Thankful Wreath

Remember the cute yarn-wrapped wreath I made....the one with the cute felt flowers? Well, that wreath experienced death by sunshine. What a way to go, huh? Our door faces south, and the intense sunshine proved to be highly detrimental to my hot glue job. First the flowers fell off...I re-glued...they fell off again....I re-glued, they fell off once more, and I cried Uncle. Our front door looked naked and uninviting.

So yesterday the boys and I made a Thankful Wreath. I took a styrofoam wreath form that I got at Michael's (40% off with coupon!) and wrapped it in burnt orange Homespun yarn. Lesson learned, there was no hot glue involved: I secured the yarn ends with pins. I found some cute orange and white fabric in my stash and decided that would make a nice textural accent, so around it went. This leaf template was available online, and I printed it on yellow & orange paper, and cut out the leaves that say "...is Thankful for...." We each took turns writing on the leaves, and our gratitude ranged from Jesus to our warm beds to Transformers. The pins worked well to secure the leaves to the wreath.

It's a great little reminder every time that we enter our house that we do indeed have a lot to be thankful for.

Blanket Envy

The throw I crocheted for Lindsay turned out to be quite popular.

My sisty, Kelly, asked me to make one for her, too. She wanted different colors and different yarn, but still wanted the chevron wide-stripe.

She chose Knit Picks (my fave!) Swish Worsted yarn in Black and Marble Heather. A great feature of this yarn is that it is machine washable merino wool. But not the scratchy kind of wool. It's super soft and it has a nice drape and weight to it. And it's SUPER duper warm.

It's an honor to be a part of a family heirloom. Enjoy, Blumbergs!

Yarn-Wrapped Wreath

This week's project was super easy & super cute.

Gather your supplies:

• wreath form: styrofoam or straw wreath (keep the plastic wrap kept on if you use straw) or scroll down for a really cheap trick.
• yarn: one large skein will be just fine.
• ribbon or extra thick yarn from which to hang the wreath. You could even knit or crochet a long i-cord or braid several strands of yarn to keep the yarn look consistent.
• hot glue gun & glue sticks or craft glue 
• felt sheets from the craft store (or if you have a lot of patience, you can knit 100% wool pieces and make your own felt....um....have fun with that.)
• sharp scissors

Wreath

1. Choose the backside of the wreath. Dab a piece of glue on the back, and stick your yarn to it. Let it dry a little bit. I had to wrap a small section of my straw wreath in duct tape so the hot glue didn't melt the plastic wrap. But I don't think it's that big of a deal.

2. Start wrapping! ...and wrapping...and wrapping.... This doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, overlapping the yarn at different points gives it a nice texture. But, it's totally up to you.

3. When the entire wreath form is covered in yarn, secure the end with glue.

QUICK TIP!

For a couple of the wreaths, we used polyethylene foam pipe insulation tubes. At our local Home Depot, you can buy 4-pack for about $2.75. You circle it up and duct tape the ends together. Each 3-foot tube makes one 13" wreath. This is obviously an amazingly cheap alternative to the $5.99 styrofoam forms you can find at your craft store.

There are two downsides to the polyethylene:

1) The circumference of the tubing is not very wide, so it makes for less decorating space. BUT WAIT! For the gray wreath pictured below, Ali doubled up the foam...she made a big circle, then cut a shorter piece to fit inside the first circle. She duct taped them together, and got a great width for the wreath.
2) The hot glue melts huge holes into the foam. Here's a solution that I've found to work: glue the beginning of your yarn onto the duct tape seam. And if you choose to cut yard-long pieces of yarn and wrap that way, you'll have to glue each yarn seam to the already wrapped yarn on the back. Another solution would be to use basic craft glue that won't leave holes in your wreath.

Now the fun stuff begins.

Felt Roses

1. With sharp scissors, cut a square. The larger the square, the bigger the rose; the smaller the square, the smaller the rose.

 2. Round the corners of the square, cut a circle, then cut a wavy spiral

Leave a little circle at the end of the spiral.

3. Starting at the beginning of the spiral, start rolling it up. Fiddle around with rolling it tightly and rolling it loosely to see the different results you get. Put a dot of glue on that circle that you left at the end when you cut spiral, and attach the rolled-up rose to that circle. Trim that bottom circle if it sticks out too much.

Lovely, aren't they?

The next obvious step is to merge these two creations:

• Choose the top of the wreath.
• Decide where you want the flowers on the wreath, then glue them on.
• Attach your ribbon or yarn or i-cord or your hanging device of choice.

Here's our finished products:

I used one polyethylene tube and Lion Brand Thick & Quick yarn. 

It was very easy to wrap since the yarn is so chunky:

  Ali used Hobby Lobby's I Love this Yarn and two polyethylene tubes duct taped together. I love the width of the wreath, and it's a great size:

 This was a straw wreath form wrapped in Paton's Classic Wool:

Have fun!

Fabric-Covered Metal Tray

Todays project inspiration also came from something that showed up on Pinterest. It is a Martha Stewart project from the craft section of her website.

Finding the right sized metal tray was proving to be a bit of a challenge on other shopping days, and there was NO way I was going to purchase a brand new cookie sheet for this purpose. 

Enter: the Lafayette Indoor Flea Market. 

Ali & I met at the flea market, and she showed me around the place. Glorious. It was full of treasures like this:

"Clouds of Cabbage" (Hopefully for a...leaky.... Cabbage Patch doll? Gack.)

Who doesn't need about 5 alien plush faces?

Size 50 knitting needles

Amazing art work.

But lucky for us, we also found these treasures for $1 a piece:

14x9" metal trays

And after a trip to Hobby Lobby to pick out some fabric (we purchased about 1/2 a yard for each tray), we got right to work.

Here's what we used:

• Metal tray of your choice
• Fabric (about 1/2 yard, depending on the size of the tray)
• Spray adhesive
• Enough felt to fit the back of the tray

Here's what we did:

Our first step was to iron creases out of the fabric. I know... I hate ironing, too, but it was worth it.

Cut the fabric leaving enough to wrap around the edges of the tray.

Following the instructions on the can, cover the top of the tray with spray adhesive.

 Working from the middle out, press the fabric down and into the corners and smooth any wrinkles/bubbles.

 Flip tray over, spray the back with the adhesive, and pull the fabric tightly over to the backside.

You'll get a kind of bunchy situation like this:

We were temporarily stumped, wondering how we were supposed to make this bunch of fabric both adhere AND lay flat. So, after some brainstorming we figured to run the edge of the scissors along the lip of the tray, which resulted in a very clean line along the edge. (A box cutter would work well here, too).

Since we had already sprayed and wrapped, the fabric still stuck to the lip after we ran the blade along the edge. The excess fabric just pulls right off. The tray was sticky where that fabric was, but it was nothing a little Goo Gone or fingernail polish remover didn't tackle.

 I had to double-wrap mine, since my fabric was light enough to let the printed picture on the tray show through. This was very much a pain-in-the-rear. I would recommend painting over any pattern on the tray or covering the main image with a thick, neutral paper so that you can do a single wrap with the fabric.

Finally, cut-to-fit the felt and adhere it to the back of the tray.

And Presto Change-o!
Lovely new custom tray to hold remotes, coasters, vases, knick-knacks, whatever.

I would give this project 4.5 out of 5 stars. After we gathered all of our supplies, it took about 45-60 minutes to complete. It was easy, and the finished project was very well worth it. A lot of bang for your buck, if you will. The downsides were using the spray adhesive, which got EVERYTHING very sticky, almost to the point where I couldn't use my fingers any longer. But, like I mentioned, it cleaned up pretty easily. Overall it was really fun!

Side Table

Found this lovely piece for $10 at the thrift store and it needed a little love. 

The table tops were laminate-ish, and so I sanded them down with a fine sanding block. I also lightly sanded the sides and legs. I removed the hardware and filled in the holes with wood filler & a putty knife. 

I bought some Behr Ultra Paint + Primer in Smokey Blue and started brushin'. That paint was AMAZING.

I love how it turned out!

Copy Cat

Today was craft day #1 with my friend, Ali. We are crafting accountability partners since we both needed motivation and ideas to craft. We had a blast this morning creating two things we ripped off from the internet. These are ideas we saw on pinterest and here are the links to the original projects:

Coasters

Wreath

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Our first project was to make coasters out of $.16 4"x4" tiles found at Home Depot. Yes. $.16.

We cut scrapbook paper into a smidge less than 4"x4". The total cost for the scrapbook paper was around $3.

Next, we used spray adhesive to attach the paper to the coasters. We decided on this instead of Mod Podge because sometimes the MP wrinkles the paper or makes it bubble up.


After the spray adhesive, we then took our handy MP and put a nice coat over the paper. This helped seal the paper around the edges.

The last step is to stick on small felt pads on to the bottom of the coaster so it keeps your table nice & safe.

One step we passed on from the original tutorial was the coat of clear spray paint. I'm thinking that we should do that...so we might fix that next week.

But, the final product turned out magical. Look-it:

The second project we did while the Mod Podge dried on the coasters was to make a ceiling medallion "wreath" for the front door.

Originally we were going to do one 10" medallion, however, we got there and there was a 16" medallion sitting next to the 10" one. And they were different styles. We had a brilliant idea to do a mash up and put one color medallion over another color medallion and make it so wonderfully dimensional. 

We bought ceiling medallions (found in the lighting department) & spray paint at the Home Depot. We also got some plastic spray paint primer because the medallions are plastic and we wanted the lovely color to stick. 

So, we primed them and let them dry.

When they were dry we assaulted each one with some spray paint. I chose red & teal. Ali chose green & teal. 

We let them dry for about 45 min. Probably could've done longer, but we were impatient. At least I was. 

Next we sprayed the back of the smaller one with spray adhesive and put a ring of super glue around the back of the inside lip. 

We stuck it on the larger medallion and prayed. Ali's larger medallion dipped in the middle, so there was a substantial gap between the two. She had to clip it together and run super glue along the edges to seal it up.

Here's what they looked like pre-ribbon.

Then we fashioned a way to hang it on the hook on our door. We looped ribbon through the hole and super glued and stapled the ends together. 

Next, we attached a tie bow to the top of the two ends that were now joined.

I had to cover my staple with another piece of ribbon. I hot glued it to the top, wrapped it around and hot glued it in the back.

And presto!