Oh Say can you Sea

I ran across a picture like this in Cracker Barrel this morning and I thought it was so awesome, I decided to recreate it.  And share it of course :)

Hope you like it!

House Tour: Bella's Bedroom

You know how I started taking you on a tour of our house a while back?  Like...8 months ago?  I happened to have my camera handy, so I took the pictures to take you on a tour of our daughter, Bella's, room (to tour our entryway click here, to tour our master bedroom click here, to tour our guest bedroom click here, to tour our classroom click here).

The entry to Bella's room is a poufy pink flower/wreath made out of coffee filters. (Here is how I made it)

 Her room is a little long and narrow, so we used the bed to divide the room into a 'reading/play' side and a 'getting ready' side.

These are the 3 stuffed animals that garner the most attention. Baby David (named after Elmo's doll), Giraffe (so creative), and Mila Monkey (we named it when we gave it to her for her christening).  I recently saw an absolutely hilarious video about kids naming their toys.  If you have a few minutes, it's worth watching here.

Her current bed is her crib converted into a full sized bed.  It was the Babi Italia Pinehurst set in Espresso.  We have the changing table converted into a regular dresser too.

B doing what she does best

A Bella's eye view from bed of her new butterfly mobile (I'll share that project soon)

Little baby feet.  This is the original stamping of her feet when she was just a few hours old.

 A Pottery Barn lamp that we snagged on clearance.

A recap of her first year, always fun to remind myself of how fast the time goes by. I didn't think I would love this as much as I do.

 

We hung the mirror that used to live above our fireplace over her dresser to give it a more grown up look.  It reflects the paper butterflies over her bed and part of her new mobile.

 

A Bella's eye view from bed.  That door is the door to her bathroom.

 

Now you can see the sink area of her bathroom.  The bathroom is sort of a jack and jill style.  It has the toilet and shower in the center room with pocket doors on either side leading to a sink area on each side.

 

Here is the bath area.  If you walk through it leads to the classroom.

The reading/play side of the room:
Can you find the silliest toy of all?

The hot wheels wall track was an addition after this past Christmas and it's one of the only real 'toys' in her room.  We usually play in the basement and reserve the bedroom for sleep or reading, but this is a fun distraction for her while I'm doing chores upstairs.

 

Our reading area by the window, with front facing bookshelves.  The post where I made the larger stand up bookshelf is here if you're curious.

 

The hanging bookshelf (I talked more about that here in another post. You can see we've rearranged a bit since then too)

Some of our favorite books from the reading area:

My Name is not Isabella by Jennifer Fosberry, all about teaching little girls to be empowered and dream big.  And of course, the main character has the perfect name :)

 Jacques and de Beanstalk and the Three Little Cajun Pigs by Mike Artell and Jim Harris, some autographed favorites from New Orleans

Classic Fairy Tales by Scott Gustavson; the illustrations in this book are phenomenal.  I can't even explain it.  We're actually putting together a puzzle now from the Jack and the Beanstalk illustration in this book.  

 So, there it is, Bella's bedroom. Stay tuned, I may even finish the house tour this year!

Coffee Filter Wreath

I've seen lots of coffee filter wreaths. After making one with my grandmother with good results, I decided to make another for Bella's room.

This was such an inexpensive and easy project.  There is no need to buy a wreath form.  Just grab a box or piece of cardboard and cut out a donut in whatever size you like.

Then you simply crumple some coffee filters and glue them down to the cardboard.  The tighter you glue them, the more full your wreath will look.  You can dip the filters in colored water for all-over color.  I just wanted a hint of color, so I used some spray ink with a pink shimmer for mine.  It gives it a shimmery dusty rose look in person.  My cardboard circle was so small in the center that my wreath ended up looking like a big carnation, which was ok with me!

Have you ever used coffee filters to make an art project?

Ribbon Pinboard with Book Page Roses

I recently finished my ribbon pinboard surrounded by paper roses made out of book pages.

This was probably one of the most time-intensive craft projects I've ever done.  I'm so glad it is finally finished.

It all started with a pin on pinterest.com, as so many of my projects do.  This was the culprit that started the ball rolling:

(Click here to check out her project website)  I loved the idea of the book page roses, but the last thing I needed was another wreath.  So I decided that the best place for book page roses was the office.  And the most useful wall art in an office, is a corkboard or pinboard.

I started with a plain 18 x 22 corkboard with a black border that I got from Target.  Like this one:

The brown framed version is on sale for $5 right now...can't beat that. I wanted to jazz up the inside so it wasn't just a plain corkboard though.

I've never made a pinboard before.  And I'll admit, I didn't even bother reading any how-to's before I did mine. I started with a yard of ivory cotton fabric from the local fabric store.

I wanted to make it more personal, so I got some iron-on transfers and picked out some quotes.  I chose quotes from kids books, adult books, and famous figures.  The iron-on part was more difficult than I imagined.  I printed the quotes the first time and forgot that it had to be flipped to the mirror image.  I fixed that and accidentally ironed on the wrong side.  oops.  (Which reminds me that I still need to clean that iron)  Once I finally got things moving, it went well though.  I got the quotes all ironed on.  Then I decided I needed to press the fabric a bit to get out final wrinkles. Bad idea... I knew from my earlier 'iron on the wrong side' mistake not to put the iron directly on the decal, so I put a towel between the iron and the fabric.  Only to have the towel fibers get stuck to the fabric.  UGH.  I decided to just make it work for the whole project.  It ages it a bit, but I still like it.  I won't be working with iron on decals for a while, that's for sure.

 
I measured out some thin batting to cover the cork area of the board. I doubled mine up to make it thicker.  Then I folded the fabric with my quotes over the edges of the batting.  I had some black grosgrain ribbon that I cut and positioned a crosshatch, with the ends folded around the edges and glued in place.  Then I used a hot glue gun to adhere the whole fabric/batting/ribbon pad to the corkboard.

I used some decorative upholstery tacks to pin down the ribbon anywhere the ribbons crossed.  It was pure luck that the tacks pressed into the corkboard well, without going all the way through.

 I had miscounted how many I needed though.  I needed 4 more for the corners.  The fabric store I went to didn't have the same upholstery tacks, but since it was just the 4 corners, I grabbed some fancier ones and used those.

With all that done, the only thing left was the book page roses that started the whole project.  Easy, right? Wrong.  Holy guacamole those things take so long to make!

So, the original wreath project has instructions and pictures of the process, (click here for that), but the gist of it (with my tweaks) is:
1. Get an old book (I chose a dictionary so I didn't feel awful for destroying a literary work)
2. Tear out 3 pages all stacked together
3. Draw a spiral on the page and use the lines to cut it out, you'll be left with a single circle from the middle...hang onto it
4. Start at the outside of the spiral and roll up the paper
5. Glue from time to time with white glue so your rose doesn't fall apart on you and to lock the last part of the rose in place
6. Turn the rose over and coat the bottom in white glue. Cover with that scrap circle from the spiral to keep everything in place.
7. Bend the edges to make it look ruffled.

The spiral is the key to what your rose looks like.  I found that I liked to draw my spirals so that they were pretty evenly spaced lines (about a half an inch apart) except for in the center, where I made it bigger.  So I started in the center with a circle, and spiraled outward with at least one go around at about 3/4 inch and then shrunk down so my lines were about 1/2 an inch apart for the rest of the spiral. This gave the inside of my rose a nice level look with the wider areas finishing out the outer petals.  That lets you bend over the outer petals for a more realistic look.

I did this while watching TV, but it took me 20-30 minutes per rose. This project used 67 roses, so well over 30 hours of just rose-making.  These roses were like cat-crack.  Pippen LOVED them.  I had to lock them away to keep them safe from the crazy cat.

But after LOTS of rose making, they were finally all done. I used a hot glue gun to glue the final roses in place and had my final product!  Whew!  What do you think?

Dollhouse

I wanted to share a post solely about the bookshelf dollhouse that Santa had the elves *cough cough* build for Bella this Christmas.  I'll be showing some pictures of Christmas morning soon, but here is some info from the elves.

The plans used came from Ana White at this link.  You can tell that they haven't put a back on ours just yet.  They were planning on doing the back in white bead board.  They didn't get around to it, partially because of time constraints and partially because they wanted to see if she would play with it in a 2-sided setup.  It can always be added later, so no biggie either way.

They liked the flexibility of these plans since it can be played with like a dollhouse, or later serve as a bookshelf.  The elves found the project more difficult than the Ana White site let on, but that's most likely because they were working in a woodshop where you can't just buy 12 inch wide boards like the plans call for.  The elves had to actually rip down and join together multiple boards to make the width correct.  Good thing for Bella that she had 2 very dedicated elves.

They also made a few detail adjustments.  They rounded off the fronts of all of the shelves, dividers and sides.  They used a fancier routed edge around the windows and doors.  And the boards for the roof line got routed to look like they were trimmed.

It's currently painted in bright white for the trim and interior.  The roof and bottom face boards are painted in Olympic's Stormy Weather (D16-3).  The sides are painted in Olympic's Pins and Needles (D51-3).

There are 6 rooms in total.  All of the furnishing and characters are from Plan Toys.  Each room is sold separately.  All of the characters came together as a family.

So let's meet our family:

Here's Daddy.  He almost always lives in the kitchen/dining room.  His hair is a little..um...unorthodox.  And his pants popped that belt the first day.  I couldn't make this stuff up, I swear.

Yep, that's Mommy, face down in bed.  Don't judge me.

Here's Bella, hanging out in the kids' room, her usual smiley self.

This is baby brother.  He doesn't exist in real life, yet.  Only time will tell.

This is the pet set. They were sold separately from the family.  Our real cat really likes the food bowls so one is always missing.  It also came with a dog house, a cat, a bunny, and a cow.  Ok, so it's supposed to be a dog.  But really, with those markings?

Technically this little cat doesn't belong at all, he's from a My Little Ponies set, but he looks so cute on the couch that we left him.

So there is the dollhouse.  Or, as Bella puts it, 'the doghouse.'

This is why it made for the best Christmas yet:

I'd love to hear what you think of it!

Crayon art

I finally got sucked into pinterest a few weeks back (you can check it out here).  Basically, it is a digital bulletin board.  You can 'pin' things that you find online and sort them so that they are organized.  Then you follow others who have similar tastes and it becomes a big swap meet of cool ideas.  I'm (of course) addicted and I've been trying all kinds of new projects.  This was the first one and I'm very excited and proud of it.

OK, spoiler alert, here is the finished product:

This was my inspiration on pinterest (the website is here):

I have been taking a painting class and had recently gone through the painful process of making my own elaborate color wheel.  Sort of like this one:

So with those on my mind, I decided to do a crayon color wheel.  In chatting with my art teacher, she mentioned that big globs of melted crayon might come off the canvas, so I knew I wanted my melted crayon to be thin to prevent that.

Step 1: buy a canvas
Step 2: draw a circle on the canvas so you have an even guide of where to glue the crayons

I know, helpful right?  I already did a sort of trial setup with my crayons so I knew about how big it needed to be based on how many crayons I wanted had on hand.  You'll see that I marked the circle with some guidelines to help keep it even.  Those guidelines included 3 spots (at clock positions 12, 4, and 8) for my primary colors to anchor the circle.

Here is that circle a little further out so you can see what my dimensions looked like:

Step 3: Lay out your crayons so you have them in the right positions and ready to go

For me, I decided to go with 3 of each primary and secondary color and 2 of each in between color (2 in between tones between each primary-secondary space. (translation, Primary: red, blue, yellow; Secondary: purple, green, orange; In betweens, blue-blue-green, blue-green-green, green-green-yellow, green-yellow-yellow, yellow-yellow-orange, yellow-orange-orange, orange-orange-red, orange-red-red, red-red-purple, red-purple-purple, purple-purple-blue, purple-blue-blue)  Obviously, the crayon colors are not as conveniently named as purple-purple-blue, etc.  You sort of have to play it by sight.

Step 4: get your glue gun ready (I put a piece of glass under the tip to catch any glue drips so I didn't mess up the floor.  I prefer glass to paper because it's less likely to stick to the glue glue when you pick it up.)

Step 4: Glue your center primary color crayons (this is why I had 3 of each of them) down on the marks you made to anchor the circle.

Step 5: Don't be an idiot like me and start with purple before realizing that purple is NOT a primary color.  Guess I got overexcited.  On the plus side, it gave me a chance to see what happened when you screw up and have to pull one off.  The good news: they're decently easy to pull off and the old glue gets hidden, so not the end of the world.

Step 6: Try that whole 'glue down the primary colors center crayon' thing again.  Then glue down the secondary colors in between (clock positions 2, 6, and 10)

Sorry the photo is a bit blurry, but you get the picture I think:

 

Step 7: Repeat for the remainder of the crayons

Now time for the fun part!

Step 7: take your creation to an area that you can get splattered.  This could be inside with drop cloths, or outside, whatever works.  It was a nice day out, so we went to the yard.

 Step 8: get your hair dryer plugged in on its warm/hot setting and turn it on.  Let it heat up a bit before aiming it at the crayons.  That way your first crayons get the same heat burst as the rest.

 

Here's where your artistic side will take over.  How you move that dryer affects what the wax splatter looks like. I moved my wrist side to side fairly rapidly, which is how I also dry my hair.  Turns out, it made an awesome sunburst sort of spray.  I just kept rotating the canvas as I felt like each color was done (to keep the flow going the same direction all the way around).  I even let Bella take a turn at it, which was sort of the whole point initially.  But we were outside, and there were butterflies.  So she went chasing butterflies and I did my dryer thing.  All done, I had a nice light coat of wax.  No globs, and I love it.

Originally I had thought about painting a word in the center of the circle, but after I saw it I decided against it because it's so great by itself.  I'm still considering making a frame out of rulers for the edge, but I like it a lot by itself.  What do you think?

Looking forward to sharing more pinterest projects soon!