Retirement Wine Cork Ornaments

This year both my mom and my friend Kathee from Craft Club retired.  For something special, I made them both cork ornaments  using corks from the wine served at their retirement parties.   

Above are ornaments I made for Kathee symbolizing things that she would do in retirement, and below is a Christmas tree I made with the remaining corks. 

With some eyelet screws, beads, ribbon, and glue the possibilities of cork ornaments you could make is endless. This is an easy way to make a little reminder of any special occasion, just remember to save the cork!

Wooden Birthday Calendar

After seeing a lot of ideas for wooden birthday calendars on Pinterest, I thought it would be a fun gift for my husband's grandparents.  I don't think it's the perfect gift for everyone since it has to hang on the wall, but his grandparents are always so proud of how their family has expanded so I thought they'd love to display it.

I purchased these wooden disks from Michaels' for the birthdays.  They had the wooden hearts in 1 1/2" as well, so I bought those for the anniversaries.

I made this template on a block of wood so the holes would be directly across from each other and the birthdays would hang strait.  It was really helpful since I tried a few without it!

 I drilled the holes as close to the edge as I could without them cracking. Some did crack, so I would plan on buying extra.

After the holes were drilled I painted the wood chips with acrylic paint (and a glass of wine).  I chose to assign a different color to each of their kids, then use a lighter shade of that color for those grandkids, and an even lighter shade for the great-grandkids from that family.

 Writing on the circles and hearts was the easiest, since we would have needed really small stickers (I had to have my mom do it since my handwriting is horrible!) We wrote the name and date of the month on the front side, and the full date with year on the back.  'S' hooks from the hardware store connected the circles and hearts.

We screwed 12 eyelet hooks to the base of the board, one for each month.

I used sticker letters to label each month, since these letters were too small to neatly cut on the cricut.

I used my cricut to cut out 'FAMILY' on black vinyl.  This made it easy to just peel off the back and stick the letters onto the board.

I used a ruler as a guide to make sure the word 'Family' would be in a straight line.  When pressed against the edge of the board, the ruler I have just happened to be the perfect spacing for my letters!

I love how the finished product turned out, nice and colorful!

2014 Calendar

I have been waiting for 2014 to hit just so I could hang my new 2014 Paper Source Calendar!

I bought it back in October because I loved the bright colors and knew that I could use the paper for crafts when I was done with it.  When I discovered that the calendar had built in craft projects on the back side I had to purchase it!

  Here are the designs for each month:

 Some of the projects it includes:

A template on the back-side of the calendar page for one of the projects:

I can't wait for January to be over to make something!

Photo Collage

 We first saw this layout for a photo collage at a friend's house, and I immediately wanted to do it for our guest bedroom! I love that together the frames make a substantial piece of art that fill the wall without being cluttered. I also like that we can change out the photos or use it in any house we move into.  I purchased all of the frames at Michael's with 40% off coupons, so the total ended up being about $80.  I didn't think that was bad considering a piece of art that large would have cost at least that much!   The photos are of our immediate family who stay in the room when they visit.  We used all sepia tone photos for a consistent look. 

Although this layout could be done with any size frames, this is what I used:

Three-8x10" Photo frames with Mat (used vertically)

Three-5x7" Photo frames with Mat (used horizontally)

The key is to make sure the outer edges all line up, so the outside edges create a perfect rectangle. Since the frames are all different sizes the gaps between them will all be different, but if the outside lines up your eye won't notice! 

We Met. We Married. We Live.

 After installing the board and batten in our entryway, we needed new wall hangings as our large mirror would no longer work due to the small ledge we created. I had first visioned a map for the space, so I decided to create  'We Met, We Married, We Live' decor as I had seen using maps to fill the space.

I purchased an old atlas at Goodwill to get the maps.  Not only was it inexpensive, I like that they have a vintage look (so much that I plan on using the pages I didn't use for this project as wrapping paper!)

I purchased the frames at Target and used scrapbooking letter stickers to put the words on the map.

 To mark the actual location on the map, I punched a small hole with a pun and secured a small, pink heart-shaped brad.

I hung the frames very close together, which I think makes them look more grand and high-end than simple Target frames. Here they are in the space! 

Custom Deck Step

 When we were building our deck last summer I wanted it to have character but not be cluttered with typical 'Deck Junk'. I decided to add more artistic detail by wood bruning a suttle message into the bottom stair backer.  I thought 'Go Gophers' with the Minnesota 'M' was perfect!

I started by printing out a template.  I got the Minnesota 'M's from Google images and typed out the 'Go Gophers' in the size and font I liked.

On the back side of the printed paper, I rubbed oil pastels along the outline of the image/text.

After the oil pastels were on the paper I layed them out on the board and taped in place.

Next I traced the outline of the images/text by pressing firmly, which transfered the oil pastels on the back side to the surface of the wood like this (I later switched to blue pastels since orange didn't show up well):

After the image was transferred onto the board, I traced the lines with a wood burner which both darkened the line and indented it, resulting in this:

It's hard to see the design in photos, but here are some shots of the finished board installed!

Holiday Decor Mother's Day Gift

 I like giving gifts that I know will get used, so I thought this would be a nice Mother's Day gift.  For both my Mom and Mother In-law, I gave them a frame that matched their decor, frame stand, and a packet of subway posters for each season which also included a neutral print for off-seasons.  It was fairly inexpensive, and now they have some fun decor for each season that doesn't take up any storage space or effort to set out and clean around!! I printed all of the subway posters from Eighteen25 which can be found here.  Below are some of the prints I included.

Beer Bar Artwork

Our new artwork for our 'bar area wan't something that we were looking for, but it just happened to come to us, literally, in this holiday Crate and Barrel mailing!

 

Paging through Crate & Barrel catalogs and seeing how they decorate and entertain is my most favorite thing ever.  I try to save them to look through with a glass of wine, but I usually end up looking at them in the garage standing up against the trunk of my car after getting the mail--can't even wait to get in the house! 

Among the pages of great product that I can't help but want, the holiday catalog had a whole page featuring this diagram of 'The Very Many Varieties of Beer', which even lists brands of each type of beer, from microbrews to Keystone light.

 

I though it would make cool artwork for our small bar area in the basement family room.  I ripped it out, trimmed the edges, put it on some gold paper and a black mat, put it in a frame I had in the closet, and here it is! The perfect bar area artwork!

Scrabble Wall Art

At a gift shop near my house, I saw a similar Scrabble wall art that used all of the names of the local towns and lakes.  It was cool, but it was $200!  

I had an old scrabble game at home that I used for mine. I had to buy another game at goodwill to get more of the letters that I needed, but that only cost $1.99.

The letters are just glued to the board, which is inside a shadowbox I bought at Michaels. 

I used "family game room" words to create mine.

To make things easier, I created a crossword puzzle on-line to determine the word layout.  I typed in the number of squares and the words I wanted to use, and it created the crossword for me. So much easier than trying to figure it out on my own!  I used this site, but I'm sure any puzzle maker site would work.

Address Wall Art

  I was inspired to make my address wall art by this piece at Restoration Hardware.  I wanted something similar but with our actual address.  Mine turned out very different, but I still like it!

To make, I bought an old piece of art at Goodwill, spray painted the frame silver and painted over the picture with some leftover brown paint (the glass broke in the process, which turned out to be a blessing because I could make it more 3-D!).  The letters are just scrap booking stickers.  I printed large numbers to use as a pattern and cut the numbers out of foam paper, then decorated each one a different way:  

Thick silver acrylic paint

 

Black ink pad rubbed on edges

 Numbers stamped with black ink

Silver Gold-Leafing

Here it is hanging in our living room!