Upcycling Wine Bottles!

I normally take pretty frequent visits to the depot with my bottles, but they were really starting to build up, and good thing too, as I was over on my favorite site (Pinterest obviously) and was seeing so many wine bottle upcycles that I had to try one! I didn't really find a specific tutorial, I just kind of winged it (not saying there isn't one that did this exactly, I just didn't read this particular craft word for word, but meshed a few different ideas I saw!)

What you need:
- rinsed wine bottles with all the labels removed (I soak them in really hot water and they come right off, but you may need to really work off some remaining glue)
- glue gun and glue sticks
- spray paint of your choice (I tried brush painting them, and it didn't look nice, you can see the strokes and when you do a second coat, sometimes the paint comes off...)
- twine

What you do:
After your bottles are cleaned and the labels are removed, heat up your glue gun, and just glue on the bottle! You can do anything, I chose words this time to try it out, but you can do a pattern on it, or anything you want really!
Once that was dry (not long at all) I started to paint them with a brush. I didn't like the way this turned out, so I took them out on the deck and spray painted them. At this point they looked like this:

Then, I got the glue gun back out, and just wrapped twine around them very arbitrarily and glued it every now and again so it wouldn't move!

Result:

When I do it again:

I don't love these, but they are a good try at something I now know I can make really nice next time. Things I will do differently next time I make this:

1) All or none - make sure your wine bottles are all alike or all different. Two of these are the same, and one is different, and I think that looks off.

2) Make sure I plan what and how I will write. I love the read one, and I don't like my impulse "font" on the other two. I wish I had done it much nicer. I will plan it out on paper next time.

Finally, 3) I hate the twine. I will either skip it, use something else, or not make it so thick and bulky next time.

But, I think they are great, and they will make nice gifts once I perfect this new craft project!

Altering Curtains

Unfortunately I didn't take very many pictures of this craft... (Bad Blogger!) but I will write about it here anyway. A co-worker had bought some curtains for her house, one pair was too short and one pair was too long. She needed a piece put in to make the curtains longer, and she needed the other ones hemmed. I decided that if I was going to put a piece in one pair, I better put it in both, so that they all match.

It was very simple, and I picked a fabric that would make it even easier! A geometric pattern that gives you straight lines is definitely  the way to go!

What I did was randomly cut the curtains in two, then I sewed the fabric I purchased to the bottom of the curtain. This bit was very easy. The bit that was more tricky (but still pretty easy) was making the curtains the right length! I first measured from the bottom of the grommets to the end of the curtains the 84" they needed to be. This was wrong. Curtains hang from the TOP of grommets! Duh! So I had to readjust it. After I got one done, the only other hard part was making sure I put the extra panel in the same spot for the one it was going to hang next to. This just involved measuring and re-measuring several times before I sewed it up!

And the finished product was this:

I will try to get her to take a picture of them actually hanging in her house to add later!

Re-Purposing Frames from the Thrift Store

A few weeks ago I was at one of the thrift stores here in town looking for something. I can't remember what it was, but while I was there I started looking at pictures. I mean, you never know, right? I found the most ugly things ever. But, while we were away this year, I had bought some matted prints that needed new frames. I decided to pick up some really ugly pictures just to use their really ugly frames for these prints.

The thing was, the frames weren't really that ugly, mostly they were only ugly because of what colour they were. I decided to get some spray paint, and make them what ever colour I wanted!

I wish I had thought to take a picture of what was actually IN these
so you could see how far my imagination had to stretch! They really don't look
all that bad once you take the stuff in them out, and give them a wash.

I made them a neutral vanilla colour to make the black matte really pop. We are moving
in a few weeks and I'm really hoping to begin a really awesome gallery wall, and
these will be a fantastic part of it!

And that's it! It couldn't have been easier really! I ALWAYS keep my eyes open when I'm at the thrift store. Sometimes you can find really awesome things there if you take the time to look at what you might be able to DO with it, and not just at what it already is!

Whale Art

Hello everyone. I have not posted on here in awhile, but I have been crafting! My latest one is soo simple! But so cute! All you need are 3 tiny canvases and 3 paint colours (1 dark blue, one light blue, & one white).

First, I drew the whale and the blow by hand very lightly in pencil, then I painted those areas white. Then, starting with the whale piece, I painted those areas dark blue. Then used the light blue for the top picture. I then mixed the two blues to create a medium blue (make sure you mix enough, as you will have a hard time matching the colour if you need to make more!). I painted with the medium blue the middle canvas, and voila! Finished product!

Ice Skate Winter Wreath

It's been a crazy few months for me, and I have been doing a little bit of crafting, but have not made time to add it to this new blog yet! I have been remembering to take some pictures though :) so I'll try and get some posts up this week.

This wreath here is inspired by Pinterest, it was one of the first crafts I had found there that I really wanted to try. The picture from pinterest ended up being a store bought wreath (you can click the picture to go to the website that sells it) but I though it looked do-able, so this is a little how-to for my version.


Pinterest Pic:


My completed version:

They ended up being very different. There are pros and cons to this.
Pro: My skate is newer, therefore is whiter.
Con: Because my skate is newer, it doesn't lace as nicely
Pro: Mine has a bird and berries wrapped around the sharp part
Con: My branches are not as long and straight
Pro: I made mine, the one above is store bough.

So, my skate for the win!!

This is how I made it, feel free to make changes to suit your skate wreath needs :)

First, get a skate, and clean it up real nice. I didn't have a figure skate, so I visited my local Salvation Army and bought a pair for $5.99 (and also found out they sell books there - amazing!!)

Then, lace your skate back up. I was very careful to choose the whitest side, and lace it up with no twists in it. If you are very particular, you could buy a new lace, but I am very frugal, and did not. It looked like this:

 Other materials you will need is some branchy things to stuff it with, and other festive decorations. A hot glue gun would probably help to. I had to use white glue.

Then I stuffed my skate with newspaper so it wouldn't be able to collapse in any places in the foot area as that would look pretty ugly after awhile.

 After that, I just stuffed my decorations into it, and glued a bird to the toe. Easy peasy.

 And this is the finished product from the back end, and again from the front. We hung it on the door to the porch instead of the front door so it didn't get weather damaged. I live in Canada after all :)

Hope you feel inspired :)

Christmas Paper Garland

Today in our office we made paper garland. I work for an environmental agency, so we used all recycled materials, and things we had around the house. The tutorial is pretty simple, and if you wanted you could probably up the sparkle of your garland by using some festive scrapbook papers, decorative ribbons, and a few embellishments to make your Christmas trees look fantastic!
The tutorial we used comes from this website: http://www.renewsing.com/2010/12/02/green-macgyver-christmas-paper-bauble-garland-%E2%80%93-an-eco-friendly-craft-for-kids/ but we decided to make our own, as we improvised some steps.

What you will need:

Scissors (or a circle punch), string (or ribbon, twine, etc.), glue, and the paper(s) of your choice!

Directions:


1) Trace and cut out circles. You will need 3-4 circles per bauble for them to be 3 dimensional. Most of us in the office chose to make 80 circles, for 20 baubles on our garland. You can make as little or as many as you like, depending on what you plan to use it for. Also, if you want to make fuller baubles, plan for more that 4 circles per bauble.

2) Once you have all of your circles cut out, fold them all in half.

You should now have several that look like this.

3) Begin gluing the folded circles together. I glued all of mine into pairs to start. Don't glue all four sides together yet.

*now you have a choice to make* in the link provided it shows that you do glue all four sides together, and then thread your string through the middle to put all the baubles together. We found that this would work if a) you are using yarn or something similar; and b) your needle is longer that your circles. We didn't do this, but if you want to, you can :)

4) Once you have all of your baubles, with one side open, lay your ribbon in, and glue the final side together. It should begin to look like this:

For this one, no space was left between the baubles

For this one, small spaces were left. If you are using decorative ribbon, this may be a  better option for you.

Of course, the spacing is your choice!

Eventually your garland will start to take shape!

I kept a loop at the top of mine to tie them together!

Some variations of this craft would be to make it from fabric if you like to sew, or you could make these into ornaments but making a larger loop than what I did above and making fuller baubles. One girl in our office even used squares instead of circles, and her's looks great to!

This is a very versatile craft, which can be as big or small, and as fancy or as eco-friendly as you want it to be! Also, its a VERY easy craft to do with children!

Enjoy your crafting!

Scrapbooking Vacations

In 2009 BF and I went on our first trip together, to Varadero, Cuba for his sister's wedding. I spent the next year working on their scrapbook to give them as a one year anniversary gift and never got around to doing any personal scrapbooking (during that year there was a lot of life things going on as well: moving, renos, etc. that kept me away from crafting). So, in the last month I have finally set up a decent enough area to get some work done, and I am getting down to it! The start of our trips together, Volume One:

This is the title page for our album. I didn't want to do a separate book for every vacation, as I thought that would be overkill.

For this I didn't buy anything new, and a lot of the materials were gifted. I had 2-3 travel themed kits that I used some papers and stickers from. The pink key used here, I actually found left behind after a class when I had went in to use their die cut machine, and have had lying around for about 6 years! I wanted this page to just be loud, busy, fun, and all about travelling! It doesn't have any theme, and it's only purpose is the words "Ryan & Jessica's Excellent Adventures". I left the vertical arrow on the left blank underneath the words 'world travellers' so I could write 'Volume One' when the time comes.

Unfortunately I don't know how to rotate this. The saved file on my computer is the right way, and it keeps uploading wrong, but anyway. This is the first page of our trip album, and is our journey to Varadero, Cuba.

For this I also didn't buy anything new. The Cuba flag I made just using card stock. I couldn't find any Cuba related items at any craft stores in St. John's. There were a few online that I found, but for the prices weren't very nice, so I had to improvise. I used our boarding cards, a picture of us on the plane, and a cut out of a plane that was in one of the travel themed kits I had. The jeweled word 'vacation' was purchased at Michael's, and the star and sea shell stickers were bought at Buck or Two. I don't love this page, it feels like it is missing a little something.

Below is the adjacent page to this. I like for these pages to match, any books that I have made, and these pages don't complement each other I never end up satisfied with the results.

This page isn't finished yet. I used a lot of different left over letters for the journaling on this one, and also some of my handwriting along the top part. I used the yellow stripped paper and the red star cut out to tie in colours from the adjacent page. where there is a dark photo and writing opens up to a certificate I received on the resort (picture below). I didn't want to leave these memory pieces out, but it was large, and the only photo was dark, so I tried to make them work. I haven't added in the last picture I took from this page yet because I can't decide if I want to pull the orange, teal, and brown from the photo, or if I want to use the greens, blues, and yellow from the opposite page to make sure they match. Suggestions?

So, this is as far as I have gotten with this project, and some papers for school have kept me away from the craft table all weekend, but I do want to commit to this blog, so I took some time to get a few things posted. Hope that you are interested enough in what is to come that you will follow, and keep checking back. I would love for you to leave lots of comments, and links to your blogs if you have one (about anything!)

Have a great day!