Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Simple Display Frame

I've been wanting a magnet board for a long time and I've also been wanting to try out chalkboard paint. I had an old frame that I didn't know what to do with, so I decided to make it into a display board.
I started out by getting a piece of metal at Home Depot. They sell sheets of metal there that are 1' x 1', 1' x 2' and 1' x 3' so if you can find a frame that fits a piece that size, you won't have to do any cutting. For mine, we had to cut about 1/4" off the side so my husband used kitchen shears and they worked great.Then I taped off half of the metal sheet and painted it with chalkboard paint. I did about 4 coats since metal is kind of a slippery surface. Then, I pulled off the tape and put the entire metal sheet in front of the glass and put the frame back together. The piece of glass showing at the bottom is used as a white board and I just put a piece of fabric behind the glass on this part to add a little texture.

This project was super easy and I love how it turned out. You could do this with any frame you have and divide it up however you want with magnet board/chalkboard/white board.

5 second Christmas Card Solution

We're staying at my parents house for the Holidays and the other day I came upstairs to find all my mom's Christmas Cards just stacked on the kitchen table. She told me she didn't know what to do with them, so I thought and thought of a cute way to display them. I'm probably not the 1st person in the world to do this...but I thought it turned out cute.

All we did was tie a bow at the top of a big ribbon and staple her cards down the ribbon, leaving space for more cards as they come. It literally took about 35 seconds and now she can show off all of her cute cards :)

Monday, December 13, 2010

DIY Garden Lampshade

So here is the shpeal... I saw this garden lampshade at Anthropologie and loved it and was inspired from it... I had a plain cream cloth lampshade at home and I thought...hmmmm... I could spruce it up a bit... and so I called my friend Dani and begged for her help since craft stores scare me and I don't know what to do when I go into one... so she came with me, and this is what we came up with... we used the cheapest material we could find... felt... and we bought a few squares of different colors... some green yarn (she already had some yellow), and she already had a glue gun and a sewing machine so we were set there... and we went to town... in this manner...
1st we cut out flower shapes... the perfect circle flowers were done with my friend Dani's various sizes of dye cuts, but we free-handed the spiky flowers and the leaves, and the middles of the flowers were either knotted strips of felt we glued on or knotted pieces of yarn.  Some flowers we tried to make 3 dimensional by bunching them in the middle, some flowers we sewed detail on (and same with the leaves) and we sewed at least a tack in the middle of each flower to hold them together... and you probably get the idea...
 The perfectly good and nice lampshade before we glued the heck out of it...
 This is the manner in which we designed what the lampshade would look like... we measured the height and circumference and then mimicked that on the floor and made our design. We also ate m & m's to help us think better... highly recommended...
 We then glued our first flower... and got confident and glued the rest...
We then used spray adhesive to spray pieces of yarn to make the stems... this was the hardest part because it stuck to our hands so bad but we managed and it worked!
And this is the finished project posing on Dani's cute lamp...
 A close up of some of the detail...


And the lampshade resting on its rightful stand in my house...
And thats it! It only takes 6 hours! HAHA... which is a LONG time... but its worth it... you initially will have gluers remorse because it was a perfectly nice lampshade without all the flowers on it, but then you will start to love it because its funky and fun and gives your room pop.  Anyway, give it a try, copy it if you like or you don't have to like it at all... just thought I'd share (most the pictures are courtesy of Dani's camera).

another tree skirt

I was going to make the tree skirt that Liza showed and mine ended up like this...
Follow Elizas directions below. Cut a circle, I did what she said and yes it makes sense. Hold your measuring tape in the middle and swing it around in a circle then cut! I then cut a line from the outside to the middle and cut an small circle in the middle for the trunk of the tree. Then cut strips of white felt, 1/2 in thick and make snowflakes all around! I saw this a few years ago at a Christmas specialty store, super cute!


Christmas cards display

Don't know what to do with all those Christmas cards you're getting? Here's one idea. Take some ribbon, rope, twine, whatever you've got, string it on the wall, then hang up all your cards with clothes pins. We have a brick wall in our kitchen that makes a great backdrop. You could also put it across a mantle, over a window or above your bed... wherever you have some extra space. A great way to enjoy all your friends and families pics during the holiday season!