Frosted Glass & Movies

Today has been a relaxing, don't-have-to-do-anything kind of day.

Which is perfect, because I happen to like those days every now and then.

I woke up this morning, made myself a hearty breakfast of bacon, egg whites and some toast then plopped myself on the couch with pillows and blankets for a couple movies.

I'm normally not much of a chick flick fan, but I don't mind having them on from time to time while I'm doing stuff around the house. So I watched Jennifer Lopez's new film, The Backup Plan, which was cute and fairly tolerable. Then I watched Dear John - figured one more sappy love story couldn't hurt. After that, I was still meandering around working on laundry and projects so I put on She's Out of My League, a comedic venture with dorky actor Jay Baruchel (he's had roles in Knocked Up, Tropic Thunder and voice-starred in How to Train Your Dragon) and Alice Eve (the Irish nanny in Sex & The City 2).

A little pilates later - I'm trying to work out a seriously painful knot in my left shoulder blade that's been inhibiting my movement the last two days, ugh! - and I broke out the supplies for a frosted glass project that I found here on Centsational Girl's blog. It's a handy way to reuse those cute but often neglected pickle and pepper jars.

I started out with this:

And some of these:

Then stuck my chosen letters on a glass pitcher I'd bought at Asda for £1:

Next I taped off a square around the letters (you could spray paint the whole thing if you wanted, I'll show you that option farther down) and used paper towels to protect the rest of the glass from any wayward paint:

And voila! The end result:

 

I still had a couple jars left and plenty of letters:

I made a little flower vase out of the tall red pepper jar, using the word "bloom":

And I had some shells we'd picked up on Lido beach in Italy, and wanted a special place to put them:

So I put "seashore" on this nice big pickle jar:

Cool, huh? It works best with the fluffy letters, since they're easier to peel off. I put only two spray paint coats on each project, waiting five minutes in between each. It keeps it smooth and gives you a better matte finish. Just lightly press the letters on to be sure the paint doesn't drizzle down behind the stickers, but that the stickers aren't stuck on so tight you can't peel them off! Made that mistake and had to toss the jar out. I got impatient and tried to pry them off too early and they took half the frosted paint with 'em.

There are other great projects to do with the frosted effect - like your plain ole coffee jar, candle holders and sugar and flour containers. Glass beware!

Now Mike is home after a day of work and golf (hard life, right?), and we've got the World Cup on. England v Algeria. Can't believe the US tied their game today against Slovenia, 2-2! They need a serious win to get some more points on the board, and soon. GO USA!

For now, I'm leaving the glassware be and heading to the kitchen to cook some dinner. Feel like keeping it simple tonight, so I'm tossing a batch of lean beef with some spices and Worcestshire sauce then grilling them in little patties with  low-fat cream of mushroom soup on top. To keep it even easier, I'll add grilled onions, zucchini and eggplant. It may not be Italian pasta but it's delicious and nutritious. (Which reminds me, I still need to blog on Venice & Milan... so many pictures you folks haven't seen yet!)

"He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.”

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe