Blooming Box

Today's project is a continuation of the pallet art I did last week.  I actually had 2 pallets and only used one for the project so I had a great idea to make a flower box.  I never really loved what I had for under the TV

And for a long time I have been thinking of doing flowers under the TV, I was just having a hard time finding the perfect container for the flowes.  I though of using a make travel trunk but they werent long enough, then I thought of using glass but that really wasnt the look I was going for and then the pallet art.  You can see the full article here.  Once the art was done I asked Joe my handy man husband to make me a flower box.  I wasnt thinking anything fancy, just four sides and a bottom but he decided to make it cute and give it an angle.  Now you have the back story, below is the finished project.  Ok to be honest, I have done MUCH more primping to this since I took this picture because lets be honest the green things are a little CRAZY but i was just so excited I had to share it with you!

Here is what you are going to need for this project:

• Wood (cut to your specifications, mine was 4" tall by 20" long)
• nails/hammer
• saw that can cut angles if you want the fancy box, otherwise just a regular saw
• paint, if you want
• flowers $30
• flower foam $5

Total cost for this project was $35 and that was just flowers and the flower foam, all the other items I had at the house!  How awesome, since this would cost over $100 at the store!!

First step is to cut the wood to your measurements.  Make sure you also cut a piece to fit into the bottom so you dont have the foam fall out if you pick up the box.  You can kinda see the angles here, but Joe actually had to redo this because the angles werent quite right, so not to preach to the choir or anything but measure twice, cut once.  Luckly we had plenty of wood to work with so no harm no foul.

Then nail all the pieces together.  I would nail the long pieces to the bottom piece first then close it off with the two smaller side pieces, but whatever you feel more comfortable with do that.  If you like the look of the wood and dont want to paint then skip this step, but if you want to whitewash your wood follow me to the next step :)

For this step you need your box, paint, water and a paint brush.  This is probably not the correct way to white wash but I like the way it turns out so this is the right way for us.  I had a gallon of white paint with about 1/4 left.  To get it the thin, whitw wash consistancy, we filled up the gallon with water about 3/4 full and then mixed the paint with the water. 

Now all you have to do is apply the paint to your project.  Easy peasy!  Let that sit overnight to make sure you dont get paint on anything then you can move on to the next step...adding the flowes!  Before you get started on the flowers, add the foam

Joe cut mine down a little so it fit perfectly in the box, if you did just a square box then you probably wont have to do this but with the angled box it does help to cut it do you have a perfect fit and it doesnt move around in the box. Once the foam is in start adding the flowers.  I bought bunches of blowers so I actually had to cut mine apart first into individual stems so if you bought bunches great, you probably saved money you just have to add one extra step.

 I added all my big flowers first then filled in the spaces with my smaller yellow fillers.

So what do you think, pretty easy right?!  Oh and I added a butterfly, because they are cute and I can so there!

I think it looks so much better than what I had before and it was pretty cheap too!  What do you think, is there somewhere you could put a cute little flower box?


**Update** I decided that I needed to show you the primped version of the box since the longer I look at the above picture the more I realize it doesnt do the box justice**

Much better right!
Project Housewife Out! 

Im Linking Up!  Come check me out at A Bowl Full of Lemons, Tip Junkie, Lil Pink Pocket, My Girlish Whims, Southern Lovely, Beyond the Picket Fence, House of Hepworths, Bacon Time, Addicted2Decorating, 6 Sister's Stuff



        

Chipping Away

Happy Hump Day to all of you out there!  It has been a slow week, and when I say slow I mean slower than a snail, its verging on ridiculous but on with todays project.  So you can see below its not super pretty or super straight or super anything.  This project is by no means a failure, but I can see that it does need a little extra work that I had not thought about.

So lets start with where this inspiration came from...Im sure you can guess it came from pinterest, and here is the link so you can check it out.  I saw this and thought it would look great over one of the lights in my hallway going up to the media room.  For the example it looks like they used a small frame and I needed it to fit over a light so I bought some floral 10 guage wire and made my own form.  This was the first misstep because this floral wire doesnt hold up when it is sodered together.  I am going to have to make a new frame but that shouldnt be too hard.  I made 2 frames on big enough to fit over the light and another smaller to fit down the middle to make a layer for the "chandelier".

The circles arent perfect but I figured they would work.  So on to the paint chips.  I always go to Home Depot for my paint because I love Behr and the selection they have.  So I got a whole bunch of paint chips in purple.  What I love about Behr is there are 3-4 colors on the sheet so you can see how the color gets darker in color which is perfect from the ombre for this mock chandelier.

 I cut each strip apart (as shown below) so I could get the punch where I needed it to go to get the most out of the strip

So to cut the circles I used a whole punch from Michaels scrapbook section.  I think this one is a 1/2 inch but I cant remember.  I was able to get 3 punches from each strip so that was excellent.  I had to take the back off the punch so the holes would fall right out rather than stay in the plastic holder so I could see where I was punching to maxamize the punch, yes Im a little crazy but I think we all know that by now!  After I cut all the holes out I seperated them into baggies so I wouldnt get the colors mixed up (I did one color at a time also to not get them mixed up).  The I was ready to move on to phase 3...follow me this way :)

So this was the dumbest idea I had and will fix this too when I do my redo, but I decided it would be best to use string to connect each circle.  When I do the redo I will use metal sticks to make sure its even and not lopsided like this mess here.  But I used string on 4 sides and was ready for the next step.

I used a flat surface to line up all the paint chips in the order or color that I wanted (2 of each color)

The I flipped them over

Using tape and upholstry thread (because thats what I have in the house dont judge!) and taped the thread to the backs of the chips leaving enough string to tie the chips to the metal frame.

You can kinda see the string a tape better in this picture.  I did about 20 of these and was ready for the last phase...attachment.

I decided to hot glue these to the frame to make sure they dont swing around and show the backs, which started out as good idea as I did the bottom section.

See the hot glue here.

But as I made my way around, I noticed the biggest error which no hot glue can save me from...you can still see the backs because the circle is so big.  The hot glue worked great as was a fantastic idea, but since you can still see the backs I am going to have to take them all down and attach another paint chip of the same color to the back so it looks amazing no matter what.  I will give you and update when I have enough patience to get this going again. 

Now you go try this at home, trust me it was harder than I thought but I am sure once I make some adjustments its going to be awesome!!  What do you think, any suggestions on how to make this better?

Project Housewife Out!

Christmas Ornaments

Its almost Christmas!!  Is everyone as excited as I am?!  In honor of it being Christmas I am going to share with you my favorite Christmas ornament decoration.  I have been doing this for years and love them.  Hopefully you will too!!  The top picture is one I made last year and here are a few others.

This one didnt turn out so good because of the crappy paint

Now to tell you how to do it...its really easy but is a major waste of paint.  I love them though so I say its worth it.  As you can see from the white ornament though it does matter what kind of paint  you get, not all paint is created equal and you can tell from that pic for sure.  I buy Folk Art metallic pain and it seems to work the best

I use all colors, usually more red/green/white because those are classic Christmas colors, but I love using fun colors too like pink and blue.  I did black and pink once too so the possibilities are endless!  The supplies you need are:

• Glass ornaments
• acrylic paint assorted colors
• ribbon
• ornament tray (keep the packaging the ornaments come in you are going to need it)
• embelishments (optional)

First step is to take the top off of the ornaments, the top being the silver part where you hook the ornament to the tree.  Once you have the top off you can start pouring in your paint.  I do one color at a time but you can do whatever you want.  In the picture below you can kind of see an example of that.  I usually do 5 stripes of paint.  After you get the paint in, start swiriling it around.  The more stripes you have the easier I find it to be to get paint coverage. 

This is also why I said this is wasteful of paint, because after you have the ornament covered in the marble pattern you love, dump the ornament over and have all the paint drip out.  I use the plastic ornament try to do this, but I have seen people use plactic cups and that looks like a good idea too.  I usually let these sit like that overnight to let the paint dry and get all the excess paint out.  When you think yours are ready put the top back on, add your embelishments and top with a ribbon.  Pretty easy right!

I would love to see your awesome ornament creations, share if you have some awesome ones!!

Project Housewife Out!

Gingerbread Mess

As you may know I made an Advent Calendar that has Christmas experiences for us to do every day.  Over the weekend was "Make a House so sweet" otherwise known as make a gingerbread house.  On Black Friday my husband and I bought the gingerbread village set from Target (I would give a link but its not on their website).  Oh what a clever idea, instead of making one house we will make a little village.  How quickly I forget that the simple tasks become my arch nemisis.  Here is the project and supplies all laid out for you to see just how "easy" this is going to be.

Oh now nice, they give you the icing in a nice bag and the houses are all in pre cut squares...oh you are so wrong my friends!!  First off, of the the houses is already cracked.  You can see a better view here.

The icing bag was a piece of crap and burst open after the first house.  The green and red icing bags didnt even have the nice tip on them so you could draw nice straight lines so they were all messy and crappy.  And when my husband tried to bread apart the already broked house he broke it even more.  Good thing icing is like cement because it can hid many sins.  I tried to do the construction of the houses but once the icing bag broke I was done with that.  I tried to decorate them and realized how evil the red and green icing bags were so I resorted to putting the icing on my fingers and using my fingers.  Im sorry if that grosses you out, but hey you arent eating it so dont worry about it :)  I think the houses turned out ok, but man next year I will do 1 house not a village, no matter how cute that village looks.  And I will NOT do the santa sleigh or train gingerbread...I know I will end up throwing those out the window, no sir I wont even think about those!

So here is my little message patched together village.  Its kinda cute but next year I will be doing one house and one house only.  Merry Christmas from my little Christmas village.

Project Housewife Out!

Underneath the Miseltoe

You remember a while back I made some super easy Christmas Ornaments?  Well I had some left over christmas picks and decided to make my own "miseltoe".  I know it looks nothing like the real thing, but I thought it would be a nice decoration to add to all my others since I dont really have anything that serves as miseltoe in the house.

Super easy, just get your picks (I used 3) tape them all together and tie a bow around it!  So fast and easy and this ones is so fun I can put it just about anywhere!  Have fun making your super easy "miseltoe" and if you have some amazing pictures of one you have made share!!

Project Houdewife Out!

Advent Calendars Abound

Yesterday was a day of learning for me.  I learned that I buy WAY to much fabric for projects.  I learned why people sew felt rather than iron it.  And I learned that Twilight is the perfect movie to cut mass amounts of fabric too (you really dont have to pay attention to it).  So let me start at the beginning and show you the inspiration for this craft project.  I saw this on pinterest and loved it, but when I saw how much work/sewing was involved I knew immediately I was going to have to modify this a bit.
http://shannonmakesstuff.blogspot.com/2009/11/felt-advent-calendar.html .  Here is a picture of here end project.

Pretty right!  So I had the basic concept, now to get the supplies.  I knew right away that I was never going to sew all those ornaments and all that so I bought some very thin hem tape (which I late realized I could just use hot glue, talk about a ah-ha moment).  I also bought 1 yard of dark green felt, 1 1/2 yards dark red felt and 25 felt squares.  Did you guys know about felt squares?!  They are in the kids craft sections and are typically 4 for $1...money saving tip right there because I was going to get 1/2 yard of each color I wanted and that was going to be way more expensive.  I also bought a dowl rod to make the project sturdy and I had ribbon at home so I didnt need to get any of that. 

Now that I had my supplies I was ready to get started.  I got the patterns for the tree and ornaments from the about blog post, which I have saved in a better format for you, but arent on this computer so I will load those up later today.  Here is kind of what they look like though to give you an example.

 I decided to start cutting the ornaments since this was probably going take the longest time (I forgot I had to cut the numbers).

Those are all the colors I have for the ornaments, minus the brown that is for the trunk of the tree.  There are 3 glitter felt pages in there too because I love glitter and it helped break up the plain red/green/white ornaments.  Honestly it only took me an hour of slow cutting to get them all done, and I was cutting one by one because honestly I dont trust my multi-page cutting skills but for those of you more talented you can totally cut faster than 1 hour.  This is also when I realized I had bought WAY too much felt.  Each square will cut 4 ornaments easily with a little extra.  Since I only needed 25 ornaments I only actually used 7 felt squares for the ornaments.  I needed 1 additional square for the trunk and will need 1 more for the star but thats only 9 squares out of the 25 I bought, so FYI, you dont need nearly as much as I originally thought.

You can kind of see the glitter ones better here, there is a white glitter one but those never really came across in the pictures.  You can also see the trunk cut-out here as well.  Now that the ornaments were cut, I was ready to cut the tree.

This is my tree and backing felt.  This is also where I realized where the iron and felt dont really mix.  Just so you all know, felt smells really bad when you iron it and the hem tape takes longer to adhere to the felt.  You have to be really patient and also make sure you dont have any hem tape showing (sometimes I dont make it perfect and have some sticking out which will melt off) because with felt it doesnt melt off so be careful there.  You could use hot glue rather than hem tape, I didnt because I didnt think about it, and it also doesnt seem as strong.  Sewing is also an option but I dont own a sewing machine so that was totally out.  Anyway, moving on to cutting the tree.  I had a pattern that I dplicated 4 times, but really I should have done 5 it would have been better, but I made it work anyway.

This is what the tree looked like after I had used the hem tape to secure it to the backing (I cut the hem tape to fit each vertical part of the tree as well as the base and the triangle of the top, for the base I just cut 4 strips to fit the box and ironed it all down).  The hard part of cutting this tree was I wanted to make sure it was fat enough so I didnt use the middle fold to cut (which as we know makes cutting things easier) so I did each side individually.  I realized now that if i had the extra pattern (making the total points 6) and I make it so the bottom of the tree was further out than the top of the tree I could have folded the fabric in 1/2 and cut that way, but we live and learn so you know to do that when you make your creation.  On the excess fabric from the tree...I bought 1 yard because I wanted to make sure I had enough but remember that the felt is folded so if you are confident in your cutting abilities you could get away with 1/2 yard and use the fold tecnique to use less fabric and save money, and the same goes for the backing.  I bought 1 1/2yards but only used the front part so if you get 3/4 of a yard you will have plenty once you open the fold.  I did end up cutting off about 1/2inch from one side to make sure the dowl rod had room to stick out, and I left 2 inches at the top to make the fold for the dowl rod to fit it as shown below.  You can kind of see the fold and that is where you slip in the dowl rod to hang your beautiful calendar.

Now that you have your hem for the dowl rod, the tree hemmed to the backing and the trunk hemmed to the backing you are ready to place the ornaments.  This would also be a good time to cut the numbers.  My husband offered his help with this and I was so happy, I SUCK at cutting intricate things (yes I consider numbers intricate) so it took him about an hour to cut all those numbers and he did double up on cutting numbers at the same time.  The hardest part for him I think was getting all the holes out of the numbers (like the middle of the eight) that took some patience.  Once you have all your ornaments in place, add the numbers and you can get a glimpse of what your finished project will look like.

You can also see the star is here, I have that template in my sheets also which will come later.  Once I got all this in place I realized how much hem tape I was going to have to use and got very discourage...and thats when the lightning bolt came...HOT GLUE!!!!  I started by gluing each number to each ornament (so that when I glued the ornament the numbers wouldnt fall off silly people!) then glued the star to the top of the tree.  Another thank you goes out to my husband for reminding me that I shoudlnt glue the whole ornament down because then I would have no pocket for my amazing advent surprise.  Ok so get to gluing the ornaments, I flipped them over and started gluing the bottom half at the edges only, so an outline of glue around the bottom 1/2 of the ornament.  This whole process only took about 30minutes, gotta love hot glue.  Now that everything was attached to the tree and my pockets primmed and ready I could get to the almost final touch, the ribbon to hang the calendar from.  I didnt have enough room to tie a knot and I was afraid the knot would come undone so I hot glued the ribbon to the dowl rod on each side so it cant come off.  And viola!  A almost completed advent calendar!

I say almost because the most important part of this project is still under constructions.  I decided a while back (mainly becasue I found it on pinterest) that rather than doing candy or just numbers to put experiences in each date.  So for example on one day we will drink hot chocolate and watch harry potter, another day we will make a gingerbread house.  That is what the pockets are for, to put the experience cards in.  Right now all that is left of those cards is to print them off with a cool border and out them in the calendar.  Tomorrow I will post those, Im so excited to share them with you, and hopefully you can add some to your family traditions! 

Here is a recap of what you need for the advent calendar:

3/4yard backing felt
1 yard felt for tree (1/2 yard if you are a good cutter)
7 felt squares in the colors of your choice
1 brown felt square (for the trunk)
1 yellow felt square (for the angel)
1 dowl rod (width of your choice)
1 spool ribbon
1/4 yard black felt
hot glue gun/hem tape/sewing machich (pick your posion)
fabric scissors
patterns
tape (I used this to hold the pattern to the fabric while I cut so I wouldnt make a mistake)

Total time, 3 hours if you are a slow cutter, 1.5-2 if you are fast.  Good luck and if you have an awesome advent calendar please share, I would love to see what you came up with!

Project Housewife Out!