Painted Rocking Horse

After many months of procrastination, the pink and brown zebra striped polka-dotted rocking horse I started for my niece, Destiny, is finished. Love it!

Thought Jars

In the spirit of trying to keep things simple this Christmas, I made little thought jars for my sisters and Mom. I took text from the talk "Unleashing the Dormant Spirit" by F. Enzio Busche and printed it on the white side of different decorative papers in a fairly large font. Then I cut the pieces up, folded them accordion style and piled them up in a jar. I tied on a matching decorative bow and placed them in a gift bag with a bag of Hershey's Kisses and a label that said "Warm thoughts and kisses this Merry Christmas!"

More Beaded Flowers

A detailed tutorial is here but I had to post a couple pictures of the pink and black beaded flowers I made for another wristlet. Too cute!






I also figured out how to wire the flowers fairly easily. I used a large safety pin, poked a hole in the center and then just made a cute loopy twist in the wire as a decorative way to hold the wire in place without having to poke it back through. It also eliminated some of the bulk underneath in the structure of the corsage.

Love it!

Girl's Camp T-shirts

We wanted the girls at church to have some fun decorating their own shirts this year, but we also wanted to have our ward name on the shirts. (Inexpensively due to rising fuel costs cutting into our budgets.) The theme for camp was "Building 101" about building your house of faith. Each ward was a different trade. Our ward was the Christy Meadows Architects.

We got shirts for a great deal, less than $2.50 each and bought some "Simply Spray" to decorate them. If you haven't worked with Simply Spray, it can be a little bit tricky. My first can was great, my second can's nozzle had a mind of it's own and it was a little gloppy but we made it work. We bought black for the stencil and lots of multi colors for the girls to decorate their own shirts.

The first thing I did was make a stencil out of stencil plastic with my exacto knife.

Then I covered the area that wouldn't be sprayed with newspapers, including a piece of newspaper in between the layers of the t-shirt to prevent the color from bleeding through.

I lightly sprayed the stencil and dabbed up the excess with a paper towel.

Here is the result.

I made 32 shirts (I think).

When we were personalizing them I made a stencil in a stencil, which I outlined with marker, that has my name and says "I heart camp"...'cause I do!!!

More Exploding Boxes

I made two more as samples for a class I'm teaching in June. I used tacky glue on my lid corners and permanent double sided tape for the rest of it. It went together really fast using the tape but I only got two boxes out of one roll of tape. I like these a lot. The possibilities are endless for embellishments. I chose to keep it simple and let the photos get top billing in mine.

P.S. If you want your photos to have the black frame around them like mine have, go to Picnik's photo editor, upload your photo and choose "Frames" from the "Create" section. There you can adjust the color and size of the frames around the pictures. Then save them and send them for processing like normal. I have mine printed in wallet size, depending on the picture, so they are small enough for the boxes. My Germany box, however, just used normal old photos I had lying around in boxes, no online cropping, no editing, no wallet sizes, etc, just pictures that I could cut down with good old fashioned scissors.

Nauvoo Project

Going through photos on my computer I came across these pictures from a project I did awhile back. I was asked to paint a "log cabin" from Nauvoo for a church activity. I painted the Family Living Center of Historic Nauvoo, in two sections on brown contractor's paper (same stuff I used for the Fiesta decorations). I used the color of the paper to my advantage. Not bad...I didn't remember to get a photo of it finished, up on the wall at the church. Oh well. You get the idea.

Exploding Scrapbook Box

Here are some pictures of the exploding scrapbook box that I made my mom for Mother's Day this year. It was my first try and I had a lot of fun making it and will be making lots more. However in the future I will only use permanent double-stick tape instead of glue or glue sticks. I found when the glue dried, the pages, if flexed, popped the paper and photos off if you weren't careful. I am not putting up directions but I will provide a link from the place whose directions I liked best here. These are all over the web and lots of people have different ideas about how to make them. I personally wanted to maximize my use of the 12 x 12 paper size. I also sent my photos via the web to Wal-mart's one hour developer and had wallets printed so they would fit on the inside box flaps that were only about 3 inches wide. Had I planned further in advance I wouldn't have had to use the one-hour but it was okay and relatively inexpensive. Also, with the wallets you get two pictures per sheet so I can make another one for me! I forgot to take a photo of the box, glued together, with the lid removed so you could see why it was called an exploding box. -Next time... Oh, and my Mom LOVED it!!!! It made her cry (which was NOT my intention BTW.) She is still raving about it!

Fiesta!!

The same day as Corey's Prom we were in charge of the decorations for a quad-stake church dance with a Fiesta theme. Wanting to stick to a really cheap budget I volunteered to paint a lot of the decorations myself. I had a lot of fun doing them. I bought a huge roll of brown paper from Lowe's and used up a lot of old paint I had sitting around the house. We had help one night from the Young Women at church who made tissue paper flowers and decorated the piñatas. One of the ladies from church made about 50 more flowers at home for us. (WOW!) It looked cute and we only ended up spending about 20 bucks total. Job well done, I say!

Beaded Flowers

Forgot your contacts this morning?? Just joking. My sister borrowed my camera and so I had to use my cell-cam. Not great at taking detailed photos obviously. Still...I wanted step by step instructions so I would remember how to do this again since they turned out so cute. I'll be posting about the entire floral wristlet I'm making these for at a (very soon) future date. (And sorry about my line spacing issues...I still haven't figured out blogger's html coding so I can fix that. One day I will take the time to look at it more closely, but today is not that day. °Ü°)

First start with about 24 inches of 24 gauge non-tarnishing silver wire. This length will leave you with about a 7 inch stem. If you need more or less, you can adjust that measurement.

Fold The wire into a long U shape...

...and add the beads while holding both strands of wire.

I used 18 seed beads, 9 white, 9 black. Let the beads slide down into the center of the U bend.

Tightly twist 2 or 3 times to make your first petal.

Now you only need to hold 1 strand of wire to add 18 more beads. Let them slide down to the first petal.

And twist tightly, again 2 or 3 times, close to the first petal.

Now take the other strand of wire and make the third petal the same way.

Keep doing this until you have 5 flower petals. Then twist the two wires on the bottom side of the flower tightly 2 or 3 times.

Gently grasping under the flower, twist the remaining wires on themselves to creat one single stem. This only needs to be "pretty" if you are leaving the wire bare. Trim the ends of the wire to make even.

Pictured here is a flower on the left without floral tape and on the right with floral tape.

To wrap the floral tape, I find it to be easier to start at the base of the stem and work back up towards to flower. Wrap tightly, but don't worry too much about perfection. These aren't stand alone type flowers and the stem will most likely be covered up by greenery or ribbon or something else. These are just accent flowers.

When you get to the flower, tear the tape and wrap tightly as close to the base of the flower as possible. Smooth well.

For my wristlet I think I will need three flowers. These go pretty fast once you get the hang of it. Hope the photos aren't too blurry... :)