Play Pom Pom letters

So it's been awhile...I'm not sure how that happened.  I guess I've been more into completing projects lately than blogging about them.  Plus I've had some big changes in my life as I'm transitioning from teaching full time to staying at home with my girls and starting my piano studio back up again.  But my intent behind starting this blog was to share my ideas to pay back for all of the great ideas that I get from other blogs.  So here I am again to finally blog about a couple of projects that I completed way back in May.

After I finished my makeover of my sewing room I figure that I better start on the family/play room since I would want the girls down there playing sometimes while I'm sewing.  I decided to paint the room the same color as the living room upstairs: Behr Silver Drop.  So I've been terrible about taking before pictures in this house but I have a few pretty awful ones for you.

The original wall color wasn't terrible but it wasn't my favorite either.  I also painted the trim because I prefer white trim to this dark stuff.  The rock wall is something that we want to remove of course but it will be quite sometime before that is high on the priority list to do.  So we live with it for now...

The lighting down here is terrible because it is a basement.  The wall color actually reads much lighter in person.  We were able to get the book ledges put up from Lyla's bedroom at our old house.  This also meant that I was finally able to finish unpacking all the boxes from our move since the only boxes left were the books from Lyla's room!

In this photo you can see the true color of the walls a little better.  The media console from our living room from our last house lives down here now and you can also read more about those stenciled storage boxes here.  We decided to put the benches from our porch at our last house on either side of the media console.  They are awesome for concealed toy storage in this room.  They also make great extra seating for reading books etc.

I decided to re-cover them with a black and cream ticking stripe fabric to make the bench a little more neutral since I wanted to go pretty colorful in the decor.  As you can see I am kind of picking random and fun pillows to go on the benches.  I don't quite have enough to fill both benches right now because I just buy them as I find one that stands out to me at a store.

For the decor I wanted to go with a fun kids theme and I wanted the colors to be rainbow.  You can see that I was taking these pictures while Lyla was watching her favorite show, Vampirina.  I can't wait to get started on her Halloween costume this year because she wants to be Vampirina and I have the perfect sewing patterns to make it happen!

I found some shadow boxes at Michaels online that came in a variety of colors.  I popped out the glass of each shadow box and moved the back to the fronts of the shadowbox so that I could pin the girl's artwork to them as a changeable gallery.  I found the crayon print and Picasso quote print on Etsy and just stuck them in my favorite white Target frames.  I made the rainbow ABC print myself on my Pixelmator software using the clipping mask tool.  The Jane Austen quote art is from our porch in our last house.

Now finally I will get to the tutorial part of this post: that Play pom pom sign.  I found lots of inspiration for this on Etsy and Pinterest but I knew that I could make my own.  I bought the largest paper mache letters at Hobby Lobby and found these wool felt pom poms at Oriental Trading.  I started by cutting off the fronts of each letter with an exacto knife and then I pushed that piece into the letter so that it was about halfway in.  Sorry I forgot to take a picture of this step.  I wanted the pom pom texture to be coming out of the letter.

Then I spray painted the letters white.

Then I glued in the pom poms with a hot glue gun, easy peasy!

The hardest part was actually hanging it on the wall.  I was going to use those command picture hanger strips but the wall was too bumpy and I couldn't get them to stick properly to stay up.  I ended up just nailing them to the wall.

I have a bonus project with this post because I also finished a little gallery wall above the piano in our living room as well.

The funny thing is that I actually just changed this up on Saturday so I'll share that with you at the end of this post.

This clock was a gift from my parents and this little music art piece next to it was from our porch at our old house.

I made this Sound of Music print with my Pixelmator software for my student teacher a few years ago. I of course printed an extra one for myself. It sat behind my desk in my classroom.  This is actually sitting on the piano now since I switched things around.

I bought this little piano player print on Etsy.

Finally, I saw piece of art like this in Hobby Lobby and decided I could make my own.  I found the framed wood piece at Hobby Lobby and used my Silhouette Portrait to cut the words and piano keys on vinyl.  I free handed the lines with a sharpie and I totally should of sketched them out first because a couple of them are pretty rough but I'm embracing the imperfections.

Here is what the wall looks like now.  I didn't edit this photo at all so it isn't the best.  My favorite fabric store in town is closing which is super sad.  They are selling everything in their story including the sample projects for kits that they sold.  I am not a quilter so when I saw this little sample for sale I was excited!  The background has subtle music notes quilted in.  It is so amazing and cute!  I'm not entirely satisfied with the layout of the thing in the gallery now, I'm thinking that I might swap the music plaque and the clock to balance it out better.  What do you think?

So I have so many posts that I can write next: my daughter's Moana 3rd birthday, tons of sewing projects, a little Ikea hack kids table, a dress up closet that I made out of a Target bookshelf from my classroom, and I am currently working on an update to our little mudroom.  And I totally forgot to take before pictures!  Hopefully it won't be as long this time before I post again!

Vintage Doily Art

Happy Labor Day weekend!  I am enjoying this weekend by relaxing and getting some cleaning and laundry done in preparation for baby's arrival.  I can't believe that it is already September and officially my due date month!

I plan to give a full tour of the nursery in my next post but first I wanted to share a couple of diy projects with you.  The first one is this beautiful and simple art that I made out of doilies and embroidery hoops.  I didn't take any photos of the process because it is so incredibly simple.

I found these doilies at a couple of antique stores.  They are easy to find and it was fun looking through them to find a variety of patterns and sizes.  I was especially excited to find that pale pink one because it fits so well with the colors of the room.  I bought the wood embroidery hoops at Joann Fabrics and decided to buy three different sizes.  I put the doilies in the hoops and then carefully stretched them so that they were taut in the hoops.  I trimmed off the excess doily in each hoop and then applied a line of hot glue around the back of each embroidery hoop to secure the doily in the hoop.

I hung them above the dresser/changing station with simple gold nails.  I can't wait to share a full picture of the dresser once I do a nursery reveal.  It is such a beautiful piece of vintage furniture!

I have one more project to share with you today.  My execution on this one wasn't the best so I will share the original tutorial with you.

I fell in love with these beautiful lace curtains that I found on clearance at Target but I knew that I still needed to block the light in the room somehow.  I decided to buy blackout roller shades because I had seen many tutorials on Pinterest of how to cover them in fabric.  The tutorial that I followed (however I did not follow it very well) was this one from the blog The DIY Mommy. It is a great tutorial but I made a big mistake when I installed the shades.  I should of installed them backwards so that the fabric would cover the roll itself.  I tried fixing it but the shades wouldn't  roll up that way. Because of this I was unable to wrap the fabric around the sides of the shade because it would look bad in the rolled part.

It still looks beautiful and the shades roll up just fine but some of the fabric is starting to bubble because I didn't do a good job of applying the spray adhesive to both the shade and the fabric.  It will be easy to fix but I am just frustrated that it isn't perfect.  It's the curse of being a perfectionist.  I know it is still lovely and much better than plain white roller shades though.  I found that beautiful fabric at Hobby Lobby by the way and with the sale on the fabric I was able to cover 3 roller shades for $25!

Check back next week for the full reveal of the nursery!

Baby Footprint Art

Wow it is hard to believe that this is my last post of 2015!  It has been a hard year in many ways especially with the loss of both of my grandfathers and my husband's best friend but the shining light of it all has been my pregnancy with my daughter and her birth this past July.  I am looking forward to a great 2016 with our newly expanded family!

Today's post is about the gifts I gave Lyla's grandparents and father for Christmas.  I knew I wanted to give them framed prints from Lyla's newborn photo shoot but I also wanted to throw in a personal touch with Lyla's footprints.  I didn't take any photos of the acquisition of the footprints because I had my hands full enough trying to prevent paint from getting everywhere.  I put some newspaper under her Bumbo seat and then stripped her down to her diaper and changed her into a disposable.  She sat in the Bumbo while I painted her feet with tempera paint and got the prints on paper.  I tried handprints too but since she is in the phase where she wants to grab EVERYTHING it was pretty much impossible to get a good one so I quickly gave up.  It would have been a real struggle to get as many prints as I needed for each gift so I decided to just get one good set and scan them into the computer.

Then I was able to open the prints in Pixelmator and remove the background by using the magic wand tool (the process is the same if you have Adobe Photoshop).  I then saved the image as a Portable Network Graphic (png file format).  Now I had a set of footprints that I can use over and over again.  I can even put them in her digital baby book as stickers (I'll tell you more about that in the future).

Next I opened up the Silhouette design software and imported the footprints.  I made sure to resize the prints to original size.

I was then able to rotate them and make them into a "V" for the word "love."  I made a box roughly the size of a 5" by 7" photo and then used a font called South Rose to spell the rest of the word. I used the shape fill and line color windows to get the letters the way I wanted them to look.

I had selected a mix of landscape and portrait oriented photos from her newborn photos for the gifts so I had to make art in both orientations as well.  Finally I opened the registration marks window and added registration marks so that I could use the print and cut feature.

I found these two-photo frames at Michaels.  I love how these simple and meaningful gifts turned out! Hopefully these will give you some inspiration to make your own footprint or handprint art. You may have noticed that I put her footprints inside a heart on the above photo so that is another idea for you.  I will be back in 2016 (wow that seems weird to say) with the next post in the Sewing for Baby series on making baby skirts!

State String Art

It is hard to believe that almost all of my nursery projects are finished now and all that is left to do is clean things up.  But I guess I am almost 35 weeks and I am taking a two week class starting week after next so it is a good thing that the room is pretty much done.

Today I have a post on some more decor for the room.  String art is such an easy project and it looks so cool.  I chose to make string art with the states of North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Kansas since we have family living in all of the those states. I found the states in the Silhouette online store and they happened to be the perfect size to fit on the wood plaques that I bought at Hobby Lobby.  I put hearts on each of the states in cities where I have lived or have family or both.  I cut the states on contact paper using my Silhouette.  I then stained the wood plaques with some leftover stain from another project.

I put the contact paper states on the plaques using transfer tape.  Then I started nailing in the small linoleum nails around the edge of the states and inside the heart.  I found that using a small pair of needle nose pliers to hold the nails in place while I hammered them in made the task much easier. It took me several days to complete this task because I could only do one before I needed a break with my pregnancy carpal tunnel.

Next I removed the contact paper.

I didn't take any pictures of wrapping the string but I used embroidery thread and started by tying it to one corner of the state.  Then I wrapped it around part of the heart and then went back and wrapped it around the next nail on the edge of the state.  I continued this until I got all around the state.  Of course the heart nails will be used several times each since there are less of them.

They turned out exactly as I had envisioned them so that made me happy.  Tying the string was a little frustrating because my string kept getting tangled up as I was trying to wrap it but it was worth it.

I put these up on the wall behind the glider with a few other art pieces.

I found the gold frame in a closet.  It was a plain wood frame that I spray painted gold.  The picture that is in it is one that I took in college but I plan on replacing it with something else.  The bottom piece is a simple project that I put together with a frame that I found at TJ Maxx.

The print is just the page of an old atlas that I bought at a used book store for another project that I will be sharing soon.  It is Mexico.  I chose that page because my mother-in-law is from Mexico.  I cut the phrase "oh the places you'll go" out on gold adhesive vinyl which I happened to have in my craft closet using my Silhouette.  I used transfer tape to place the vinyl on the glass of the frame.  It was a super simple project and it turned out to be so cute.  

So that is another completed piece of the nursery for you.  I still have 3 or 4 projects left to share with you in this room and then you will have to wait a little bit for the big room reveal post.  Next up on the blog will be the 4th installment in my Sewing for Baby series.

Framed 3D Monogram

My little one's room is quickly becoming one of my favorite rooms in our house.  In fact I think that it is pretty much tied with the porch as my favorite.  I am proud of what I have done in all the rooms in our house but this one is really something else.  And it isn't even finished yet!  As you can see from the picture above, this part of the room is getting close to being finished.  If you are curious about the baskets with the cloth diapers you will have to wait because today's post is about the framed monogram (if you couldn't guess by the title).  Thanks Captain Obvious ;)

I found the frame and letters at Hobby Lobby and the fabric is a Cotton + Steel print called Tokyo Train Ride.  I purchased it at our local fabric store Modern Textiles.  I started by measuring the inside of the frame and cutting a piece of foam core board to those dimensions.  I then used Mod Podge to attach the fabric to the foam core.
 

I put the fabric foam core piece in the frame and just used packing tape to lightly hold it in the frame.  

I spray painted the letters with the same gold paint that I used on the curtain rod and the lamp.  

Next I placed the letters on the fabric and then traced them with a fabric marking pencil.  Then I measured where the hanging holes were on the letters and marked those spots with an x on the fabric. I hung the frame on the wall using a french cleat.  I like this type of picture hanging hardware because it really makes the picture flush with the wall.  I used a french cleat to hang the watercolor skyline in the living room for the same reason. 

I then hammered nails into the spots that I marked on the fabric.  They went straight through to the wall which is okay because it gives the frame added stability.  Sorry for the blurry photo!

Then I hung the letters on the nails easy peasy.

This was a really simple project.  The hardest part was dealing with drilling holes in the plaster wall for the french cleat.  Plaster walls can be frustrating sometimes but I still love my 1927 house! Next up on the blog will be another installment of my new blog series, Sewing for Baby.  You can check out the first post in the series on cloth wipes here.