Wall decor - Bird Silhouette

LOVED THIS!!!

This is my new favorite craft project! It is a little time consuming though but you could almost get it don't in a day if you are organized :) Start with a canvas and decoupage some newspaper around the sides, you will be putting burnt book pages on the top but the paper is pretty thick its hard to get it to wrap around the sides.

                                    
 Rip the book pages. Pages with larger paragraphs look better in my opinion that ones with alot of gaps. Rip several shapes so you can piece them together easily later.

                                     

WARNING!! Get a large bowl of water ready in case one of the pages gets out of hand. It would probably be a good idea to do this outside on a sidewalk or something not on a kitchen table with paper all around you but well whatever :P

Singe the edges of the pages with a candle - stay in a well ventilated area because the ink could very well be toxic... IF a page gets out of control blow on it fast and forcefully and it should do out, I learned that blowing too lightly will just make the page burn faster. You can also drop a page into your bowl or water and then take it out and let it dry if you still want to use it.

To get the smudged look it worked better to use a candle with a large wick that has a large flame. you can also take some ashes from other pages and smear it with your finger onto the page but I didn't like that look so much.

Mix Elmer's glue and water to get a paste and glue the pages onto your canvas. It works best to bruch on the glue to the canvas and the backside of the page - it sticks better and then do another coat on the whole thing to seal it and make it shiny.

Make some templates the size of your canvas from computer paper. Sketch a tree branch onto your paper and then cut it out to make a stencil.  

I am a TERRIBLE artist, I can barely  draw a stick figure that looks remotely like a homosapian. However some tips I have for making a branch look real are to get an image off google to work from. Make the branches get smaller as you move away from the trunk and end a branch by it dividing.
 

Trace the branches onto your canvas. You made your paper template the size of your canvas so this should fit on your canvas perfectly.

I used acrylic paint, shiny black.

I got the bird silhouettes from google, you can also cut them out of a magazine. I used a black sharpie and colored them in to make them look like a silhouette. Decoupage them on. What you will find is the glue changes the color of the black paint on the branches so just go back and touch up the spots that have dried glue on them with more paint.

                                              

Paper Lantern

Man have I been on a paper craft kick or what?!? This is a really easy project though!

Start with a paper lantern from the store, I'm sure you can get these from Walmart or Target, this one was given to me so not sure where to buy it.

The tissue paper if from Target. HUGE shout out to Target for having brown tissue paper!!! It took a stop to 3 different craft stores, a mad dash to the ladies room after TWO bubble teas and a cranky manager trying to hurry my impulse purchasing but I finally found it at Target. AND Target had a Starbucks which is where I got the tissue paper with the writing on it. Just buy a drink and be nice to the Barista and you can get some too ;)

Cut out circle from the tissue paper. I used a dixie cup as a template.

I used the rings made by the wire inside the lantern as a guide to just spiral your way around.  I made a 2/3 glue 1/3 water decoupage paste to glue them on. I think it got a little too clumpy at the bottom ( where you start - work your way up so the tissue paper layers easily ) So I would just start at the 2nd or third 'ring' if I made this again.



Whimsical Flowers on Canvas

This is a really easy project that you could do in an afternoon - Great rainy day craft :)

This project is made with a rectangular canvas, scrap book paper, wooden stir sticks, hot glue and Elmers glue.

To make these flowers you will need eight circles of decorative paper, another circle or peice of scrap paper for the backing.

Fold the circle into quarters and then fold one edge over from line to line so it looks like this.

Repeat with adjacent side it should now look like this:

NOTE: I shaded in with pencil so you could see the different sides, when I actually made these I didn't draw the dotted line or anything on it i just eye-balled where it needed to fold.

Flip your circle over and fold so the flat edge (that you just made by folding the side) so it lines up with the center of the opposite side. When you do this with both of the quarter sides it should look like this:

This is one of the eight 'petals' for your flower, glue them onto a scrap paper to hold them all together.

The back will look like this. This is a sample one that i was practicing with - when you glue them make sure the petals line up more evenly than this one ;)

You  can also use a 3D sticker like this one...

The grass that you see is just scrapboo paper that I cut a strip about and inch and a half wide and freehanded some irregular cuts to make it look like grass. You could also do thinner slices so it looked like long narrow grass.

Hot glue the sticks and flowers. Mix 2/3 Glue and 1/3 water and decoupage the grass and leaves on.

NOTE: You can also take a piece of cardboard and paint it white if you don't want to buya canvas...

DIY Paper Lantern Garland

So here is my first blog of a craft idea. YAY! I hope anyone that happens along likes what you see and happy crafting :)

You will need:

Dixie cups - I used plastic white ones but I think paper would be fine.

Scrapbook or other decorative paper

Hot glue gun

Christmas lights

Step 1: Cut out the paper sot hat it will fit snug around the cup. You can get a template by wrapping a piece or plain lined paper around your cup and cutting that to fit ( don't use youe nice paper to figure out how it needs to be cut, you might have to shave a little off and try a couple times but you'll get it :) Trace your shape onto your paper and cut out.

If you have some paper that is solid collor you can dress it up using shaped hole punches.

Step 2: Using your glue gun make a thin line (your cups can melt!) to adhere the paper and wrap the paper around the cup. add onother line of glue to secure the paper and viola!!

Step 3: You will probably have a little extra paper at the top so just trim that off for a more neat end product.

Step 4: With a razor or xacto knife cut an 'X' into the bottom of your cup

It should look like this ---

Step 5: Press the little Christmas lights through the X you made until it doesn't slide off easily.

The paper with the hole punched shaped looks really stunning with the lights on :)

Hang somewhere you'll enjoy it and admire all your hard work!

Blog Splog...

I can not believe I am writing a blog. I don't journal, I don't write as a general rule. But I do muse and more importantly I CRAFT!! And I cook, bake and generally enjoy being creative so why not a blog?? I'm sure the cyber world is just DYING to hear what I'm thinking on any given day... well prabably not but you might be interested in the crafty sort of things I come up with, If that is the case, Welcome! This is going to be great ;)