LUMOS!

I am pulling out my nerd card today.  Sometimes I cant help it, being a nerd makes me happy and lets be honest its just more fun to be a nerd!  Im totally geeking out about the Avengers movie...but I am of course going to wait until its been out a little longer so I dont have to sit in a packed theater.  But Im sure the title LUMOS makes you think of something other than Marvel, and good!  Because today is a Harry Potter post!

I have seen posts all over etsy of lightswtich plates for Harry Potter but I didnt love any of them enough to buy them.  You know what that means...I better make my own!  That also meant using Mod Podge.  Truth be told I have never used it before and was very nervous about it.  I looked online for some good tutorials but didnt really find anything that matched what I was doing so I just read the back of the bottle and went with it.

First things first you have to create your art!  Of course you could draw on the light plate itself, but I cant draw so I googled some clipart.  I wanted day and night and for them to merge seamlessly so that took some time for me to find the perfect images, but I eventually found it and it looks awesome!!

Above is the art I made.  I forgot to take a picture of the first step because I was so excited to get this going.  First step is to print out the art, cut it out and then mod podge it to the front of the plate.  To do this cover the back of the art with mod podge using a foam sponge and line it up with the edges and press down.  Make sure you roll over the edges to make a seamless look.  For me I put a little tiny bit of mod podge around the edges and pressed down, going one side at a time to make sure it stuck.  A note here, make sure you use a thin layer that way it doesnt ooze out the sides.

Once you get the art down, cut out the holes for the switches.  For this leave one side attached so you can have a seamless look here too.

This is the back of the plate and you can see I pulled the art back through the hole, applied more mod podge and adhered it to the back of the plate.  For the holes for the screws, I didnt pull that back through all I did here was make a hole (which you can barely see) so that I can push the screw into the plate and make it looks great!

Let that dry for about 5 minutes and then apply a thin coat of mod podge over the top of the art.  Something I learned the hard was to be careful of the ink spreading.  I think if you let the plate dry for about 5 minutes this should help, but what i ended up doing to make the color stop bleeding was to do the top 1/2 first then go to the bottom 1/2 that way the colors stayed in their respective areas.  You can kinda see the blue from where I tried to get the blue off the sponge to have a fresh start.  On the plate itself you can see the white lines of the mod podge.  You will be able to see the lines when it dries so remember that.

Let this sit for 15 minutes and repeat 2 more times to make it good and solid.  Remember that you are going to be touching this a lot with oily hands so you can a good layer to protect your art.

After the last coat let that dry overnight and then screw it into place.  Looks pretty good right?!  Although I have to admit I am a lover of glitter and am pretty confident I am going to add a layer of glitter to this to make it pop even more.  Thats what I learned about mod podge is you can layer stuff and thats awesome!  Now I can just go back and add it without having to make a new one!!

Check out my nerdness in all its glory.  I made that poster for the wands I got at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter...its Hermione and Dumbeldore.  Dont judge :)  So what do you think?  Have a great spot you could put a cool decorative light switch?

Project Housewife Out!

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Sign In

Im sure you are all familiar with the traditional wedding guestbook...you know that lame book that we all sign that the couple probably throws away after a year or so.  Well when I was getting ready to get married I knew I wanted to do something different than the boring old wedding guest book, I just never saw the point of that.  I ran across an article on theknot.com (because what bride doesnt spend hours a day on the knot.com before there was pinterest!) that had different ideas for a guest book and there were some pretty good ones!  Among the top ones for me was a picture of the couple with a big mat the guests could sign, another was a tree where the guests would use green stamp ink to make the leaves of the tree, but my favorite was the one that I ended up using and that was fabric squares that you make into a quilt.  With fabric squares, each guest can write you a message, draw a picture, just sign their name, whatever they want it lends to more creativity on their part and I loved that idea.  I think everyone that came to our wedding in Orlando and the reception in Houston all signed a square at least once and I have this beautiful (ok so the quilt needs work) quilt that I can look at all the time and be reminded of the love of our guests on our special day.

I know this picture isnt very big, and thats a little by design so you cant see all the horrible stitching in the quilt.  I think Im going to take it and have it professionally done because my husband and I did an AWFUL job putting this together.  I know nothing about quilting so I did the best I could, but let me tell you what we did.

Pre-wedding I cut about 100 fabric squares about 4x5 so they were large enough for people to write and for me to sew but not too large that I would have to have this massive quilt to deal with. 

Wedding Day I had my bridesmaids have the squares on the tables with sharpies and fabric pens and told the guests what to do with the squares.  At the end of the night they picked them all up and gave them back to me.

Post-Wedding was a little more interesting.  I had this brilliant idea to lay all the squares out on the floor so I would have the perfect pattern (all seriousness this was a good idea it just took forever), but the "brilliant" idea was that I didnt cut the square perfectly so they werent all the same size.  As I started sewing each row together piece by piece I noticed it wasnt 100% straignt, but I figured it would work out in the end.  Well it didnt.  As Joe tried to sew all the rows together to make the big quilt the rows werent all the same length or width so he had a hard time there.  Once he patched all the rows together we got a really big sheet of green fabric for the backing and batting to go in the middle (pretty sure that is right for quilting but I dont know anymore), getting the batting to sit right was the hard part and its still not laying right because we suck at sewing.  Now you can understand why I dont want to try and learn how to sew this project scared me for life!

To date this quilt is hanging in the office where I look at it all the time.  I dont notice so much that it is pretty much falling apart, I notice more the notes people wrote and the drawings that were done.  I do want to have this fixed so it doesnt fall apart one day and have all those notes lost but I do love that we put it together as a couple (Im not gonna lie there were fights!) and it is still standing through the move.  I cant wait for our 50th where we look at this just as fondly as we do today.

If you are married, what did you do for your guestbook, and if you had the traditional book what did you do with it!!

Project Housewife Out!

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Six Sisters' Stuff

  







 

Pallet of Colors

I have a confession...I may be slightly addicted to pinterest.  Im sure most of you are too, its a sickness that makes me want to spend all my money on cute ideas.  While I was trolling pinterest, I saw this really cool looking headboard

Source

So cool right!  Well I already have an awesome headboard (which you can see here) but I need some cool wall art for on either side of my TV and I thought this was simple enough to do the trick without overpowering the TV.  Now let me should you my before shot

No bad, but not good enough for me.  So now I can show you the project!!  I got the inspiration to use pallets from here.  But I wasnt crazy about the flowers I thought that might be too busy for the TV area so it was a blend of ideas to creat my final project, which see below for the after!!

Yes I am about to watch Once Upon a Time, and why arent you its an awesome show!

I think it brings a lot more color to the roon and is just a little cooler to look at...what do you think?

Ok on to how to make this baby...first you need a pallet.  My husband works for a plumbing supplier and they have loads of pallets so that was totally free yay!  So before I get down to the nitty gritty...here is what you are going to need

• 1 pallett---all of the pieces (free)
• paint of your choice, varying shades (free)
• crobar (free)
• saw (free)
• nail/hammer (free)
• painters tape/paint brush ($5)
• pencil/ruler (free)
• screw/wire (for hanging) (free)

Total cost for this project...$5!!!  What, thats amazing!!

Looks kinda ugly right?  Well dont worry we are painting it so no worries.  Now you have to get the boards off, and if you have a cro-bar that would be best. Joe had to use a hammer and that was pretty hard so if you have a crobar make it easy on yourself.  Below are the boards cut down to the measurements I gave Joe.  I wanted the project to be 15wide by 30 long, so I plank from the pallet was long enough for 2 strips.  You can also see from the picture here that we used the pallet support beams as cross beams for the art. 

Here it is all put together ready for paint.

I first thought to whitewash it (I hadnt decided if I wanted to do the color blocks or the flowers yet) and that turned out pretty well, and I think also helped with the paint.  It was kinda like primer but didnt bring up all the pulp that comes out of the wood when you use regular primer (more to come on whitewashing later)

I let these sit overnight to make sure the paint had set.  The next day I started taping out the lines for the stripes.  I wanted each pallett art to be different so I measured the stripes at different heights.

I used a paint stirrer as my guide and a pencil to do the initial lines then went back and put painters tape over the lines.  Remember that where you put the tape you cant paint otherwise you will have gaps between the stripes so be mindful of that when you put the tape down.  You can see below what I did to make sure I kept that straight.

Now you have your painters tape down get to painting.  I had plenty of leftover paint from the walls and color samples so that was free too!

Let that sit overnight so that when you put the second layer of painters tape down it doesnt pull off you paint you just did.  Once it has dried and you get your second tape down, paint again.

Wait for the paint to dry and remove the tape.  Now if you are like me you will have to do some touch ups, but if you have one of those sponge paint brushed that has a stright edge this is pretty easy.  Once its dry, you can screw your screws and wire into the back of the boards and hang them up!  Make sure you use an anchor when hanging these babies are pretty heavy!

Pretty easy, pretty cheap and pretty fun too!  I feel like an artist enough though I cant draw to save my life!  DO you have a space that this art would be perfect for?  Let me know, and what do you think of this art?  Should I leave it or do the flowers pallet art?  I think I need a second opinion

Project Housewife Out!



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Sharing My Failures

Up until today I have shared with you all my success stories.  Today, I am sad to say I have a failure to share with you.  A few weeks ago I tried my hand at crayon art and have to say it turned out pretty well.  You can see it here.  Since those turned out so well I decided I would try one for either side of my TV.  So here is what I started with.

Thats 2 15x30 canvasas, painted with the red "basic" paint covered in glitter.  Here is another view of the canvases.

You can kinda see the glitter better here.  So in my infinite wisdom, I thought this shade of red would be a good backdrop for my crayon art idea.  The bottom 1/2 would be the grass and the top 1/2 would be the sky.  I would add flowers and butterflies to make it 3-dimensional and it would be fabulous next to the tv.  Well I started with the hair dryer and here is what happened.

I wanted to melt the crayons down so you didnt really see them but didnt think that when they melted you would see the canvas behind it anymore.  I tried to put embellishments on it to make it look better but that didnt really work out, you can see that here.

I think the major problem is the red background.  Im going to try and paint over it with possibly yellow, but right now I just put it to the side because Im mad at it!  So there you have it...not everything I make looks amazing or even that good.  This is my cautionary tale that crayon art is NOT as easy as it looks.

What craft failues have you had?  I would love to hear from you!!

Project Housewife Out!

Color Me Happy!

As we all know I am addicted to pinterest, so when I saw this I knew I was in trouble.  I never know what I get my grandmothers for Christmas and thought, why not make them some art.  So I waited for canvases to go on sale at Michaels and set about making my art.  A side note for this project, you are more than welcome to use Crayola brand for your crayons, but a 64 pack was about $7, but a 64 pack no-name was $1...thats right $1 so you can tell which one I chose.  What you will need is:

1. Hair dryer
2. Canvas size of your choice
3. Hot glue gun and extra glue sticks
4. Crayons- I used 2 boxes per 12x12 canvas (to get the colors I needed, I have the equilivant of 1 box left over, but its full of colors I didnt use)
5. Decorations, if you so choose
6. newspaper for easy clean up

Let me start by showing you the finished products to get you motivated to do your own.

Yay!  Lets get started!  I decided to do one like grass with flowers and the other like the sky with butterflies flying around.  I also thought this would be the best way to make the most of all the crayons so I ended up with all red/pinks in the extra box..what to do with those :)  To start off with, pick out all the colors you think you are going to want to use and line them up on the canvas.  I dont remember how many crayons I used but it was each color family from 2 boxes (so all the greens/yellows/brown from 2 boxes).  Once you have them all lined up how you like, start gluing them.

I dont know if you can tell from this picture, but when I glued mine down I made sure all the labels were facing the same way.  Since I didnt love the logo on the crayon I had the address line facing out as it had the least amount of text showing.  I tried to rip off the label but they wouldnt budge, you can try it buy it didnt work for me.  Once you have all the crayons glued down, set out your newspaper to start blow drying.  Warning...there is a fair amount of splatter to the back of the canvas and to the side so make sure you put enough newspaper to cover that.  I had a wine bottle that was pretty tall that I perched my canvases on to make the dripping easier for me, but Im sure you could just lean it up against something and that would be fine too.  Here is what it looks like after about 1 minute.

Since this was such a small canvas the whole thing only took about 15minutes per canvas, so not too bad and the color was pretty thick, needless to say I was happy with the results.  I did have some of the crayons get bunched down the middle and if that happens to you just run the blow drier over the parts that are too thick and they will melt down.  Also, I pointed the dryer down and towards the middle of the crayons that seemed to work best for me.  Remember that not all crayons melt at the same pace so be aware of that, I had one that wouldnt melt even after having the dryer on it for 5 minutes, so watch out for that.

Now that the color is all melted let it dry (about 5minutes, this stuff dries fast) and if you have designs, you can add them with the hot glue now.

Those are my finished projects, I love them and am a little sad to see them go, but that just means its time to make my own for my house!!  If you made some awesome crayon art, share I would love to see what inspiration you got!

Project Housewife Out!