I think this is my favorite month yet, from both last year and this year.  I love how it all came together.  I love the color mint and last year I decided I wanted to use mint for the St Patrick’s decor, but I didn’t get very far.  I found the glass ornaments for 80% off after Christmas last year and used them as a starting point.  I tied on some fishing line and then hung them across the top of the mantle and mirror.  I recently discovered Jadeite and immediately fell in love with it, and it fit perfectly with the mint theme I was looking for.

I saw this shelf/hutch thing, whatever you want to call it, on Pinterest and loved it; I knew I wanted to make one for myself.  I went to the salvage yard looking for a cool window to use, but they were all broken and dirty and moldy, so I decided to just try and make up one myself.  I have realized I have a hard time with some repurposing, I have a strong aversion to cleaning up certain things and often prefer to buy the raw materials for what I want and to make it look “rustic”.  I know, I know, it is funny to some people (and by some people I pretty much just mean men) to take something new and make it look old, but what can I say, I like the look but I like clean things.  I ended up using some trim and sort of created a window look.  I assumed it wasn’t going to be easy to create the whole thing from scratch, but it was difficult in different ways than I expected.  I made a set of shelves and then nailed the bead board and trim onto it.  Then I stained it, applied some Vaseline in certain spots then painted it all in white.  Once the paint was dry I scraped off the paint in the areas where the Vaseline was, to get the aged look.  I am really happy with how it turned out.

I have been collecting the jadeite and other mint and green items since the beginning of January from various stores and websites, and I already had a couple of items.  I especially love the Jadeite cake plates and teacup.  I made the 17 block (for St. Patrick’s day being on the 17th of March) with some metal house numbers from Home Depot that I spray painted gold and attached to a block of wood that I painted white.

I made a couple of different prints in Illustrator that I put in the white frames.  And I put some gold washi tape on the candle and clear vases.  For the shamrock on the left I cut the shamrock out of bead board and painted it gold and then glued it to a piece of square plywood that I painted mint.

The wood shamrock garland was a really easy project that I love.  I got some mini wooden hearts on sale at Micheal’s and Joann’s after Valentine’s day and I painted them in sets of 4 in ombre mint.  Then I took some precut and drilled wood plaques from Michael’s and painted them gold and glued the hearts to them and strung the gold ribbon through it.  I got it all done in 2 episodes of “Call the Midwives” (which I LOVE even if I cry every. single. episode!)

This lucky nail/string board may be one of my favorite projects yet.  This picture from Pinterest was the inspiration, but I knew I wanted something for St. Patrick’s days so I chose to use the word Lucky instead, and I wanted to add the painted shamrock as well.  That meant that I had to change how I strung the embroidery floss because I didn’t want it to cover the shamrock.  I seriously love it.  The books underneath it are a Christmas gift from my little sister.  It is a 2 volume set of fairy tales that both me and my 2 sisters read growing up.  So perfect that they happen to be mint colored.

And the other cake plate that I love.

For the piano I placed a bunch of bottles and vases in a rainbow, which I think is so fun.  I already had a lot of these, but back in early January I pulled them out and then have been searching stores and the internet to fill in the gaps I was missing.

The rainbow bead board was a project I made last year and one that I had been planning for years.  I slowly collected the beads, buttons, glass and little odds and ends for a few years before I had enough to fill the board.  Then I painted the wood and super glued  them all on, after many practice placements.

I am very happy with how the centerpiece turned out too.  I had a different arrangement when I first put everything out that I pretty much hated.  I played around with some different options trying to find something I liked.  I had a spare piece of 3/4″ plywood lying around and I tried it underneath the square glass vases and really liked that, so I decided to make a small wood “table runner” to go underneath them.  I added some slats of wood on top of the plywood in a herringbone pattern, then cut some pieces of 1/2″ thick board to go around it and create a frame.  I sanded the whole thing once it was all glued together to make it nice and even and painted it mint green.  It was a bit too bright for my liking, so I did a few washes of white and light brown over the green.

In case you missed them here is January and February.