Make a Paper Chain/ Christopher the Christmas Tree

I don't know where to start this one so I'll play it safe:

Hello! How's it going? That's good. Me, I'm doing well. 

In October I took a couple days over to fly out (in a horrible sketchy plane) and be a bridesmaid in my best friend's wedding. I have four 'best friends' but this particular one has been around for many years, she and her twin sister have been my 'besties' since we were ten, and friends since we were seven. You can see a precious before and after type picture on my Instagram by clicking HERE.

Anyway, as wedding favours she had little baby pine trees and a very cute pinterest-y display. I snuck this picture while picking up empty pop cans and beer cups. Sober bridesmaiding at its best.

Now this may seem like a complete 180 degree topic change but I promise it's related: My favourite Christmas movie growing up was Christopher the Christmas tree. I know that it's not on many lists, but it just always got me. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube HERE. The premise is very ugly duckling-esque but without spoiling the ending... Christopher was a baby Christmas tree who was never taken into anyone a home to be their family tree because he was so small and "ugly". So I took my little baby pine tree and names it Christopher. He sat in a mug for three months until I finally made him a home.

You would be surprised how hard it was to find a basic clay pot that wasn't enormous or teeny. I found this guy and his base at Michaels for under $5 (with a coupon of course). 

Now I have a pretty realistic view when I have ideas of how things are gonna turn out. I picture something in my head and know it's going to be 30% not as nice. So when I decided I was going to turn this clay pot aka Christopher's future home into a kate spade esque room decor masterpiece, I knew there was going to be a learning curve of sorts. After like six coats of white paint, some gold I borrowed from my moms ancient paint stash and a monogram stencil curtesy of markandgraham.com and my Silhouette Cameo, I was done and you can see the result at the top of this post...

30% people. I know it's not perfect but for my first attempt of stencilling I'm pretty pleased. Not perfect, but hey, it's... authentic.

Now to complete the look I figured Christopher needed some decorating... And conveniently a WTJ page came to mind. To see how Christopher's lovely garland came to be you can check out my latest Wreck This Journal series video.

Not perfect, but cute tight? 

Thanks for reading (and watching)!

Adrianna.

January 2015 Room Tour & New Room?!

I've always been in love with bedrooms. There's no way to say it that isn't ridiculously weird. Whenever I would go to friends houses in elementary and high school, I was always interested to see what their rooms were like. I think you can tell a lot more about someone by the space they spend most of their time in than, for instance, how they present themselves at school.
I was always fascinated by teenagers bedrooms in tv shows... All the posters and decor that just didn't translate into the room I had. I wasn't allowed to hang posters except for the kitten one I got from the book fair in grade three. My mom is a chronic redecorater. When we were growing up, a room got redone at least once a year. Usually with a theme.

My two brothers and I shuffled rooms around a few times.

I started with the biggest room. I think it was just a plain white room with mother goose wallpaper. When my brother was born we each got room makeovers, his being Winnie the Pooh themed and mine Minnie Mouse. I still have that bedspread in my bunk in our trailer. Here are a couple screen captures from a home video circa 1995.







When my second brother was born I was evicted so they could share the bigger room which was, as well as the majority of our childhood, dinosaur themed. I was about eight at this point and very fittingly had an obnoxiously girly flower room.

At the tail end of my time in that room my brothers and I filmed a house tour. Yes, a house tour in 2002 (maybe 2003?) before YouTube even existed. (What an obnoxious hipster I am). I filmed it with my dad's video camera, I had my own cassette tape for all the plays we made and filmed, while my middle brother (who is now 21) hosted the tour. Our quirk was that in every room my youngest brother would be "a statue" in some kind of pose that worked with the room, it was the best way to involve the baby of the family... who is now eighteen! You can view my room's segment of the tour in the following video:

In grade seven I was moved downstairs into what was once my moms craft room so the boys could have their own spaces. My youngest brother kept the dinosaur room and theme while the other one who was (unhealthily) obsessed with bows and arrows and fashioning them out of whatever possible got a Native American themed room. Now I don't know if this is politically correct but a teepee canopy and wall art that I got off of a Magic School Bus art program was pretty cool. This was the start of my moody I don't care about anything phase so I kept the decor my mom already had going in her craft room and stuck with the animal print.  But, as this was the peak of my sarcastic, moody, writing everything all the time phase: I actually wrote a room tour. Yup. That actually happened. It's from 2005 (or at least thats what Google days is when Incomplete from the Backstreet Boys came out). So, I'm just going to warn everyone: I was quite obnoxious.

            How many times can one song play in a day? That new Backstreet Boy song is driving me crazy; frankly…. The song itself is a bit Incomplete. Finally it ended, jeez took long enough. Now another weird song is on about some guy who heard some gossip about his ex who some lady sent out to her boyfriend of sixteen years. Seriously the singers of our time are seriously low on ideas.
 There’s nothing like sitting down to my computer at 10:17 at night writing some pointless thing that will just be sitting in some folder within a folder within a folder in my computer for the next two years until I decided to delete it. I’ve been listening to the same radio station for the past seven years and sometimes I wonder why. My room is a tannish color and an animal print border going all the way around with a black bookshelf, bedspread, beanbag chair, and calculator; it’s animal print… the room… not the calculator.

(continued)

1. I'm very sorry that you had to read that. 2. I'm very impressed if you read all that and do not blame you if you couldn't. 3. Again, so very sorry.

This was in between my two picture taking phases: post film and pre digital so I don't have many pictures unless you count weird webcam selfies. I apologize for the poor quality but these are screen captures from one of our plays: a Titanic remake. Also, the girl in the picture isn't a family member so her face has been blurred for privacy :)
What the heck was that at the end? WELL to go completely full circle I am officially moving into my mom's craft room. Now instead of getting down-graded to a craft room closet in the basement I am lucky enough to get one of the biggest rooms in our house. With my brother moved out my mom wanted to shuffle things around and down-size her craft room as she doesn't use a lot of the stuff and therefore the space.





You can kind of see some carry over between the rooms now!
Then, when I was in grade nine we moved to a new house. I was turning sixteen and had been given the okay to do whatever I wanted with my space, something that was not allowed in the old house unless it was attached with sticky tack. I could post about 1000 pictures of the different variations of my lime green bedroom but in 2011 I filmed a room tour. I did this video for a tumblr video challenge and the post can be found HERE :)

In early 2013 I decided I needed a change and wanted to purge my life (and therefore my room) of people that weren't in it anymore so I took down most of my pictures. I started envisioning completely changing my room, and took a shot in the dark and asked my youngest brother to switch rooms with him. I ended up giving him money to seal the deal haha but in April 2013 I was completely settled in my new room. Being in that room started to bring new things, including my new YouTube channel and doing a lot of social media. The following video is my new room tour that I filmed today!

So stay turned for ANOTHER room tour! ;) I am really excited about the opportunity to have a completely new space for a completely new year! My biggest goal is to get organized and accomplish as many of my goals (no matter how small) and I'm looking forward to have such an amazing area to do everything! Thanks so much for reading this super long post and I hope you've enjoyed the ride of my bedrooms through the years!
Adrianna.

Who I Needed

[The quote poster thingy in the picture was made with scrapbook paper, a dollar store canvas and my Silhouette Cameo. The lace vase is from Ikea (actually my church... my mom said I could have it, whoops).]

If you follow me on any social media you'll know I'm obsessed with quotes. I actually made a big long post on this blog that you can find HERE regarding my long-term love of quotes :) 

The way I've discovered quotes has definitely changed throughout the years as social media and the internet in general have grown. If you had told me I would soon be finding quotes that were screenshots of tweets on tumblr I (and anyone else) probably would have thought you were bonkers. Yes, bonkers. 

Yet here we are.

I forget what tumblr blog I found it on but it was in my drafts for about a month. It's one of those quotes that make you think. And it just sounds cool. 

Most of the quotes I collected when I was in elementary and high school were copied and pasted just for that reason, they sounded cool. I never really cared if they applied to me or my life but just enjoyed the way those words were strung together. And if they rhymed, even better.

But post-secondary has ruined me and now I overthink everything.

Who did I need when I was young?

I am not going to lie, I had a pretty great childhood. My family went on amazing vacations, I have a great relationship with my parents who have been married for twenty-five years and I never had to share a bedroom. 

But the whole friend thing was my problem. 

 All my life I was the "mother hen". Maybe it's from being the oldest child or always being a girl that played with dolls- from Barbies to Cabbage Patch and having a beyond creepy porcelain doll collection. When I started school I was a chronic befriender of the weird kids. I liked being nurturing and helping people and, well, being someone's only friend. 

I can trace it through all of my school years. I would make a friend, we'd get really close and then for some reason we couldn't be friends anymore (moving/ changing schools/ her parents fearing I was going to make their daughter into a lesbian... not making that one up, unfortunately). 

I was the weird girl. I always was. I liked Digimon and wore overalls and cornrows and wrote stories for fun.  I didn't listen to the popular music, didn't get clothes from the cool stores and apparently that doesn't get you friends. 

In grade five I made two friends (twins) that I decided were the real deal. We did everything together and even when they moved three hours away we stayed close. We're still best friends after knowing each other for sixteen years and this fall I am a bridesmaid in one's wedding. They were weird too. We played real life Neopets on the playground at recess and researched Ancient Rome for fun. Ten years after we met one of their boyfriends gave me two-hundred Digimon cards because he was told if I didn't like him, he would be single again. 

Theres nothing like meeting people that know you're weird and different and encourage it.

Once I started high school I stopped hiding the things I liked and actively displayed Disney and Digimon and everything else on my binders and in my locker. I figured if people thought that was weird, I didn't need to be their friend.

Acceptance comes in many shades and maybe my flavour seems very first-world-problem to you when there's so much other hate and exclusion based on sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, class and so forth but I figure when people have been told they're not good enough, it doesn't matter why. I know I am a white, middle class, CIS female and so I know I have not faced challenges that many people have and I don't pretend to have done so, but I try to be as accepting of people no matter what may make them different from me.  

It's okay if you like things or are things that everyone else thinks are not normal. If someone is going to give you a hard time for being different, they lost the opportunity to have a freaking awesome lifelong friend.

I wish someone had told me that when I was ten. 

Adrianna.

Quote/ Unquote

I'm what you might call a quote-a-holic. Actually, you probably wouldn't because you're obviously way cooler than me and wouldn't use terms like that. But I really, really, REALLY love quotes. My obsession started back in elementary school when chain emails were a big thing. I actually have a few funny ones saved on my computer still, but the majority were cheesy poems that you had to forward to everyone you loved to remind them that you care. And when you were twelve in the early 2000's, it was very serious business. Anyway, I received one (and I honestly couldn't tell you who sent it to me) but instead of the usual cheesy poem it was a bunch of (equally cheesy) short sayings punctuated with emoticons illustrating each saying. And a monster was created.

I printed out the group of sayings on my dad's old black and white printer and pinned it on the little half cork board and half white board that I had in my room. And thus, my new quote obsession spawned my first quote board. These quotes also found their way into my msn messenger screen names more than once.

I had just finished a book report for school and part of the assignment was to include a quote from the book. In grade seven if was that annoying overachiever/ goody good/ teachers pet and of course just one quote wouldn't suffice. So there were three. 

And after getting my book report back, I cut up the part with the quotes and that went on the quote board as well.

Then, one of my first online loves was discovered: http://www.firehotquotes.com (It still exists!). I spent countless hours copying and pasting quotes from and into word documents. I then found quotes from digimon, and at the time I was hiding my obsession in order to appear 'cool' so I altered some of the quotes to be un-digified. 

The collection grew and grew and I began cutting and pasting all these quotes onto my little bulitin board. And then upgraded to a full size bulitin board. And another. And another.

Then I decided the quotes were too spaced out and older quotes were too separate from newer quotes and I wanted there to be more variety on each board as well as an optimal use of space. If you can't tell, I take the weirdest things very seriously. So, an entire summer was spent taking off all the quotes that had been held on with sticky tack, and reapplying them with glue and leaving as little space between them all as possible. I got really good at Tetris that year.

Now, I have nine quote boards. They have travelled with me from old house to new house, some to four different bedrooms and multiple room reorganizations. Each one has some kind of mini tribute to Canada as well as random things, pictures and of course... So many quotes. 

Of all the things I own and have made, my quote boards are the most special to me. It was something I came up with all on my own and they grew and evolved with me. Yes there are the cheesy quotes I found when I was twelve, and the digi-sensored ones as well as the later added actual digimon quotes. They are still incomplete and I have a drawer of 'to be pasted' quotes as well as a document of 'to be printed' ones. After ten years of an obsession I have over a thousand pages worth of quote related word documents and have depleted Canada's supply of sticky tack and glue sticks. 

There are very few things I treasure to the same standards as these boards and I'm only half joking when I tell my mom that they can't go into storage because they're going with me to every room I ever occupy, including my grave. They can be cremated with me, right? 

Adrianna.