Ahoy! Welcome Prince

I'm just plain kicking myself for not taking better (or more) pictures of this craft project. What was I thinking? Just two decent pictures to show and only four pictures taken in all. And I'm so proud of this project. Today and, well, sometime soon I'm showing pictures of some crafts I created for a baby shower for a lovely lady from my church. Today I'm showing off the nautical theme flags. I see these sorts of stringed pennant flags in Pottery Barn kids catalogues (seriously, buy something from them once and you're on the list for years) and in Martha Stewart magazines and I was dieing to give them a try myself. Most of the flags you'll see are sewn. And I have a bit of a phobia about dusting off the sewing machine so I tried to think of how I could do pennants without using a sewing machine. And here's the recipe I came up with.
I'm a huge fan of liquid starch. It's uses are limitless. I completely saturated the fabric (approximately 2 yards) with the sticky stuff and hung the fabric over my shower bar to dry overnight. And when dry, the seersucker was like paper. I was able to cut it with scissors for paper and paint on it with poster paints. I cut an isosceles triangle out of a box of Ritz Crackers, leaving two little inch long tabs along the top of the triangle to use to attach the flags to the rope. And here's a true essential for something like this -- I created a template for where and how large to place the letters so that the lettering was consistent from "W" to "O" and each letter in between. I used the same box of crackers to cut out a box for the letter and I made sure that each letter touched the top, bottom and sides of the box when it was placed over each flag.
I used scrapbooking brads (cheap from the craft store) to attach the flags to the rope.
This is something worth doing for a party because it provides some great craft bang for your buck. I should also mention that a trio of Command Adhesive hooks anchored the project to its walls and came off with no problems. This project cost around $13 in total:

• Fabric -- $5 from the Harry Hines fabric outlets
• Brads -- $3 for 80
• Rope -- $2 from the hardware store
• Liquid Starch -- $3 from any old grocery store, near the fabric softeners and detergents.

And from that I have plenty of starch and brads left. The compliments came pouring in as the guests arrived for the party.

This May Look A Little Odd

This looks odd. For one thing, it's not a craft that photographs well. For another thing, well, it's not that great to start out with. But this is a dream of mine and this is my first crack at that dream and I'm pretty excited about it. So what you are looking at is a wine bottle that has been sawed in half and has two little holes drilled in it to thread wire through, then filled with little rocks, sand, and a pot with seeds in it. I'm going to hang the whole contraption in front of my window so that the little seeds will grow and plants will live in an old wine bottle. I'm going to make a series of these and hang them in my window. It's going to be some kind of recycled hanging gardens. Yeah, that sounds about right. Who wouldn't want a hanging wine bottle garden? Right now I've only got a small cache of empties to saw through. But I've got a bunch of full bottles. From now on, my place is always on tap! And I'm going to start bugging you about not throwing away your empties so I can get better at this glass cutting business. Do you see the roughness of those edges? It's pretty rudimentary. Let's not even mention the pair of cracks in the glass near the wire holes. Yikes. Hope the whole thing doesn't bust. Fingers crossed.

More details -- this is my first Drimmel project. My Nana gave me the Drimmel for Christmas. And it took me a while to locate the perfect bit -- I needed a round diamond tip. I visited a few hardware stores before the man at Elliots had just what I needed (which, of course, reminds me that I shouldn't ever try to find hardware somewhere before I have hit up Elliots). However, using a rotating diamond wheel on a piece of glass kinda terrified me. I had to pull out the old safety goggles from chemistry class (sometimes its good to be a partial packrat) and wear some dish gloves before I'd try this out. I practically had 911 on speed dial before I first placed the whirling, buzzing, Drimmel bit against the wine bottle. I was sure it would split into sharp splinters, flying at high speeds at my face, neck, arms, hands, priceless porcelain figurines, antique dishware, you name it (Ok, those last two don't exist, but still, a flying shard of glass is a pain where ever it goes). Of course, nothing of the sort took place. It did create a very grating sound -- like a million pieces of chalk squeaking on a chalk board -- and a cloud of fine powder filled the air. Holding the Drimmel steady is kinda tough and that's why the lines on my first try weren't very good. That plus I was too scared of getting hurt to do a good job. I think most of my fears were unfounded but I'm going to keep up the caution around the Drimmel. It's a little more risky than say, paper and glue (the subject of tomorrow's post). Anyways, I'm going to find that happy medium -- the Taoist wu wei -- between caution and precision, chaos and order for my next cut bottles. It shouldn't take me too many cases of Riesling to get one that is chiseled properly.

And finally, about the letter "e". There's no relevance. It can stand for anything under the sun -- eggplants, Ethiopia, energy... I bought a bunch of letters at Curiosities (on Abrams) and I thought it would be neat to attach one letter to each wine bottle/plant. Perhaps I'll spell out something when I'm all said and done. Starting with "e" is a good idea, since it's in like, every word.

It's A Wrap

There you have it! Fifteen pretty little packages wrapped in my homemade wrapping paper. Perhaps you can spot one that you received -- I know that a few of my readers (Katie, Dj Jazzy, Lucy) each have a little-green-tree-festooned box in that picture. I can't tell you how delightful the reactions I got to the paper were. I truly didn't expect it to get any reviews at all. I thought I would make it, use it and feel good on the inside that I did my part to conserve resources and be creative. I didn't dream that the gift recipients would get such a kick out it, too. Lots of people saved the paper. No joke! Uncle Jim, Mrs. Sue Woodward, my dad ... and those are the ones I know about. How touching! To think that my wrapping paper was good enough to save! I watched several of my readers who had the chance to open one of the above boxes try to guess what part of the two phrases they had received. If you recall, the options were, "Once upon a time" and "And they all lived happily ever after. The end."
I really enjoyed adding buttons and bows and various other doodads to each present. The pallet of green and off-white was really easy to work with. Red added such a pop and buttons dressed the packages up and made them very snazzy. And yet, a simple (and heavily hot glued) pine cone kept the paper feeling very natural.
Lots of design magazines and blogs really pushed for a homemade Christmas. And while I didn't have time to home make gifts for everyone on my shopping list, I was pretty excited to have homemade paper. I'm definitely going to be doing something like this again next year. I already have some ideas (and I'm 99% sure I will have forgotten them by next year, but just in case I wrote them on stickies and put them at the top of my Christmas decorations box on the top shelf of my closet). I hate to forget a good crafty idea.

Tree Saving Tree Wrap

I think I told you last week that I was planning to reuse the scrolls from my office Halloween. You remember, the ones that said, "Once upon a time" and "And they all lived happily ever after. The end." Added together, the scrolls measured 16' long, which will wrap plenty-o-Christmas presents. So I took my kitchen sponge, drew a tree on it, cut out the tree, and stamped little trees all over the scrolls in various greens and silver craft paint. What's great is that I was reusing the paper and I bought the paint when I was a sophomore in high school for a project for Mr. Jensen's English class. It was something artsy that had to do with A Tale Of Two Cities. And here I am a decade later using the same jars of paint for a Christmas project. A little ridiculous. But I'm giving myself a "Conservationist Queen" award for reusing and recycling and being environmentally conscious. Oh and you can't beat a project price of nil. And as long as I'm being super smug. Three cheers for me thinking about Christmas wrap before Christmas is hitting me over the head and is less than a week away. This year I've been getting so far behind in craft projects, I'm proud that I'm done with something Christmasy in November. I've even purchased three presents. Join me in praising myself on so many accounts... Haha. I took a picture of the supplies I needed to do the project. I think its pretty obvious that they are household supplies. Nothing fancy. I loved mixing the green colors across the sponge to produce trippy little striped trees. And they mixed in with the plain jane trees to make quite the forest. I can't wait to wrap presents with it! I love doing projects that require a lot of time, thought, planning, smarts, know how, expensive supplies and all that, but let me just tell you, it is truly liberating to do something as simple as sponge painting. This project required the motor skills of a third grader. Every once in a while, I do a project and think, you know, I could do this again and again. Sponge painting fits that bill. If you are ever in a crafty mood but don't want to have to work very hard to do something satisfying, try something like this. I already have plans for another type of wrapping paper for Christmas. I'm thinking that the next needs to be red and gold to counterbalance this green and silver one. Right?

Eyes Wide Open

OK, so I started my blog yesterday. And I feel tremendous pressure to take stock of all the creative things I've got going on and present them in an organized way. To borrow a fav copy editing verb, I'll be mulling things over for a bit. (Mull is a wonderful headline verb, since it basically means "think" or "ponder" but takes up half the space of those. That's a little lesson in headline writing from someone who quit that industry after a measily two years. Note, however, that one's coworkers on the copy desk will make fun of each and every use of the word "mull" because it's so lame/lazy.)
Until I decide how to introduce all my creative little projects, I thought I'd throw up this picture of plastic snowflakes (yep, Target sells them 20 for 2 dollars or something terribly cheap like that) that hang from the ceiling all over my kitchen. They are so cheap and plastic, but for one or two months a year (I pull the Thanksgiving-to-Epiphany Christmas season) they make me happy with their bright colors and shiny ways.