Nursery Decor

This weekend I decided to head to Dubuque, IA to visit my sister.  We did some awesome garage sale-ing/thrifting (more to come on that) and then decided to spend a bit of time working on some crafts!  My sister doesn’t really care much for crafts, so when she agreed, I was really surprised but definitely took her up on it!  What did we decide to do?  Head to Michael’s and Hobby Lobby!

I had pinned (over a year ago!) this image to my “arts & crafts” board.  So what was on my list?  Bubble wrap canvas art!

Source

After we grabbed our supplies, we got to work.  Kimberly recently got married, so she had PLENTY of bubble wrap laying around the house.  She had little and big bubbles…I opted for the little bubbles (but think one with big bubbles would be awesome!).  I cut smaller squares of the bubble wrap and was ready to go.

I took a paper plate, my paint (the nursery colors) and made a little design.

I forgot to take a picture of this step, but I promise it’s easy.  Take your bubble wrap square and mush it around in the paint until it’s all coated.  Then, put on your canvas and press down.

I reused my little plate and bubble wrap square several times.  I really liked the mixing of the colors.  I was careful to rotate my square every time, I didn’t want to have it line up as a whole little row of bubbles.  Then, I just kept going!

The finished product!  I really love how it turned out.  The mixture of colors was great and the little bubbles made it really fun.  I’m really happy with it and I am excited to hang it in the newly painted nursery.

Cost breakdown?  Super cheap.

16×20 canvases were on sale at Michael’s, a 2 pack for $5.00.  Kim and I split a 2 pack, so $2.50.  I grabbed 4 bottles of paint that were on sale for $.50 each and the bubble wrap was already on hand.  Top that off with a 15% off coupon, and we were at grand total — $3.83.  Fun nursery art?  Under $4.00?  SCORE!

Want to see what Kimberly made?

Recognize it?  She wanted to put her own twist on the easy canvas art Mel and I made last summer.  She went with shades of blue to go with her new quilt in their bedroom.  I think hers also turned out awesome!!  The monochromatic colors are awesome and definitely pop in the room.

All in all, the weekend was a success!

Anybody else making fun canvas art?  Painting something?  I love links!

Fancy a Coffee?

For Christmas, we gifted ourselves a Keurig.  I am not a coffee drinker and Steve lives on the stuff, so I assumed we were pretty much getting it for him…but then I discovered the world of Keurig cider, cocoa, and tea!  So now I love our Keurig too.  What I did not love about ol’ K is the amount of counter space it hogs.  This was not jiving with me…after trying the coffee machine near every conceivable outlet in our entire kitchen, I came up with a plan.

We moved our media stand into the “dinnette” nook to use as a coffee bar table.  I grabbed some things we had around the house and FINALLY hung up our word art that’s only been sitting around for 6 months or so.  The only thing I bought for this was the his and her mug holders.  I found them at Hobby Lobby and got both of them for $7.00 total thanks to an awesome 50% off sale.

I wanted to have one side as a coffee bar and one side as a wine bar…however, the universe is thwarting my efforts right now, so Lucy’s food has been promoted to the special kids table as a place holder.

I lucked out and happened to have 3 baskets in the closet that fit perfectly.  The dishes in the cabinet is my mismatched china collection…remind me to blog about it someday.  I needed somewhere to put tea, and I had a blue glass wide mouth jar down in the basement that did the trick nicely.

I found my little mirrored tray for $4.00 at Goodwill.  My jars were from Target along time ago, I just personalized them with chalkboard vinyl and my Silhouette.

I’m loving this small piece of completed-ness in our house of chaos.  It feels SO GOOD to finally have something on the walls.  Anyone else doing some reorganizing?  Did you put together a coffee bar?  Move your entertainment center somewhere else when it no longer worked with your house??  Do tell!

Linked up with: The Gunny Sack.

Mixing Up Some Mixer Art

I’ve been dying for more chances to use my Silhouette but we’ve unfortunately been out of town quite a bit with the holidays.  We went to my parents house this weekend to celebrate Christmas and I decided to bring to my new toy with me.  As we were browsing Pinterest, we stumbled on some vinyl mixer art.  This got the wheels turning and we headed to HobLob to pick up some white vinyl.  I download the Cooking Utensils shape for my Silhouette as well as the Spatula shape.  Some copying and pasting and I was in business!

I measured the mixer and used about 7.5″ tall and 8″ long, so using the grid in the Silhouette Studio, I made it exactly these dimensions.  Once I had the design done, I didn’t a quick test cut with cardstock and then loaded up the white vinyl.

This is the negative space once I pulled it off my template.

After I had my utensils cut out, I used transfer paper to pull them off the vinyl and make the adhering on the mixer a piece of cake.

I know there are lots of fancy tools for this, but I used the Pampered Chef scraper to transfer from the transfer paper to the mixer.

After you have made sure your vinyl is adhered, it’s time to peel it back and see the big reveal.

TaDa!  It was super easy and turned out SO cute.  My momma’s mixer has never looked better.

Did you do any crafting for the New Year??  Who else is lovin’ the vinyl on appliances trend?!?!

Linked up with: A Bowl Full of Lemons, The Southern Product Queen, Savvy Southern Style, One Project Closer

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Making a Cameo Appearance

Christmas came early over here…you see, we have a tradition of opening our gifts together and having a mini Christmas.  We spend actual Christmas day with one of our sides of the family (rotating because they live too far apart) and like spending some time together with our own mini Christmas.  I have been SO EXCITED because I figured out what to get Steve, he managed to not buy it himself before Christmas, and he forgot he wanted it so he was surprised!  Woo hoo!!  What you ask?  A GPS running watch.  His old one met a tragic end last summer when he forgot it on the roof of his Jeep.

What did he get me you ask??  A Silhouette Cameo!!  For those of you unfamiliar, it’s a crafting/scrapbooking mega machine and I had been having dreams of all the delightful things I could make with it.  I was pumped that he remembered I wanted one AND ordered it!  It was super easy to get started with and I’m complete enamored.  After some learning and practicing with paper, I decided to dive into my first project.  Etched glass.  I thought I’d start small in case I messed it up and grabbed the Qtip jar from the bathroom.

First thing first, I pulled up the Silhouette Studio to design my logo.  One of the (many) cool things about the Silhouette is you can use any font you have downloaded on your computer in the designs.  I spent a LOT of time on free font websites when we were doing our wedding invitations, so I’m excited to reprise that practice for my crafting!  For this, I went simple and selected the Bodoni MT Black.

The cutting area was set to 12″ x 12″ and I guessed on how big I thought my jar was….I probably should have got out a ruler to actually measure my jar, because I ended up way to big.  So, once I had my design, I sent it to my machine bestie to cut it out.

I was too antsy to order Silhouette vinyl and wait for it to arrive, so I headed to Michael’s and picked up some vinyl designed for the Circuit.  It cut beautifully, next up, I think I’m going to try contact paper since it’s cheaper, but that’s a digression.  I loaded it up and it went to work.

Since I was way off with my guess, I decided to just go with a Q on the Qtip jar because I liked how the Q looked, simple as that.  With my vinyl secured, it was off to the laundry room sink.  I got some Armour Etch at Michaels.  If you are going to etch glass, Armour Etch is pretty good, but it’s pricey.  Luckily I had a 50% off coupon, but it was still $15.00 for a 10 oz. bottle.  Not my usual bargain basement pricing….

It’s important for this step to put the etching creme on very thick.  If it’s not thick, the etching won’t look even.  I left it on for 6 minutes.  After the time was up, I simply washed it off (safety alert: wear gloves because it’s acid and you don’t want it to burn your hands.  There is also a warning on the bottle about only rinsing it in a stainless steel sink so it wouldn’t impact the finish…moral of the story, read directions first).  At first, it really didn’t look like anything had happened, but once I got it all rinsed and dried off, I had this:

As a side note, it’s very hard to take a picture of double sided etched.

The Qtip jar in action.  A super easy project and a great way to get started with my new machine BFF.  And yes, expect to see a lot of Silhouette projects coming up because my imagination is running wild.

Anyone else celebrate Christmas not on Christmas?  Any other Silhouette lovers out there?  Have you ever etched glass? I think I might need some more practice…

Santapaws

I didn’t really MEAN to take the month of December off from blogging, but it just sort of happened.  In life news, I got (and started a new job).  I still work for the same company, just a new role.  I’m loving it so far, but it’s been a whirlwind.  In between the chaos that is life, I’ve been working on Christmas shopping and merriment.

I really wanted to try my hand at some personalized gifts this year.  I love Christmas gift giving and I wanted to put a fun spin on it.  I decided to tackle pet silhouettes for my bff Melissa  (don’t worry, I already gave them to her, so I’m not ruining any surprises).  They were pretty simple, I found some photos of her furbabes on facebook, enlarged them using nothing more than Microsoft Word, printed them, cut them out, and then traced them on to black scrapbook paper.  I cut them out again (nothing fancy, just a regular ol’ scissors) and used some Mod Podge to adhere them to the canvas.  I decided to cover the canvas with another piece of scrapbook paper to better match her house color scheme.  Wrapping the canvas was a bit tricky, but I basically wrapped them just like a present.  I decided to personalize them a bit and include their names.  I think they turned out pretty fantastic and they were SUPER easy to make!!

Check ‘em out!

Supply list:
5×7 canvas
Black Scrapbook paper
Printed scrapbook paper
Mod Podge
Foam brush

See?  Super easy!!  Is anyone else making any crafties  for friends or family??  Do you get nervous when giving someone something you made??  Merry Christmas week!!

What do reindeer use to decorate their Christmas trees?

Horn-aments….  I love bad puns.

Anyway, we were feeling festive this weekend and decided to get all of our Christmas decorations out and get the house ready.  I have been excited for Christmas for awhile now, it’s the first time we get to decorate our very own house!  Steve bought a Christmas tree 4 Christmas’ ago (right after we started dating) and I still love it.  It’s artificial but has very real looking branches.  He scored a mega deal on it at Ace Hardware, it was 80% off after Thanksgiving (and no, we never buy seasonal decorations before the holiday actually happens).  We have red and white bulbs (it’s Husker town after all) and then fill in the rest with meaningful ornaments from our childhood.

and yes, Kirby will spend all of Christmas in that very spot.

I had a tree as well, mine was much smaller and we decided to set that one up in our dining room.  We figured 1) it would look nice from the street and 2) maybe we’d be distracted by the pretty bulbs and not notice that we still need to finish mudding the drywall.  This tree has a purple theme.  Our wedding colors were purple and silver and we were originally going to be getting married in December, so we had a stock of purple bulbs to use for various decorating items.  Fast forward 2 Decembers (we got engaged in December of 2009) and we still have a LOT of bulbs around.  Decorating a purple tree seemed like the most logical step.

Yep…it’s crooked (turns out, the top of the tree and the bottom of the tree don’t fit together as well as they should) after a lot of “doctoring”, this is as good as this is going to get.  The only tree skirt we had is burgundy, so if we go ahead and do a purple tree every year, I’m going to have to find a different tree skirt.  Oh well, it’s not perfect, but our house feels so festive, I don’t mind

After we got the tree up, I headed to pinterest to see what other crafts I could pursue with the ornaments.  Steve reminded me of a youtube video I showed him last year on how to make a wreath.  After a quick Google, we found the video back (check it out here) and got to work on our own mini craft night.

We had a hanger on hand from dry cleaning, so we pulled that apart and shaped it into a circle.  Then, I headed down to my basement stash for some ornaments.  We hot glued the tops on so they wouldn’t pop off when we moved them around the wreath.

I just took some hot glue and plopped it around the top.  The top is hidden eventually so you don’t have to worry about being neat.

Steve did a lot of the strategic stringing onto the wire.  We found it easiest to bend one end of the hanger and then string 10 or so bulbs and then alternate them to a full pattern.  As we got small pieces done, we would put a piece of painter’s tape on the hanger to hold the pattern we had.  We weren’t too strategic about it, just tried to get a fairly even disbursements.

This was the trickiest part (and yes, we literally used 4 sets of pliers), once we had the bulbs all strung, we had to carefully bend them in to place.  This is important to do sloooowly otherwise, you’ll break some of the ornaments.  Thankfully, we only had 2 fatalities in the process and we twisted the wire back around itself.  As he mentions in the video, there were a lot f weird gaps between the bulbs.  We didn’t have any garland on hand (and didn’t feel like going to Walmart), so we improvised with some leftover tulle from the wedding.

We wound the tulle through the bulbs until we had it tucked in so it looked nice.

Here’s the finished product, we tied some white ribbon and glued some smaller bulbs throughout the wreath to add some dimension.  We have it hanging on our closet door right now, it was too thick to put between our front door and our storm door.  I like it on the inside, it’s just so festive and makes me smile.  I’m so glad Steve remembered the random idea from last year.

If we did it again:
1)   We wouldn’t fill the hanger full to the end, it was pretty heavy and hard to keep perfect shape.
2)   We would have spent even more time forming the circle on the wreath
3)  We would have attached the ribbon hanger before we did the tulle stuffing.  We did it as our last step and it was tricky to make it look integrated into the wreath.

Any other pre-Thanksgiving decorators out there?  Any more ideas for me and my plethora of ornaments?  Do you get ridiculously excited when your husband suggests craft night??

Linked up with Bower Power!

Feelin’ a little batty

Good news!  This month’s craft night was a smashing success!

On the agenda?  A wreath for Halloween.  This is my first “holiday” in the house (other than Easter but I hadn’t lived here that long yet, so we didn’t have any decorations).  I have been pinning up a storm for some awesome Halloween decorating.  I probably won’t put up too much this year since I hate paying full price for seasonal items, but you better believe I’ll be at the 75% off sales!!  One of my favorite wreath pins?  A yarn wreath with some foam bats.

I had a wreath form left from a failed wedding project, so I jumped at the chance to repurpose it.  I grabbed some $2.00 yarn at Hobby Lobby, a $2.00 spool of ribbon and a $.38 piece of craft foam and I was in business.  Super simple …wrap the wreath with yarn, really really tight together, print out bat template, cut out foam, hang on door.

And yes, at this point, we were fixing our lights, which is a long boring story that I’m not even going to write about.  Basically, the wire for our exterior lights got cut in the process of our exterior fixing and Steve had to rerun a new wire all through the dining room.  Good thing we haven’t fixed the wall in there yet.

Thought I’d show you closer up too.  I used plain pins to attach my bats and I disguised my pins as bat eyes.  This way, I can remove the bats and ribbon once Halloween is over and re-use my gray wreath with something different attached.

Here it is with the lights up….we still need to reattach the storm door, but we’re at present (literally, as I type this) trying to remember how to put it back together…Once we get that done, the storm door will be up and our outside will be done-zo!

The other craft?  Metallic pumpkins!  I got some cheap baby pumpkins and metallic spray paint at True Value and set to work.  The vase is from the Ikea trip of a month ago, and I still need about 8 more to actually fill up the vase, but I keep forgetting to grab some when I’m at the store.  I love the shimmer they have and copper spray paint might be my new fav…

Anybody else loving the yarn wreath trend?  Did you have higher expectations for my decorating than some pumpkins and a wreath?  Don’t worry…I have more Tricks (and treats) up my sleeve.  I see the seasonal decorating wagon and I’m jumping on!!

Linked up with: Eighteen25, A Bowl Full of Lemons, Nifty Thrifty Things

We Met, We Married, We Live

Melissa and I snuck in not one, but TWO craft nights this month.  (Catch up on the first photographic craft night here)  I was loving a lot of the map pieces that were being pinned on pinterest, but one in particular caught my eye.

Source

I loved the idea and we decided to do a map project for craft night.  I headed to AAA to grab some maps…As a side note, I have been a AAA member since I was 1 year old.  My great grandma never wanted me to get stranded and since AAA covers whatever vehicle the card member might be in, it traveled in my diaper bag with me.  A perk of AAA is that you get free maps whenever you want, so off I went to secure the needed maps.  I grabbed Sioux Falls, St. Louis, and Omaha.

Upon arriving at Melissa’s, I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do for sure so we decided to improvise.  Melissa had a Fisker’s circle punch, so that settled it, I would do circles.  As I thought about it more, I decided I want to try some paper embroidery.  We headed to Hobby Lobby and I bought some red embroidery thread and a needle.  If I were to redo this, I would probably measure things and make templates, but in the spirit of craft night, I winged it.

First up was “we met”.  I decided to embroidered a heart.

Yep, you’ll notice the center of that heart is the Ameristar Casino.  In the mood for a how we met story?  Good, because I’m in the mood to type it.  One of my first assignments when I started work was to pass my:  Series 7, Series 66 and PHR certification tests.  This took from July until April of the following year to accomplish.  To celebrate our passing, a bunch of friends and I headed out to a new club that had just opened at Ameristar casino, “Home”.  Now we love to dance, so as soon as we got there, we headed to the dance floor, never mind the fact that we were the only one’s out there.  After a few songs, the dance floor starting filling in and I happened to look across the crowd and see a really tall cute guy in a black shirt (we’re not really that tall, I’m 5’10″ and he’s 6’3″, but inexplicably, a lot of short people live in Missouri, and I regularly end up feeling like a giant).  He seemed to be attempting to get my attention and come over to dance with me, however he spent a fair amount of time working up the courage to come over.  After some consultation with his friends, he managed to make his way over to me and introduce himself.  We had a good time dancing and talking, since he was from Nebraska (my neighboring home state), we talked a lot about the Midwest and then spent FAR too long discussing rhubarb.  No, I’m not joking.  We both love rhubarb pie, crisp, and I was explaining rhubarb wine to him.  Apparently, all this left a good impression on him because he called me a few days later to invite me on a date and the rest, as they say is history.

Next up, I decided to give wedding bands a whirl.

We were married in my home town, Sioux Falls, SD.  Mostly because we were contemplating a move and didn’t want to have to travel back to St. Louis to attend our wedding if we ended up moving before wedding day.

Last, but not least, I made a house for our first house…I don’t think I need to go into those details since ya know, that’s what this whole blog is about

After I had my map parts, I needed to figure out the perfect way to display them.  I’m not good with fonts, I don’t have Photoshop, so I decided to keep with the theme of making it my own, I would embroider the date for each of these events on some bigger paper and frame the whole thing.  I headed to Gordman’s and found the perfect frame.  It was $9.99 and I had a 20% off coupon, so this was perfect.  Then, I headed back to Hobby Lobby to find some scrap book paper and more embroidery thread.  Scrapbook paper was 50% off, so total I spent 75 cents on scrapbook paper and thread.

When I got home, I tried my first run of dates free hand and this failed miserably, I decided to make a template on the computer and print it off.  I taped it to the back of the scrapbook paper and embroidered my numbers.  This worked great and I was able to find a rhythm pretty quickly.

Tada!  The finished project.  I didn’t really have a scientific method on this, just went with what I thought looked good, and I have to tell you, I’m in LOVE with it.  I can’t believe this on a whim!

How about you?  Are you lovin’ map art?  Have you embroidered paper?  Did you bring your ottoman outside to your patio this weekend??

Linked up with A Bowl Full of Lemons , Tip Junkie, DIY Show-off, It’s a Blog Party, Newlyweds on a Budget, 5 minutes just for me, Young House Love, House of Earnest, and Bower Power.

Julie over at Peanut Butter Fingers, just made her own embroidered map out as a gift for her husband for their 1st anniversary.  It turned out so cute!!!  If you’re looking for more embroidered map inspiration, head over and check her out!

Also linked with the DIY Show-off.  Click on the button to see other awesome DIY projects!

Now I know my ABC’s

Several weeks ago, I was looking for some inspiration for monthly craft night so I headed to pinterest.  I was struck by several words made up of individual photos of letters.  I had been pondering how I could do something similar myself and by a stroke of luck, I was walking downtown in the old market and noticed some of the awesome letters painted on bricks and store fronts.  Photo walk craft night was born.

We (Melissa and I) headed to the Old Market after work to get our photog on.  I wasn’t sure this would work out, but I was pleasantly surprised!  They turned out pretty darn good!

Here’s some of my fav’s…

I love the font on this one, the color, and the little imperfection from the chipped bricks in the upper left.

I love how the bricks come through on this one.

How cool is this A?!?!

It was so easy to do, I don’t have a fancy camera, just a normal Canon point and shoot (though macro mode is vital for this).  Once I collected all my photos, I uploaded them using Picnik to crop and resize and then I sent them off to Walgreens to order.  I was originally going to do black and white, but I thought the colors all kinda flowed together.

This project was super easy and super cheap!  Now, I need a 4ft long frame so I can hang my masterpiece on the wall!!!

And all together now!

A little hankie pankie

This weekend is exciting, my parents and sister came to visit me and celebrate my early birthday.  After dinner last night, we were discussing what to do and my mom told me she had something for me to look through.  One of my aunts was getting rid of some vintage hankies and my mom brought them in case I wanted to do anything with them.  I love vintagey things.  I started digging in and there was a LOT of them (over 85).  I started pulling some out and got really excited to start making…something.  What?  TBD.

My sister decided she wanted to join in the fun.  She is not usually interested in anything related to crafts, so I was excited to have her on one of my crazy projects.  I had seen a photo of a scarf made from hankies on pinterest, so we decided to make some scarves.

We laid out an existing scarf to get a sense of how long it needed to be.  We’re laying out Kimberly’s scarf first.

I started the sewing.  The conversation that ensued before the sewing started:
Me:  Do you want to sew your own?  You took home ec and learned to sew, right?
Kim:  Um…yeah, I’m more of a pinner.

So with that settled, I took the sewing machine.  It was super easy, just put the right sides together, have the designated pinner pin one side, sew, iron the seam and repeat.

Mom got in on the fun too.   Mostly to help me as I broke my sewing machine repeatedly.  I wish I was kidding.  The worst one?  I broke the needle, then when I went to remove it, I dropped it.  If fell down and jammed in the bobbin case so I couldn’t get the bobbin out or the needle out.  After a lot of tools, prying, and frustrated words at my sewing machine, we got it out and could continue sewing.  Moral of the story- I need to use my sewing machine more so I remember how to use it.

Kimberly modelling her new scarf (with Lucy’s help)

Modelling my scarf.

This project was super easy and they turned out so cute!  Best of all, the project was completely free and gives us a way to keep a family heirloom of sorts in the family.  Hope you’re all enjoying your weekend!

Linked up with A Bowl Full of Lemons and Joey and Lana.