Aaaah, the reason why I get up in the morning!
I think I’ll frame this and hang it near my bed so that I see it every time I open my eyes to “snooze” my alarm clock.
****UPDATE
For my sister :)
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Sep
02
Jade is absolutely one of my favourite colours! I have an OPI nail polish in Jade that I wear ALL the time. So, when I stopped in at Home Hardware to get some spray paint and stumbled upon a box of jade green cans, I was stoked. I had seen a picture on Pinterest (obviously) of a table fan spray painted pink! Since I hate pink I decided to paint it green instead.
My fan went from this….
…to this…
Here is the original picture:
(from Curbly blog)
Beautiful!
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Aug
08
I have officially completed the 32 teacup candles for my sister’s bridal shower favours! *took forever*
This time I took many more pictures of the process.
First I used a double boiler to melt the wax (I don’t actually have a double boiler, so I just used a large pot with water + a smaller pot inside of it). I then poured the liquid wax into a measuring cup (good for pouring without making a mess).
I cut the wicks longer than I actually needed so that I could wrap them around the pencils to keep them up right. I sometimes would dip the bottoms of the wick into the wax before filling the candles to kind of anchor it to the bottom of the cups (but not every time), then I poured in the wax.
I let them sit for awhile, until they were at least mostly cooled (a dip will occur in the middle of the wax), then I refilled them and cut the wick! Ta daaaa…
I had wax left over (and because I was originally using the wax of tea lights, I had a million little wicks with those silver anchors attached) and I had swiped some bottle caps from my mom’s dinner party last weekend, so I made some little bottle cap candles as well! Pretty cute :)
Aug
02
I’m very excited to share my latest project! Sprucing up a string of twinkle-lights!
Last Christmas I stocked up on strings of twinkly lights for holiday decorating. I love the look of them in the dark, but they’re pretty darn ugly during the day. So, when I saw a picture of a cardboard flower decoration for these lights, I jumped on it.
All you need is an empty egg carton, scissors, paint and glue. And (of course) a string of lights.
As usual, I didn’t take any pictures during the process, but it doesn’t really matter. Cut each portion into petal-like shapes, whatever types you want. I did 3 flowers with pointy petals (like lotus flowers) and the other 3 with rounded petals. (Also, I used 2 portions for each flower, to make it look more full. The original picture that I had found used 3 for each!)
I then painted 6 blue and the remaining 6 purple, plugged in my glue gun and came up with 3 full, pretty flowers of each colour. I was stumped for awhile on how to make a hole to fit them onto the lights, but eventually I turned to my trusty electric screwdriver and got the job done!
My bed went from boring (but beautiful),
to whimsical and fun :)
To me the green wire sort of looks like a vine that the flowers are growing on, but I’m debating painting it white so that my bed looks a little cleaner and more attractive!
Overall though, I’m very happy with the way these turned out :) Plus they were quick and easy, which is a bonus for me!
Jul
31
So, as I’ve mentioned before I am throwing a Bridal Shower for my sister, and due to my struggling-student’s budget, I’m making most of the favours/decorations etc, myself. Most of the things that I’m making have something to do with memories from our past — saltwater taffy because that was a favourite part of our summer trips to Maine, a game of Mad Libs because we spent hours playing and laughing at these when we were young, and I’m thinking of doing a memory game because our mom would make those for us all the time for our birthday parties. I want there to a be a lot of things that my sister loves, so when I came across a way of making your own scratch tickets, I was SO EXCITED!
Today I did it. I bought some pretty purple cardstock, some plastic contact paper, and I was off! It was way easier than I expected, but it did take quite a bit of time (it seems like that part always surprises me…).
Here is a link to the original blog post with a great tutorial for making these. Here’s a picture of hers:
Amazing, right? And they’ll be so much fun for the shower!
My tips:
Make sure you measure twice and cut once….and cut in a straight line.
Do at least two coats.
If you’re making these for a party (such as a bridal shower, like me) make them personal by using photos of the guest of honour on the winning cards!
I was curious as to whether or not they’d be easy to scratch, so in the name of experimenting, I sacrificed a ticket. (I repainted it already) I think it looks pretty great! I couldn’t be more excited for these tickets!
Category: Uncategorized
Tags: bridal shower, DIY, homemade, lottery tickets, scratch tickets 2 Comments
Jul
24
Last week I happened upon a blog post by the Happier Homemaker. I immediately fell in love with her project: DIY wood map art.
(get to her tutorial here)
I decided that I was going to make this myself and was SO excited. However, I wish I would have realized just how much work came with this project!
First I went to the website from the Happy Homemaker tutorial and printed the 9 page map. I was restless and wanted to get started with the project, so I taped the papers together.
Yesterday I headed to Home Depot and bought 2 pieces of pine, and had them cut to 90cm each. I also picked up 2 tiny cans of wood stain, you know, the kind that are normally used as samples. $5 each, not a bad way to go. I got a Behr wood stain in Russet. I also picked up some fine grain sand paper and was on my way!
Yesterday evening I spent a LONG time on my living floor tracing the map onto the wood. SUGGESTION: if you happen to have those knee pads that some professionals use when they’re on their knees for long periods, USE THEM. My knees were killing me by the time I was finished!
That’s how the tracing looked when I was finished (sorry for the bad lighting!). So I went off to bed and vowed to finish today!
This morning I brought all my supplies outside and started sanding. Once I was done, I opened the stain and finally got started! For about 2 hours I was bent over my work, and this is how far I got!
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to finish! Stay tuned to find out :)
Category: Uncategorized
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Jul
18
For the past couple of months I have been counting down the days oh-so-patiently until the bridal shower that I am throwing for my sister! I’ve never even been to a bridal shower, let alone thrown one, so I’ve been working on it little by little, keeping tabs on absolutely everything I’ve done and everything that still needs to be done. Pinterest has been the best resource that I could ask for, with a million ideas that I never would have thought of!
The biggest challenge that I have right now is the favours. We decided to do a tea party theme, and we found a few tutorials on making candles out of tea cups! Obviously these are super cute, so we decided that we wanted to make them (my sister is super crafty too). Yesterday was my first attempt — and of course I burnt myself with hot wax. OW! Not to mention that I can’t figure out how to clean my pots of the wax.
Anyways, these are a couple of examples of the candles that we saw and fell in love with:
Martha’s tutorial here.
This very short (no details) tutorial here.
These are a few of mine, they definitely aren’t as good as the others, but I’m happy with them!
(this is an awful picture, I’ll post more when they’re all completed)
I don’t think they look too bad, and they were definitely worth the burn, but at the moment they have these little wells in them that Martha Stewart had warned me about. I still have about 30 more to do (depending on how many people end up coming to the shower) so I guess I’ll just try to fill them up next time!
The tutorials from these websites/blogs were super helpful when making these! I’m so happy with how these look and actually had a lot of fun making them, despite the HUGE mess that I made. If you try to make these yourself, make sure that you put down a garbage bag or something else disposable onto your table in case the wax drips. At first I was just using the pot to pour the wax into the teacups, but that made a really huge mess, so I poured it into a measuring cup which ended up working much better!
Once I’ve done the rest I’ll post more pictures hopefully with some tips that I come up with to make it a little more safe and a little easier — at least the cleaning up part!
Jul
18
For my first post on my new blog (!!), I’m going to introduce my jewelry. I’m obviously amateur and I haven’t made anything in awhile, but Pinterest inspired me a few months ago to experiment with a pair of pliers and some thin wire from Home Depot. My very lovely roommates told me that my rings, etc were great, so I bought some beads and craft pliers and continued on. Since I moved back to Ontario 2 and a half months ago, all of my jewelry and supplies have been packed away in a box.
Here are the pictures I had taken when I was contemplating selling it.
These were the first things that I ever copied from Pinterest, and I’ve been using creative people’s awesome ideas for some seriously fun crafts/DIYs/time wasters ever since. I’m very much addicted to Pinterest and I love all of it!
Stay tuned for more of my copy cat fun!
