Extreme Makeover: Piggie Bank Edition

She started out as a simple pink piggie bank. Then a career shattering accident destroyed her. We've rebuilt her into a new and improved, more glamorous piggie bank.

Here's what happened. We bought my daughter a simple $10 pink piggie bank from Target. They are super cute. The other day she put the bank on the corner of her night stand and gravity won the ensuing battle. So I carefully gathered the pieces and glued them back together. There were a lot of cracked pieces so it was obvious the piggie would need some serious reinforcement. I decided to decoupage her with tissue paper (old sewing patterns to be exact) in 2 or 3 coats. Once that was completely dry, I gave her 2 coats of white paint. She has more texture now, since the tissue paper didn't go on super smoothly (I was intending to turn her into an art piece for my shelf, not give her back to my daughter.) But I like the texture under the paint, it gives her character and camouflages the places where I didn't get her glued back together smoothly.

Sadly, I cannot take credit for drawing her fancy adornments. They are simple scrapbooking stickers that I cut and carefully placed to make her "wings", "shoes", ears and eye lashes (oh and what I think may be a tramp stamp.) Then I took my very cool Tul permanent markers and highlighted the designs. I think she turned out pretty glamorous. And just to make sure no one peels the stickers off, I then sealed the whole bank with a coat of Mod Podge.

DIY Jewelry Organizer

Lately I've been noticing what a big mess my dressing table seems to be. I have a nice jewelry box where I keep my expensive jewelry, a store-bought organizer for my costume jewelry and I keep my bracelets on vases. But it looks cluttered. And tacky. And I wasn't overly thrilled with the store-bought organizer. What to do?

Well the obvious solution is DIY!!! So after a few fails (and I mean epic fails that basically ruined the store-bought organizer) I decided to hit the thrift stores and find a sturdy shelf that could hold my necklaces, earrings, dangling earrings, rings and bracelets. Not as easy as it sounds, but for $4.99 I found this:

It isn't gorgeous, but it has the bare bones of something useful. Since the brackets on the bottom shelf were broken, I took the shelf apart and removed all the brackets. Then I decided to move the bottom shelf down (there were already holes drilled where I think it might have attached to a dresser or something.) Then I broke out the Clorox wipes and cleaned it up.

Oh, and here is Jack demonstrating that the shelves are placed approximately sausage-sized-cat apart.

See? Better already.
My first approach at painting the shelf was a black and white motif with women's silhouette's...my husband wasn't too thrilled with that. And before you ask, the organizer is going into OUR bedroom so I guess HE should get A SMALL bit of say in how it looks. He's more conservative than me, prefers neutrals and would be happier if I only wore small unobtrusive jewelry. Yeah, trying to please him only goes so far.
I went down to the storage room and found an old can of latex paint. It's satin finish, which I like, and a nice pale brown. My original plan was to do the pale brown base coat, use lace as a stencil and spray paint a dark brown over the lace. Would have been gorgeous...but not for $7.97 a yard for lace. Never one to pass up a bargain, I noticed that sheets of duct tape were on clearance. I figured, I can print on the duct tape (right 'cause anything will go through my printer,) and then cut the shapes out, use them as stencils with the spray paint and peel them off.

All I'd need to do was whip out my really cool rotating finger knife and cut out some butterflies.

Flaw #1 The printer would absolutely not feed the duct tape sheet through.
Flaw #2 The duct tape was hard to cut through the backing paper, and as a result, not all the butterflies came out pretty.
Flaw #3 My carpal tunnel wasn't feeling the whole carve 3 sheets of duct tape with extreme pressure on the blade to get all the way through.

So I just traced over the butterflies I had printed on regular paper onto the backing paper side of the duct tape sheet. There isn't any ink transfer but you get the impression to work with. I whipped out my scissors and cut out as many as I could get in various sizes - I ended up just using 2 sheets. All that was left was to apply them in a pleasing design, spray paint over them and then peel them off.

Flaw #1 When you put duct tape shapes onto latex paint and then try to peel it off, it takes the paint with it.

Now I have something I kind of like. I can scrap the whole spray-paint idea (it's cold and windy out anyway) and just leave it pale brown with the shock of neon pink butterflies scattered over it. It appeals to my need for color and hopefully it will appeal to his belief that it has to "fit in" with the rest of the bedroom.

But I'll have to leave the story off for now. I have decided to use 3 vintage coke bottles to keep my bracelets on, probably hot glued to the shelf...and I have a rough idea for my dangling earrings and necklaces...but so far no real victories in coming up with a DIY earring holder for post earrings. Oh and I want to make one of these for my rings, but I don't have a pair of heels to do it with just yet.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Organization Ideas! Updates to the Garage & Studio

My daughter, who just turned 8, recently came home from my husband's parents' house with his old skateboards. She likes them so much that she decided to earn her "Make Your Own" badge in Girl Scouts for skateboarding, and wanted to get a better board with her birthday money. Yesterday she found a great sale and got an $80 Tony Hawk board for $30!!! I insisted she get safety gear (knee & elbow pads and wrist guards). But this created a teensy little problem, now I have rolling things to trip and fall on in the garage....

My husband's solution was a simple set of shelf-rails and brackets for the skateboards plus a shelf on top for their safety gear. All of this is tucked behind the back door of the garage.

As you all know, I've been working on my studio for awhile. I've been thinking I need some sort of organization under my desk, a cubby system maybe. I like this one from the site, Why Not Do It Yourself

But that particular method involves me spending money, something I hate to do when I can find a free way instead. As luck would have it, I have 2 cats, and therefore we go through a fair amount of litter. I like Tidy Cat clumping litter and it comes in these cool plastic buckets. I am sure the idea behind the bucket is to take them in and get them refilled at a discount, but no one in our town does that. So the buckets just piled up in my shed.

I counted up and I had 10 buckets sitting around unused (I have in the past used them as wastebaskets, and recycling buckets.) In order to make them stack nicely, I had to first pull off the lids, then take the handles off. I cut my hand doing one lid and hit my knuckles at least 10 times taking the handles off, but it was worth it. I sprayed them out with the garden hose and then brought them down to the studio. Here the are as my new cubbies:

My table is big enough for 4 buckets to lay on their sides and 1 up across the bottom and then 3 on their sides and 2 up across the top level. They are nice and snug so I didn't need to drill any holes for zip ties, but that wouldn't be a bad idea in the long run.

They are holding miscellaneous items for me, but I think they'd be a great solution to organizing a small fabric collection for sewing or for larger crafting supplies.

Have you ever heard this rant:

The garage is the only place in this house that I can really call mine!

Yeah, my husband has told the girls and I this particular fact more than once. So after the last time he got mad about the garage being left in disarray, my 7 (almost 8) year old said, "Let's make the garage really special for him!" So we started hatching plans. We figured we needed wall hangings, his favorite mascots and maybe some furniture.

Our first idea was a big sign proclaiming the garage to be Dad's. Here's the graphic I came up with:


I removed the "established date" from this picture in case someone wanted to use it. You can use this image or email me if you would like a higher resolution copy.

I started out with the idea of using an overhead projector to put the sign on the wall and painting it like a traditional mural. There were 2 problems though:
1. The garage needed a second coat of paint and I had no idea when that would happen
2. My 7 year old needed to help with the mural for a GS badge and I didn't figure she needed to be on a ladder.
So, how to create the sign inexpensively? I found white foam core at our local dollar store - 20x30 sheets. So I bought 3. Then I had to figure out how to get the design big enough and transferred over to the foam core. I used the website BlockPosters to enlarge my image to poster size. Then a friend suggested rubbing the back of the taped together poster with a dark colored chalk. Place the chalk-side down on the foam core and trace the design with a ballpoint pen, being careful not to puncture the paper/foam core.

[Now here is where I want to give you a hint. If you are using foam core, it probably has a paper coating that you'll actually be doing the painting on. In a garage, it may be exposed to moisture. It would be smart to paint a base coat of white paint (or whatever background color you choose) on the foam core BEFORE you transfer and paint the design. I learned this the hard way.]

Painting the sign was pretty standard. I started by outlining all the black areas so that my daughter could do the fill work, and theoretically not go outside the lines. I need to work with her on the concept of pulling the paint along instead of pushing it. So after she did the fill work, I went back and cleaned up the edges (sometimes more than once.) We then discovered that the checkered flag was too difficult to differentiate from the wrench, so I went back and painted the flag with gold paint. Here's the finished sign:


The next idea was to give my husband a little bit of functional furniture for the space. The garage really is a garage though. It has his tool bench, cupboards for storage, bike/toy storage and 2 cars in it. We weren't going to be able to find a couch for him. But he does have an old t.v. out there and on nice evenings we like to sit in the cross-breeze from the back and front yards while the kids play outside. So we thought we could give him a cool fold up table for beverages. I checked my local garage sale website and found someone with wooden t.v. tray tables. She gave me one for $3 because it had marker on it. We brought it home and painted the top black. Then we started arranging our bottle cap collection on it. We didn't have quite enough (a lot of the caps were used to make GS Christmas ornaments) so we added cool vintage Budweiser coasters and started gluing. As you can see, we are still a few caps short, but we are taking donations from friends and we'll have it full in no time. Then we will see what my husband wants to use to finish it, but I'm leaning towards self-leveling epoxy to make a nice hard finish.


The final step was adding his mascots. I had 6 metal trays that I thought would make cool wall hangings, all I had to do was come up with stencils for them. Without thought I was able to come up with the Chicago Bears, Jeff Gordon and the Nebraska Huskers. I found acceptable images and printed them off as big as I could get on a 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I could go into how to cut a stencil, but really, here's a great tutorial that will probably explain it better: Stencil Tutorial
My husband was okay with the first 3 signs but then he said, "what about the Oakland A's, the Atlanta Hawks and the Pittsburgh Penguins?" Okay, it was my fault for not thinking of the A's, but in the 12 years I've known this man, I've never heard him mention the Hawks or the Penguins. Oh well, whatever makes him happy. They turned out okay but the Huskers one is a second generation - I overcut the first and then gluing it down to paint with was nearly impossible - and the Penguins almost went flying across the room about 30 times before I got it done.








So that's the garage makeover. He likes it and we're pretty proud of ourselves.

At last, at last! My Studio!

For those of you who know me, you know that I don't really have a room in the house to call my own, a place where I can create and feel free to leave my stuff laying around however I like. In the last year, 1/3 of our family room (a long narrow room) had been set aside for me. But it lacked a lot of what I needed: shelves and a division from the kids' play area. I decided that if I could create this space myself, with a limited budget, I would be that much prouder of it. The first step was to take what I had and organize what I could. I started out with my sewing cabinet, 2 sets of plastic drawers, a 6 foot conference table, a sofa table and a homemade shelf that could stand on a table, plus a few odds and ends like plastic storage boxes, a drawer-style organizer (like my husband uses for nuts and bolts,) and baskets. I am a huge Pinterest user. So I've been pinning my ideas for Organization and Decor on a dime. I figured the best way to start was with my messiest supplies. So I decided to organize my ribbon and fibers. I took my inspiration from Sippy Cup Mom, I went to Wal-Mart's paint counter and asked for some paint mixing sticks. The lady gave me a handful without blinking (they also don't care if you take one of every single paint sample card they have.) I took my homemade shelf and attached a small curtain rod that I had laying around. I also had the little hooks designed to hang the curtains, so I used those to hang the paint sticks which were wrapped with my ribbons. I have a lot more ribbons and fibers than what you see on my paint sticks, I just didn't have the time or space to add them all to this organizer. The ones already wrapped nicely on cardboard bobbins stayed in their case and the ones too big and bulky were placed in a drawer of one of my plastic drawer sets.

I also liked Sippy Cup Mom's jars, so I picked up small jars during canning season so they were on sale, and nailed the lids to the underside of my shelf. Arranging the buttons by color has helped so much! I also keep my hot glue sticks (plain and colored) in some of the jars and my sequins. On top of the shelf is my little drawer organizer. I decided to make it pretty by cutting and gluing paint sample cards to each drawer (I kind of have a thing for rainbows.) But then I realized there was no way to tell what was in each drawer, so I used little plastic game pieces and rub-on letters and numbers to set up a grid system. Then I wrote out an index of what is in each drawer - in pencil for easy changing. It's a new system and I'm still working the kinks out. I have a wonderful husband who can do just about any job around the house, but he hates to hang shelves. So I decided I could do it myself. In our back yard I found deck planking salvaged from my brother-in-law's house that was around 12 feet long. So I got out the circular saw and cut each one in half. I had room for 3 shelves, so I save the 3 in the best shape (as a side note, my husband has forbidden me from ever using the circular saw again, saying I was going to cut my head off one day, whatever that means.) After the shelves were cut, I scrubbed them down with pine sol and attached my brackets. Okay, as a disclaimer, I thought I placed them correctly. But 2 days ago when my husband came to help put them up, I had apparently measured the studs wrong and the brackets had to be removed and replaced. That's when I learned how to remove a stripped screw. But yesterday we got the shelves up and I started putting my stuff on them. It's nice to get all my stuff up off of the floor!

We tossed around a lot of ideas of how to divide my space from the kids' play area. My first thought was to wall my section in and make a bonus room, but my husband didn't think that was a good idea. So then we decided on a false wall of some sort. The first plan was for a room divider made of old doors. Old doors can be expensive, but when you check with your friends and in your community, you can get them pretty cheap. So it seemed like that was the plan until I realized my only light source was from the ceiling fan in the kids' play area. A divider made of doors was going to remove most of my light and the air-flow the fan provides. So plan b was to create a false wall with pallets - with the stipulation that he find them. They had to be oak pallets. The false wall I like came from this article on Dump A Day. So that was the plan...until I found a brand new 3 section room divider at a garage sale for $15. I talked the lady down to $12 because that was all I had. The divider was meant to hold pictures, but I figured, why not make it more functional? This is also a work in progress, but I started with the first panel adding my wine cork collection to make a simple cork board (I ran out of corks so I might go back and cut them in half and re-glue.) The second section I just put black paper in and then I hung my thread organizer in front of it. I got the organizer for $10 at Wal-Mart and painted it black. Since I earn extra money by sewing badges on Girl Scout vests, I need a lot of colors. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my favorite thrift store sells them for a quarter apiece! The third section is a fabric picture board. I have not yet chosen how to utilize the next level of panels, but I'll come back to it when I do.

The last big issue was how to store my pens, pencils, markers, brushes, pliers, tools and other small odds and ends. I have a 5 year old daughter who can't seem to hear me when I explain that my scrapbooking pens and markers are not for her coloring books, and I still can't figure out what she did with my good acrylic paint brushes. Plus I had an open space where the corners of the big table and the sewing cabinet met up. I decided to use a homemade card case (my father-in-law built the cases and the shelf, plus some awesome CD cases. He's pretty handy), as my tool case. She would have a harder time getting into it, but it wasn't tall enough on it's own. I considered buying premade table legs for it but then I realized I had the larger of my 2 plastic drawer sets available. It houses all of my Girl Scout supplies and didn't need to be opened up from my main work area, so I faced it out into the play area and placed the tool box on top. It worked pretty well.

So that's where I'm at with the studio. Not a bad start. I'll update things as I work out the bugs. And look, I even had room to hang my toy collection, my favorite poster and to display my own art.

Rainbow Gum-Wrapper Weave Bracelet

Lately I've been seeing a lot of really neat art projects with rainbows. I love rainbows and I love the look of paint chips, plus they are free. So I've decided to create some rainbow wall art using paint chips. This post is not about that wall art. Okay, I played around with the paint chips for I don't know how long and realized that I couldn't make it work while they were in one piece.

So I started cutting my stack of chips apart, tossing the white segments off to the side. My paper cutter wasn't doing a great job cutting just the white off, or maybe I wasn't doing a great job of it. Anyway, I noticed that the growing pile of white strips had thin bands of colors around them that variegated up through the rainbow as I cut through my stack. So I'm sitting there, mindlessly cutting and trying to imagine what I could possibly do with those strips. I decided to try a gum-wrapper weave with them, like the one I did the Christmas tree garland out of. I worked through the colors, trying to keep the pinks, pinkish reds, reds, reddish oranges together and so on, but not stressing about making the order exact. The chain ended up being a couple of feet long. So, how to make it into a bracelet? I decided to use a can as my form (I liked the size of a can of baby clams. Not too big on my wrist but big enough to slip the bracelet off easily.) I wound the chain around the can and started "sewing" it together with an elastic cord. I didn't want it tight, since it is paper it needed to have some give to it. Also because I didn't stitch every single link together, it doesn't look quite as pronounced that the chains don't match up exactly in the zigzags.

There are a lot of different gum-wrapper weaving tutorials online. This one is pretty good, though it starts with a wider piece of paper than I did. It would be a stronger weave, but sometimes you just make do with what you got.

Homemade Christmas? Ornaments & Garland

'tis the season to make some holiday cheer! I have been hard at work on a few Christmas projects. First off, we have a yearly fundraiser at the library and I was asked for some ideas of what I would put onto our tree this year. One of my jobs at the library is to help sort and sell donated books. Sometimes books are in such bad shape that I can't do anything with them but throw them into the recycling bin. (Some people cannot throw books away, no matter how bad of shape they are in.) Apparently there has been a 'fall cleaning' mindset going on in our town because we have had so many books donated that I have no room to put them onto the sales shelves. So I said to myself, we're a library, couldn't we make ornaments out of old books? I quick search on the internet later and I knew this was going to be fun. I didn't expect the whole tree to have my "recycled books" theme, but the director liked the idea and was willing to give me the chance to run with it. I found inspiration for the paper tree topper at Great Green Goods. The topper is actually 2 pieces tied around the top of the tree. The backbone is a page from a very badly torn board book. I then made 12 spiral rolls of pages from picture books and hot-glued them on to the backing. Then I made 12 spiral rolled pages of old romance novels (which were about 1/2 the size of the picture book pages,) and glued them in between the first set of spiral rolls. To make a center for the topper, I added one of the fanned ornaments made out of picture book pages and glued on a sparkly snowflake.

The fanned ornaments were an idea I found on the blog Pinecone. I didn't make them with two layers but we did use the button center idea and the assistant director helped me out by adding glitter to the edges of the ornaments.

We made the cutest round ornaments that I found on the blog Craftside out of children's books that had broken spines. I liked this type of paper best, it is heavier grade and holds up better.

The last touch for the tree was to make a garland. I cut strips of paper about 1/2 inch by 6 inches long from old romance novels, kids' books, graphic novels and atlases These were randomly woven into a gumwrapper weave. You can find instructions and videos on how to do this all over the internet.

The final touches that really brought the tree together were the great idea by a coworker to use glitter hairspray to add some sparkle to the fanned ornaments and the tree topper, old fashioned strands of silver icicles and a random box of vintage glass ornaments we found stashed in the storage room marked, "Janitorial Supplies." I think the tree topper looks like a prairie windmill and so I'm going to give my tree a title: Homemade 1940s Prairie Christmas.