Crafts

05-23-12

I have been spending most of my days still crafting away! I feel like I have too many of them started at the moment, so I should probably work on finishing some of them before I start anymore. The most recent ones I have finished are some glass pasta sauce jars that I have added words to and spray painted. Sorry about the pictures...they are not the best and they words are also backwards because I took them with the camera on my computer. The picture on the bottom is a jar that says hope on it. The one to the left says love. I got this idea off of pinterest and it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. In order to get the words on the jar you have to use a hot glue gun. Well, for those of you who have worked with a hot glue gun before, you know that it is sort of hard to steady the gun and to control it enough to write something with it. You tend to have a long string of glue that follows the gun back to the counter. So I did a couple of them on high heat and then thought hey why don't I turn it down to low because the words were so hot that they were just sliding down the jar. Well this was a brilliant idea however on low heat you basically have to use all of your strength to get the glue out of the gun. The caused me to shake even more...so let's just say it was an interesting craft. After you get the words on the jar and it has totally dried all you have to do is to spray paint it. With all of that to say I absolutely love how they turned out. With the paint over the entire jar and the words you can barely see all of your flaws. You can just see the outline of the words. I have made six of these now and they all say either Faith, Hope, Or Love.

The second craft that I have finished involves toilet paper rolls. Now before you start saying "Gross", "Well that can't can't be anything pretty", or "Are you doing a kids craft?" let me explain. I also got this idea off of pinterest and after I saw it I started saving my toilet paper and paper towel rolls. It took me a long time before I was even able to start this project but I am so glad that I took the time to save them up. I created two different projects with the rolls. One of them sort of frames in our mirror in our dining room and the other one is just a decorative flower or in Will's terms it is a star :) Once you have collected your rolls you will then cut them into twelve pieces per toilet paper roll and thirty-six pieces per paper towel roll. Once you have then all cut up you will then start to glue them into a pattern you would like. After you have your finished product you will then spray paint it with your desired color. I chose black because it matched our decoration the best. Pictures of both of the projects are below and again I am sorry about the picture quality.

This is the one that borders our mirror and I used about seven toilet paper rolls per side.  In order to make this pattern you will glue four cut up pieces of the roll together to form a four petal flower. Once you have five of them done, you will then glue them together with two of the corners of the petals. Once you have four rows you will then glue those together with the corners of the petals as well.

Here is my flower/ star! Terrible picture but I hope it gets the idea across. This one didn't really have that direct of a pattern so I kind of just did one of my own. The center is a flower with six petals and then I just went out from there.

I hope you enjoyed my projects and even get brave enough to make them yourselves! I have been thinking about starting to sell my some of my crafts and was just wondering what some of you think? You guys are my closest friends and family so I trust your opinion. I am mainly thinking about the stuff that I crochet and then possibly moving on from there. Let me know what you think!

04-17-12


Hey everyone! So I know that I had mentioned that I had been doing a lot of crafts...well, I have and I wanted to show you what I have made. While I am waiting to hear back from the surgery centers here in town, I decided that doing crafts would be a wonderful way to fill my day. In fact, I will let you in on a little secret. I would love to open up my own store and sell my crafts and my mom's cookies :) I don't know if God will ever make that possible but that is what I would really love to do. Some of these projects that I will post took longer than the others but all of them were super fun to make.

This first project that I made was one that I had thought about doing for a while and I am so glad that I finally did it. When I taught myself how to crochet hats, things flowed pretty smoothly but when it came to teaching myself how to make flowers, well let's just say that took a little longer. After several days of practicing I finally got it down. I had been making flowers and sewing them directly onto the hats but then I decided it would be kind of fun to be able to switch out the flowers if you wanted to. So, I added a hair clip onto the flowers and they clip right onto whatever hat you are wanting to wear. They actually stay very well. It's kind of fun because you can wear just the flower in your hair if you want to as well. 

This second project that I made is very similar to the first one in terms of uses. I just recently got into making fabric flowers and this project was sort of a by-product of the last project that I have posted on here. These are just three simple fabric flowers glued onto a hair barrette. This can be clipped onto a hat, a headband, your hair, or even a bag. I think they are really cute! 

This third project is a simple magnet that turned into a really fun decoration on my fridge. After I learned how to crochet flowers, I crocheted a whole bunch of them because I wanted to make sure I would remember how to make them. Having all of these flowers just sitting around got me to thinking about what I could do with them. Half of them I made into hair clips and a forth of them I put on hair barrettes and the other forth I decided to glue onto some cheap magnets that I got from Walmart. The magnets don't work extremely well in terms of holding pictures up but I think it is a really cute decoration on a fridge.

This next project was one that I had been working on when we lived up in Faith at Crown but I had never gotten around to finishing it. So, this last week I made it a priority to finish it. This bin is where we are going to place our prayer requests that have been answered by God. Will and I really want to incorporate prayer more and more into our marriage and I thought this would be a really cool way to not only remind ourselves but also to visually see how God works. I am going to place a notebook by the bin and that is where we will write our prayer requests and also the prayer requests of our family and friends. Prayer is such a powerful thing and Will and I want that to be a main focus of our home. I think it will also be a really fun witnessing tool as well. This was a really easy project to make. The container is actually a frosted animal cookies container. After we got done with the cookies I didn't want to throw it away. So, this is what the end result became. :) I just washed it up really good. Soaked it to try and get all the glue off of it and then I decorated it with scrapbook paper, flowers, and ribbon!

These next two projects are my favorite but they also took the longest (well worth it in my opinion). This first project in a welcome sign. I saw this idea on Pinterest and decided to give it a try. I had all the yard already and all I had to do way buy the letters. I bought my letters at Hobby Lobby but I am sure you can find them other places as well. Once you have your letters and the yarn that you want, you simply start wrapping the yarn. And then you wrap some more and then you wrap some more...you get the picture. The hardest part about this project is gluing the yarn onto the ends of the letters once you have the base of it wrapped. This was my first sign so don't look too closely because I got glue everywhere! Even though it took several days to finish it, I love how it turned out. I then bought three short shelves and sort of alternated them in height and placed the letters on the shelf.

 My sixth and last project that I have on here for you today is one of my favorites. I also got this idea off of Pinterest but I added my own style to it. This is a cheap and simple mirror from Target that we got to hang up in our room. They didn't have any fun full length mirrors that were affordable so we bought this boring white one. After seeing the idea on Pinterest I decided I was going to spruce up this mirror a little bit. I spend almost four hours making fabric flowers and after I was finished with those, it was time to move onto the mirror. I wasn't able to get a good picture of the outsides and insides of the mirror but what I did was glue cords around it so that you couldn't see any part of the white. I then started gluing on the flowers one by one. I am not quite finished with the mirror but you get the idea. It is so much fun to see a boring mirror turn into a beautiful mirror. 

03-12
Crocheting is my new love!! It is so much fun and I find it easier than knitting (although knitting is fun too). I have self taught myself how to crochet...well I don't know if I can claim that. I learned how to do it off of youtube.com. I started out by just making a dish rag and then went to making a hat. I then learned how to make flowers and I never realized how many different flowers you can make; some are easier than others. Just recently, as in today, taught myself how to make headbands. Now these I did not follow someone on youtube. I was just playing around and eventually made a headband. They are kind of fun! Anyways, I'm no expert but I hope you enjoy looking at them!

This is the fourth hat I have created. You can also add flowers to the hats as well.

This is the first headband that I made. It has two strands on it (kind of hard to see because of the flower).

This is the second headband that I made and it is with a different flower (rose).

You can also wear the headbands as necklaces.

These headbands are very easy to get on and off because I have added a loop and button to the back of them

And these are two flowers that I have made that are different from the ones that are shown above.