How to Make Quick and Easy Greetings Cards While Making Your Own Scrapbook Stock

A few years ago, my mum gave me a book by Traci Bautista, in it she gives lots of advice about using collage and other forms of mixed media. Lots. The part that stuck with me the most was the, to me, revolutionary idea of using scrap paper and paper towels to clean your brush between colours.

So, that's what I do. I now have a great stockpile of scrap paper covered in strokes of bizarre colour combinations and swirly marks.

The only awkward part of having these scraps of paper everywhere is that I don't do anything with them, other than stare at them longingly, enjoying the funny marks.

A while ago, I decided that now was the time to do something with them, so I started using them as backgrounds in scrapbooks and incorporating them onto cards.

The best part of using these scrap pieces of paper to make greetings cards comes from how they don't look 'scrappy' at all. Ultimately, you're saving money by not buying those scrapbooking papers and creating your own lovely pieces of stock paper.

In short:

- When you're painting, clean your brushes on pieces of cardstock and paper between colours

- Cut the remaining pieces into squares

- Attach them to folded card

- Hand letter / scrawl your handwriting across the front

- Use a metallic sharpie marker for creating a scalloped edge

Simple!

Last Minute Valentine's Day Gifts and Cute Puns

Valentine's Day is soon! Keeping the gifts cost-efficient is fun and easy. I like keeping it simple and fun. So, here are a few ideas if, like me, you leave Valentine's day until the last moment:

You'll need:

- snacks

- gummy bears

- other things that you're loved one will like

- a gift tag

- sharpie markers

- white card board

- washi tape

Directions:

Buy all the goodies.

Come up with ridiculously cheesy phrases for your products.

Coffee:

"I love you a latte"

"You are the perc of my day"

"You keep me grounded"

"All you need is love and coffee"

Chocolate and Sweets:

Gummy bears

"You are bear-y cute"

Swedish berry candy

"I like you berry much"

Chocolate covered nuts:

"I'm nutty about you"

Mints:

"We are Mento be together"

"You are a breath of fresh air"

"We are mint to be together"

Salsa/ pepperoni sticks etc:

"You are hot stuff"

These are all incredibly cheesy things for Valentines day but I had fun with them and it only cost me $15 for all the products I bought. Plus, I get to eat these as well so it really is a win-win.

Decorating your Own Holiday Plant Pots

It's no lie that I love painting plant pots and, well, anything around my house. I absolute love giving something my own style and my own voice. It's a quick project and it's really straight forward to do. The hardest part, as always, is figuring out the design you want.

I put together a straight forward, easy to use guide to painting your plant pots for indoor use, in dry areas. This process is definitely not designed for pots intended to be used for plants.

Step 1:

• Collect your supplies

You'll need:

 

•  Plant pots - I used 2 terracotta pots
• Acrylic paint - I used 5 colours in total (teal, purple, antique white, silver, black)
• Paint brushes
• Water to keep your brushes nice and clean
• A little imagination

Step 2

 

•  Paint your plant pots in the base colour, remember to do the bottoms.
• Leave them to dry properly

Step 3

•  Turn the plant pots around and paint the inside a bright colour
• You can skip this step if you want it to remain the original colour
• Alternatively, the inside would look just as fab all one colour, in this case it'd be antique white.

Step 4

•  Paint the rims of the plant pot because this is the one you likely missed when painting it all one colour.

Step 5

•  Below the lip of the pot, paint a contrasting colour line
• The straighter the better but it's ok if it's a bit wobbly

Step 6

  Paint your patterns on the outside

• If you're feeling ambitious you could always add pattern to the inside.

 Step 7

•  Add black detail around your patterns to define them further
• I added a little silver shapes that contrasted against the main pattern to make them a little more fabulous

 

I love how these turned out. Mainly because I love the idea of mini containers holding ornaments littered around the house. Adorable.

These do take a little time to get right and you will need to be comfortable with a paintbrush to get results you're happy with but they're worth the time and effort. 

If you don't have time for this but love them as much as I do then you can always pop over to the Etsy shop and buy them to be delivered directly to your house.

 

What do you think? If you tried this I'd love to see the links to it below!

Hand Painting Practice for Mural Walls

A few months ago, I came up with the brilliant idea that I should paint my walls in the style of Alisa Burke, the woman that is, to me, the definition of artistic bravery. Hand painted walls have always appealed to me. Ask my parents, they were rather perplexed when I used water paints to draw what was (in hindsight) a rather dreadful flower on my bright yellow bedroom wall. I loved it at the time, my dad did not when, years later, he had to do use three to four coats to cover it up.

As I've mentioned before, I like to do trial runs aka I am not as brave as Alisa Burke. If I'm honest, I'm not convinced I'm ever going to get around to completing this project. I hope I do! In the meantime, it was a useful motivational tool to get me to practice drawing flowers.

 

This one (the long picture above) was drawn on the back of a cereal box (I am nothing if not resourceful!). I used permanent marker simply because it was on hand. I also had to do it in stages because, actually, those fumes are lethal!

 This one I did with paints as I spoke to The Canadian about his day. This one is on the back of a pizza box. I didn't enjoy how it soaked up the paint colours but I did enjoy how messy it was.

 I have been on such a recycling kick at the moment too! My friend bought be a gift in a pretty orange paper bag and now that paper bag has a painting of flowers on it. I discovered pretty quickly that I should draw more than I think I'll need because once you fill in the background the foreground quickly becomes sparse.

 This final one was never completed. I got tired of breathing in sharpie marker fumes. It's amusing to me how quickly I jump from one medium to another. One week it's paint, the next it's sharpies. Oh, my flighty mind!

After all of this I got a little brave and painted directly on the basement wall...I was really into it as well until I realised there was a grumpy spider watching me. That quickly put an end to any big aspirations I had.


Would you ever consider painting directly onto a wall? With the price of wallpapers it seems to be the only affordable option to having pretty walls.

End of Autumn and Drying Fresh Birch for Crafts

Winter is right around the corner. I am starting to feel the cold and the other day, The Canadian woke me up when he was scraping ice off the car. Ok, so the noise woke me up, but feeling sad that his day had started so badly kept me awake. We've recently had some trees chopped down in the back garden. Just in time too, as they were pretty unstable and last week saw some vicious winds that blew over our fence (!), I'd hate to have seen what it would have done to the weak trees had they still been standing.

We have a whole pile of leaves that we've been bagging up for composting. Apparently black bags allow leaves to compost slowly, not sure how true this is but since we have a 6' pile of leaves in the back garden, I'm willing to give it a go.

The Canadian kindly made discs of birch for me to practice painting on, but in the meantime, I have to figure out how to cure them properly. I found a microwave method but I'm a bit wary about putting wood in the oven let alone the microwave! Does anyone have any tips? I do not have a wood kiln and do not fancy waiting up to 18 months for them to get a 12% water/air balance. They're about 1-2cm depth by 6cm x 8cm. So far, I've popped them into brown paper bags and left them in a warm place, apparently this will help.

Even if I don't get any answers, I really enjoyed myself doing things in the garden. It's a big deal for me to put myself at risk of spider contact. All you arachnophobes will know what I'm sayin!

Pumpkin Love

 

 

It's Halloween! Nearly.

I am dressing up and touring the neighbourhood as Cruella D'Evil. Black and white cocktail dress, talcum powder in my hair and wicked make up. It's going to be fabulous. Presuming the snow stays away and it's not too cold. Otherwise, I will be going as a sleeping bag.

A few weekends ago, I went in search of a pumpkin to carve. I came back with 5. I thought it would be easy, it turns out that my mum really used to do most of the manual labour for this when I was younger and, therefore, gave me an unrealistic impression of how boring pumpkin carving is! Thanks mum!

Watermelons or pumpkins...you decide.

The Canadian and I spent a great part of last weekend carving 2 pumpkins. There was one large and one small. And both were equally tiresome to clean out and carve. We had 5 pumpkins and I was bored after two. I wasn't really sure what to do to ensure that the other purchases had been worthwhile. I really wanted to use these for Halloween!

I was doing my daily exploration of blog posts when I came across the Boo pumpkin at Life Over Easy (fabulous blog by the way!). I loved the idea of sticking letters on a pumpkin but I was still a little stumped because I didn't want to buy letters. In the end, it was going to the pet store, where an overzealous assistant had painted and branded a pumpkin to match the stores logo. I asked her what she'd used only to learn that acrylic paint does a really brilliant job of sticking to pumpkins. What's better is that you're not actually wasting pumpkin when you do this. So here's the last minute idea for pumpkin decorating:

Last Minute DIY Pumpkin Decorating

Supplies:
A pumpkin
Pencil
Black and white acrylic paint
Paintbrush (quite a small one) 

Directions
I started off by searching the internet to get inspiration. Try looking for "Pumpkin Silhouettes".

After I'd found one that struck my fancy, I outlined it with pencil on the pumpkin itself.

I then painted within the lines, embellishing as I went.

Tip: I found that having separate paintbrushes for each colour meant I could work faster, as there was no need for washing the brush in between colours.

Tip: I loved the dollar store paint because it dried really fast. Nothing worse than getting paint all over the counter!

 

These are the results, what do you think? Which is your favourite?

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We're going to be hosting a really awesome giveaway this Friday, so be sure to stay tuned!

Living Room Favourites

I've really been thinking about my living room lately. It has a really boring wall and I've been desperately thinking of ways to make it look like a part of the room. Here are some of my favourite decorating wall pinterest boards, they've helped to get the creative juices flowing and hopefully, this time next week, they will have helped me transform my boring wall into something more exciting.

Decor - Walls: Lauren So many framing and gallery positioning ideas.

Decorating the Walls: B. Art work rich with lots of inspiration for DIY decoration.

Living Rooms: Brandy B Colour inspiration and furniture layout. There's so much variety on this board.

Living Rooms: Laura Christenson  I love this board. The style is so fresh and it's long being an inspiration of mine.

Decor: Wall Art:Donna at Funky Junk Interiors Not just photo frame inspiration, but unique and creative ways to display memories and memorabilia.

I use Pinterest nonstop for inspiration. I adore the site and the potential it offers. I have boards for artistic, creative, renovations, home decor, food and even Photoshop inspo! It's so addictive. Have you used Pinterest for inspiration?

Cotton Anniversary: Blanket Fort for Grown Ups

Blanket forts are so much fun! You can never be too old to enjoy one. Better yet, there are loads of ways to make your grown up blanket fort work for you.

The Canadian and I recently celebrated two whole years of marriage. Neither of us feel that our anniversaries need extravagant gifts or plans. After we married, we agreed to ensure that our anniversaries would turn into special dates, whereby we would do something together, rather than buy something for each other. In a way that's similar to our outlook on Valentine's Day, we are of the opinion that if we need to focus on one day a year, we're not doing it in a way that works for us.

After scouring and reviewing the North American and British wedding anniversaries, we decided to follow the British traditions. This year marked the second year and, as such, the cotton anniversary of our marriage. We spent the day with immigration Canada - not the best place to spend it! After what was a stressful day, we had a BBQ with some family and, once everyone had left, we built a blanket fort, because blankets are cotton, yup nothing gets past me.

Few people were as excited or as amused by our plan to build a blanket fort for our anniversary but we still loved it. It was juvenile, fun and exciting. The best part about it is that we are both nerdy people, we enjoy building things and its a unique shared experience for the memory bank. We also got to work as a team and building a blanket fort, to us, was a brilliant way to spend a cotton anniversary.

We planned our blanket fort so that we could sleep in it, watch Doctor Who (didn't I say nerdy already?), and eat our favourite finger foods. We pulled the mattress into the room and set it down next to the sofa, we placed ladders, side tables and chairs around the mattress and pegged the blankets around them, all the fabrics were light weight, and the entire fort was supported by the ceiling fan and the curtain rods, all through the use of handy pegs (be sure that the fabric is not heavy if you are using light fixtures. Secure it very loosely, if you tug on the blankets, it's better for the fort to collapse rather than the light fixture land on your head!).

We filled the fort with fairy lights and voila! Our fort was complete. It lasted 5 days, until the cats managed to get in and have fun with it!

Here's some tips on how to build a grown up blanket fort that works for you:

~ collect all your blankets, sheets, spare fabrics, duvets, pillows and scarves in one place.

~ pegs, lots of pegs! And maybe some safety pins.

~ have an idea of what you want your blanket fort to look like: will you need cushions or a mattress? What about fairy lights (those little lights used on Christmas trees the world over)? Do you want to crawl in, walk in or just duck to get in? Do you want to stand up inside the fort? Do you want to keep it up for a few days? (If yes, where can you build it so that pets, children and guests won't require that the blanket castle be taken down prematurely?)

~ be wary of fire hazards, blanket forts and flames do not mix well.

What so you think, is there a blanket fort in your future? Have you ever built a blanket fort for grown ups?

Getting Creative

I have been busy recently. Sorting out directions, developing hobbies and working on feeling good. 

A few weeks ago, I started working on being creative. This is what I did:

We once bought hideous photographs of Paris, they were printed straight on canvas and weren't particularly good. So I decided to practice abstract painting. I found left over paint samples and developed these three pieces of art. I'm not completely happy with the results but I'm proud of myself for starting to decorate with my own work and having enough confidence to think that my art should be displayed on a wall. Even if that wall is mine.

A few months ago, I came across a battered sketchbook. The paper inside was excellent AND it was on sale for $4. Usually retailing for around $20, it was a steal and I needed it! The ugliness was hard to get over. So one day I just started throwing paint on it until it developed into this. I love it. It's the first time I've mixed paints since I was in high school. One of my biggest limitations is the fear that I'll get it wrong. After redecorating this sketchbook, I felt confident. This helped me get over my fear of "ruining" something, getting wrong or being embarrassed. 

This was so much fun. I was having a stressful day. I took time out to paint the envelope of an important document being sent to a friend. It was so cathartic. It was the first time I'd played with paints since high school. The envelope developed further but not before I wrote out her full address! Eek! So, consider this a sneak peek until I able to edit the photo.

This developed into this:

It still needs work but I'm loving how it's turned out.

I have been so busy with work (opening night, tonight!), so having a creative outlet has helped me manage stress (and overeating). What do you do to manage stress?