Felt Merry Christmas

I was inspired by a felt Merry Christmas pendant I saw on pinterest similar to this one.

We were doing our Christmas card photos and of course I found it just a few days before and spent a few long night sewing some felt letters, stuffing them, and getting them on string and ribbon so we could use them in our Christmas pictures.

Sadly, it was really rainy and cold that day, so none of the photos of our banner turned out really well, but I will share this one!  This photo of courtesy of Lovella Photography, I've worked with her multiple times and she does a great job.  If you live in the Detroit area, I highly recommend them.

Even better about this photo, I wasn't fat.  :)  Thankfully this was right before I started eating everything in site.  Need to get back to eating a plant based diet and no white flour and white sugar again.  But easier said than done.

Off that tangent, I think the banner is cute, too bad it was just so windy.

I spent so much time on that banner, I couldn't bring myself to toss it or just store it.  I thought it would make a great addition to my mantel!

I like it so much that I'd really like to make some for each holiday, but then I remembered how much work it took to do in the first place.  I'll just tuck that idea away for the time I'm not already working on two quilts, three scrapbooks, and house improvements.

How did I make it?  I can't find the item I pinned on pinterest, but I printed out a font ( can't remember which) on paper in a really big size, it only fit two letters per page on a landscape layout.  then I cut out the paper, pinned to the felt and cut out the felt.  Took a needle and thread, sewed it, stuffed it, put it on a ribbon.  Pretty awesome if I say so myself!  Hopefully you think so too!

Now just to hit up the Christmas sale at One Kings Lane so I can get more goodies for the house next year!

Painting the old bench

Ever see things on pinterest and get motivated to do something?  Then have a huge fail in making it look like you saw on pinterest?  That's what this post is about.

We have an old nasty bench in our backyard.  I don't know when it was built, I imagine from the first owners (we're the third), but nothing much has been done with it.  While I would like to spend $600 on a really cool one I saw on One Kings Lane, I don't really think that's in our budget anytime soon.  Man I want everything on that site.

Yep, nothing pretty.  don't mind my ghetto hay as I weed the back area.  It's a jungle out there, I'm in the process of getting it weeded and mulched.

I hate this bench.  I really wanted to break it down and get a nice iron one, but then I saw some cool ideas on pinterest.  So I bought some paint.  and painted the whole thing.  I originally painted it all white, but thought that was a little bright.  I used the below paint from Sherwin Williams in marshmallow (or something like that).

I used my cricut to cut out the word Welcome and glued it down so I could get a stencil - like  i saw on pinterest  hahahah....FAIL.   That didn't work out so well.  

So I made a few touch ups.

And now it's not perfect, but it's much nicer.

DIY Canvas Photos

We have a very dark house.  We back up to woods so not a lot of natural lights comes in.  We bought it as a foreclosure, so there's a lot of work to do on it.  One of the things we did recently was paint the front entryway a red color called Maine Lobster.  I think it was a Sherwin Williams color.  We love lots of color.  Problem is, it made it look really really dark in the entryway.  Eventually we want to paint the closet doors in there white as well as the trip to help lighten it up.  But in the meantime, I wanted to blow up some photos that were mostly white to help bring color in there.

I like artwork with meaning.  I don't like to just buy stuff from walmart and hang it up.  The upside is all our stuff has a story.  The downside is our walls are pretty bare.  :)

We used two photos that didn't have a high enough resolution to be blown up into a large canvas.  But I could get large prints, so I did that and bought some plain canvas to diy them onto.  I followed the below blog and you can see my outcome.  My one tip: don't rush it, wait for the black paint to dry before you modge podge.  Oops.

http://www.blissfullyeverafter.net/2011/12/diy-photos-on-canvas.html?m=1

 These are the two photos I picked and what they look like aftewards.  You can see the black streaking from not letting the black edging paint dry completely.

My husband says it looks like they're 'messed up', but then when I gave him a look he said that they must be messed up on purpose like you see in stores.  :/  My Dad said they looked good, but then scratched at them, not sure why, totally unnecessary.  So who knows.  Maybe they look horrible and no one has told me.  But in the meantime, we can't afford the large paintings and artwork I like (one photograph I found at hte Plymouth Art in the Park was $1300!  Out of my budget!), so these will stay.

At least until I find something on One Kings Lane or Anthropologie that fits the color scheme.  :)