Pumpkin Floral Arrangements

Wow, it has been over a month since I posted!  First of all my MacBook met its demise 2 weeks ago and there was really no warning for it.  I just turned it on one day and the screen was a bright white screen with a flashing folder with a question mark.  There was also a clicking sound coming from the hard drive.  It had a good long life for a laptop so I wasn't too sad.  Now I am typing on a shiny new MacBook Pro.  One of the awesome things about this is I can now import photos to my computer so much faster!  

I wanted my next post to be about our bedroom but it was not in the cards.  I thought we might be done with it this weekend but we made an error while cutting the quarter round and needed to get more.  Our Lowes no longer carries the shade of quarter round that I bought only two weeks ago!  So I had to order it for store pick-up and it won't be in until November 16th, grr.

So in the mean time I found a little fall decorating project to occupy my time.  I still had Easter decorations on the table so it was time for a change!  I found a really pretty picture of flowers inside a pumpkin on Pinterest and I thought I would give it a try myself.  The picture from Pinterest was of real flowers in real pumpkins but I decided to make mine out of fake flowers and craft pumpkins.  

Michaels was having a sale on their craft pumpkins so I picked up a few but they were out of the smaller white ones so I was sad.  But then I was at Target and they had some white craft pumpkins so I snagged of those for $8.

I started by cutting the tops of of the pumpkins with a kitchen knife.  It is just like carving a real pumpkin except that you don't have to dig all of the slimy goop out of the middle.

Then I took some floral foam and placed it in the bottom.  I was going to glue it in but I didn't know what type of glue to use so I decided to go without it.

I had purchased a mixture of orange, yellow, and white florals at Michaels.  Most of them had too long of stem so I lopped them off and began sticking them in the floral foam.

And this is how they turned out.  The project was fairly cheep and took only about 30 minutes to complete.

I had to add a little sparkle so I added some glittery orange feathers.

Ahh, I love fall.  I think that these turned out beautifully and I will enjoy having them on the table until December.

Nightstand Makeover

My new room of focus lately is our bedroom.  I can't wait to paint the walls in there because I am tired of staring at these paint swatches:

 I will be painting one wall at a time as I am simultaneously working on making over some of the furniture pieces in the room.  I decided to start with the nightstands.  Very few pieces of furniture in our house are new, most are a variety of thrifted, consignment, or hand-me-down items.  When we moved into this house we had to find nightstands.  In our rental house there was only one little nook that could fit our queen bed so we had no room on the sides for nightstands.  I found this lovely pair of nightstands at a consignment furniture store for $20 a piece.  They weren't much to look at but they are mostly solid wood and I like the shape and size of them. We have been using them as is for over a year now and they are great functionally but it was time for a change in appearance.

 

I decided to paint them since I am also planning on redoing an armoire and a dresser which are both laminate.  I chose a nice dark brown, Valspar Brown Velvet, and bought a gallon in satin finish.  I also decided to do a fun stencil pattern in that faux leather square in the middle of the top.  I started by sanding it down with my new handy dandy palm sander.

After sanding, I cleaned it off and then I primed it with Zinsser 123 Bullseye primer.  I like that primer because it is thick and sticks well to many materials.

Then I painted two coats of the Valspar Brown Velvet on all of the nightstand except the part where I would be painting the stencil pattern.

I chose two Folk Art acrylic craft paints for the stencil design on the top: metallic taupe and french vanilla.  I covered the whole area with the french vanilla.

I bought this geometric pattern stencil at Michaels.  Then I stenciled using a foam brush and the metallic taupe paint.

I found this drawer knob at Hobby Lobby. 

Here are the finished nightstands in the bedroom. It is definitely a huge improvement.  I love the classy and unique look of them now and it makes me even more excited to paint the walls and trim in this room.

Next up on the bedroom list is redoing my armoire and painting the wall and trim next to my closet.

Creating Custom Fabric Labels with the Silhouette

My latest Silhouette project was one that left me banging my head against a wall for a while.  When I found out the Silhouette was able to sketch designs and I found out about gel pens made for writing on fabric, I knew that I had to make some cute custom labels for my sewing projects.

I bought all my supplies for this project and was ready to get sketching:

1. fabric-I bought half a yard of twill fabric at Hobby Lobby because I wanted the labels to have a little weight and texture to them.

2. Iron on adhesive-I used Heat'n Bond in the red pack.  The purple pack can be used if you want to stitch around your labels.

3. Fabric gel pens-I bought mine in a two pack at Hobby Lobby in the aisle with the fabric paints.

4. Silhouette pen adapter

I started by designing my label in the Silhouette software.  My first design used one of my free downloaded fonts and a bird in a birdcage image.  This was a problem but we'll get to that later.  I started by cutting the iron on adhesive to the size of the work area on the cutting mat.  Then I ironed it to the fabric following the directions on the fabric and cut out the piece with the adhesive and placed it on the cutting mat.

Then I loaded the mat into the Silhouette, hit the send to Silhouette button in the software making sure to select sketch pen instead of blade and hit cut.  This is where the problems started.  The program would stop for a really long time as if it was frozen and then the program would crash.  This made me very frustrated.  I finally figured out that I had to use designs and fonts that were specifically labeled as sketch designs and fonts in the Silhouette store.

So I found a few of these in the Silhouette online store, downloaded them and redesigned my labels.  In the meantime my gel pen leaked all over a corner of my fabric, ugh.

Lovely, right?  Then I started sketching the new labels and the pen was leaving lines as it moved across the fabric to sketch the next label.

I figure out that the nib of the pen was too far down in the holder so I adjusted it and was finally able to get some labels successfully printed.

Despite all the headaches that this project gave me, I am really ecstatic with the results.  I just made another set of burp cloths and the labels look fantastic on them.

 

Hopefully if you are trying to do a project similar to this, this blog post will save you from making the same mistakes that I did! 

Ruffle Wreath

I am finally back after a long break!  The school year started up three weeks ago and I have been occupied with many creative projects in my classroom instead of at home.  I have also been out of town the past two weekends so that has made it hard to do projects at home as well.

This ruffle wreath is a project that I have been meaning to tackle for a while.  I pinned this post on Pinterest in July.  I bought the materials for it in early August.  I finally got around to making it this past Tuesday.  Use the link above to find the tutorial because I did not take any pictures of the process.  It is super easy to make and took me about 45 minutes to complete (most of that time was spent cutting the fabric).  The fabric is Premier Prints print from fabric.com and I got the straw wreath from Joanns.  I love how bright and fun it is.

I think that I might adjust it so that it hangs a little higher on the door and I did adjust it later so that the ruffles are more towards the bottom.  This picture reminds me that I still need to get on painting that woodwork around the door white.

I also wanted to share the new furniture addition on the porch.

The best thing about this cedar chest is that it was a free hand-me-down from my father-in-law.  I love that it still has the tag on it.  I think I will keep it just as it is because I love it.  I plan on storing blankets in it for the cold months coming up and putting my antique bottle collection on it.

Dry Erase Menu Board

I have been busy with my new Silhouette Portrait again.  I have wanted to make one of these menu boards for a while now and I am hoping that it helps me with meal planning. I have a tendency to be lazy and just want to order something or eat out if I don't have something planned.

This project was pretty simple.  I bought a long frame at Michaels and found this great graphic pinkish orangish wrapping paper at Target.

Just ignore the Mod Podge and brush in the picture.  I tried that method first and had too many issues with bubbles so I tried it a different way.

I took the frame backing and traced it on the wrapping paper and cut it out slightly bigger than the traced area.  Then I wrapped the edges over the the back of the frame backing and taped them down.  Then I put the backing back in the frame which took a little bit of effort but eventually I ended up with this:

 Then I designed the words in the Silhouette Design Studio software.

The fonts were ones that I downloaded.  The font for the word "menu" was called Fancy Pants and the font for the days was called Janda Apple Cobbler.  I bought the flourish and poppy at the Silhouette online store.  I thought the poppy would tie in nicely with my faux roman shade from this post. 

I printed the designs on black adhesive vinyl just like the labels for my spice jars.  

I really like how the black vinyl pops against the graphic background.

Then I hung it on the wall and wrote out the menu for the week.  There are a lot of leftover days because I work for the local independent league baseball team during the summer so I am not home for dinner very often.

Here is what this corner of the kitchen looks like with the addition of the menu board.  I like how it adds an extra pop of color.

I have also been working on organizing my kitchen cabinets so here is peek at some of the work I have done with that.

 

I should have taken a before but it was a crazy mess in there before.  I had thrown away all the rings that came with my measuring cup and spoon sets so I used some shower rings that I had hanging around.  It is nice to get them out of the drawers where it takes me forever to find the right size spoon.

Spice Jar Labels

So several months ago I posted this very long post on some kitchen updates that included the story of how I wanted to make one of those magnetic spice racks but it was a major fail so instead I ended up with this:

Well I have really enjoyed having my spices so accessible and organized but there has been one little problem.  The names of the spices are written in sharpie on the bottom of each jar which means that if I want to find out which spice is which I have to lift it out and check the bottom.  And while this might seem like a fun carnival game akin to picking rubber ducks out of a kiddie pool and checking the bottom to see if you won a prize, the game got really old really fast.  

So, enter my new toy: the Silhouette Portrait.  

You can find all the info on this awesome machine here. It is basically like a printer except it cuts a variety of materials including paper, cardstock, adhesive vinyl, fabric, etc.  I have been contemplating buying one for a while now so when I received some money for my birthday from my in-laws, I decided to take a leap and buy one.  I LOVE it!

My first project was making labels for my spice jars using adhesive vinyl.  I bought the label shape in the Silhouette online store.  The online store has tons of shapes for download that cost 99 cents a piece.  It is so much nicer than buying multiple cartridges of designs like other similar brands of cutting machines. There is also a featured free shape each week.  The font I used was called stencil and I think it was one that actually came with Microsoft Word but who knows now that I have so many free downloaded fonts.

 After putting all the labels on, I put them in alphabetical order to make them even easier to find.  I love the way they look.  This project was phase one in organizing my kitchen.  Yesterday I finished organizing everything inside the cabinets so the kitchen is nearing completion.  My next Silhouette project is a menu board for the kitchen wall.  I'll share as soon as I finish!