Button Magnets & More Wall Art

Truth be told, I would have had a craft day whether it was a snowpocalpyse or not. Yesterday was fun and relaxing, but today I needed to do something! So I did two different projects. First up, we have button magnets! This is hands down THE easiest DIY project ever. Supplies needed: variety of buttons and magnets. I got the adhesive backed magnets, but you could get just *magnets* and hot glue them to the buttons.

Seriously, that's all there is too it. Before, we had ridiculous Elvis magnets. Yeah, it was fun to change his little outfits, but our fridge looked hideous.
And now it's darling! Eventually, I would like to make more with different colors. But for now this will do.
The second project is a "why buy that when i can make it" project. I saw this cool felt wall decor on etsy. For my version, I used an old shirt and some thick white fabric that my grandma gave me. This project is also pretty easy, but it is tedious. First, I stretched the shirt over an embroidery hoop.
Next, I made 5 medium sized flowers and 3 big flowers out of the white fabric. This is the time consuming part because I had to trace each petal and cut them all out, then glue the bottom of each petal, THEN glue them all together. Probably 50% of the glue ended up on my fingers.
Lastly, I arranged the flowers in a cascade over one side of the hoop and hot glued them down.
It matches my bathroom perfectly! So I hung it above the towel rack. Ét, voila! C'est tres mignon, n'est pas?

Ice Day!

As soon as I heard that we were expecting a blizzard of epic proportions, I crossed my fingers that today would be a snow day. And it is! My daily computer ritual involves checking gmail, facebook, and craftgawker. Here's the thing about craftgawker: sometimes you find one jackpot of a post that leads to MORE posts and blogs. And those lead to more, etc., etc. Today I fell down the craft blog rabbit hole. Poor husband has been trying to get my attention for the past few hours. Finally he resorted to video games (boo hoo, I'm sure he's heart broken). Here are lots of blogs with free things for you!

Lollychops has a variety of cute downloads, from gift tags to patterned paper

My Owl Barn has an adorable (and customizable!) 2011 calendar

Free Pretty Things For You is the place to find vintage freebies

Feed Your Soul is a "free art project" where you can download pdfs to create instant art

Over at Just Something I Made, you can find tons of downloads. My favorite are the cannister labels!

Creature Comforts has lots of lovely freebies and projects

Easy Wall Art

I have been making weekly trips to Hobby Lobby in the hopes that canvas will be on sale. Even though canvasses haven't been on sale, I haven't had any trouble finding other things to buy at Hobby Lobby. I digress, though. On a "just looking" trip to Big Lots, I stumbled on a set of TWO canvasses for $6!!! I bought them so I could finally reproduce a project I had seen on Blue Cricket Design. I decided to use gray and yellow (my favorite color duo) to match our bedroom and hang them above our bed. Don't mind the crappy pictures, they were taken on my new phone.

You can see the tutorial and the original art here.

R-Lo and Auj: Craft Day, or "Hold Me Closer, Tiny Tailor"

Finally, a day off! I "slept in" (which is now, sadly, 8a.m.) and took about an hour to wake up. I started reading a book, but I just couldn't get into it. So I decided to do my other favorite day-off activity - crafting! I figured my friend Auj would be up for some refashion projects, so I invited her to bring some old clothes and shoes over to see what we could come up with. I planned on doing 2 things: a men's plaid shirt refashion, and a bleach pen shirt design. The bleach pen shirt seemed like the easier of the two, so I went ahead and did that first. Success! Then it was time to move onto the men's shirt refashion. It pretty much involved cutting off the sleeves, creating a new neckline, and adding ruffles. As a non-sewer, this seemed like a pretty good beginner's project. At first it went well...I mean, cutting is easy! But when it came time to sew, it was a disaster! The thread kept bunching up in crazy ways or getting caught in the bobbin somehow, or breaking (seriously?!?). I tried for hours and could not manage to make a ruffle. At this point, Audrey had made some super cute boots and a bleach pen shirt. She brought in her Singer Tiny Tailor (her mom found it for $2 at a garage sale!) so we could try the ruffles on her machine. That too was an epic fail. It was the most confusing bobbin set up process I have ever experienced. Finally, we gave up on sewing. On the bright side, I know how to thread my machine and put in a new bobbin. And we came out of it with some cute new things!

Audrey's bleach pen desgin: a super cute owl!

Boots made from old flats and sweater sleeves.

My bleach pen shirt design

And my headband!!!!!!!!

I have another craft day planned for tomorrow with L-Mo. I'm hoping it yields much better results!

Monogrammed Wreath

I love having days off! Lately, I've been reading on my days off rather than cleaning or cooking or being any sort of useful. Sometimes I like to go to craftgawker to get inspiration when I'm just lounging around in my free time. Last night's post-work craftgawker browsing yielded so many potential projects, my bookmark bar is exploding with crafty goodness! I stumbled upon a lot of craft blogs I had never seen before and found a good three or four projects I wanted to try. So today, I went thrifting and Hobby Lobbying with my mom and sister. Joey and I went ahead and did a monogrammed wreath project I saw on The Diary of Dave's Wife. If you want to create your own, you'll need:

1) a picture frame

2) 2-3 pieces of coordinating scrap book (or Stampin' Up!) paper

3) mod podge, craft glue, and hot glue gun

4) some cute brads

5) acrylic paint

6) a wooden, metal, or paper letter found at Hobby Lobby or Michael's

First, we painted our frames and our letters. Joey painted hers the same color. I originally did the same, but ended up painting my "L" black and my frame yellow.

While all this was drying, we moved on to the paper portion. We used mod podge to adhere paper to the frame's backing. We also used to other coordinating pieces of paper to cut out 3" circles. The circles are made into little medallions. For each medallion, we used 4 circles and a brad.
Joey did all the cutting! Then we folded the circles twice to make triangles. These we glued to a 3" circle that we cut out of scrap paper. In the center, we glued a flower and pushed the brad through the center.
Lastly, we used hot glue to attach the medallions to the frame. I love how Joey's turned out. She did a great job!
And here is mine. We still need to buy ribbon so we can hang them on our doors. But I can only handle so much in one day. I can't wait to finish them though and hang them on our doors!

Pizza Puffs

I had been wanting to try out a recipe I saw on Noble Pig (a wine and gourmet food blog I stumbled upon) for quite some time. My fried Amber's housewarming party seemed like a great opportunity to make them! So I quadrupled the recipe, used a big muffin pan instead of a mini one, and made both pepperoni and cheese. It was very easy and pretty delicious.

This is the recipe for 12 normal size puffs:

1-1/2 cup flour
1-1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1-1/2 cup whole milk
2 eggs
8 ounces mozzarella cheese, shredded (about 1 cup) (I used provelone)
8 ounces pepperoni, cut into small cubes (about 1 cup)
1 cup pizza sauce
4 Tablespoons finely chopped fresh basil

1) Pre-heat oven to 375 and grease muffin pan.

2) Mix flour and baking powder in large bowl.
3) Add milk, eggs, cheese, and pepperoni. Let stand for 10 minutes.
4) Pour into muffin pan, then bake until puffed and golden. This should be 20-25 minutes.
5) Warm pizza sauce in microwave. Sprinkle puffs with basil and serve with sauce.
There you have it. Simple and delicious! Great for a party or just a snack.

Organize Yourself!

Anyone who knows me knows that I thrive off of structure and organization. I'm always looking for better ways to organize and keep track of my schedule. A new challenge in my life is meal planning! I hate it, absolutely hate it. I spend hours online looking for recipes that husband and I both will enjoy, that are easy and somewhat healthy. THEN I start a grocery list. Then I have to back through and edit the list so the items are in the order of the grocery store. It takes FOREVER and I hate it. Here's the light at the end of the tunnel: Mealfire.com!

It's very easy to use. You can create your own recipes or add their little bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar. When you come across a recipe online, you just click the "save to mealfire" bookmark and it saves to your account! Once you have a library of recipes, you can just drag them to the day on the calendar that you want to make them.
Another awesome feature is that it creates a grocery list for you. Select the recipes on the calendar that you want to create the grocery list for and BAM!
And best of all...You can input the grocery store layout and then it will organize your grocery list based on the store's layout! There is also a handy mealfire app for iPhone. Now I love meal planning!