My Superstar Crafty Mom

So I was thinking the other day, what's the first thing I ever "crafted"? The answer is actually hanging in my bedroom (in what I like to think of as the "ultra-girly corner" of an otherwise nice, grown-up bedroom). This mirror is my first memory of trash-to-treasure crafting, and it's something that I made with my mom. Or, more precisely, my mom made while I looked over her shoulder and begged to help.

I'm going to guess that I was about five or six years old when we made this. The mirror originally had a bronze floral frame, and even my five-year-old self knew it was kind of gaudy. Mom took it outside, laid newspaper over the mirror itself and tucked it in under the frame, which I recall thinking was very smart. Then she spray-painted the whole bronze floral latticework white.


When the white paint had dried, the two of us sat down in the living room and painted all of the flowers--some white, some blue. I seem to recall that I was in charge of painting the yellow centers. And I imagine that we did this while watching One Life to Live (our favorite soap opera at the time.) And voila! We had a flowery mirror fit for a little girl's bedroom. (Or...ahem, a grown-up person's bedroom.) To be honest with you, I am completely incapable of knowing if this mirror is atrociously tacky or outrageously beautiful and hip. It's one of those items that has sort of merged with my identity and the story of who I am, and as long as I don't break it in a move some day, I will likely have it for the rest of my life.

At this point--if you didn't get it already from my lead-in--I'd like to state, for the record, that my mom has been my crafty inspiration my entire life. She let me destroy the kitchen with adolescent candle-making, sewed our dresses when Erin and I were in the musical Oklahoma!. And she is basically the brainchild of our family tradition of having "crappy craft Christmases" on years when we're all feeling a little broke. To be honest, those Christmases, where virtually everything wrapped under the tree is some sort of handmade wonder (or catastrophe), are all of our favorites. This painting above, in fact, was a gift from my mom on one of our crappy craft Christmases! Not so crappy, in my opinion!

And so were these vases, which she decoupaged using her secret decoupage technique! (You can see I've put the vases to other crafty uses, storing my various crappy crafting supplies.)

She's pretty good though, right?

And in recent years, she's even started selling her handmade decoupaged pendants online like a total rockstar. Go mom! She's been killing it over at Ebay for some time now, but just last week she expanded onto Etsy to open up her own online shop.

I was so proud of her that I had to gush to the online universe. I guess you could say I'm a pretty big fan of her work.

Oh, and special shout-out to my sister who taught me how to embed links this week. Thanks, Erin!