More Fall Decorating!

October came and our monthly craft group was once again looking for ideas...Pinterest to the rescue!  We found this cute idea shown here for a framed craft.  I decided to go with something in the fall theme as my Fall and Thanksgiving decorations are not as plentiful as say my Christmas decorations.  Once again I attempted to use everything from my own stash and was fairly successful!  I do believe Tina contributed some of the stamps and ink for the sentiment and she found great frames at Wal-Mart for $3.  I picked up one package of KandCompany fall accent pieces/die cuts and was ready to roll.

I used a solid piece of Gemstones tan card stock for the back ground and I used five different 1/4" ribbons and one 3/4" ribbon from my stash.  I pretty much followed the Pinterest idea for the basic layout, but added my own personal touches.  I utilized the die cuts around the centered sentiment piece rather than offset it to the left.  I used a golden colored card stock and chose a fairly large sentiment stamp so needed something to make it pop from the other brown tones.  I added a scalloped edge die cut in a deep reddish/burgundy behind the sentiment oval.  I added a small brown bow at the top of the sentiment and jeweled up both the sentiment and the background die in gold jewels. It's a little hard to see the shimmery paper with this picture.

I think it's time for some Christmas projects!  Imagine, Create, and Enjoy!

Fall Decorations

So I have been perusing Pinterest as I know many of you do.  I found this cute little idea for a Christmas decoration, but because I have so many Christmas decorations I decided to use the idea with a Thanksgiving or Fall theme.  The original post was found here.  I decided to do the word Thanks.  I found these cute wood letters on sale at Jo Ann's and picked them up along with a bottle of Folk Art metallic bronze paint.  I painted the entire set of letters front and back with the bronze color.  I think I did about 3 coats to make sure it was covered well.

In the original idea the letters are painted white and hung with green ribbon.  Because I have a brown china hutch and this is where I wanted to hang the letters I decided the letters needed a little more "punch" so they would be seen against the brown hutch.  I found in my craft stash some pumpkin colored glitter.  It was the perfect color match for the letters so I glittered each of the letters up and sealed them with Mod Podge.  I then found some glittery fall ribbon at Michael's (on sale of course!) and picked that up to hang each letter from.  Since I wanted the letters to drape down from the top of the hutch I needed a piece of wood to hang them from, something that was sturdy enough to hold the ribbons and weighty enough to stay on the top of the hutch but would remain hidden.  So off to Jo Ann's I went again and found a 1/4'  by 3" by 24" piece of craft wood to use as my mounting board to hang the letters from.  I spaced the letters evenly but staggered them slightly so they were not all at the same level.  And here is the finished product!  I'm still thinking I might add some more accents to the top of the letters, maybe some small colored fall leaves or pieces of pine cones, maybe some buttons?  We'll see!

Go on, Imagine, Create, Enjoy!

Wreaths

Hi there, it's been awhile...there have been big life happenings in my little corner of the world, but finally feel like I'm getting some of my time freed up again.  I have a small group of friends who try to meet once a month for a craft night.  It's a pretty eclectic group of ladies with a wide variety of styles and tastes.  We started the group to encourage ourselves and each other in our crafty pursuits.  We wanted to specifically set aside time for ourselves, visit and touch base with each other and hopefully accomplish something during that two hour window, one night a month.  We have no set rules, we don't require everyone do the same project, we put out suggestions and usually bring our version of the supplies to create our project.  Something unique and different for each of us.

Have we been successful you may ask?  Depends on how you rate success!  Have we met every month, nope...but in the months we have met, we have done what we set out to do, we've visited, crafted, and most every one of those times, made something new or different, something outside our comfort zone, something we'd seen on Pinterest or somewhere else and wanted to try, and done it with enthusiasm and most importantly...enjoyed ourselves.  For September's evening everyone decided they wanted to make wreaths.  Because we don't have strict rules or a set format everyone did something a little different.

I have a lovely Fall wreath that I had made a few years ago so decided to focus on a wreath for Halloween.  My design utilizes a couple of different design ideas I had seen on Pinterest.  I tried to use only supplies that I had at my house but ended up buying a couple of items as noted.  The first idea was to use wire insulation tubing from Home Depot (.97 cents) to create the wreath.   I cut the tube to the length I needed to create approximately a 15" round wreath.  I duck taped the ends together and then wrapped the entire wreath in black tulle.  I found some black 1/2 inch wide ribbon with glittery dots in Halloween colors at JoAnn's and wrapped that around the circumference of the wreath.  I found the same kind of dotted ribbon in 2 1/2" wide and made a bow for the top of the wreath.


The oval at the top was cut from an old file folder 2 times (recycling at it's best!) and covered in orange paper.  I used a strip of black paper and my Martha Stewart Drippy Goo punch to have some black goo dripping from the top of the oval.  I bought "eeire" words from K&Company, this one says Boo! and has a bunch of glittery, swirls and such.

For the main part of the wreath I decided to go with rosettes!  My eyes are always bigger than they should be and I don't often take into account all the work involved in the particular design I've decided on.  I folded a lot of rosettes!!! Lucky for me I had the Tim Holtz rosettes die and the Ribbons and Rosettes Cricut cartridge which had a rosette pattern with spiders on the edges.  This helped a lot!  I used a variety of patterned Halloween paper I had at home as well as plain card stock in the standard Halloween colors, purple, black, orange, grey. After cutting all the rosettes I folded and glued and folded and glued, and folded and glued some more...you get the idea!  I started arranging the rosettes around the wreath, stacking and hot gluing.  I found a small bag of colorful little spiders that I also added as accents.  I then had enough of the 1 inch dotted ribbon left to make a hanger which I looped around the wreath and tied in a bow at the top.

Fun times!  Cya later!  Imagine, Create, Enjoy.