Sage, Naomi – Author at Plaster & Disaster

We’re back for another installment of one of our favorite features: the truth behind the photo. The thing about blogs is that you experience other peoples’ homes and projects entirely through photos, and it’s easy to forget that not everything is as it appears. We’re not talking photoshop or deliberately misleading photos — but angles, lighting, and cropping can make a big difference in transforming an image and even make the difference between a project that looks like success on film but was a disaster in real life.

We love sharing these truths because some of the things that go on behind the camera are pretty ridiculous — and if we didn’t tell you about absurd things like the time Sage climbed up a ladder outside her house to photograph Sam’s study, then we’d have to confront some scary questions about the way we choose to spend our time. Instead, we just get to write it off as blog content.

So today we’re sharing the truth behind some recent projects: our “bloggeriest crafts of early 2016,” aka the raccoon oven-baked clay trinket dishes and Pantone color-dipped cork chandelier. You might have thought these projects were ridiculous enough on their own, but the behind-the-scenes had us laughing even harder than the final results.

First up, the trinket dishes with the adorable raccoon face/butt combo:

These were total spoofs (raccoons eat trash and carry rabies, people), but the final photos had even the two of us thinking maybe we were onto something. I mean seriously, that is a well-styled shot. But now we have to let you in an a sad little secret:

Okay so we want to be totally clear: normally we don’t tell you that a project worked when it didn’t, because that would be outright lying. But these were joke projects that were never intended to be replicated. So we omitted a crucial little detail, which is that after we’d shaped our dishes and were ready to bake them we noticed this on the packaging:

In case you’re having trouble reading this, it says: “Do not bake or fire.” And, “Never hardens.” Um, say what now? Somehow we managed to grab the exact wrong clay while running around Michaels. Obviously we were left with no choice but to forge ahead and deceive you all via photographic trickery.

Our first challenge was that we want to add little legs to the dishes, but we thought they’d be so soft they’d sag. So we did what any normal person would do, and used the lids of mason jars to reinforce the bottom of the dishes. We were already in deep at this point, there was no turning back.

We were also worried we’d have trouble painting on the soft clay, but it worked just fine. And they turned out to be so adorable that we were glad they were actually totally unusable or else we probably both would have ended up with ironic raccoon trinket dishes on our bedside tables, thus becoming the punchline of our own joke. There’s really nothing worse than that.

We also had a little too much behind-the-scenes fun with our amaaaaaazing color-dipped shabby chic cork chandelier.

First off, question: what’s more ridiculous than this craft project? Answer: the amount of work that we put into getting perfectly-styled photos for this craft project.

The Truth Behind the Bloggeriest Crafts - Plaster & Disaster

Thank you to cameraman Brad, who at this point has accepted that there’s no point asking questions when Very Serious Blogging Activities are underway

We also realized partway through the project that the cork strands make incredible necklaces, so we clearly had to pause for a brief fashion photo shoot (no doubt we are the most stylish people you know).

Of course we have to get meta with this and show you the truth behind the photo of the truth behind the photo, which is us using a selfie stick (for the very first time…Sage won it at an office holiday party Yankee Swap) to snap this picture.

And of course here’s a photo of Brad taking a photo of us taking a photo of ourselves with the selfie stick:

And then a photo of us looking at the photo Brad took of us using the selfie stick:

So in summary, we took a break from making a ridiculous satirical craft in order to festoon ourselves with cork necklaces and then take a photo of ourselves with a selfie stick while Brad took a photo of us taking a photo of ourselves and then we took a photo of Brad doing that and then we looked at the photo and took a photo of that too. Absurd? Undoubtedly. But we seriously suspect that this is the sort of thing that’s going on behind the camera a lot of the time when people share “candid” photos of themselves online.

We hope this gave you a little taste of what it’s like to be behind the camera with us without actually having to spend an entire day of your life making joke crafts. Next week we have a little more disaster for you (as usual), plus Sage is starting to tear her kitchen apart for the Great Kitchen Renovation of 2016 and Naomi will be sharing progress on her bedroom makeover — stay tuned!

(Sharing at Link Party Palooza)

As you probably realized (due to our over-the-top blog anniversary celebration a couple weeks ago) we’ve been blogging for over a year here at Plaster & Disaster! We’ve published 163 posts, each one a little gem of inspiration and wit, honed, polished, and sent out into the world to enrich your lives… right?

Not so much. We’ve shared a lot here that we’re proud of, but we can’t honestly look back at the past year and claim that we’re happy with everything we’ve done. We’re committed to being open and honest about our DIY disasters, so we feel we should be open and honest about our blogging disasters, as well — as uncomfortable as that may be.

So here are a few posts that, looking back on the past year, we regret, or at least would do differently.

Naomi’s Blog Disasters

One of the early lessons I learned was that not everything I make is worthy of being on the blog. Quelle horreur! For one of my first posts, I shared a makeover of two IKEA RIBBA frames that I fixed up as a gift for my parents.

The angle of that photo makes me cringe. (And what’s with the aggressive text all over it, anyway?) But the sad thing is that I sort of like this project – or at least the idea behind it, of creating pattern by taping off areas and applying a glossy polycrylic over flat paint. However, the result wasn’t as extreme as I was hoping it would be, and I was not nearly a skilled enough photographer to capture the variation in finishes that I did get.

But it’s not the project or photos that I regret, it’s sharing it on the blog as if it was just the coolest thing and something that I’d be doing again. It was the second week of the blog, and I wasn’t comfortable enough to do that yet! I probably wouldn’t share this project now, and if I did I’d be talking about what went wrong or what I’d be doing differently next time

Another post I have serious regret over is my tutorial about how I use Serif DrawPlus for blogging. This was written in August, after I had been blogging for over 6 months, so I really should have known better. But, man, that post was boring.

I knew it, too. I was bored writing it. The sad thing is that this subject really shouldn’t have been boring. The Starter Edition of Serif DrawPlus is a great (and free) tool that I use for pretty much every single post, and also to make some of the incredibly witty and humorous images that we entertain you with here on the blog:

The Great Grout Vs. Caulk Debate

But the issue with the post was that I got too caught up in explaining how to do the simple things (which most tech-savvy people could probably figure out for themselves) and didn’t get to explain how to do the cool things that people might actually be interested in. I said I would do a follow-up to share the interesting parts (and still might) but really just got so bored with the whole thing I was happy to put it behind me.

Sage’s Blog Disasters

Now that Naomi has bared her soul, I guess it’s time for me to admit that EVERYTHING I DO IS PERFECT AND I HAVE NO REGRETS. I’ll be back on Wednesday to share yet another perfect post.

Just kidding! Not about the Wednesday part, if you like mid-century furniture, copious disasters, and 1,800-word posts, then I think you’ll enjoy what I have in store for you Wednesday. But the truth is, I do have some posts I regret, so I guess I should quit stalling and spill.

The first I shared in our first month blogging, and it was about my wedding. Let me be clear: I have zero regrets about my wedding. It was awesome, and I love being married. But I do regret sharing a really long (1,600 words) personal post in our very first month about something totally untimely.

This is definitely a place where we share about ourselves and our lives, but looking back it feels totally random that I would share something so long about a non-DIY topic so early in the blog. I wish I had shared it later in the year (maybe on my anniversary in June? what a concept!) when our readers had already started to get to know us a little better. As it is, the only people really able to appreciate the post would have been friends and family who are also readers, and chances are those people were actually at the wedding. For anyone who didn’t know us and was trying to figure out what this new blog was all about, I think it probably felt strange.

Another post I don’t love in retrospect was my post in September about some big life changes and a small DIY project. I think I felt like I couldn’t just devote a whole post to the topic of getting a new job (which meant that Naomi and I no longer worked together), so I tried to smoosh it in with a DIY project and some ramblings about how I was cleaning out my closet. I think either topic could have been interesting in its own right (though closet clean-outs are everywhere in blogland at this point), but putting them together created a hybrid post that felt kind of strange.

I think what both these regrets show is that we’re still working to find the right balance between substantive projects, small updates, and personal posts. We post three times a week, and we want a lot of those to feel like meaty and/or entertaining projects to you. Otherwise, what are we really adding to the blogosphere? BUT, we also know that feeling a personal connection is what we love most in the blogs we read, and it can also be nice to feel like bloggers are real humans who do small and mundane projects sometimes in addition to the big room makeovers. We’re still figuring out how to do that best (and would love any feedback you have about what you’d like to see less and more of!), but hopefully we’ll keep getting better at it as we embark on this second year.

Joint Blog Disaster

Although we feel that joint posts are some of our strongest, we’re not immune to messing up when we’re working together, either! We could point to the time that we actually made a craft project using cutlery, as we did in our roundup of the most disastrous disasters in 2015, but even though you never win when using silverware to decorate your house, we actually think that the post itself was pretty funny.

However, one joint project that we definitely regret was our dual makeovers of thrift store cane chairs.

We’re pretty into the dual makeover idea (so much so that we did them for our first post and as part of our blog anniversary) but we’ve sometimes had trouble finding matching things to fix up that we’re both excited about. In this case, neither of us were that into our chairs or our projects, and we shouldn’t have shared them on the blog as if we were. The post isn’t a great read because its pretty obvious that the enthusiasm just isn’t there.

Since this post was written, Sage has already thrown out her chair, and Naomi fully intends to do the same with hers as soon as she gets around to not using it as a place to pile cloths. Not our best work!

Ick. That was uncomfortable. There is something freeing about sharing craft and DIY disasters on the internet for people to learn from our mistakes, but sharing on the blog about things we don’t like that we did on the blog isn’t quite as fun.

We’ve definitely learned a lot in our first year, nuanced lessons like “don’t pretend that a project is good when it isn’t” and “don’t be so boring.” Here’s to not repeating those mistakes in year 2!