Handmade Nursery: Wall Art Continued

I got on a roll yesterday and painted 2 more pieces for the future nursery. Here is the "g" that I was painting the other day. I used a canvas board for that one so I just need a frame to put it in. I have been in love with the state art for awhile now so I made one for the baby using a wrapped canvas. I painted around the sides so I'm just going to hang that one up on the wall as is. I have one more wrapped canvas I purchased so I might make an Indiana one too as most of our family is either in Indiana or Kansas. One of these days I'll get around to making a whole outline of the United States and put hearts all over it where all of our family lives to hang in the main part of the house.

I used another canvas board, so this one will need a frame too. The fabrics to the left are the three I made crib sheets out of so I pulled the star shape from the orange and green sheets. There's a little peak of the adorable fox on the polka dot fabric. I have more things planned for him!

Welcome to the new followers that just joined me the past couple days! I love having you here!

My entry into Strut Your Stuff sponsored by Appliances Online and the Bosch Washing Machines

Handmade Nursery: Wall Art

I made up my mind over the weekend that I wasn't going to wait until baby has a nursery to start on art for the walls. I have a vision in my head of a collage wall of different pieces. Some will be painted on canvas, some will be printed artwork and there has to be at least one big painted wooden letter in there too. Since we finalized our baby name choices over the weekend and they both start with G, this was the piece I started with. It is completely ironic that we ended up with names starting with the same letter again. When we were trying to come up with names for L, the boy name also ended up starting with L. We have had the boy's named picked out for some time but were still struggling with the girl's name this time around. I heard the name over the weekend and knew that was it and so did Nick. And it was again completely unintentional that it also starts with a G! I am so excited and relieved to have baby names picked out now that I'm 31 1/2 weeks along.

Rustic Garland

While my daughter REALLY wants to start decorating our Christmas tree with ornaments, I am trying to wait until Daddy can be here. In my eyes, putting the ornaments on the tree is a special family tradition. I have photos from the past 2 years of my husband lifting L up to put the star on top of the tree and I love to see how she's grown and changed.

I've been trying to come up with little projects to keep her mind off of putting ornaments on the tree so I came up with a garland we could make since we don't have any for our tree! We have a lot of country and cowboy ornaments so it needed to be something natural and rustic so we went to Hobby Lobby and picked up a couple bags of wooden beads and a spool of sisal.

All we did was string a bunch of beads onto about 30 feet of sisal and tied a knot on either side of the bead in completely random spaces. Some beads are a few inches apart, some are only half an inch apart. The 30 feet shrunk down to about 15 feet with all the knots and clipping off the end of the sisal would it would unravel too much from putting the beads on. One thing that helps with that is taping the end of the sisal like the end of a shoelace, you get a small hard end that will slide through the bead.

To compliment the bead garland I also cut 2 inch strips of burlap and pulled the same thread on each end of the strip and gathered it until I liked it. Then I tied a knot on each end of the thread that had been pulled so the ruffle would stay.

I alternated the burlap and the beads down the tree and I'm loving the result. The beads are delicate, yet natural and the burlap is rustic, yet has a soft look with the gathering.

Thank you for stopping by on this cold Indiana Friday!

Have you heard about Martha's new paints?

I must have been hiding under a rock, or at least under a pile of paper that wasn't letting me wander my favorite crafty blogs. I didn't know that Martha Stewart was releasing a line of acrylic paints for Plaid. Unfortunately they are only available at Michael's though. As much as I do love Michael's, we only have a Hobby Lobby and Joann's in town.

If you've been hiding under the same rock as me, here are some links to some reviews showing off these versatile paints on everything from wood to fabric.

The Crafting Chicks painted storage cans for crayons and other school supplies as well as metal lunch boxes.

Craft Test Dummies has a good review of the 5 different finishes available.

And Tatertots and Jello stenciled decorative pillows!

I haven't had the privilege of trying these paints out but I can't wait to save up a little spending money and drive 45min to Michael's. Have you had the chance to use any of this new line yet? I'd love to see what you've used them for.

Here is Martha herself talking about her new paint line:

One Nation Under God

I've been thinking about making a sign or something with the pledge of allegiance for a month or so but I was finally able to finish it yesterday. It's not exactly the idea that was originally in my head but I do love the end result. It started out as a scrap of 1x12 from a bench that is a work in progress. I painted it with some cream acrylic paint and some antiquing medium that I haven't quite figured out yet. I haven't had luck with the brushing on and wiping off immediately like the instructions say so I end up mixing a little of it with the base paint and blending it from there. The words were all designed in Photoshop and cut from vinyl.

Twirlin' in the Wind!

I read so many different tutorials for making pinwheels so I don't have just one source to credit. I did a combination of a several using 4" squares of scrapbook paper with a straight pin attaching it to a dowel. The trick to helping the pinwheel work seemed to be putting a bead on the straight pin before I put it through the paper and another bead between the paper and the dowel. One more thing I played with was making sure the pin was at a 90 degree angle to the dowel. I've had the acrylic box forever and a day and it was perfect to fill with sand and put the pinwheels in.

Red, White and Blue

I am ashamed to admit that our Easter decorations, even as few of them as there were, stayed up way too long after Easter. Then we had so many events and busy weekends in a row that I never got a chance to redo my shelving. So even though it's less than a week before the 4th of July, I am still going to decorate and do something crafty!!

Yesterday, with my daughter's help, I sewed up a felt circle garland. Cutting the circles out took longer than the actual sewing! A couple years ago when I painted the living room, we took down the horrible clanky vertical blinds, and put up these temporary cheap mini-blinds. I had planned for curtains, some nicer blinds, something! Nope, the cheap white mini blinds are still there.
This morning we took the entire family to the beach. There are two beaches nearby where dogs are allowed, so we picked the one that requires less hiking to the beach and it was PERFECT! We had the beach almost entirely to ourselves. People just started to come out when we were getting ready to leave. The thing I can't get over still after 7 years of living here is the temperature drop when you get to the lake and the water felt sooooo cold today! On a 90 degree day it feels great to cool off in the cold water, not so much today when it was in the upper 70s! But we still had a great time. It was our greyhound's first time at the beach. She didn't care much for the crashing waves but she did get her feet wet. Crystal, our beagle mutt, was soooo excited! She loves to swim, but wasn't sure of the bigger waves today. When she'd get to the shore, she would whine and bite at the waves coming in! We've had her out there to swim many times but this was probably the biggest waves she'd seen.

What can a styrofoam ball and a pile of plastic grocery bags make?

A fun fluffy super cheap decorative ball is the answer!!

I saw this wreath by Betty Plain and Simple that Tatertots & Jello posted on her facebook page. Then I was browsing around myself and saw these kissing balls at The Idea Room. And wha-la! I put together a "kissing ball" made from plastic grocery bags! I unfortunately didn't take any photos as I was making it because I was in doubt that I was going to like the end result. I lost count of how many bags I cut up but it was at least 20! The ball is sitting on a glass candle stick holder from the Dollar Tree (Everything is $1!! Love that place!)

This is one of two floating shelves in our living room and this one sits directly above our TV and protects the DVD player from little hands. The DVD player sits on the left and the rest of the shelf is always a work in progress. The bears are always out in the living room and are part of my Big Sky Carvers Bearfoots collection, the photo is of all my kids (the last family photo of them before the big guy passed away), "Kiss" is a metal piece I picked up last year at Hobby Lobby and the candle in the background is something I created today too!

I picked up the glass pieces at the Dollar Tree along with the red crystals. I poured just a little of the red crystals into the bottom, cut a small piece off of a paper towel tube and nestled it into the crystals and poured the rest of the crystals around the outside of the tube and filled up the center of the tube with just enough to cover the white part of the battery tea light. Since it's up on a shelf you don't see the tube, all you see is the "flame" of the candle above the crystals and I can easily take the candle in and out to turn it off and on.

L.O.V.E.

As I was reorganizing my shelves of decorations in the basement, I was reminded that while my Halloween and Christmas decorations take over the entire area my decorations for every other holiday are more than lacking! I headed to Hobby Lobby this afternoon with a mix of ideas in my head and came home with this $1.50 piece of wood and got to work. The paint didn't end up quite as I had hoped thanks to an overly dark antiquing medium that I quickly covered up with more antique white paint. The letters are some of my removable wall vinyl so technically this board could be changed for every mood and holiday but I think I will leave it dedicated to Valentine's Day or I might forget about it and never changed it back to LOVE next year!

Button Indian Corn

L and I decided to start fall today even if it doesn't feel like it outside!

First up we did a Button Indian Corn craft.

I cut out the corn and she glued on all the buttons. Once all the buttons were on it was really heavy so I glued together 2 pieces of card stock and glued the finished corn onto that to make it more stable.

She was rather pleased with herself!

Then we did a L planned craft. She wanted to make a sparkily leaf. A PINK sparkily leaf. I could not find any glitter anywhere. But I have gone through everything so I know I don't have any. I need to get some because this girl wants everything to sparkle. She was so serious with her pink leaf and the blue background she had me put it on. I found some little rhinestone type things for her to glue on as well as some little white pompoms. She had a blast even if I didn't have any glitter!

It was so hard not to push that leaves aren't suppose to be pink, etc. I got over it and let her creativity flow and she had a blast!

Here's another photo of my craft area with even more progress made. Today was the second time I've been able to go down and make something without having to dig for supplies.

The "Before" Photo

As I've mentioned a few times, we have been downsizing anything and everything. We have made ourselves think seriously and realistically about everything that is in our home. The main part of our home is 866 sq ft. not including the small basement. We learned that we are just going to have to live with less stuff living in a small home.

My area of the basement has been a huge undertaking. Here is a photo I took today, after taking out TONS of crafts off the shelves on the pegboard on the left side of the photo and off the grid shelves on the right. I had a full table of crafts, fabric, scrapbooking and stamping supplies at the garage sale and I am happy to report that the majority of it sold! There was just a few things that went off in a box to the thrift store.

This photo looks like such a mess doesn't it?!? It really doesn't look as bad as the photo appears. You should have seen the true before but it's really been a year process as we had a garage sale last summer too. The boxes you see in the middle don't really belong to the craft area. There are a couple totes of my winter clothes in there.

So here it is for the world (or just a few people) to see. This holds me accountable to finish my space into an organized and decluttered space.

Tutorial Tuesday: Scrap Wreath

Does every sewer have a scrap box? Mine is always overflowing and I never know what to do with them. Right after I got rid of a big bag of scraps I saw where someone used it as stuffing for their dog bed, so I started saving again since I've been meaning to make the dogs new beds forever and I really don't want to go buy a bunch of stuffing if I'm just going to throw these tiny scraps away.

I saw a link awhile back for this awesome spring burlap wreath tutorial at the Tatertots and Jello Blog. So fun, right? Today I finally got out and bought a wreath, pulled out my scrap box and started cutting. I made 3 different sized templates from tracing different size cups onto a newspaper ad that was going to be thrown away. I pulled out some denim from a purse that I started to make and ended up in my UFO pile and found some matching ribbon in my stash from several years ago.

I wrapped the wreath with denim and and held it in place with the sewing pins that were too bent and dull for sewing and were just going to be thrown away.

I cut 25 of each of the 3 sizes of circles, random combination of fabrics, plus about 20 more denim circles out of the middle size.

The tiny pieces that were too small to cut another circle out of went back in the dog bed stuffing pile:

And after pushing all of the circles into the wreath with more sewing pins... ta-da!! The finish product!

Handmade Monday

My little love and I needed a Valentine's Day craft to make, yes it's January but I wanted to put them up and enjoy them! I settled upon these crayon hearts: http://www.marthastewart.com/good-things/crayon-hearts?comments_page=1

Our final result looks nothing like the photo in the instructions but that's okay because L and I had a blast. She loved shredding up her broken crayons and sprinkling them in the waxed paper. Sorry for the dreary photos, as you can see L's yellow room is the only place in the house that isn't dreary this time of year.

We decorated L's door.

Hung a few in the kitchen window.

And hung the rest from the corner of a shelf in by the kitchen table.