New Etsy Shop to Support Charities

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I posted about this on my instagram, tumblr and twitter accounts, but I neglected to write anything about it here- unfortunately when I have an idea that is implemented quickly, my actual blog is rarely the first place I share it. I assume that most of my readers here followed me on social media first and know about the shop, but in case there are any blog readers who don’t, here is a little information about it!

After the election in 2016, I, like many people, felt overwhelmed and fearful about what our future as Americans would hold. I was tired of waking up everyday feeling depressed and anxious, and I wanted to practice self-care (which for me was mainly deleting my Facebook) while still feeling like I was actively fighting on behalf of the movement to protect the rights of all current and future Americans. After returning to LA from Savannah and being confronted with a small pile of handmade things that weren’t getting used and needed to be given away, I wondered if anyone would purchase them if I put them up for sale. I have never been interested in making things to specifically sell for a profit, but I had never before considered making things to sell for charity. Thankfully I didn’t stop to think too long about whether or not anyone would want to buy my stuff, because if I did I probably would have talked myself out of it.

In December I pulled out all my handmade things that were in great condition but were no longer being worn (or had somehow just never made it into my wardrobe rotation in the first place), took lots of photos of them with Claire’s camera, and opened JasikaIsTryCurious on etsy. Some of my first items included the famous Octopus sweater I made for Claire which she had outgrown, a brand new blue linen dress I made from a vintage pattern, and prints of some illustrations that I usually only sell at comic-cons. I was (and am) very transparent about why I opened the shop and where the money is going- this is my small way of contributing to the cause, which is a phrase that was used by abolitionists referring to the work they were doing to end slavery. Obviously the circumstances today are different than they were hundreds of years ago in this country, but there are still MANY parallels- we are still fighting for freedom, still fighting for the rights of all bodies, and it is a cause that I feel passionate about. To paraphrase an age-old call to arms, no one is free if all of us aren’t free.

After collapsing into a ball of anxiety (my first panic attack? jury’s still out on this) at the Women’s March on January 21st and having to leave early, I was reminded that #resistance doesn’t look the same on everyone, and that is okay. Action takes many different forms in our communities and in ourselves, and we should never feel guilty if our personal fight looks different than our neighbor’s- so long as the fight is still there.

My fight is to use my hands, which have fed me, clothed me, nurtured my loved ones and quieted my fears in times of distress, to create art in as many different forms as they can muster. My fight feels powerful, and familiar. My fight may change and grow according to what it is the movement needs from me and what I can offer to it.

All proceeds from my shop will be donated to various charities that will benefit the most under our current presidency. In December, strangers and friends alike helped me raise $500 through my etsy shop, which was then doled out to organizations like Black Lives Matter, the legal defense fund for Standing Rock, and kids of Flint, Michigan. I have several other charities on my list that will be rotated out whenever I have more money to send (I intend to donate in $100 increments) like Planned Parenthood, the Trevor Project, and a legal defense team for immigrants under threat of deportation. The list of charities will be updated as our country continues to find ways to fight for communities at risk.

The shop has been virtually empty since most everything sold in December, so I have been working for much of January to add more items to it, with a current focus on making macrame hanging planters/holders, an artform that my friend Adrienne introduced me to last year and that I am having a lot of fun with (as you can see, I have included a few shots of some of the makes in this post). I have some more ideas of future items to bring to my shop, including a series of drawings inspired by all things sewing, which I am terribly excited about. In all honesty, my emotions have been a bit of a roller coaster since the election and it’s been hard to find balance- I find myself feeling either completed dejected and helpless about the state of our country, or incredibly hopeful and empowered by the movement that so many people are joining. I am hoping that as time goes on, I will find sturdiness. And for all of you experiencing the same emotional turmoil and fear as me, I wish you the same.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

 

Constellation Quilt

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I saw the pattern for this quilt on Cashmerette’s instagram last year and immediately wanted to know more. I looked up the company that makes the quilt patterns, Haptic Labs, and saw that they have lots of different designs, from maps of neighborhoods and cities to bodies of water to constellations in the sky. I loved the Brooklyn map design a lot, but I don’t live there anymore so it seemed weird for me to make it while living in Los Angeles (if I ever live there again, you better believe I’m gonna be snatching up this pattern with the quickness). Months passed and I forgot about the quilt until Christmas, when I opened one of my gifts from Claire and found a constellation lap quilt pattern! I didn’t remember even telling her about the quilt, but apparently I did, and she didn’t forget! Good job, Claire!

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The quilt pattern kits are equipped with a relatively vague instruction sheet (totally fine for someone familiar with quilting and embroidery, but I wouldn’t suggest this pattern to a complete beginner) and a quilt sized piece of durable paper with the quilt design printed on it that you use to guide your embroidery stitches. Once you have your materials together and have layered your batting, quilt top and quilt back together, you safety pin all the layers with the printed paper on top. Then, starting from the center of the quilt, you use embroidery floss and quilting thread to stitch over the design on the paper. Once a section is done, you very carefully tear away the paper to expose the fabric and stitching underneath. The paper is strong to hold up to all the handling that must be done, which unfortunately means you have to work pretty hard to tear the paper off of the quilt without destroying your embroidery. The pattern maker suggests stitching very taught so that you don’t run the risk of loosening up or your stitches when you pull the paper away. The overall process was simple and methodical once I got my embroidery mojo back. The stitching was made much easier with an embroidery hoop, and although it took time to unclasp the hoop and move it to the next section every 8 inches, it definitely saved me a lot of time, since free-stitching onto a project as big as this can get a little unwieldy.

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Before starting the quilt, I looked for inspiration online from others who had already completed the project, and the overwhelming majority were made with white thread on a deep blue-hued quilt top to create contrast and emulate the night sky. They were beautiful, but our home decor doesn’t have a lot of dark colors, and I prefer pastels anyways. I took a risk and went way against the standard, choosing a natural organic cotton for my quilt top and a medium-tinted aqua cotton for the back. For thread, I thought it would be cool to do the stars of the Milky Way (which show up as a smattering of french knots on the quilt itself) in yellow and the actual constellations in pink. Initially I wanted the constellations to look like an ombre gradation, so I chose a few different colors of pink floss and divided the design into three segments. I don’t think the end result reads strongly as ombre but I still love the way the colors look together- the whiteness of the fabric allows all the embroidery colors on top to pop, and the darker colored quilting thread I used grounds everything visually.

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When I first started the quilt I did not plan on embroidering the names of the constellations (none of the quilts I saw online labeled them, at least not for this particular design), and I thought that was so that the quilt would be usable on both the front and back- obviously backwards writing on the underside would make it look kind of weird. But that is NOT the case. I tried so hard to keep my embroidery stitches sharp and clean and accurate so that the back would look as good as the front, but after about an hour of meticulous stitching, I realized it was either an impossible feat or simply something that was not in my wheelhouse. I had never before embroidered something that was as clean on the front side as it was on the back, but for some reason I thought that since this was a quilt with an underside that would be seen, it was possible to make the stitches look good on both sides. Once I gave in and just concentrated on making the top look beautiful, the stitching went a lot faster and I realized that I did indeed want to include the names of the constellations. I am so glad that I did! I love how the quilt looks a little like a map of the night sky with the names on it, and I am hoping that eventually I will become a bit more familiar with identifying them in the wild. As for the back of the quilt, it is of course imperfect, but it’s got it’s own unique beauty going for it, in the way that the insides of things look weird and unique and ambiguous. I like it a lot more than I thought I would.

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I have made a lot of quilts in the past several years, but this is the first one I have made using a pattern, and although it certainly wasn’t the typical quilt pattern I assumed I would be working with, I’m glad this was my introduction.

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I could not be happier with the end result, and I love that I have some experience with hand quilting now. For the longest time I have wanted to make a large quilt for our bed, but I have only made quilts by machine that were smaller in size, so I was stumped as to how I would stuff an entire queen sized blanket under the standard sized arm of my machine. This is slightly embarrassing to write (cover your eyes, seasoned Hand Quilters!), but it honestly never even occurred to me that I could stitch the whole quilt by hand. It would take a lot of time, for sure, but probably no more than the 4-ish months that it took to complete this constellation quilt, and this required much more intricate handiwork than a simple running stitch. So, thanks to this beautiful little pattern, I am now inspired to try(curious) my hand at something even bigger!

(and PS thank you Claire for the beautiful pictures!)

 

TryCuriousity and DIYing Your XMas

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Hi, folks! There has been a really long hiatus from this here blog because 1) Claire and I haven’t made time to plan out photoshoots and 2) I have been neck-deep in Christmas present making for the past three months so I don’t have that many makes to share in the first place.

I have this fairly complicated relationship with the Christmas holidays, as detailed in this article I wrote for Autostraddle, but to sum it up for you, I hate the pressure of the holidays to consume, consume, consume and spend, spend, spend. Because I am not a religious person I wont resort to complaining about the true meaning of christmas or anything (since I don’t really have much of a connection to that), but I do have a real distaste for the idea that Christmas seems to boil down to adding more things and stuff to our lives and the lives of the people we love. To combat this disconnection and try to promote more meaningful gift giving for myself, I started DIYing the bulk of my Christmas gifts a couple of years ago, and I have to admit that it has been a real game changer. It has made me more excited about the gift giving process (and the holidays in general), it has given me lots of time to sit and think merry thoughts about the recipients of my gifts as I make them, and it has made me cherish the relationships with my friends and family in a way that clicking “add to cart” on amazon just doesn’t.
However, DIYing Christmas does NOT come without it’s cons. Making the bulk of my gifts is particularly tricky for me because about 90% of my friends and family member’s birthdays fall in the months of October, November, December and January, which I also tend to celebrate by handmaking gifts, so the tendency to get overworked and overwhelmed during this season is tremendous. By the time December rolls around, I am usually stressed, kicking myself for biting off way more than I can chew, and feeling more than a little antsy to get back to making things for myself. But is all seems to be worth it when I get a text from someone saying how much they loved the package of homemade bath and beauty products that I sent them, or when I see someone open a gift that was made specifically with them in mind and their face lights up with excitement and gratitude (I’m looking at you, Lawrence!)

I don’t intend for this blog post to be a pity party- I know exactly what I am getting into when I commit to making Xmas gifts each year and no one is to blame for the hard parts of that decision except myself! Instead, I wanted to share a new venture I embarked on at the end of the summer which ultimately contributed a huge part to my DIY gift giving: POTTERY!

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speckles_blogClaire suggested we learn pottery together because LACC was offering classes that took place at a studio in our neighborhood. I had never taken pottery before, aside from hand building clay pieces in my high school art class. My trycuriosity got the better of me so we decided to sign up, and it should come as no surprise that I was pretty much immediately hooked. Our teacher, Torros, is just LOVELY.

This is a terrible picture of me/ excellent picture of my beloved pottery teacher Torros!

A photo posted by Jasika Nicole (@trycuriousblog) on

He is the kind of teacher who offers advice when you need it, but who otherwise let’s you experiment and learn and grow at your own pace. I love having that kind of freedom in my art classes. With some artforms, like painting, I seem to have a very rigid idea of what constitutes as “good”, and I am very hard on myself when what I create doesn’t seem to match up to those ideals. But with pottery, I have had such a different experience. Maybe because I started out with low expectations of what I was capable of- I had never worked at a wheel before, and for all I knew I would be terrible at it. And if I was terrible at it, I wanted to be okay with that and still enjoy the process. So I just followed Torros’ simple instructions and figured a lot out on my own. When I made something that fell apart, I scraped it off my wheel and started over. And when I worked on a piece that didn’t seem to be turning out the way I had hoped it would, I wouldn’t give up on it. I would keep my hands on the clay until it morphed into something unexpected and cool or until it had been worked so much that it had no more life left in it. Working this way was SO much fun and it made the end results so exciting because I rarely started making any pieces with a prediction of how they would turn out.

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This is my favorite piece and the only one that I made sure didn’t get given away as a gift. Technically it’s supposed to be a sauce bowl (see the spout?), but I’m sure there are even more ways that I can use it. The result of the glaze was a huge surprise and delight.

My happy-go-lucky attitude with pottery was working wonders for my own creative fulfillment, but apparently it was not appreciated by everyone. One day I was at the wheel working on something that started out going in one direction, but along the way it lost steam and needed coaxing to be brought back to life. I slowed my wheel down and started carefully re-shaping the lip of my piece, which had folded over and needed to be cut off. It was working itself into a delicate opening and looked like the ripple of a wave, and I was enjoying the process of turning a mishap into a thing of beauty when I heard a man’s voice across the room yell out “Torros! Help this girl! She doesn’t know what she’s doing!” Surely this man wasn’t talking about me, I thought to myself, but still I slowed my pedal and lifted my hands to look up and see what was happening. The man was staring straight at me. He said “You need help! Torros, you gotta help her out!” I was immediately offended and I snapped back “This is actually EXACTLY what I want to be making right now, I don’t need anyone’s help, I am very happy with this!” Thankfully Torros glanced over at my work and backed me up. “She knows what she is doing, she is just fine. It is going to be very nice,” he said to the man, who in turn just kind of grunted and went back to making his beautiful, perfectly shaped containers with lids.

I couldn’t believe the gall he had! It’s one thing to privately dislike someone’s art- everyone is entitled to their opinion and I am certainly not interested in impressing him or anyone else by my participation in class. But to publicly declare that someone doesn’t know what they are doing when they try their hand at making art? I would never have the audacity to tell a fellow student in an art class that they didn’t know what they were doing, no matter how little I liked the work that they were creating. This is STILL boggling my mind. And believe it or not, I happen to have an actual time lapse video of the piece I was making right before he tried to call me out (see below)

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Despite this asshole’s unwarranted commentary, I proceeded to make about 20 finished pieces of pottery, and I am not sure that I could be more happy with how they turned out. This was such a unique experience for me, such a departure from the way I usually go about learning a new technique in a class setting, which is usually filled with a bit more self-criticism and bit less lightheartedness. All but two of these pieces I have decided to keep for myself, so this is a spoiler for any of you that got gifted a piece of hand made pottery and haven’t opened or received your gifts yet!

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Here is a layperson’s rundown of the pottery making process:

  1. Get some clay.
  2. Put it on your wheel.
  3. Center the clay, which means spinning your wheel very fast and using pressure from your hands to make sure the clay is completely even and centered on your wheel.
  4. Form it into something you find beautiful, then cut/slide it off the wheel.
  5. Let it get a little dry but not all the way.
  6. Trim your piece, which means leveling off the top and bottom with tools to get them even, and smoothing the edges and sides. If you are making a mug, attach your handles.
  7. Let it dry completely.
  8. Fire it up in the kiln.
  9. Sand down any rough edges.
  10. Wax the bottom. Glaze it.
  11. Fire it up in the kiln one mo ‘gin.
  12. Sand the bottom so it doesn’t scratch the surfaces you set it upon.
  13. ENJOY YOUR CREATION!

The glaze part of the process is definitely the most fascinating, impressive and bizarre part for me. It’s kind of a mixed bag in that you don’t ever really know what it is you’re going to end up with. The colors of the glaze don’t necessarily match up with what the final effect will be, and when certain glazes touch each other, they create new colors and textures that you can’t always predict. For the glazing part, I just kind of give in to the universe and keep my fingers crossed that it comes out looking okay, which so far has worked in my favor. Most of my pieces have three different glazes on them, and some of the glazes really elevate the entire piece of work.

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This is Claire’s favorite. I used wax, which you coat the bottom of your pieces in so that they don’t get glaze on them and then get stuck to the bottom of the kiln, to create a leopard effect on the top piece of the jar. Everywhere the wax is, the glaze wont stick to, so the dotted parts are just unglazed, fired clay peeking through.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And there you have it! I am so excited to have the basic skills of working on a pottery wheel in my toolbox. In the new year I plan on making a 4 piece table setting for our home! Seems a little ambitious, I know, but I have faith that I can make it happen over time; the possibility of eating off of beautiful me-made plates and bowls is just too amazing to not attempt 🙂

Thanks to Claire for all the amazing non-instagram photos of the pottery!

To all, I hope your holidays, if you celebrate them, were bright and merry as can be! And happy new year!!!

Your pieces shrink a lot when they are fired so my perfectly normal sized mugs came out quite a bit smaller than I intended- next time I make them I will have to form them into giants!

Your pieces shrink a lot when they are fired so my perfectly normal sized mugs came out quite a bit smaller than I intended- next time I make them I will have to form them into giants!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Design*Sponge Feature!

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An Actor and an Analysts Home- Design*Sponge

I feel REALLY lucky to have found my way into the Design*Sponge circle in the past few months. I am thrilled to announce that I will be in Grace Bonney’s new book In The Company of Women, coming out in Fall 2016. The book is comprised of interviews with a diverse group of women who are photographed in their “workspaces”, whether on sets, in lecture rooms or in offices. Grace and her team photographed me both in my craft room and in my garage, where I do most of my furniture and upholstery work (and also a lot of my shoe making since the garage offers more ventilation for toxic cement glue fumes). I wore my mint green ladybug dress since it was my most recent completed sewing project, and I had SUCH a great time; Grace is funny and thoughtful, she has a great laugh and she is and easy to be around- one of those people that makes you immediately feel comfortable no matter where you are or what you’re doing. I felt like I could hang out with her for hours. I cannot wait til the book comes out (I would be purchasing this thing even if I wasn’t in it- the caliber of women Grace interviews is really fantastic!) and I will definitely share it here on the blog when it’s ready for pre-order.

In the meantime, I am also happy to share (even though I am like a week late- sorry!) a tour of our home  on the Design*Sponge website: An Actor and an Anaylist’s Home. It was a lot of work putting this together because my friends and I were filming an indie feature (#SuicideKale) at our house at the same time we were trying to keep everything super clean and tidy for the photos. FYI I do not recommend doing two projects like this at the same time. BUT! The photos came out great thanks to Claire and I am so pleased with the lovely feature that D*S put together! Design*Sponge has long been a source of inspiration for me, particularly when I was bored and rained-in for 4 years in Vancouver, living in a furnished home and obsessing over all the fun DIY projects I would tackle when we finally moved back to the states and lived in our own place. Having our home featured on such an incredible site is basically a dream come true for me, and I am very grateful to D*S for the opportunity!

Living a Try Curious Lifestyle

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It dawned on me recently that my interest in creating things was big enough to merit it’s own little world here on my website. Technically this site is supposed to put me in the ranks of modern actors who update their pages with information on upcoming performances and showcases and classes and resumes, but if I am honest, I have never felt quite “in the ranks” of modernity with my job anyways. My life as an actor is, in my opinion, the least interesting thing about me; I am not the most talented person in my field, and there are plenty of people with my job who are much more well known than I am. But what does make me special is my fascination with creating things with my hands, the incredible amount of patience I have with myself, my trust that there is little in this world that I cannot accomplish. So I (re)introduce to you TRY CURIOUS BLOG, a space dedicated to sharing in the delights of living a try curious lifestyle! I have Claire to thank for this fantastic title, which seems at once fitting and silly and inspiring, while giving a nice little nod to my own queer identity. So far my life in creative curiosity has acquainted me with power tools, shoes lasts, boom mics, vintage sewing machines, onigiri molds and bentonite clay, and I feel a thrill every time I have another opportunity to expand my world. The older I get, the more enthusiasm I have for the process as opposed to the final product, and this has diversified my artistic endeavors tremendously. Thanks so much for being a reader of this blog and for showing your support with comments and likes.

Here’s to living a Try Curious lifestyle together 😉

New year, new rack.

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COAT rack, that is! (ba dum ching)

When we first moved to LA, my wife and I rented a really cute house across from a beautiful, hilly cemetery and started to try and build up our pitiful collection of furniture. We had lived in furnished spaces for our previous four years in Vancouver, and everything we had kept in storage in NYC was cheap and ugly and falling apart. It was the need for a nice, big, solid dining room table and my disgust at how expensive furniture can be that inspired me to try and learn how to build it in the first place. Anyways, as you can imagine, in our first few weeks in Los Angeles making our new home, there were tons of trips to Home Depot, and just as many to the Rose Bowl flea and Ikea and World Market and Target and vintage home goods stores, where we could fill in all the holes of what we needed but could not make for ourselves. Our unfurnished rental had a large living room with a fireplace and a tall, arched ceiling, but no foyer or entryway space, so on a whim, I purchased a ridiculously (and unsurprisingly) overpriced iron coat rack from World Market. expensive ass coat rack

Full disclosure, I love/hate World Market. Their aesthetic is awesome, but their quality is shitty. Sometimes I just go in there for a little inspiration and a root beer, but I complain the whole time about how we shouldn’t buy anything cause it’s just gonna break unexpectedly.
So anyways, a few months after moving to LA, we bought a house and had to move again, with all the furniture we had made work for our rental space. Most everything translated well in our new home, including the the cute antiqued coat rack, which has provided an excellent space for us to put all our leaving-the-house shit for the past couple of years. However, this year when we got our Christmas tree, we had to move the coat rack out of the way and into the office to make room for it. And holy shit, what a difference the absence of a coat rack made! Our house is bigger in square feet than our old rental, but the living room/dining room is much smaller, and the ceilings are normal height. It was only through living a few weeks without the coat rack that we realized how awkward it had been in the room and how much space it took up.

photo 1The above photo doesn’t really do it justice, so you will just have to take my word for it- it crowded the area and ruined sight lines to the big window we have in front. So we got rid of the thing, kept it in the office for the holidays, where it continued to be in the way and take up too much space, but was less obvious. I needed a solution, something to house our bags and scarves and jackets, but something that didn’t involve having to use that bulky (expensive) coat rack. You see behind the rack to the wall next to the chalkboard? All the empty space on the left side? I hated that about as much as our huge rack (!). It was only apparent when you closed the door, but that space was usable and felt weirdly empty with nothing there. So, problem solved: get rid of the coat rack in the house and make a wooden something-or-other to hang on the wall in that empty space.

The next part was pretty easy; assembling some hooks and proper screws and finding a nice old piece of wood to reuse (this was from a shelf that had mostly fallen apart in the backyard when it flooded/ rained for the first time in a year). photo 2Claire sanded the board down but kept most of it as is cause the color and distress in it looked nice, and I screwed in some hooks on the front, and a few smaller ones on the bottom side of the board). photo 3

Positioned her on the wall, screwed her into the stud (!!)) and voila! Bye, bye, iron coat rack. The hooks used don’t all match each other, cause I couldn’t find four of the same ones, but I kind of like the mishmash look of them all together- plus, you can’t really see the hooks when they are covered in chilly weather accoutrement.

Final look: photo 5

Cleaner, opens the space and makes it much brighter, and provides a better spot for our armchair (not seen in the pic) which used to be shoved up next to the coat rack. The room looks so much bigger and less cramped, and I love being reminded of how important it is to rearrange furniture every once in while. Sometimes it just takes new eyes to recognize old problems. And speaking of old problems, I have a bulky expensive coat rack to give away if anyone wants it.

DIYing It Up

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Thanks to a blog post I read in November of 2012, I was introduced to a new book that had just come out, called The Handbuilt Home, by Ana White. It was purported to  be a book that gave easy, comprehensive instructions to make furniture, no matter your experience level. On a whim I put the book on my Christmas list, and on the plane ride from Florida, where we spent the holidays with my family, back to Los Angeles where me and my partner had just moved, I read the book cover to cover and was penning a list of all the things we needed to buy at Home Depot on a drink napkin. Since putting all our stuff in storage in New York and spending 4 years in furnished rentals in Vancouver, we had no furniture to speak of, and more than anything, we needed a table and some places to sit; our first days in our LA rental found us in one primary spot in the house: a mattress in the middle of the living room floor, where we slept, ate, watched tv, read and cuddled. It took hardly any time at all for the coziness factor to wear off.

Anyways, my logic was this: we could either spend over a thousand dollars on a finished beautiful dining room table, or we could spend half that money on tools and materials and build one ourselves. Then, if we found the process to be fun and worthwhile, we could KEEP building furniture, making the investment of tools more cost effective with each project. Unfortunately, after our first two projects (a Farmhouse style dining room table and a matching bench), Claire’s interest had waned, but mine grew, and over the past year and some change I have continued to build furniture by myself, becoming more competent and taking on more challenging tasks. So far we have built the aforementioned dining room table and bench together, and I have worked solo on a coffee table, bookcase, printer console, upholstered vanity stool, and a rolling kitchen island, along with a slew of other smaller woodworking projects.

I wanted to share my latest furniture DIY creation here on my blog, because it is my most ambitious project to date. We recently got a master bathroom renovation to turn our tiny, barely functional hallway bath into an en suite with much more space and efficiency. In trying to make the most of our budget, I decided to take on the task of building our vanity, which, if purchased in the style and materials we wanted, would run us no less than $1500. With some free plans from Ana White’s website and a bit of advice from our contractor, I built the tile topped vanity from scratch and tiled the surrounding backsplash for $490, and it was custom built to fit the exact measurements inside our new bathroom. The project took about 11 days from start to finish, and the most difficult part of the whole project was the tiling. I had never tiled before and it was WAY more intense than I anticipated- I sprouted stress-induced fever blisters within hours after all the grouting was complete. I don’t think you can put a price on fever blisters, but all in all, the project came out beautifully and I am very very proud of it!

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I built the wood part of the vanity in my garage and when it was ready for the next steps, our reno crew moved it to the inside of the bathroom.

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I had to space out the tiles to get an idea of placement and figure out which ones I needed to cut.

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I had no idea that tiling was such an intricate process and that there were so many PIECES involved! Edge tiles, corner tiles, border tiles…the list went on and on! Thankfully we used a simple subway style tile for our vanity so our local hardware stores always had what I needed.

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After adhering the tiles to the surface and edge of the vanity, they need to be taped so that gravity doesn’t pull them down and the edge pieces fall off.

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It took a while to find the perfect knobs and hinge hardware for these cabinet doors, but we eventually found some pretty crystal knobs that elevated the Tiffany blue color of the vanity (which was spray painted for a smoother finish).

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Tiling is complete here and the sink was installed by the reno crew. The sink was purchased at the Habitat Rehab store for only $20, and it was like brand new!

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Finished vanity with tiling, and you can spy the gorgeous black and white penny tile underneath (a tiling project that I did NOT undertake- I left that to the professionals!)