Glitter State Artwork

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Georgina

Glitter State Artwork

So here is another one of my Christmas presents I made. I have had my eye on this craft for a while. I actually love state artwork, there are so many fun ones I want to try but how many pictures of states can a girl have in her house, I believe the answer is too many. What better way to have fun making them and not look like a hoarder- than making them as gifts! 🙂 This one took a little bit more time simply for the fact that I a) needed daylight (to trace the state outline on my paper) since I don’t have a lightbox I needed daylight and as sad as it is, that is hard to come by in the winter during the hours I’m at home. and b) I wanted the glue and glitter to completely dry and set before framing.

Here is what you’ll need:

a print out of your state of choice. I obviously chose the best state in existance, Wisconin.
Thicker paper, like cardstock, poster board, this really depends on how big of a state or picture you are making
Scissors
Plain ole regular modge podge (mine in honestly still from when I was like 17 years old. still works, but I’m running low and need more soon!
Glitter. I got mine in the card making section at Micheals(you can see the pic below for deets) but really any craft glitter will work.
Paint brush
Containter to coat your cut out in to avoid a glitter catastrophe 🙂
Double stick tape
Frame and if you want, colored paper to line your frame.

Optional:

You can use a sticker of a heart or if you don’t have on I just painted a heart in red/pink paint on a peice of paper and cut it out and stuck in on.

Here is a picture of some of my supplies:

Clockwise: My modge podge and glitter I used- an illustration that you really want to not be shy with the modge podge in order to get a good coating of glitter to stay on the paper, my cutout in a glass container covered in glitter, then once it had dried a little and the exess glitter shaken off.

Here is what I did:

1) Print out an outline of your state. I mean I guess you can freehand it but I would suggest printing 😉

2) I taped my thicker cardstock over the outline and held up to my patio door (this is where that daylight is needed) and just traced the shape. then untape the sheets.

3) Use scissors and carefully cut out your state from your thicker cardstock.

4) place the outline in your container and use a paintbrush or spongebrush thingy, to coat your paper in modge podge. See my picture above about how you should really put a good coat on. Otherwise the glitter won’t stick nicely and it will be alittle thin, but be careful to not overcoat otherwise it will probably never dry. No harm in doing a little test run on a peice of scrap paper like I did above too.

5) When modge podge is still wet, coat generously with glitter, making sure to get a nice even coat and no “bald” spots.

6) Let the glitter and modge podge set for a while, probably like an hour and then pick up carefully(as it’s not all the way dry yet) and shake excess glitter from the cutout. Then I placed the glitter state on a piece of scrap paper and allowed to dry completely. I waited 4 days because I went out of town but I’m sure it doesn’t really take that long, but I’d for sure wait a full day.

7) You can pour your excess glitter back into it’s container and save for another glitter craft 🙂

8) This isn’t a necessary step but once my state was dry I took it outside and sprayed it with a high gloss arcylic sealer. Basically just because I wanted to set the glitter a little more. I didn’t want to have specs of glitter coming “free” and getting all over the glass of the frame because that would be a pain in the ass to deal with. I had purchased it for a different craft and thought, “hey why not try it”. Like I said, it’s not necessary but if you have anything similar lying around it worked great. ( Here is a link to the product that I used)

9) Once dry, if you choose you can place a heart over a particular locatiaon of the state that holds any significance to you. Then I put a couple peices of double stick tape on the back and taped it to a peice of black paper and placed in the frame.

TA DA!

Ignore the reflection in the glass of the frame. It was nearly impossible to not get my hands or face ! 🙂

I was so pleased with this craft! I made it for my best friend who is originally from Wisconsin but moved to Minnesota. I told her this was so she could always see “home” 🙂 I miss you B!That’s pretty much it. I mean this had so many endless possibilities not just in states but any shape you could think of. I think an outline of a stag head and antlers or something like that would be really cool too. Experiment and let me know what awesome things you all create 🙂

Thanks for reading!

xoxo

Cork Letters

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Georgina

Cork Letter Craft

Sooo- I LOVE making homemade gifts for Christmas. Throughout the year I will save ideas for certain people and usually on December 20th I start working on them….. Kidding. Well sort of- my plan is usually to get started wayyyy earlier than I do.

This year one of the gifts I made for a friend was a cork letter of her new last name (she recently got married and decided to take her husbands last name) the idea came from something I saw on Etsy selling for about $100. Um no. And plus I could make that! Soo I did. And you totally can too.

Here is what you’ll need:

hot glue (duh- craft staple)
burlap or some fabric to wrap your letter
knife (be careful 🙂 )
corks , the real wine corks made from you know, cork. Not the plastic ones.

Here is how to do it:
I went to Michaels (but any craft store has these) and bought a wood letter, in this case a ‘C’ . It was really inexpensive, I’m talking like $4, PLUS those places always have coupons.

I basically just wrapped the letter in burlap- my thought with this was that the hot glue and corks would stick better to the burlap than the plain letter and my letter was white instead of a wood color and I was going for more of a natural look- anyway, uses some hot glue and wrap the letter. It doesn’t have to be perfect because you’re covering it.

Then I honestly just cut up corks in a random fashion in tons of different shapes and glued them on! I tried to get them pretty tight to one another and overlapped a lot. Um seriously that’s it! It turned out perfect. I was soo proud of it. Haha. I am totally going to make more.

I feel like I should share that somehow my family came into a trillion corks. So no I’m not boozing on wine every day to save up- though I do have my own little collection started, if only boxed wine had corks, then I’d have a lot 🙂 hahaha- my dad probably isn’t too thrilled about that comment 😉 anyway I am fortunate enough to be able to have TONS of corks at my disposal. Someone we know had asked a restaurant to save them and then realized they didn’t have anything to do with them so they passed them to us. No complaints here!

Um, yeah thats a 55+ gallon drum filled with corks. loveeeeee

So anyway, this is actually a pretty easy and lower cost project. Hope you have fun and experiment with this! The possibilities are endless.

Thanks for checking out my blog!!

Paint Chip Calendar

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Georgina

Hi!

So I have seen these quite a bit around the internet- both Pinterest and just poking around the web. The brilliant idea of a paint chip calendar. You take an old frame(or new one if you would like- but I love re and up cycling! 🙂 ) and some paint chips(paint card samples or whatever they are called! OK, you don’t buy the paint cards but you acquire them however you do. I went to a hardware store and picked out colors in the same family and just took them(Green of course!). That’s what you’re suppose to do right?! I mean truthfully I did feel a little sheepish taking 20-ish paint chip cards but I think it’s the norm. Anyyyyway- you could choose any colors you like- be it random or all the same or same color family etc… Cut them into squares and put in the frame and use a dry erase marker to write on the glass the dates and days and month and you’re done! Basically that plus scissors and tape are the only materials you need.

Materials:

Old frame with glass intact
Large sheet of paper to cover background of frame
Various assortment of sample paint cards
Ruler
Scissors
Tape

So what I did was:

– Took out the picture originally in the frame and cleaned the glass and such

– Traced the glass size on my large piece of paper and cut that out

– I measured how large my paint cubes could be to be able to fit row of 7 by columns of 5 turned out to be about 1.7′ x 1.7′

– Then I just went to town cutting those squares from the paint samples till I had a few in each color

– Then: (this is the only part that took awhile because I’m anal) but you evenly space and tape down the squares to the backdrop paper leaving enough spacing at the top to write the month and the days of the week

– Insert it all in the frame and BAM! you’re done! You have a gorgeous DIY month-to-month reusable calendar

Here is how mine turned out! (sorry the picture is not good at all but you get the idea!)

Since this picture I've found a marker that writes darker- Happy!

Thats it! Hope you enjoyed. Thanks for looking!

-G

Painted Vases

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Georgina

Hi Again!

So here is another craft project that I recently completed(once more apologize for no tutorial pics or anything as I did this project a couple of weeks ago). I originally saw this idea HERE.

This project actually took a little bit of time because I had the hardest time finding the enamel paint (actually the surface conditioner)that the original idea blogger had used. After some research I determined any enamel or paint designed for glass would work. I found my ‘vases’ (one of them is actually a glass) at Goodwill and the smallest one I got at the dollar store. The paint I ended up using was Martha Stewart Craft paint which I found at Michael’s Craft store and pictured here:

Martha Stewart craft paint with a satin finish. I did not use this color but wanted to show what the bottle looked like.

So while I was shopping for the paint, I had picked out the color “Pool” (number 32014) sort of a aqua-marine/turquoise color and was contemplating doing the vases all the same color as the original blogger had. BUT then I saw the color “Love Bird” (#32051) and fell in love with it. It is a gorgeous corally-red. But then I thought it would be weird to have two one color and an odd man out so I opted for a third color of “Arrowhead”(#32080) which is a basic grey. Now the paint says that after you paint your item (metal,glass,fabric) you need to let it ‘cure'(*still not really sure what that really means) for 21 days. what?!? Maybe if it was for something you were going to eat off of or something like that- but my vases are only for decoration so I knew I’d be fine once they were dry to the touch.

Soooo- to prep my vases I used good ole Goo-Gone to remove the stickers then washed them with warm soapy water and dried, then cleaned the inside of them with rubbing alcohol just so the surface was extra clean and the paint would get great contact. Then the painting began! Sort of messy with the tall one reaching in to the bottom and getting it all over my hands but the others went great. and here is the finished product!

I love painting the inside so that they are still high gloss and gorgeous on the outside!

They were dry within 2 days. & Sorry that pics is a little cluttered/ not great. But they turned out gorgeous I think. I just had the thought of doing another something of this fashion but doing different shades of green. (green is my all time favorite color and most everything I do or choose is green)ha!

Not a lot of direction or detail but it really wasn’t hard at all! Let me know if you have questions at all!

Thanks for reading!

-G

Lace Infinity Scarf/First Sewing Project

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Georgina

Hi all!

As I’ve stated before- I just recently graduated from college(December 16th to be exact). As my college graduation present, the only thing I wanted was a sewing machine. I’d been doing mini projects with just a needle and thread since I was 12 years old, but it’s tedious and to be honest mostly all I did were fixes/touch ups or minor alterations on clothes. Also fix little tears, broken straps or missing buttons on friends clothes who would have otherwise thrown them away!!

Side note: It still amazes me how no one, and I mean no one my age, or in my group of friends at least, can even do as much as that! I was always hailed as being “Suzy Homemaker” in my group of friends and my sewing “capabilities” were one of the reasons thought honestly they are nothing to brag about. but moving on!

So my wonderful Mom and Dad got me a Janome 8050. It’s a really cool machine with tons (50) of built in stitches and an easy to read and use screen; and even though it comes with the foot pedal I have come to know and absolutely love the Start/Stop button! Admittedly at first I had NO idea how to use it. I had used my moms very old machine in the past but she always threaded the bobbin and set everything up for me. So I needed some assistance to say the least. After a hour and a half long private session on all of the basics I was ready to take on a project. But what?!?! (I still have relatively no idea how to read a pattern-so that was out of the question) I had seen a lace infinity scarf on Pinterest and remember just loving it and at the time i thought well how easy to simply sew two pieces of fabric together.(Later come to find it’s a little more difficult than that- but not much!)

SO here is my inspiration for the project!

http://sweet-verbena.blogspot.com/2011/10/single-loop-lace-infinity-scarf.html (Katy has a lot of other great tutorials on her blog too- check them out!)

and I apologize in advance for the next couple of my posts not having step-by-step/tutorial pictures or directions. I’ve made this scarf and a few other projects before I knew I was creating a blog. But here is a pic of my finished Scarf:

A little dark- but the underlay is light green satin-y material with the overlay of black lace.

I will try to take another picture of it soon so you can get a better idea.But I’m just to excited about my blog I wanted to get another post up asap!

Hope you enjoyed

xoxo

-G