Yarn Bird Feeder

Since we’ve moved to our current home, I’ve noticed how established and serene our family’s yards are. I love all of the little squirrels and birds that are happily playing around their trees.

We do not own one tree (yet). It’s hard to attract birds with no trees so I have to lure them with tasty treats and luscious building materials for their homes. This was an inexpensive and simple craft that would be fun to do with little kids!
Necessary Tools & Materials: scissors, yarn (great way to use up old scraps!), suet bird feeder

 

1.) Wrap yarn around your hand

2.) Cut yarn

3.) Stuff feeder

4.) Wait for birds

Happy Glam

Although the circle is still my favorite shape, I’m getting really into triangles lately. Things that have especially sparked my interest are:

(Yes, that is a Deathly Hallows necklace in there…back to the post.) I’d recently bought a 5×5 wrapped canvas for my niece and decided that triangles would be the best thing EVER to put on it. I was right.

I started by painting a base coat followed by two coats of gold. I had this tape* waiting to be used for an awesome occasion such as this. I made triangles (with no rhyme or reason) on the canvas with the tape:

Once I taped the canvas, I started choosing my colors. This is the hardest and longest portion of any painting I do. This step often paralyzes me from starting a painting because it is so daunting.

I did a lot of mixing to find the exact colors I was looking for and in the end I was quite shocked proud on how well the colors meshed.

I painted several layers of each color to obtain the opacity I was looking for. Peeling the tape off before letting the final coats dry seemed to be a good idea (something I’ve learned by painting the rooms of our house.)

Notice the areas that the paint seeped under the tape? In order to sharpen the lines, I re-taped the outsides with scotch tape and re-painted the gold stripes. If I’d used a stickier tape, this would not have been an issue.

The final product turned out better than I’d hoped! I named the piece ‘Happy Glam’ for my 2 year old niece who is a very happy little girl who loves glamorous-sparkly-shiny type things.

What projects have you been up to lately? Any shapes been especially inspiring to you? Circles are still in, right?

*I would not recommend this type of tape for this project because it did not adhere to the painted canvas well, which resulted in me having to repaint the gold lines.

Tuesday Truth

My Tuesday Truths always have something to do with what’s going on in my life. This one is, for me, is now a mantra that helps me stay motivated in completing my art. I have two paintings that are not complete because I am afraid I won’t like the end result…but it’s silly because I don’t like how they currently look either. The piece pictured above has been like this for over a year now.

Listen to your art. Just do it.

20 Date Ideas

Hopefully these date night ideas will inspire you to spend some time with someone you love!

1. Find a recipe and cook it together. Make it a theme night and play music to match the type of meal.
2. Go off the grid for the weekend- no cell phones, no TV, no computers. You’ll be amazed at what you can do for entertainment.
3. Go see a movie at the drive-in.
4. Go to a restaurant you both have never been to and order their specialty.
5. Buy 3 bottles of the cheapest wine and have your own wine tasting at home.
6. Play a board game.
7. Go bowling and order cheese fries.
8. Have a spa night. Take a relaxing bath then follow up by taking turns giving each other massages.
9. Movie or TV marathon.
10. Play some miniature golf.
11. Hit some balls at the batting cages.
12. Be in control and go to a shooting range. Be careful!
13. Put together a puzzle.
14. Go on a food crawl. Go to a different restaurant for an appetizer, entrée, and dessert.
15. Go fishing with worms.
16. Dress up to the nines and test drive a car you have no intention to buy.
17. Pack lots of blankets and drive out in the country to look at the stars. Don’t forget brownies!
18. Snuggle up by the fire and read a book with hot chocolate together.
19. Give yourself an imaginary budget. Then separately go online and pick out all the things you would buy for each other with the money.
20. Get active! Go on a bike ride, hike, geocache, etc.

I’d love to hear more suggestions on fun things to spice up a Wednesday night!

Hex Bracelet

I have an obsession with wanting to make jewelry that tests my patience (of which I have very little). The first type of bracelet I attempted was a friendship bracelet. I used to make these a lot when I was younger, had no troubles at all. This time, we watched YouTube videos for about 1/2 hour before we even got started and it took us FOR-EV-VER to get them done!

My apologies for the quality of the shot, it’s from my phone. It was taken right before I shipped it off to my best friend in Taiwan!

The second bracelet I tried was a Chan Luu wrap bracelet. NBD right?? Wrong! It took 3 hours and it only wrapped three times. That’s 1 wrap/1 hour = not worth the $40 on materials.

Bracelet attempt #3 was a second Chan Luu wrap. This is what my expectations were and I wasn’t going to give up with a 3 hour wrap that’s so-so.

Isn’t it awesome? At $245, I thought I’d try it to DIM (do it myself). For my second attempt I spent more money ($85 for all materials) but I got better quality beads and leather.

So much cooler isn’t it?! I used turquois beads, a bone colored stone bead, and pyrite nuggets with dark brown leather.

My most recent bracelet en devour was a brass hex bracelet. It seemed easy enough to find the materials and couldn’t be too time consuming because most of the bracelet is braid, right? Hmph. I had to go to two hardware stores to find the correct nuts and twine and had to re-do the bracelet twice. The tutorial I followed was from Honestly…WTF? which has a lot of bracelet tutorials.

I purchased #8-32 brass hex nuts and white twine at home depot. I bought 6 packages of the brass nuts for $0.98/piece and the twine for around $3. (I used 24 nuts total for my bracelet but you can use as many or little as you think makes the bracelet your style.)

I cut three long pieces (two full arm spans) of twine and tied them together. Next, I threaded a nut onto the string and slid it to the knot.

The next step was to braid. I wanted to have two wraps around my wrist along with the nuts showing on my wrist. I found it easiest to have someone hold the end so I could quickly braid and de-tangle the knots (that are inevitable). If you don’t have someone to hold the end, clipping it to a clipboard or tying it to a doorknob would be helpful.

Once the braid was able to wrap twice, I started process of braiding the nuts on. For a more in-depth description, follow the tutorial link.

I proceeded to braid while putting a nut on every other string. Two helpful tips that the tutorial did not suggest:

1.) Tape the ends of the twine. If you are using leather or rawhide, you will be fine. If you are using twine it is much easier to thread the twine with the nuts if you have them wrapped like shoe lace aglet (of which I learned on Phineas & Ferb).

2.) DO NOT LET GO! Hold tight to the strings once you put the nut on. If you let go, it will start to unbraid and you will have to re-do it.

Braiding the end, after braiding the nuts, keeps the nuts secure and finishes the rest of the bracelet.

Once the braid is finished, put one last nut on the end and tie a knot. The bracelet should look something like this when finished:

I am a huge fan of it! This bracelet is great if you like layering bracelets on your wrist. I am also a huge fan of the pink and gold bracelet! (I think I’ll do that one next!) I LOVE this one too! What do you think? Are you a fan of bracelet layering? Have you spent way more time than intended on a jewelry making project?

No. 2 & 3

Here are the pictures of the 2nd piece as promised.

 

 

I gave my second piece to my parents and it is proudly hung in their kitchen window

 

The third piece I completed for my niece Fiona’s 1st birthday! I designed the piece and did not use a pattern so it was a great learning experience!

I L.O.V.E. Stained Glass!

My newest (and second most expensive) hobby is stained glass! There is an awesome community education program at a college near by who offers tons of artsy classes. I decided to re-try my hand at stained glass because I enjoyed the bit of dabbling I’d done with my parents when I was younger. I went to the first class, at a local glass shop/studio, all nervous like the first day of Kindergarten!

This is what I came home with:

My first pattern, copper foil, solder, nails, razor and glass cutter. Great start! Next I needed to figure out what colors I wanted for my piece. I picked some out from the recycled bin during class, numbered and colored my pattern accordingly. (This post is not sponsored by Heineken, nor do I recommend drinking while dealing with glass. This is the box they gave us to carry glass to and from class.)

I proceeded to trace the pattern by laying it on the table and placing my glass on top. Using a white wax pencil I marked out my glass pieces, cut and numbered them.* (*Most important thing to remember when cutting glass. Even if a pattern is made on a computer, the pieces will vary slightly.)

Note the pieces that are cut out from the pattern with those really awesome ‘no black line’ scissors. Cutting the pieces out, gluing them directly on the glass and then cutting the glass is how I started out cutting my pieces. Did not work out as well for me.

After cutting out every piece of glass and making sure they all fit together you ‘copper foil’ them (Copper Foiling is the type of stained glass that I am working with.)

After every piece has been copper foiled and ‘burnished’ (the copper foil rubbed smooth across the glass edges) you can solder the pieces together and add a border to hold it all together. (No picture for this process because I completed this during class time.)

At this stage (after one week) this is what I have gone overboard buying accumulated:

Honestly, everything was necessary, in my opinion. Most of these tools saved me a lot of frustrated yelling and broken glass. My husband also made a cutting board and is in the process of making a light table (I know, I’m spoiled!) So now, here’s what our dining room table looks like 24/7:

Spoiler alert! Sorry that picture has my current project (project 2.)

Here is a picture of the finished project numero uno. I have named my piece ‘First Glass Peace’…because I think I’m funny.

Viola! First project under my belt! I have started cutting for project 2 and final project pictures will be coming soon!

 

What is Geocaching?

Geocaching is an outdoor sporting activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called “geocaches” or “caches”, anywhere in the world. (According to Wikipedia.) 

I would define it as a high tech treasure hunt!

We went on our first geocaching adventure this past week on our 7 hr road trip to Sandusky Ohio (Cedar Point of course.) We had heard about this ‘sport’ a few years back but always seemed to forget about it on the weekends. Since I can barely make it through the 1.5 hr drive to Indy, I knew the 7 hr trip would be torturous. I started researching online and asking around for advice/suggestions.

The best tip we got was to download the geocaching app from www.geocaching.comwww.geocaching.com. We were a bit hesitant because the app is $9.99 but it was totally worth it!

First cache looked like this:

 

The cache was entitled ‘you can not get there from here.’ We were confused…but we kept driving. We got to a road block and the compass had indicated that it was .2k NW of where we were.

 

Jeffrey went in to scope things out before I attempted it with our camera and clumsy feet.

 

From deep in the wilderness I heard ‘uuuummmmm…we can’t get there from here’ (just like the title told us!) There was a big creek in the way!

 

So we drove around some fields to get to it from the back way.

 

We had to be vedy vedy sneaky at the second cache.  It was at the back side of a rest stop by the dog walking area. Jeffrey’s bright aqua shirt and our red ‘swag bag’ (the bag that held all our treasures) probably weren’t the most subtle for being sneaky.

 

There was no way to get to it other than through the fence (which was surrounded by thorny bushes!) There was no way we weren’t getting it! We had to press on!

 

We found it in this hollow log. Of course I begged Jeffrey to get it out since there were spiders crawling in it! **Geocaching is not for the faint of heart.**

The third cache was in a cemetery. Most of the caches we saw on the route were in cemeteries or at rest stops.

The final cache we found on the trip was at a rest stop as well. Again, trying to be sneaky, we hiked around to the back where the dog walkers were, including a family that we had seen at the first rest stop!

 

I’m pretty sure Jeffrey’s in the bushes somewhere trying to get this shot.

I recommend geocaching for all ages! The app indicates the type of terrain as well as if the difficult to find. As beginners, we only did 1 star for both terrain and difficulty.

I found out that there are geocaching clubs all over the country. We have one in Central Illinois that gets together to do caching!