If you give a mouse a cookie.....

Its no secret that I love burlap.


I am still rocking the burlap wreath on my front door.  I'm thinking it is going to stay there until I put up my Christmas decorations... which will probably be as soon as I can get the energy to head up to the attic and lug down the boxes.  Better yet, I will see if Chris will do that part.  Maybe I'll put it on the chore chart!


Anyway, I went a little crazy over the weekend.  I was on a burlap spree.


Well, really I was on a "do things" spree.  I was trying to make up for all those weekends I sat on my butt and watched trashy TV.


So I spent many hours holed up in my craft room rocking out to the new Miranda Lambert CD- which is GREAT btw. My favorite song is Mama's Broken Heart.... well maybe it's tied for my favorite (with like 4 other songs).  Seriously brilliant lyrics.... "Run and hide your crazy and start actin’ like a lady."  I love that line.  Not sure why.  Just love it.  Seems like words to live by....


Back to burlap. I pulled out all those yards of burlap I had laying around after the baby shower I threw a few months ago and decided to put it to good use.


I had been thinking about doing some sort of table runner or table cloth to switch up our table setting, but wasn't sure what to do.


Enter burlap.


Actually, that is a lie.  I skipped a step.


Enter silk.


I had some left over cream colored dupioni silk that I used for curtains at our condo, and I thought it would look so awesome on our table.  I was so wrong.


I tried it as a runner, as puddled in the middle and even as a place mat.  All ways were just wrong.


NOW, enter burlap.  It is less fancy, less fussy and I didn't need to sew anything.  Just use scissors and glue. 


That's my kind of fabric.


I simply cut it to size to be a runner down the length of the table: skinny and long (yes, those are technical terms).


Since I am WAY too lazy to measure (pretty much anything), I carried the whole jumble of fabric downstairs, threw it on the table, then folded and tucked until I thought it looked good.

Then I hauled it back upstairs and cut on all the folded lines.

Long and skinny.  PS I HATE my ironing board cover.

Then, to make it look slightly less haphazard, I decided to iron it and "hem" the ends.  With hot glue of course.

I double folded the ends, then ironed them flat

Glue guns are the height of fabulous-ness

I tossed the finished runner on the table with some new stuff I just got (we'll talk about that later), and was pleased with the simple result.  Although it did make me wish I had some fancy new dining chairs to go with my non-fancy burlap runner.

Ta-freaking-Da

After I stopped daydreaming about dining chairs, I realized my glue gun was still plugged in upstairs. The hot glue gun made me want to glue more stuff and so I ran into the basement to grab some skeleton keys that I had recently swooped up at Michael's for $1 each- can you tell that I am a sucker for the $1 impulse buys??  Clearly cheap marketing ploys TOTALLY work on me.

I love the shape of skeleton keys

I am a sucker for skeleton keys (especially when they are $1), because they are so reminiscent of the time period of our house.  Even some of our doors have old skeleton key holes.  Actually, the Secretary desk has one.... I should try sticking a key in there.....
The keys had all mismatched finishes, but luckily I had some oil rubbed bronze spray paint on hand, and gave them a quick coating so they all matched.

Here to save the day

Then I ran the mostly-dry keys upstairs, where my hot glue was piping hot and dripping on my carpet (maybe that is an excuse to tear it all up??).

I had a few extra frames laying around and I knew I wanted to frame the keys in a fun way.  So I grabbed some more burlap and glued they keys too it as a backing.


Burlap glued to the paper insert from the frame.

At this point I basically had rewrote "If you give a mouse a cookie" where I'm the mouse and instead of a cookie, it's a hot glue gun... which leads to burlap (or maybe it's the other way around), which leads to keys, which leads to spray paint, which leads back to glue and burlap.

It took a few trys to get the keys positioned correctly on the burlap, then to hang correctly once they were in the frame.  I eventually found an arrangement I liked.

So there you have it.  Burlap.  It's the go-to fabric of the year for me.

I recently found that other people love burlap too, and it's not just me!  Can you believe it?  There is a blog that is doing a whole month of burlap themed projects.

I may need to get some inspiration from them, since I still have a few yards of burlap left!


Check out all the cool projects made of burlap!