Five Minutes and a Glue Gun: Steampunk Headband

One day I happened to have five minutes and a glue gun. I also happened to have a few tiny gears from a craft store pack.

 

I also had a $1.00, boring gray headband. Clearly the only thing to do was make a steampunk headband.

 

Here it is:

 

 

 

 

 

Not bad for five minutes and 2$. Don't you want one?



Easy DIY Decor: Chemistry Lightswitch Covers

You might think I would be tired of customizing light-switch and electrical outlet panels by now, after the many others I've done, but they were so easy! I couldn't resist adding some to the kitchen.

I decided on a chemistry/science theme for the kitchen décor, so of course the periodic table had to make an appearance.

 

I also made a couple with diagrammed molecules. They took a little longer because I had to cut out each molecule instead of just slapping on the whole piece of paper, but even these just took a few minutes plus drying time.



 

I'm running out of electrical panels to decorate!





Movie Popcorn Bucket Cake

If you're as interested in cake as I am (I know you are), you've probably seen many variations of the movie-cake, where a talented decorator creates a realistic popcorn bucket out of edible materials--none of which are actually popcorn.

I decided to try my hand at this for my aunt's birthday/Oscar night party this year. In the past, I'd decorated some very elaborate cakes for my dear Aunt Sittrea, including a book cake and a tea set cake. I was excited to try my hand at making this cake, and even though it looks simpler than the other two I'd made, it had it's own set of challenges.

The finished product looked like this:

First I needed to make the popcorn, which in the end, was my favorite part of this cake!

I started with a bag of mini-marshmallows and, after some experimentation, discovered that cutting them into clover shapes gave them the most realistic look. If you are hoping to try this, be sure to clean the knife frequently so it doesn't get gummed up; this tears the marshmallows rather than slicing them. I added a dab of watered down food gel along each one and let them sit out for a day to get stale so they weren't so squishy. I made about two cups of them, which took a while, but was worth the effort!

Next I had to bake and stack the cake for the bucket. I used four six-inch rounds.

I measured the cake and estimated how tall and wide to make the strips of red and white fondant around the bucket and put them on over the "dirty icing" layer. I also added a plaque of sorts to be the front label of the bucket.

This label was my biggest problem and my biggest disappointment. I should probably have traced or used a stencil or something to compensate for my sloppy handwriting. My first attempt looked pretty bad and I ended up removing the plaque and making a second one.

Here's the first one:

The second was better, but not stellar. Lastly I adhered the popcorn to the top of the stacked cake with icing and painted it with yellow food gel as butter.

I think the Oscar party-goers appreciated the cake and I keep learning every time I try something new!

Aardvark, Bird and Gifraffe Wall Art

If you don't work at a zoo, (and even if you do) you probably have never heard a pregnant woman say, "I'm planning on decorating the nursery with an aardvark theme." But if you're me, this was hardly unexpected. My brilliant and kind friend Sara is due to give birth to a baby in April and I wanted to make her some aardvark art to adorn the nursery walls, since aardvark art is not easy to come by.

This was an incredibly easy project that turned out so well I made some more for myself. I simply bought two pieces of scrapbook paper with complimentary colors, modified an aardvark drawing I found to make a template, and cut out the form of the aardvark from the solid colored-paper.

The framed result:

I liked the aardvark, but for my bedroom I wanted some custom bird art, so I found a drawing I liked and made a stencil of two birds on a branch. Add frames found on clearance at the craft store and...

I have two pieces of art with exactly the colors and patterns I had in mind to brighten the walls!


Before I made the aardvark, I had tried the same technique for a wall-hanging to go with my giraffe-print electrical panels. I liked how it came out and will put it up, but I think using a darker solid color would have made the giraffe print pop more.

Merman Cake

Maybe it's a reflection of my personal style, or maybe the friends I choose, but occasionally I get requests for really odd cakes. For instance, this anteater cake I did last November.

This time the cake was a merman cake for my friend Tom. He loves really tacky merman ornaments like these, which inspired my artistic pal Adam to suggest a merman cake for Tom's birthday party. I insisted that Adam collaborate with me on the project and this is what we ended up with.

Genius. I can't take credit for the parts that are impressive, such as the illusion of rock hard abs or the cute cowlick in the hair-do, but I will admit to making all of the sea creatures, only some of which are visible from this angle.

My favorite is the octopus.

In the next post, I'll demonstrate that I have more strange friends (aardvark nursery art?!)

DIY Custom Electrical Panels

My previous home improvement blog post involved "sewing" and painting some curtains to cover my closet, which have turned out to be a wonderful investment of time (just a few hours) and money (just a few dollars!)

Now it's time for another frugal and fun home improvement project: custom electrical panels. Because we (okay, I) chose a theme for each room in the house, I've been toying with inexpensive ways to unite the furnishings and decor while conveying the theme. Also, because we did a lot of painting and tearing down sheet rock, many of our electrical panels ended up stacked on various counter-tops.

For our travel-themed room, I used some pages of maps from an atlas of Alaska that I bought for a dollar at an estate sale. I traced around the panel and adhered the map to the panel with decoupage glue. Then I used a craft knife to cut out the space where the plug-ins go through or the light-switch flips up and down. Lastly I covered the maps with a few layers of the same glue and sprayed a clear sealer over the top.

Voila!

I used the same method to create some panels for one of the spare bedrooms where I've decided to have an owl theme.

The cute owl wrapping paper came from World Market, and I used the same paper to add some pizazz to an old Ikea bookcase.

I also covered the panels in the hallway bathroom in a giraffe print to match the tile and mirror:

The living room downstairs is going to be outer space themed, but I wasn't able to find paper that satisfied me, so I painted them with acrylics.

I'm hoping to do more of these fun (and easy) decorating projects, and I'll try to keep up with blogging about them!

DIY Painted Curtains

In an effort to rekindle the excitement of this whole home renovation thing, I tried some fun projects that I hoped would also add to the overall appeal of the house (without having to do ANY MORE washing, sanding, painting, etc.)

The master bedroom closet is very long and the previous owners had a curtain stretching over it, rather than closet doors. We'd taken down the curtains to paint and carpet the room and had been staring into the disarray of the 96 inch closet ever since.

I decided to make some curtains that would coordinate with the duvet cover I found at Bed, Bath and Beyond's clearance section for super cheap.

The duvet cover has a pattern with a silhouette of a bird on a branch, which I wanted to replicate on the curtain. I made a stencil by tracing the bird on tissue paper and then gluing the tissue paper onto cardstock. The result was this:

I bought a king-sized sheet which would stretch across the whole closet for 6$ from Goodwill. I cut the sheet in half and "hemmed" it using Stitch Witchery. This stuff is amazing! It's an iron-on adhesive that holds fabric together and is so much easier (for me) than sewing a seam!

Once I had two panels of blank canvas, I experimented with some spray fabric paint and a scrap of fabric to see if the stencil would work. I tried the spray paint, some acrylic paint and bleaching out the color to see what looked best.

The bleaching didn't work at all for this stencil and the fabric paint wasn't precise enough for the detail either. The acrylic paint with a small brush would have to do, though that was the most time-consuming option. I had to free-hand most of the design and I came up with it right on the spot, so I might have done something more organized like a repeating pattern if I'd known ahead of time what method would work with the stencil.

I started making a black tree with a mixture of the fabric paint and acrylic paint, but I had to pour the fabric paint out of its bottle and scrap the pump spray because it wasn't accurate enough:

I used the stencil for the birds, but otherwise free-handed this whole panel. Then I added the white accents.

For the second panel, I wanted a design to complement the first, but knew I could never replicate the whole thing. So I did this:

The white horizontal lines are just from sun streaming through the blinds. Sophie is inspecting my work as it dries.

 When they were dry we hung them on a wooden rod that the previous owners had left us with.

Right panel:

Left panel:

Together:

Again, my photography skills are woefully insufficient, but in person the curtains look pretty good! The entire project took me probably around 8 hours, but it only cost about $12. Not too shabby.

Several of my family members have April birthdays, and I knew I wouldn't have time to make a cake for the joint birthday party we were having, so I brainstormed some craft projects I could give as gifts. I decided on decoupage coasters, inspired by these ones. Mine had a bit of a different flavor though, since I was making four sets, for four very different people.

The first set I tried was for my brother-in-law, who loves the show Arrested Development (who doesn't?!). I printed out the sequence of photos from Buster's encounter in the photo booth, though I forget which episode it's from. I cut the pictures out and glued each one onto a tile and painted over them with three coats of decoupage glue. Then I cut squares of felt and hot glued them to the backs of the tiles.

Simple! They looked pretty good, but I wanted to be sure that hot beverages and moisture wouldn't damage them, since they are coasters after all. I sprayed them with two coats of sealant to finish the job.

I wish I had taken a photo of the whole set of the Arrested Development coasters! I did remember to take photos of the Mario Brothers 3 set I made for my brother, as well as the Doctor Who set I made for my dad's wife.

I liked them all so much I wanted to make duplicates for myself! I will post more photos of the next sets as I finish them. Not only did these coasters work as personal gifts for anyone--print family photos on a set for Grandma, Monet paintings on a set for an art lover, etc.--they were also very inexpensive to make. The tiles cost 13 cents at Home Depot (or 16 cents at Lowe's), and felt is 33 cents a sheet from any craft store. I also tried adhesive felt, which was easier than hot glue and less messy. This would still only run you about a dollar per set of coasters. I already had the decoupage glue, but it runs about 7 dollars a bottle.

Have fun!

DIY Wall Decor: Unusual(ly easy) Craft Project #17

I'm always looking for easy and useful craft projects, so when I received some odd little puzzles from a white elephant gift exchange, I hatched a plan. Each 5 x 7 puzzle displayed a cupcake decorated in a different color. Kinda cute, but what am I supposed to do with tiny puzzles that I can finish in ten minutes? Turn them into wall decoration, of course!

Step one is to complete the puzzle, which in this case took very little time. Then Jared helped me spray adhesive (very effective and easy to use!) onto the back of the puzzle. We had to keep the puzzle intact while we flipped it over, which was not difficult with a 5" x 7" puzzle, but would be challenging with a larger one. This layer of adhesive made the pieces stick together so the puzzle was in one sheet. Then we sprayed a piece of cardboard with the adhesive and laid the puzzle onto it.

Once the adhesive is dry, cut the cardboard as closely around the puzzle as possible, so it has a sturdy backing. Then use any 5" x 7" frames and place the puzzle inside. We dug through some thrift store shelves and found four nice frames for less than $4.00! You can coordinate the frames, but we thought it would be fun to use four different ones.

For apartment dwellers like ourselves, punching holes in the walls for nails isn't an option, so these Scotch mounting squares have really come in handy. We put half a square on each corner of the frames and they hold really well without leaving goo or a hole to worry about.

Then you can hang your puzzles wherever you want; for instance, hang them next to your picture of jaguars that you can't remember acquiring but display anyway because you don't have that many things to hang on walls.

Or hang them above the oven for inspiration.

This project is very versatile because anything you can find (or make) a puzzle out of can become part of your decor.

Homemade Stuffed Owl and Bunny

 I bought some felt pieces on a whim at the craft store after entertaining the idea that I might be able to make little felt stuffed animals from them. Surprisingly, it worked!

The owl, since his shape was simpler, was my first attempt. I didn't have a tutorial or a pattern, so I cut a blobby owl shape out of card stock and used that for the body. I made the wings from card stock also, but traced around the caps of an ibuprofen bottle for the whites of the eyes and free-handed the other facial pieces.

Here are the pieces laid in place without any sewing or gluing yet.

I am not a talented seamstress by any stretch of the imagination, so I glued as much of the felt as made sense. For this stuffed animal, I only sewed the main body pieces together. All the accent pieces were glued on with god's gift to crafting, a hot glue gun.

Then he got some stuffing and here he is!

Riding the success of my first attempt, I tried a more difficult design for the second one, which was clearly a mistake. I had to make separate ears and sew them on, as well as add a face with elements other than felt. The felt piece on the bottom of the rabbit really made me step-up my sewing skills.

 Once I sewed the sides together and turned the rabbit right-side-out, he looked more promising. Still, he lists a little to one the left, and I can just hope that that is an endearing quality, rather than shoddy workmanship. 

And I really like the rear view.

Now that I have the experience of creating two felt stuffed animals, I want to do more! The problem is that if I make more, I will HAVE more, and even though my intent was to give them away as gifts, I'm not quite sure the crooked rabbit make the cut. I fear I would end up with an army of off-kilter stuffed animals that might be unsuitable as gifts. On the other hand, maybe they shouldn't be looking a gift rabbit in the mouth. (Note: stuffed rabbit does not have a mouth.)

What animals would you like to see made?