She's (not) Crafty!

I’ll spare you the latest details of my sleep training soap opera because, well, there are no details. Miss Dub cried for one hour that fateful night and has been sleeping soundly without waking since. (At night that is – she hasn’t been sleeping nonstop since I wrote that post.) Sometimes she cries before going down for the night, but mostly she plays herself into a deep sleep. It does result in some bizarre sleeping positions, but I’ll take a pretzel baby in exchange for sleep any day.

So there. We did it, though lapses are to be expected since she is a baby. I’ll let you choose to congratulate or berate me as your emotions dictate. Of course, the latter will get you a severe blogger beating as one anonymous – hereby known as “Miss Rude-O-Pants” – learned the hard way. It’s not that I can’t handle a little criticism; it’s just that I have little tolerance for making my readers feel like crap. Also, being wo-MAN enough to use your real name helps because it’s a lot easier to take on some nameless face than Becky from Duluth. Also, I’m hoping that the comments section will get so intense that I will soon be able to sell tickets to read it on Pay-Per-View. Because, let’s face it, we’re all looking to get rich quick and this looks like my best chance.

But in other news, I’m a horrible crafter. Actually, I’m not a crafter. A crafter thinks of projects in the middle of the night not just for home improvement purposes. A crafter eats, sleeps and breathes ribbon. I, however, eat cereal.

So I should have known better than to take on some recent projects, like painting the cubbies of a small bookcase in Miss Dub’s room. FYE – Cheap, MFD-made, bought at Walmart (blasphemy!) bookcases do not take well to paint, even after a hearty sanding and heaping helping of primer. It will peel straight off, leaving you with a very distressed set of cubbies. And not the crafty kind of distressed. (Remember, I’m not a crafter.) I mean the distressed look that says, “Any good crafter knows that you cannot paint on fake wood.” Also, the kind of distressed look that says, “Any good Target lover knows that shopping at Walmart will bring nothing but misery to you and your home.”

So that was a huge mistake.

Then, I decided to put together a little frame wall in our hallway since we currently have two personal photos on display at our house, both excerpts from our engagement photo shoots FOUR years ago. And I really needed something to show for the 1,200 pics I’ve taken of Miss Dub over the last nine months. So I ordered a select 400 of them and bought a bunch of frames at our local Goodwill, which is one of the cleanest establishments I’ve ever seen, thus debunking my theory that all thrift stores have hanger dust. Then I decided to spray paint the wood frames a nice shade of silver. (Are there shades of silver? Or is it just silver?) But once again, my non-crafter status worked against me. Because apparently any good crafter knows that you should spray the back sides of frames first, as you’ll want any drips to fall to the back upon final spray. Also, don’t be so impatient to have them dry that you end up smudging them like I do my toenails every single time I paint them.

Maybe it’s not an issue of craftiness but of patience?

Whatever.

I will say that my quilt wall turned out excellent. But that’s because I received all the lap quilts from my Queen Quilter mother, who is a crafter, though she loves cereal even more than me.

I guess I’m just doomed to be the girl who wants to be crafty, but instead fills notebooks with ideas for novels rather than sketches of scrapbook pages.

And that’s OK. It’s just a little distressing.

But you will buy my books, won't you? 'Cause I'm looking to get rich quick.