Fabric and Felt Flower Bouquet

It's almost Mother's Day. I admit, I'm excited. Mr. S is amazingly good at gift giving. It's never about price, he's just so dang thoughtful. That's why I chose him to be my baby daddy...15 years ago. 

Last year, he got up with E and then my two guys brought me breakfast in bed, followed by flowers, followed by gifts. It was really over the top and totally unnecessary, but I really appreciated the effort, especially for my first Mother's Day. 

My mom has always insisted on no gifts for any holiday from us kids. I disobeyed her for a long time but several years ago, I threatened her with homemade gifts. She called my bluff so I made her a scrapbook of my brother's and sister's USAF Basic Training photos. She loved it. 

So, now I'm on the homemade gift train and I can't get off. Each year, I'm scrambling for ideas of new things to make (psst... sometimes I cheat and buy her something awesome on Etsy, but I fess up that I didn't make it.)

For Mother's Day this year, I got my inspiration from these fabric flowers at Bower Power and these felt flowers at Paper & Stitch.

I found the vase at Target for $12 and used some purple and yellow fabric and white and yellow felt that I already had. Using their tutorials, I lost 7 fingerprints from hot glue burns but ended up with a fabulous bouquet of flowers to send to my mom. I made it several weeks ago and have had it sitting around our kitchen since. I was pretty sad to box it up and ship it off yesterday. I think I need to make another one for myself. 

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there! I hope you all have a fantastic day! 

Fabric Wrapped Lamp Shade

I'm working on adding some accents and patterns to my living room now that we got some new furniture. I'm in love with blues, greens and yellows. First up, the lamp.

We've had an Ikea lamp shade on this Target lamp for a very long time. Except, the lamp is made to attach at the top and the shade is made to attach around the light bulb. So really, the shade is just ever-so-carefully balanced on the lamp.

Time to un-ghetto-ify the lamp!

I started with a $20 plain white shade that's shorter/fatter than the Ikea shade. In the picture, it seems very similar but the simple fact that the new lamp shade actually attaches to the lamp is the biggest difference here.

Time to get super technical. Not.

To cut the fabric, I laid it on the floor and then cut about an inch from the top and bottom as I rolled it along. I did a little adjusting to get the pattern right. Still, it's a little better looking from the front than from the back, which is fine for its location.

I used spray adhesive, following the temporary bond instructions to lightly attach it. A bead of hot glue along the seam makes it look nice and neat. I also used hot glue along the top and bottom and folded the excess to the inside.

I like it. A lot. I might paint the lamp base white but I'm going to live with the black for a while before I made that decision.

Note, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with that room divider that's propped up behind the lamp. It was in the opposite corner of the room, but the new sectional fills up that corner now. I still love the fabric so I might wrap some canvas with it or maybe frame it in a big white frame.

What are you fabric wrapping lately?

Thank You Cards

I made these for E's teachers when he moved out of the infant room. They took about 15 minutes to make and they're so cute. 

It's pretty obvious, but the supplies are: blank craft cards, a Thank You stamp w/ blue ink, colorful bakers twine, some scrapbook flowers and a couple matching brads (is that what they're called?). 

If you're like me and you have buckets and buckets of scrapbook-type stuff, you can easily throw together some really good looking cards in no time. No need to rush out to the store when you need a card anymore! 

Felt Board

I've been working on a project. A very much ongoing project that may just go on forever. I made E a felt board. I bought the biggest (cheap) canvas I could fine at Hobby Lobby, which happened to be 30"x40" and was $16 after my 40% coupon. I cut and hand sewed a grassy hill (green felt) onto a blue sky (blue felt) and then stretched and stapled the whole thing to the canvas. Tada! Felt board. That part was easy, albeit a bit time consuming. That part is also done.

It's all the "game pieces", if you will, that might keep me cutting and sewing felt for the rest of my days. I've been finding inspiration everywhere to make little scenes for E to play with. As soon as I made the first couple pieces, I let him have access to the board. I admit, I typically wait until I'm completely finished with a project before letting destroy...er... play with it. So, it was hard to hand over.

For the past couple weeks, he'd wake up in the morning or from a nap and discover what new pieces are on the board. I'm sure I'll revisit this post many times, but here's what I have so far.

The full scene (minus the third piece of road, which has already disappeared):

The slightly flower-ish looking sun. But you know it's a sun because it's wearing sunglasses. right? 

The peacefully weepy cloud and the airplane. 

Dinosaurs strolling down the road. Makes perfect sense, right? Houses, airplanes, dinosaurs. It happened.

The house (I need to make at least one more), with an apple and lemon tree, and a pond with ducks and a frog next to a coniferous forest of three. 

And here's a close-up of that pond. It's really my favorite part. Well, it might be a tie between the pond and the rain cloud.

If you've never experienced one of these boards, it all works by friction. Nothing is stuck all that well but it stays in place well enough for imagination time. In fact, because nothing sticks that well, a good slap to the canvas knocks most of it off. I decided it would be HI-larious to bang on the canvas and yell "EARTHQUAKE!" after E had set everything up. He did not think it was funny. In fact, he cried. Maybe he's not the little destroyer I think he is. 

On my near future to-do list: 

• One more house
• More animals/dinos
• People
• A rocketship
• A bus
• Couple cars/trucks
• Another piece of road
• A rainbow
• Lightning? 
• More clouds

Fabric Room Divider

Have you priced out those three panel room dividers? They're not cheap. So, I decided to make one. We had a bunch of stuff that we kept in a corner between the couches. Stuff including the drums and guitars for our Guitar Hero/Rock Band games. Yeah, we're nerds. I wanted to have that stuff accessible, but hidden. Hence, the room divider.

I enlisted Mr. S to cut the wood for me. We just used some super cheap 2in trim wood. (Is that the right term for it?) He made me two 2ft wide and 6ft tall rectangles. Our intention was to make it three panels, but once he brought me the second one, I realized that two were big enough. I think we made them a little extra big. I've certainly never seen them this big in the store. I suppose that's the advantage of making your own-- not only is it cheap, you can make them whatever size you need. Not to mention, you have endless fabric choices too.

So anyway, he just cut the wood and nailed them together. Nothing fancy because they were about to get covered with fabric. I used the super high tech method of laying the fabric on the floor, putting the frames on top and eyeballing the cut. Then I got even more high tech and stapled it to the back of the frames.

Here's the fabric. Wish I knew the name. It's a simple teal and white/cream flower pattern.

And here's a close up of my stapling skillz. See those folded corners? Ah, yeah! No, just kidding. I suck, but it looks good from the front and that's all that matters. 

After I got both panels covered, I had Mr. S attach them with some small hinges. I did this on top of the fabric because otherwise I would've had to figure out how to stretch the fabric around the hinges and that was not going to happen. Note: nothing here needs to be heavy duty. I mean, it's just going to stand around. And that wood is really light. Here's a look at the hinge. We just used two-- one about 1.5ft from the top, and one 1.5ft from the bottom.

And here's the full effect-- along with the cat and the dog. There's a bunch o' junk behind that divider, but you'd never know. Of course, it kind of draws attention so people always ask what's up with it, which means our junk may be hidden, but it's definitely not a secret. 

Candy Dish

You know what's awesome? Being without cable and internet for several days. No, just kidding. It's not awesome. Anyway, I think we have that mess settled so I should be posting more normally.

I've been holding onto this one because it's one of my faves. This was something I saw on the interwebs, but I can't really remember where. It's so cheap and so cute.

Whatcha need: A terracotta pot (top and bottom), a fishbowl, a wooden knob, spray paint, glue. I suggest getting all your supplies at the same time (you can get them all at Michael's, for sure) to make sure your pot and fishbowl are compatible sizes. They have lots of sizes so you could make a teeny tiny candy dish, or a ginormous candy dish.

This is yet another The Possibilities Are Endless craft.

Whatcha do: First, glue the knob to the bottom of the saucer part of the pot. Let that dry per glue instructions. Spray paint both parts of the pot. I went with white. Again, the possibilities are endless. Once the pot color is to your liking and its' all dry, glue the fishbowl to the bottom of the pot.

This can be changed up in so many ways. Big or small, endless color and pattern possibilities. Even the type of candy can completely change the personality of it. I made this one for a friend at work. I didn't think it was a good idea to have a candy dish around the house-- especially such a breakable one. BUT, I think I'm going to need to make myself one. I'm thinking a super bright and glossy blue.

Did I mention that the possibilities are endless? And best of all, this is a less than $10 craft! 

BFF Mugs

My sister is coming home from Afghanistan this week. Can I just say YAY!? E and I will be going for a visit and we'll be celebrating all the holidays/events she missed while she was gone. I'm more than a little bit excited. So, while she's flying across the world, I'm getting crafty. First up, some BFF mugs for us to sip our coffee from while we chat on weekend mornings again. You know... when it's morning for both of us, not morning for me and evening for her.

These mugs are all over Pinterest and I think you can even buy them on Etsy if you're not up for making your own. I'm up for a challenge, so I went for it.

First, I started with some $1 mugs from IKEA. Except, they seemed too small and they were oddly sloped which was going to make the pictures skewed. So, I hit up Target and got some more substantial mugs for $3.50 each. Still, quite cheap.

I googled "Ohio silhouette" and "Virginia silhouette" and printed/cut those out. I used a little double sided tape to attach them to the mugs.

When I moved into my desk at work, I was left with a bunch of old school office supplies from the 70 year old man who lived in my cube before me. Things like transparencies and those transparency pens. Also, one of those black grease pencils. I don't even know what people used those for in the office environment. I've only ever seen them in the grocery store when I was a kid. Anyway, it has come in handy several times around the house. I used it to trace the outlines of the states.

Sip, sip... kitty wants a drink! 

The Pinterest ideas are for using Sharpie markers on the mugs and baking them to make them permanent. I splurged a few extra bucks for an actual paint marker that is made for ceramics. Once I had the grease pen outlines, I used my marker to trace inside and draw the hearts.

I let the marker dry for about 30 minutes before I carefully scrubbed off the grease pencil with a napkin. I wasn't sure how smeary the marker would stay and for how long. The directions said the marker needed to dry for 4 hours, but should be baked between 4 and 8 hours. They baked for 40 minutes at 425 degrees. Easy peasy.

I'm so excited for Sis to open them and then I'll return to Ohio with my Virginia mug.

A Toddler Activity

Even though I work a 9-to-5, I like to pretend that I'm a craftastic stay-at-home mom. I imagine that SAHMs make lots of fun, crafty activities that keep their toddlers busy playing and learning all day long. Of course, I have no idea what SAHMs actually do. As far as I know, they could be sitting around all day eating Twinkies while the kids play with matches. But, I prefer to think they're craftastic.

So, this is my shot at a SAHM-ish toddler activity. 

I have a collection of clear plastic containers-- water bottles, juice bottles, snack containers. I filled them up with various things-- some noisy, some pretty. E has glittery water, water with beads, bottles with just beads and with bells, ribbons, sequins... you name it. They're dirt cheap and disposable when he bangs up the bottle/container too much. And, the possibilities are endless-- every time I take a trip down the craft aisle I get more ideas. 

For added safety, I'd suggest putting a little adhesive around the cap once the bottle is ready. You don't want your little ones getting those caps off and eating whatever treasures you've put on the inside. 

Beads in Water

Mini Gold Bells

Ribbons (for first birthday presents) and beads

DIY Mobile

When I was decorating E's room, I kept seeing, and lusting after, those gorgeous (and expensive!) mobiles that are all over Etsy. I decided that I could make a reasonably cute one myself without spending a fortune. I thought it would be relatively temporary but little did I know that it would still be hanging more than a year later. He can reach it, but doesn't bother it at all.

So, here's what I did...

Supplies

Yarn

Embroidery hoop
Styrofoam balls

Acrylic paint

Big plastic needle (I'm not sure what they're actually used for, but you need something that will stab through the styrofoam balls)

Sponge paint brushes

It's a little time consuming, but it's easy:

1. Wrap the hoop with yarn. Wrap and wrap and wrap until there's no more hoop showing. 

2. Using the needle, string styrofoam balls, tying a knot under each ball to keep it in place on the string. If the needle is thin enough and the yarn is thick enough, the balls will pretty much hold themselves but I'd still add the knots for good measure. Leave a bunch of yarn at the top of each string of balls.  

3. Attach strings of balls to the hoop, tying all strings together to create the hanging part. This is a little complicated. I wrapped each string around the hoop and then brought all six of them together in a knot. Ultimately, there are six strings of yarn that go to the ceiling.

4. Paint the balls. The possibilities are endless! This took just one coat on each ball with a couple touch-ups at the end. The styrofoam paints surprisingly well. 

5. Hang and enjoy! 

Adjust the yarn so everything hangs evenly and use a Command hook to attach it to the ceiling. I have it hanging under a vent so it spins on its own when the heat or AC is blowing. Otherwise, a bit of a spin in one direction will make it unspin for a while. 

It was SO easy and the possibilities with different colors of paint and yarn are endless!