Plaster & Disaster

I hope everyone had a wonderful Fourth of July weekend! Sam and I were total hermits — we worked on a room painting project (more details to come next week!), went for a trail run to relive the fun we had two weekends ago, and roasted s’mores in our fire pit for the first time. It was lovely.

But here we are at Monday again! Somehow it always keeps rolling back around. Today I’m continuing our grand tradition of occasionally sharing about things besides DIY and home improvement, just to prove that we’re real people who do more than just paint, decorate, and turn cactuses into tables.

So today’s post is about an awesome vacation I recently took with my mother. I know what you’re thinking: most vacations are awesome. But this one was particularly special. It was also some of my other favorite adjectives: affordable, easy to plan, active, outdoorsy, devoid of large crowds, and full of ice cream and good conversation.

This summer my mom is having a milestone birthday, and last year I mentioned that I would really love to do a trip with her to celebrate. Now that I’m a married adult living in a different city, and especially now that my mom is fulfilling a dream that involves living on a sailboat in the Caribbean for most of the year, we don’t get to spend a lot of time together just the two of us.

Usually when someone says they are “captain” of their household, it’s metaphorical.

We started narrowing in on the idea of doing a hiking trip of some sort, since we both liked the idea of doing something active.

As luck would have it, my mom recently decided to fulfill another dream: to hike the Tour of Mont Blanc, a 100-mile trek that circumnavigates Mont Blanc (the highest peak in Europe) and passes through France, Switzerland, and Italy. My mom and I went to France together when I was young (eighteen years ago, which is crazy to me) and visited Mont Blanc, and ever since then she’s had this dream of doing the trek.

As much as I would love to do it with her, it’s 11 days long plus travel and I just couldn’t swing taking that amount of time off work. So instead, we planned a trip that would be great training for her. Our busy schedules meant it was going to be difficult to take on the logistical challenge of planning a backpacking trip (given the provisioning and advance planning involved), but instead we were able to stay in a cabin that my aunt and uncle own in Vermont (the amazing state where I was born and raised), and climb some of Vermont’s highest peaks in a series of day hikes. Granted Vermont mountains are pretty small compared to out west (our mountains are older, dammit!), but that seemed like the perfect level of fun and challenge for us.

As for what we hiked, we decided to tackle some elevation with a little distance thrown in for good measure. All told, we traversed 35 miles over 4 days, and climbed about 8,000 feet of elevation gain. Vermont has five peaks over 4,000 feet, and we hiked three of them (but none of them start right at sea level — they were all 2,000-2,500 foot climbs).

The first day was Killington:

It was super buggy on the trail and the summit, hence the squinting….

And we finished with celebratory soft-serve ice cream (in Vermont we call them creemees, and they are sold EVERYWHERE and it is AMAZING and I MISS VERMONT SO MUCH):

The second day was Camel’s Hump:

And again, celebratory creemee:

And the third day was Mt. Abraham (Mt. Abe):

Plus an additional 1.6 miles roundtrip to a second summit, Lincoln Peak — just 25 feet short of 4,000 feet:

And celebratory creemee:

Only one of the creemees is for me, I swear.

On our fourth day, we hiked a trail that goes around my hometown of Middlebury, Vermont. The trail is 16.5 miles, but we got a little lost at the beginning and ended up adding an extra mile — so we clocked in at 17.6 miles, which took us about 8 hours.

My “oh my god are we almost there?!?!?” face

And the celebratory creemee at the end:

At the end of every day, we returned to our cabin and cooked dinner together (except the last evening when we met up with my brother and his girlfriend for dinner).

It’s hard for me to describe how special this time with my mom was. With so much time together and no distractions (besides exhaustion), we moved past all the obvious topics of conversation that you cover when you just see someone for a day or two and had the most interesting discussions. We challenged ourselves together, encouraged one another to keep going when our legs were tired and the bugs fierce, celebrated together at the top of each mountain, and had no shame in eating soft serve ice cream four nights in a row before dinner.

And I’m so incredibly proud of my mom. I found this trip very challenging, and I was literally in the best shape of my life having run a marathon three weeks previously. She is an inspiration to me in so many ways, but this particular trip deepened my intense admiration for her brave and adventurous spirit, and the way she continues to challenge herself and pursue her dreams.

Happy birthday Mom, I love you, and you’re going to totally kick butt on Mont Blanc!

As I shared when I wrote about my diamond cement push pins last week, I have been wanting to play with cement for a long time. However, I was also pretty nervous as it seemed much more hardcore than most of the crafts that I do (which mostly involve gluing stuff or looping yarn around stuff).

So I was excited to find this mold (affiliate link – read our policies) which I could use for a pretty easy and entry-level project. The mold is actually intended to make shot glasses out of ice, but I thought could be used to make a set of cute little cement bud vases.

Cement is actually pretty toxic and dangerous! Breathing it in is harmful, the dust can irritate your eyes, and prolonged contact with the wet cement mix can burn your skin.

To be extra safe, I wore a respirator, goggles, and nitrile gloves.

Those are exactly the sort of pictures of me I want floating around the internet, by the way.

As I did with the push pins, I used Quikrete Hydraulic Water-Stop Cement for this project, which is great for impatient people and craft projects because it dries very quickly. This is more expensive than regular cement sand, but at about $8 for 10 lbs it is still cheap enough not to matter to me. When I start mass producing this stuff and selling it at an insanely high profit margin I’ll go for the cheap stuff and deal with the extra drying time.

With cement, the set-up and clean-up are totally the hardest part, and actually doing the project was very easy. I just mixed up the cement in small batches, making it slightly more liquid-y than the package called for so it would be easier to fill the molds.

I carefully poured it into the molds, jiggling the sides to help it fill in and break up air bubble.

Since these would be sitting flat eventually, I used an old paint stirrer to smooth the top into a pseudo-flat surface.

I made four, and then let them sit for about an hour (because it was fast-drying cement) before popping them out of the molds to check them out.

Awesome! This was the fun part. It is so fun to see the strange cement gunk turn into a real object.

Don’t they look cool? To think, they were just strange (and slightly toxic) dust just hours before.

I decided to make three of them into a set of vases. I let them sit in my scary garage for a couple days to be sure that they were absolutely dry, and then brought them upstairs to paint.

To complement the modern shape, I decided to paint three stripes of varying heights on each. I started by taping off the first two stripes (one along the bottom, and one a tape-width up), and then carefully filling these in with white craft paint.

I had some trouble getting the tape to form a tight seal on the cement, so I painted with a downward motion to avoid leakage under the edge. The stripes came out nice and sharp.

Next, I taped off a third stripe on each, in the middle of the two white stripes.

I then filled these in with black, yellow, and turquoise (channeling Sage). After the paint had dried, I coated them with a cement sealer to protect the craft paint and avoid water leaking into the cement.

…and of course I had to go get flowers to celebrate my amazing new bud vases!

I love the way the stripes turned out! They’re fresh against the dark and dingy cement.

Working with shot glasses, I was worried that the flower arrangements wouldn’t feel substantial. But I was able to fit a lot in there.

These are just the right size to brighten up any space. Filling these only used about 1/3 of a small bouquet from the grocery store, but they can have a big impact. The cement base makes them feel more substantial, too.

I had a ton of fun with this easy project, and am definitely more comfortable working with cement now. I can’t wait to take on more ambitious projects!