Anything you can do, I can do better...

While my sister and I were growing up, we used to go to the video store almost every weekend. The store was a standard shop, with the VHS cassettes (all illegal copies of course) arranged by genre. Actually the only exceptional thing about the store, were the amazingly sour-faced ladies working the counter. 

The reason we kept going there, was because they had a pretty large collection of G-rated movies. My mom, being strict, insisted that we could only watch videos by ourselves if they were not PG-13 or worse. A PG could squeak by after a screening. A large part of the G-rated selection consisted of old school musicals. So we watched Brigadoon, Summer Stock, Kismet, basically any MGM-ish grand production over and over (and over) again. We actually knew that Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced on air, even before Vogue became a hit. (And now I am in school with kids who don't even know the lyrics to that song, how old am I.......)

But to get to the point of my story, I am thankful for that part of my upbringing, because the music and pop-culture references I took with me still enrich my life to this day.

For example today: I finished another big project in the house, with the whole time in my head the song playing: 'Anything you can do, I can do better..., I can do anything better than you...'. I don't know who I was singing it to, but as I was tacking along, i was having a lot of fun: yes I can, yes I can.

This was the project. We had bought a Manstad sleeping couch from Ikea. After consulting several fabulous websites, I quickly realized that to change the color we did not like, I was going to have to do it Ikeahacker style.

This is the before:

What I used was 10 meters of fabric, a sewing machine, 3 rolls of thread and a tacking gun. Oh yeah, and one rainy afternoon. And I must admit, I had a lot of help from Looup...

 And this is the end result! (Domi, you would be proud)