a different kind of sand castle...

bringing sand and shells home from a beach vacation is do-able.
a sand castle? not so much.

unless, of course, you find a new way to make a sand castle ;) 

and i did. 

continue reading to see the everyday material that inspired me and how i used it...

painting the globe...

today i'm sharing a project that uses the OTHER 'color of the year',
Ultimate Gray.
(since most of my recent projects have been all contained Illuminating Yellow,
i thought it was time to give the second color some attention!)

i finally came up with a way to restyle an item that i've had tucked away for years...
it was a banged-up, scratched, faded (but not in a good way) paper world globe,
and using gray and white paint to transform it was the perfect solution to update the look.
note: this is a globe from the 1990's. not vintage or antique. not valuable.

now it fits into my decor, and is a sweet reminder of special people each time i look at it.
isn't that better than keeping something stashed in a closet
because although it means something to you, you don't know where to PUT it?

continue reading to see the before, during, after... and AFTER!

NEW! Sweet Sweater Sandbabies!

in my last post, i shared my new 'sweet sweater kakamora'

along with a 'flashback' to a previously unseen 'sweet sweater sandbaby':

and he was cute.... but he needed some color to fit into my studio/office decor!

so i grabbed some bright beach buckets, white beach hats,

one last tan sweater from my stash, and one tan chenille 'sweet sweater pumpkin'
and started playing around....

the happy result was these three adorable beach babies in colorful buckets!

oh, but wait... i didn't stop there! keep reading to see what happened NEXT!

a tipsy tiki totem pole

you may have seen the sign that says 'Tipsy Tiki Bar' in my last post...

that's connected to another recent 'restyle' of an old project.

a week before the tiki bar came into being, Mom had an idea for something else in our backyard.

she shared her idea with me, and i liked the fact that it was basically a way to re-use items

from our Happy HULA-days theme last Christmas.

i started noodling the 'how' of the project... and remembered a favorite feature at Disneyland.

yup. there's something there that my grandpa Ward helped to build in 1963

that we enjoy to this day, and that inspired this project!

continue reading to see how i re-used our Christmas decor!