Cute Birds and a Bathroom Update

A few months ago we decided to re-paint the kids (and guest's) bathroom. We found a shower curtain Rob and I could both agree on and then TRIED to find a way to decorate the bathroom without it being all match-matchy straight from the store ugliness. I painted one wall a silvery brown color on top of the chair rail and a darker chocolaty brown on the lower half. Then I decided I wanted to make a cute bird and an owl for in there...only by the time I finished painting everything else I wanted in the bathroom, the bird and owl just didn't go so they are now proudly hanging out on a dining room wall.

I LOVE the quotes and think they look über-cute in these dollar wood frames I painted from Michaels flanked by $2 heart plates I scooped up at Ross's.

Since the shower curtain has rectangle graphics we wanted to have shapes like squares and hearts and circles too, (also the other towels I have that go in here have circles on them but they are in the washer today.) So I had my husband cut out a round disk of scrap wood and I painted this little design and then roughed it up a bit.

Overall we like the final look of the bathroom and I love my new little dining room birds! Now I have about 300 more unfinished projects to tackle, eventually...!

Dot Art Sign

I made this cute little dot art sign for my Mom. It was so simple but it really looks spectacular in person. All I did was dip the ends of my different sized paint brushes and even pencil tips into the paint to create a random dot pattern, kinda swirly for the sun. Same thing for the edges. I used tiny black dots to make up the lettering. No talent required for this one, honestly.

Baby Quilts

I made baby quilts for my niece and nephew, both due in early April. I didn't have a pattern for either so I just kind of made it up as I went along. They are easy so a pattern isn't necessary!

For the pink and green quilt, I cut strips of I think 23 different fabrics in sizes that ranged from 1 1/4 inch wide by 12 1/2 inches long to 3 1/2 inches wide by 12 1/2 inches long. I made both side panels first and planned to stop once the length was 36 inches but it ended up being a little bit longer. Then I made the center panel, adjusting as necessary so no matching fabrics would end up in the rows directly next to each other. Once it was all pieced I squared up the quilt, cutting off extra length from the rows if necessary.

I layered the bottom fabric, the warm and natural batting and the pieced top and pinned it together. I want to try to baste it together next time and see if I like that better. I don't like the safety pin holes in the fabric.

To quilt it, I hand quilted different sized hearts all over the quilt. Then I folded the backing fabric over to make the binding and pinned and sewed it up on my machine.

Love it! My sisters said they were all putting in their orders for when they are married and expecting girls!



For my sister Hannah's son's quilt I wanted a different pattern. Although these colors would have looked great in the stripey pattern too.

I made 6 inch blocks by cutting two 6 1/2 by 2 1/2 inch strips and two 2 1/2 inch squares of the same fabric and then one 2 1/2 inch square of a contrasting fabric. I cut it all out before I sewed anything together so I could rearrange the fabrics until I got it just so. The 2 1/2 inch squares get sewn together first with the matching ones on the outside edges of the row and then the longer strips get sewn to the top and bottom of that pieced row. Easy! Just be consistent in your quarter inch seam!

I love how this one turned out too! Hope my nephew gets a lot of snuggles in it!

Old Stuff...

I made these forever ago but I just stumbled on the old photographs this morning so I decided to post them. I loved those dolls! I really need to make some more of these soon. It's so satisfying to make something you like even when you look at it 8 years later! I made the first doll for my sister-in-law on Rob's side, Erica. The other two were for my little sister, Holly. The wood plate, I painted for my mother-in-law several Christmases ago.

Baby Shower Invitations

My sister-in-law and I got together last night to put together some baby shower invitations. (Addresses and phone numbers are blocked out just because that doesn't need to be all over the internet...)

We kept it really simple, just printed our invitation on white cardstock, four to a sheet and then cut those out. Then we stamped two corners with a big flower, using pigment ink and a piece of scratch paper underneath since the whole stamp didn't go on the invitation. Immediately after stamping we sprinkled it with embossing powder and then melted it with a heat gun. We cut out larger rectangles of the patterned pink cardstock and inked the edges of both the white and pink papers with a cotton ball and black pigment ink and allowed them to dry before we used double sided tape in the corners to adhere them. Not pictured are the cute envelopes which we stamped in the lower left corner with a simple black flower (no embossing) using the same flower stamp.

When we were done we were sitting there saying, "Oh my goodness, these are SO CUTE!" It's nice when you can impress yourself! :)

Flowers...

For Valentine's Day I made candy flowers for the ladies I visit teach. Except for one elderly woman who is diabetic and got real flowers.

It's really easy to use wired floral sticks to wrap one end of the candy wrapper. Then cover that with floral tape and push it into a square of tissue paper to cover a styrofoam ball. Wrap a fabric bow around a clay pot and voilà! I also added a few beaded flowers to mine. So cute and so easy to let a friend know you were thinking about them.

In the past I've also used chocolate bars as flowers...which are a little trickier to wrap, because they're heavier, but worth the effort. Once I even glued chocolate to a big food storage can and made a "cake" for a chocolate loving friend's birthday. The effort makes a simple gift really cute.

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!