Another Scrap Frenzy Complete

I’m a chronological scrapbooker, it must be the OCD.  All of my kids albums are done in order.   I spent an entire day working on covering the last years worth of photos.  I call this a scrap frenzy.  In a days time, I completed 19 12X12 layouts and one 8X8.

The 8X8 layouts are always a single photo that strikes me.  Most are of family members.   I have my own little scrapbook just for me that I keep these layouts in.

Today’s 8X8 was a layout of my Mom.  My brother has the original, color photo, but I scanned it and had it printed in black and white.   Mom’s pants, in real life were pink & white checks, she wore them a lot, they matched her pink cotton candy lipstick that she loved to wear back in the day.

Since the photo was in black and white I thought it needed some bright color.   The colors in the photo aren’t “true”.  There’s some fuchsia and red in there with the oranges.

I think it turned out lovely, so I thought I’d share it with my faithful readers.

Prayer Journal Craft

Here’s a quick and easy craft that allows you to show your own style without it needing to be “perfect”.   The handy dandy prayer journal.

You’ll need a little hard back journal or a composition book, some Modge Podge or craft glue and scrapbook paper and embellishments.  You could even use some of the new colored duck tape.

If your journal has a slick feel, you’ll need to sand it a bit so your papers stick.  Apply a thin coat of your glue to the front cover or your book.  Make sure you put glue in between papers that overlap.   Once the front cover looks the way you want, put a thing layer of glue over it all and then allow it to dry completely.   Repeat the same steps on the back cover.

Now, the day before I was going to actually assemble my journal I happened to be in the craft section at a local department store and found sheets of cloth duck tape for $1.88 a sheet.  It was the perfect size for the little journal so I bought a sheet and gave that a whirl this time.

The front and back are both colored in the colorful cloth.  Then I took a piece of thin, sparkly ribbon and hot glued it to the front, starting at the bottom and taking the ribbon up and over the top edge.   The ribbon will now be a self attached book mark.  I threaded a few beads onto the end of the ribbon.  Then I added the shiny charm at the top and the sticker in the middle.  The charm is hot glued on the inside cover and the sticker is self adhesive and it reads “The Journey of a Thousand Miles Must Begin With a Single Step”.

It’s  a bit hippie looking, but I think I like it!

The Crafty Ballet Mom, Part 2

Way back in February I shared a post with you entitled The Crafty Ballet Mom.   Truth be told, it’s probably one of my funniest posts, or at least to me it was.   If you didn’t read it, pop over and do so now, and see how I made these lovely faux cotton candy props.

Here we are in spring recital mode.  The ballet instructor once again asked me to use my creativity to work on props.  She apparently has more confidence in my ability than I do. 

Anyway, she shoved a lovely little tangerine colored tutu into my hands and asked for fourteen tiny bouquets for the fourteen tiny dancers to hold during their dance.   The class is a young group, and without something in their hands they tend to flop their little arms around like little baby birds trying to learn how to fly.

I took the little tangerine tutu (which I should have photographed but didn’t) and headed to the craft store.   I  came home with this wonderful pile of crafty goodness.

The little roses are just a tiny shade lighter than the tutu, and the little greenish/white accent flowers are the exact shade as the edging on the tutu skirt.   Luckily there were 8 roses per bunch, so I only had to buy two bunches (and they were on sale, score!).

I used the husbands wire cutters to separate the roses and accent flowers into nice, neat little piles.

Next I paired up the roses with the accent flowers, to make sure I had enough of each.  This is an important step so you don’t get to the end and realize you’re out of accent flowers.  I learned how important this was in my original The Crafty Ballet Mom.

I did see that a couple of the bouquets were going to need some more accent flowers.   I made another trip to the craft store and bought one more group of accent flowers, and I also bought some white glitter tulle.  This is where things got ugly, and painful.

The goal with the tulle was to add some fullness and sparkle to the bouquets.  What I didn’t realize is that the glitter off of the tulle would fall every so gently off of the tulle and onto the surrounding area…skin, clothes, the floor, it all had sparkles.  For days to come sparkles could be found in various places, some of which I’m quite sure God never intended to have sparkles, ahem.

Other than the sparkle issue, things were going relatively smoothly up until this point of the process.  I had wrapped the stems tightly together with floral tape, and added a few strips of the glitter tulle into the little bouquets.  Lovely, no?

In a moment of reckless abandon, my crafty mojo suddenly turned on me.   “Wrap the flower stems in sparkly tulle”, it said.  “In fact, hot glue the tulle on so that the little ballerinas don’t pull it loose”, cried the crafty mojo.   Why?  Why do I listen to these ideas?

Here you see the victim, placing the flower stem onto the folded sparkly tulle, the hot glue gun at the ready.

Searing, scorching pain shot through my fingers as hot glue and sparkly tulle became one blazing glob of crafty nightmare.   Sweet mother of all that is good, why?! Why did I listen to my crafty mojo?

Too far into the project to give up I pushed on, wrapping, gluing, uttering things like “good hooglie mooglie” in elevated tones.  With an occasional '”gaaaaaaaahhhhhh”  thrown in.  The children precariously peeked around the corner “Mom, you ok?”

Um, no, I’m not ok.  I’m burnt, and I’m stubborn and I will not give in.  It finally dawned on me (oh, say 7 or 8 bouquets later, because I’m quick like that) that if I didn’t pick the cooled dried glob of glue/tulle off between each bouquet, it would in fact not burn at all.  Ha! 

Sixteen little bouquets later (yes I made two extra, just in case), my task was complete.  Long live the conquering Crafty Ballet Mom!!

Stupid crafty mojo.

The Crafty Ballet Mom

There are several things I never expected to be called in my life.  One was mom, one was crafty and another was anything to do with ballet.   Yet, today this crafty ballet mom spent the day making props for the upcoming Performance Awards.   Funny, no?

My first project was to make flower holders for the “Flower Dance”.  This one was pretty simple.  I found some lovely little metal flower pots at the Dollar Tree, and some silk flowers.  The biggest issue was how to keep the flowers standing upright so the dancers could easily “pick” the flowers during their performance.  I’d planned on buying little plastic bottles, but in a moment of genius, I asked the pharmacist at Wal-Mart if I could have 8 little empty pill bottles for a project and he said yes.  Score!  (Although he did ask “and do you need LIDS?” as if he thought I may have had ulterior motives.)

I hot glued the pill bottles into the bottoms of the buckets, then hot glued fake grass around the edges to cover the orange bottles.  (I know I need more grass, but we are currently snowed in and a trip back to the Dollar Tree is on hold.)  Then I cut the stems of the flowers and wrapped them by two’s with floral tape, and tada!

The second project was for the “Cotton Candy Dance”.   So I came up with this stash of crafty goodness.

For future reference, Kool-Aid will NOT color polyester fiber fill.  However, liquid food coloring will.  You never know when you might need that bit of information, so store it in some deep corner of your mind, okay?

In order to color the polyester fiber fill, place a few drops of food coloring in a plastic zip lock bag, then shove some fiber fill in and begin wallowing it all around the bag.   You may need to add more food coloring as you go, but do NOT put it directly on the fiber fill unless you want it to look like it has chicken pox (ask me how I know).

Anyway, once you have your fiber fill the correct shade (or as close as you can get), then set it out to dry a few minutes.  Now this is where things get sticky, for real.   Lay a long bead of hot glue down the side of one of the paper cones (totally random thing I found at a clearance type store, I knew they’d come in handy one day!)  If you don’t have the “official” one’s you use for cotton candy, then roll up a piece of heavy paper and tape/glue it together.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the glue.   Now the hot glue instantly adheres to your poly fill, which instantly adheres to your hands.  Which burns and makes you scream things like “good hooglie mooglie” (or worse).   Consider yourself warned.

Now that you’ve got some of the poly fill glued to the cone, you just need to work it around, and around repeating the hot glue, burn, good hooglie mooglie steps as necessary.

Once you’ve blistered your hands, I mean finished gluing it all, then take it outside into a WELL ventilated, not windy place and spray it heavily with clear acrylic sealer.   Which by the way is highly flammable, an eye irritant and is harmful to breathe…but hey it works and gives you a nice little buzz.

In the event that you think that this would be a good time to squeeze your creation together to make it more firm, DON’T, because your hands will instantly stick to the colored, smelly polyester fiber fill and you’ll have to ask your child for help in dislodging it.  Don’t even ask.

When it’s all said and done, you’ll have some lovely fake cotton candy for some little ballerina to shred while waiting to go on stage.

You may also have hands that look like this.

I’m sure the stains will wash off by the time the blisters heal.

Craft it Forward Project

My friend Vicki posted a great little project on Facebook some weeks ago.  It was very simple.  You place a blurb on your Facebook page that says “Craft it Forward:  The first 5 people to comment will receive a handmade gift from me in the next year.   But you must repost this onto your page and craft it forward.”

This week with a snow/sick day combined for the girls I took the opportunity to knock out my five crafts.   If you HAPPEN to be a a personal friend named Donna or Michelle, and you commented on my post that day, you might want to stop reading here so you don’t see your giftie.    I’ll start with the other three and give you both time to GO AWAY.

First up is a project for a friend from our church plant team.   The colors didn’t pick up well in the photo, but the canvas has shades of green ink on it, and then the cardstock has some tangerine around the torn edges with a little rub on in the upper left hand corner.  Meghan is just so bubbly and seems so full of enthusiasm, and this saying just reminds me so much of her.  Although you can’t read it in this photo, hers says:

”Love life, engage in it, give it all you’ve got.  Love it with passion, because life truly does give back many times over, what you put into it”  ~ Maya Angelou

The next one is for a friend with several small grandchildren.   I used copper and cinnamon inks on the canvas and then added copper to the edges of the green cardstock. Joyce is always doing something with one of the grandchildren and this just made me think of her.

Next up is my friend Karen.  She too is a friend from church and a grandmother.  She’s also learning to do some new crafty things like quilting.  She’s making keepsakes for her children and grandchildren.  I used copper and black ink here and added some layering.

Michelle, GO AWAY NOW!

This one is for Michelle (surprise!)  Michelle is raising two girls and one boy, all very close in age and full of energy..and doing a great job.  She’s one of those moms who takes ordinary days and turns them into precious childhood memories.   I used pink and blue inks, and then layered some pink and blue paper.   The middle says:

“ While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.” ~ Angela Schwindt

Donna, WHY are you still here?  You’re as bad as Michelle, now go away.   This little birdie was supposed to be something grand…but it didn’t turn out as I’d planned.  Instead, I used some crimson and copper and black inks and turned it into a magnet for her fridge.  Every morning when she gets her half-n-half from the fridge she’ll see it and know that she is brave, and soaring into her destiny.  The photo doesn’t do it justice, it really is a very lovely piece.  Lindsey said “It looks like Auntie Binkie, it sparkles like her.”

It’s amazing how a few hours of creativity can produce this….

Recycled Christmas

My husbands company is having a recycled Christmas ornament contest, with PRIZES. Everything you use to make the ornament must be recycled or repurposed. This is what I came up with.

The base of the ornament is an old cd. The covering on both sides came from old Christmas cards. The fluffy fake snow is stuffing from a busted chair cushion. The sparkles in the snow is translucent wrapping ribbon cut into tiny pieces, and the ribbon is, well…ribbon.

It’s not stunning by any means, but it’s cute and I had fun with it.  Maybe, just maybe nobody else will enter and I’ll win by default!

What fun things are you crafting this year?