two coats of white paint on my two parts of the castle (this took like two and half small bottles of white craft paint which were like 65 cents at michaels) I grabbed a dry erase marker and started working on the decorative elements.

 After I finished all of the drawing I grabbed some black paint, also 65 cents, and started to do some shading so you can see the box on the right is shaded and the other is not. I did this because I didn't know that I would like the shading but in the end i decided to do the whole castle with shading because it looked cool.

 And here is the finished product! I haven't done anything to keep the two pieces together other than wedging one box corner into the other. That has worked so far,  but I may eventually find a more permanent way to keep them together.

 Overall this was worth the 2 dollars and the couple of hours it took. Especially because Walter really loved helping work on the castle I just wish I could have thought of more kid friendly things to ask him to do on the castle. Walter is still a little too young to appreciate the awesomeness of the castle, and he doesn't quite use it as a toy play area; but, we can hope that eventually he will use it as I had originally planned. There was a website that I used for inspiration of this project but I cannot find it right now..i'll post it when I find it.