Heart It

I put together this little piece of art a few weeks ago and have been meaning to take a picture and post it, buuuut yeah, I’m slow.  I cut out a bunch of hearts on my Silhouette cutting machine to the size of my choice and spent more time than I thought trying to space them evenly in this frame, hah.   I just used a glue stick to glue them onto some plain white paper, then stuck it in this frame.  I was originally inspired from an Etsy shop that my friend had showed me.  I decided to go with flat hearts instead of folding them, and making a heart shaped pattern within my little heart mosaic.

I heart it.  You could easily punch out a bunch of hearts with a heart shaped hole punch too, such as this.

DIY Christmas

So I wanted to share the DIY gifts I made for Christmas this year for my friends and family.  Unfortunately you will have to deal with crappy cell phone pictures (I lost my camera battery charger for like 3 weeks in December, fail!).

Vanilla Extract. It is SUPER easy to make and you can get a bunch of vanilla beans online for much, much  cheaper than in the local stores.  I bought mine from Beanilla.  All you do is fill your jars up with vodka and add split vanilla beans. The ratio is about 1/3 cup of vodka to one vanilla bean.  You’re supposed to let it sit for at least six weeks in a dark, cool spot before you use it.  I cut out some circle tags out of kraft paper, stamped them, and attached them with some cute bakers twine.

I also made some fun necklaces. You can’t see them well here I know, but it started as a light piece of wood.  After lots of cutting, a dremmel purchase, sanding, staining and painting…they were done!  They were all the same colors (a dark wood stain with gold paint), but the shapes and designs were irregular.  I loved how they came out.

It’s Fall! (ish)

It’s finally sort of Fall.  By sort of I mean, the weather was fall-like last week, and now it’s warmed up again, but still much cooler than it was 2 weeks ago.  Better than nothing I suppose.

I think one of the reasons for my lack of blogging is because summer seriously depresses me, because it’s SO hot for so long.  It makes me grumpy, tired, and just negative all over – and you don’t want to read a bunch of grumpy posts complaining about the weather!  Especially if we aren’t getting out of town/going on many trips.

I’m pretty sure I owe any readers left a few recipes that I’ve meant to post, but just haven’t. Like those awesome gluten-free donuts and chocolate stout cupcakes (which, apparently, I thought I blogged about but I did not. Fail.). And share quite a few other epic recipes that anyone who can bake needs to try asap.

Some other tidbits to update you all on..

• We’re headed to Michigan for 10 days on Thursday! I’m super excited – all of Chris’ family lives there and we haven’t visited in 2 years! Sad….we didn’t go last year because we got married and went on our honeymoon. Which bring me to…
• Our anniversary! It’s coming up in the 23rd 🙂  The trip is sort of our celebration I suppose, we don’t have anything else planned than I know of.
• Here’s some recent phone snapshots of what I’ve been up to. My camera was dead for a few weeks because I lost my charger.

Bakersfield Oktoberfest! First timers. It was pretty legit!
Decorating for Halloween in the house. Speaking of…

I’ve also been shooting zombies.

My favorite band came out with a new album. Love.

And I am going to see them in November 🙂

Made a little deer art for the wall.

Letters.

I saw a framed letter DIY a while ago and decided to give it a shot last week.  The only annoying part was trying to comb through the wooden letters at Michaels: none of the letters were in the right spot, a bunch were missing, or broken..so after 15 minutes of that I was SO done, hah! I wish I had some more letters to throw in the frame, but I think it looks pretty cute still.

All you need is small wooden letters, paint (spraypaint is the easiest), some thick paper for the background, a shadowbox fame, and of course, hot glue!  I decided to go a little bit of a different route and use yellow paint to do the “I ❤ U”.  I think it would be super cute to do other little words, sayings, or someone’s name.

Wedding Wednesday: DIY Boutonniere

This post could also be subtitled “Or, the Boutonniere’s That Never Made It”.

If you took a look at this wedding photo of ours, you’ll notice the guys have adorable yellow craspedia (aka, billy buttons) in their jacket pockets.  Well, that was not the plan.  In fact, I spent an  afternoon before the wedding envisioning and creating some super cute boutonnieres for the guys to wear.  So, while we were getting ready on the day of the wedding, I was looking all over for this giant zip-lock bag that I had them in…nowhere to be found!!!  And I had seen them a few hours earlier that day, while we were setting up the reception area and unloading boxes of things. I had left them on a table.

Well time was now running short, and nobody could find them.  So one of my bridesmaids came up with the quick solution of tying a small bunch of the craspedia together with twine and just tucking them in the guys’ pockets. Well, it turned out really cute and I forgotabout the whole thing. Until the next morning while packing up the reception decor. I found them in a box that was set aside as if they were trash! Boo.

Anyways, here they are!

Materials:
Craspedia (dried)
Spotted Guinea Feathers
Faux Foxtails (har…) – I got mine at Michaels
Twine
Scissors
Small glue gun

For each boutonniere you will need 1 craspedia stem, 1 foxtail stem and 2 guinea feathers.

1. Trim the stems of the craspedia and foxtail so they are about 4-5 inches long.  You will trim the excess stems off later, but they are easier to handle when they are long (TWSS).

2.  Remove the “fluff” off your two feathers as shown in the photo below. Make sure you don’t rip off the shaft (“stem”) of the feather.

3.  Cut a piece of twine. You won’t need much but cut a strand about 6″.

4. Gather your 2 feathers and 2 stems together so they are bunched up however you would like them to look.  This can be really tricky and tedious, but after you glue the twine on you can adjust them a little to make it look prettier.

5. Put a dab of glue right above where you are holding the bunch together, and place one end of the twine on.  Let dry for a minute, this will help you control the rest of the wrapping.

6. Continue to wrap the twine around the stems downward, adding a few small dabs of glue as you go.  You will probably need to wrap about 1-2 inches of the stems so you can handle the boutonierres and pin them to coats.

Ta-da! Rinse and repeat! All mine were a little different from each other, but it doesn’t matter whatsoever.

today

So this is what I am {continuing} to do today: organize my disaster of a craft room.  It started with the wedding planning, throwing all the stuff I was accumulating in there (and after the wedding, throwing it all back in there), then having our floors redone and guests stay in our guest room, thus leaving me with no choice but to throw random odds and ends into my craft space.  Then came Christmas and many, many birthdays…throwing gifts, wrapping paper, boxes  & bags in there.

Wish me luck. Ohhh I will need it.

inspiration: craft storage

Not sure what came over me the other day, but I had this urge to start looking for some cute storage pieces for my craft room and now I can’t get it out of my head.  It’s an utter mess right now, mostly because I don’t have places to put things.  Here’s some things I am currently drooling over.

Image sources: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6

Aren’t these amazing? I am imagining labeling all the drawers with cute papers, throwing all my stamps, pens, paints, and other supplies in there.  It would be all kinds of amazing.  I’m going to have to start hitting up all of the local antique shops, because people don’t really ship things this large (or it’s super expensive). I hope I find something as amazing as these pieces soon!

Hooray!

Hello to everyone stopping by from Freckled Nest, Leigh-Ann is super awesome and sweet! And you guys, are so lovely – thanks for all the comments thus far!

I’ll take this moment to confess, I have a bit of an online shopping problem. I buy little random things online all. the. time. Ok, maybe not THAT much…but if I haven’t received a package in the mail in a while, I get kind of sad! Here are a few things I’ve bought recently that I love: 

This super cute ruffly dress from Delias. I bought it to wear to my cousin’s bridal shower this weekend 🙂 I think it needs a cute pair of yellow shoes, don’t you?

I thought this plate thing was awesome! One, there’s deer on it! Also, Chris is from Michigan. And the color of green is actually really pretty! I haven’t found a spot for it yet (since our woodsy room is green, it really won’t go there), but I kind of think it’s awesome!

 

Yet another dress I just ordered from Modcloth 🙂 I think it’s so cute, I haven’t received it yet so hopefully it’s worth the money and looks good. I want to wear it to my bridal shower or maybe my cousins wedding. Hmmm…decisions, decisions!

 

 

This is actually a panel of fabric! I randomly came across it while fabric browsing, and I bought this panel and was thinking I could frame it for some wall art? I’m not sure what else I could do with it to display the whole thing, it’s kind of large.

 

 

I found a super good deal on these beautiful Craspedia that you have probablly, like me, been seeing a lot of. I have wanted to incorporate them into our wedding since yellow is one of our colors. I ordered a bunch of them as a test to see how they look, and it far exceeded my expectations so I will definitely be ordering more 🙂

xoxoxo

Spray Paint Adventures

I’m probably a little late to hop on the spray paint bandwagon. I’ve spray painted a few things, but nothing fancy or exciting. I found this cute key at Marshall’s the other day and I love it but didn’t love the color so much.

So I decided to grab some spray paint and transform it. I painted it a lovely shade of blue:

Found the perfect spot for it, right next to the door! And I actually JUST made the art above it…the space felt empty and I needed to fill it up. Luckily, I’d bought some embroidery hoops a few months ago and it fit the space perfectly. I made some flowers and added some pearls for a little cuteness.

And of course, I didn’t just buy blue spraypaint…I also bought yellow.

I bought this bottle of wine a few years ago (just because it was a cat!), and it was purple, however, not the prettiest purple. Much better now.

 

Last weekend we were up in the bay area, staying with Those Corwins. We hit up an antique store and we found these AWESOME brass deer. Not a big fan of the brass decor, so I spray painted them grey 🙂

I like that the paint is super cheap and you get a lot of bang for your buck! This is going to be an addiction, I think.

Are you a spray painting fanatic? What kinds of things have you spray painted?

Working for the weekend

We’re headed up north this weekend, hooray!!! I get to see some of my most awesome friends, andddd, spend Saturday at the SF Renegade Craft Fair!! I am soooo excited and can’t wait to find some super cute handmade stuff! I promise I will share with you my finds 🙂

Oh and here’s a cute deer photo for good measure. Have a great weekend!