Canva - The Secret to Looking Professional

I spend a lot of my free time trying to figure out how to better my Etsy business, which basically means I'm constantly trolling the online forums. There's lots of good info there if you take the time to sort through it all.

Someone posted a question a few weeks ago asking buyers what turns them off to a shop once they click on an item. Most of them said pictures and a lack of shop policies (which I was very guilty of), but one person mentioned that they don't like when a shop doesn't look put-together. Namely, no banner, no logo, etc.

For the last year my banner on my page has been a pretty generic picture of roses and baby's breath that I took a couple of years ago. I never really thought twice about it, but it certainly didn't fit with what I sell or say anything about me or my business.

So I finally posted a question of my own. How do you make a banner? For free, because I'm a cheapskate.

And thus I was introduced to Canva. The secret to looking professional on the internet. I had to download a new browser to use the site (my preferred Safari isn't yet compatible), but it was totally worth it. It's super user friendly and there's tons of free options so you can really create something that says something about you without having to spend a penny. Granted, there are even more options if you're willing to shell out a few dollars, but that's beside the point.

This is what I came up with for my new banner:

Simple, clean and effective. It gets my shop name out there in a very low-key way. I don't want my banner or my logo to distract from the items I have for sale, but I want it to look like something that a professional did (hopefully I achieved that, lol).

The opportunities are endless on Canva. You can create banners, business cards, facebook pages, blog pages, even your own custom-sized image. I'm officially addicted.

I was messing around with it one night and came up with a new design for my business cards.

All my boyfriend could say was, "Looks good. But 'crafter extraordinaire'? Really?"

Hey, I was just having fun. And what's more fun than that?

Get out there, guys! Try Canva for yourself and let me know how you like it :)

Burlap Christmas Wreath

What a week! My booth is officially closed at the local antique mall and my Etsy views have increased 300% this month, due to my tweaking, re-tweaking, and triple-tweaking of all my listings and my SEO. Not to mention that I've added more than I ever have. Granted, 11 items isn't really a lot, but I'm getting there.

One of this week's projects (I've been a busy bee) was an adorable little burlap Christmas wreath. While I generally prefer the glitter and pizzazz of a decomesh wreath, my boyfriend absolutely hates them. When I told him I was going to make a burlap one he actually volunteered to drive me to Michaels with the hopes that it would replace the one that I have ready to put on my front door after Thanksgiving.

No such luck for him. It's too small for a front door wreath and our door is exposed to the elements anyway, so it just wasn't to be. So it is now posted on my Etsy site, hopefully soon to go to another loving home.

I love it! I'm pretty strict about having seasonally-appropriate decorations up in my house, but I'll admit that I've got this thing hanging on the wall in my hallway right now.  It's so simple, it's the perfect addition to a "rustic Christmas" theme.

I've got to say that I'm really digging the little faux-stitcheed deer on this ribbon, too. It's made to look like a knitted sweater and as much as I love the look of it, I can tell you from experience that it's a bit of a pain to actually knit those things. Tangled and overlapping yarn, a cat trying to drag off the skeins and making a huge knot of the whole thing . . . Nightmares.

I'm a sucker for a double bow like this one. I've made some of the round bows (the kind that I can only ever think of as a "fair ribbon" bows) and used them on various wreaths, but I always seem to come back to these. They're almost peppy, somehow.

I hope you like this week's craft as much as I do!

The Challenges of a Small Success

Despite the fact that I've had my Etsy shop open for over a year now, I still consider myself a newbie because (until recently) I didn't really mess with it much. I think over the past year I've posted 15 items and 10 of those were in the past month.

I sort of jumped the gun when I first opened shop. Bright and early one morning, while the rest of my house was asleep, I hopped on my Mac, got myself a cup of coffee and said, "Really, how hard can this be?" I grabbed a scarf that I'd knitted a while back, took a couple of photos and voila! An Etsy shop was born. 

My first item sold within a month or so, and frankly that was a surprise. After my initial spurt of confidence, I hadn't really thought too much about the shop or the solo item that I'd thrown on the web. A woman in Australia bought my scarf for $15, but I hadn't really researched my shipping costs and ended up losing money in the end.

Did that bother me? A little. But I was riding the Cha-Ching high from Etsy.

This spurred me to convince my parents to go in halfsies with me at a local antique mall on a booth. 

I didn't have the inventory.

I didn't have a business plan.

I didn't really think past that blur of I can do this!

And so, a year of significant monetary losses later, my contract is almost up and I'm about to close down my booth. Actually, Friday is my last day. And I'm okay with that - I jumped in without really thinking. My parents were more geared towards selling knick knacks and interesting small pieces that they found at auctions while I was more interested in making and selling my wares. It didn't mesh well. Frankly, it looked like an awkward hodge-podge of just stuff.

To make matters worse, the booths on either side of mine were well-done and exactly what I had been hoping for my own.

So now I'm taking a BIG step back, revamping my Etsy shop, researching SEO and marketing. I'm hoping that this next step with EclecticMES is a little more successful than my last one and definitely hoping that it'll be at least more organized and focused.

Lesson learned: Don't let a small success go to your head and interfere with your business plans and goals. Keep a clear, calm head, work hard, and the rest will follow!

Crochet baby blanket

It's official! I've finally finished my first crocheted baby blanket!

I've been knitting since I was eight years old and all my life I've heard that if you learn to knit first, you'll never learn how to crochet. I'm not sure who decided that was a fact or why it's such a popular notion, but I'm here to tell you that it's not true.

I love crocheting. I hate to say it, but I might just like it even better than knitting. 

I've been teaching myself to crochet through trial and error, online tutorials, and the occasional youtube video. I've done hats and scarves and was really excited to tackle my first "big" project, if you can consider a baby blanket big.

I love the bright colors on this thing. My boyfriend shied away, but then again his idea of a "fun" color is gray. Bleh.

I went with a 3 double crochet shell pattern for this one. With the cotton yarn and the no-brainer pattern, it worked up in time at all.

 

Nothing beats the clean lines on this thing. I stuck with a single crochet border on the blanket and I'm glad I did it. The single crochet brings it all together with a clean, crisp outline.

My pride and joy baby blanket is for sale in my Etsy shop :)

Chalk Paint and Re-Upholstered Chair Makeover

This is the fifth day that it's been raining here in the Valley. We're really not used to this kind of weather and I think everyone's going a little stir-crazy. My own stir-craziness prompted me to revamp an ugly dining room chair left over from a yard sale I had over the summer. What was I supposed to do with a single chair? For the last few months it's been living underneath of a pile of junk in my basement. 

Well, after getting my new desk settled in my craft room, I realized that the hulking rolling chair that I used with my old desk was way too big. And thus began the great chair makeover.

Welcome to my dirty basement!

This was really a project of firsts. I've never worked with chalk paint, never made chalk paint, and I've never re-upholstered anything. I never really thought that I would.

First, I removed the chair pad by unscrewing the four screws on the bottom of the chair.

Which left me with this:

That's a layer of dirty, outdated fabric, a layer of rounded foam, and a final layer of square foam. I saved the old fabric to use as a template for my new polka dotted material.

Then I painted. I used the recipe for chalk paint that I found online from Lowe's: 

1/3 cup of cool water

1/3 cup of plaster of paris

1 cup latex paint

I used paint that had primer in it and I've read in a few different places that it's better to use paint WITHOUT primer, but it was just what I had on hand. Like I said, this was a stir-crazy, gotta-do-something-NOW kind of project, so I literally had everything I used for this project on hand. Was that the best way to do it? Probably not.

It took a solid 2 coats of paint and I still had to go back and do some touch-ups here and there. Not really sure how I feel about the homemade chalk paint, but I don't have anything to compare it to, either.

Then began the upholstering. I cut my new fabric, tossed the old, and very carefully laid it out on the old foam. Then I took my handy stapler and stapled it down all the way around. I found the corners to be a lot more challenging than I'd thought they would be. I sort of took the bunched-up approach. I pulled it as tight as I could across the front and then bunched it so that you can't see the bunching from the front. Then I stapled. Liberally.

Last, but not least, I figured I had to do something with the big blank space on the back of the chair. I thought about adding the initial of my last name but (with hopes that I'll one day get married), I decided on a big M instead.

I downloaded a cursive M from offline, printed it, and colored the back with a chalk pencil. To transfer the image, I taped it to the chair and traced over the lines on the paper with a pen, then removed the paper. The charcoal leaves a sort of "ghost" image behind and then I painted in the lines.

If you ever choose to do anything like this I STRONGLY suggest that you do NOT do it this way. It took FOREVER to hand-paint that letter. It looks pretty decent, but I didn't even have the right size paintbrush and ended up using a tooth pick to fill in the small lines with paint and at the end gave up and outlined the whole thing in black Sharpie to smooth the outer lines. (Remember: last minute project, here.) If you have the option of a stencil or a vinyl letter, definitely go that route.

All in all, though, I'm pretty much in love with my new chair. 

Love!!!

Ruffled burlap garland

I'm a little late on this week's post - sorry guys!

The big project this week is a ruffled burlap garland. A friend of mine had mentioned that she'd seen one draped over the door of a local primitive store and when I went to check it out, I knew I had to make one for myself. The store was asking $30 for one garland, but I was pretty sure I could remake it myself for less.

It was a pretty good success. I bought some burlap rolls from Wal-Mart, grabbed some scrap yarn and a yarn needle from my craft room, and went to town.

Yes, I have purple walls in my living room. No judging lol.

The secret to sewing the burlap to make the ruffles is to sew in a zig-zag pattern. The larger your zigs and zags, the larger the ruffles. Sew through a good two feet of burlap and then push the burlap down on the yarn to make it bunch up. The burlap didn't go as far as I thought it would - I used two entire rolls of burlap (not sure what the measurements are on the length of those rolls) and it only made a garland long enough to just cover the top of my mantle, about 4 1/2 feet. Right now I'm using it as a fall decoration on the mantle, but if I were to make another one for Christmas, I think I'd make it a little longer so I could drape it along the front of the fireplace.

Some pumpkins and some shiny fall leaves really made the burlap pop.

Bundt Pan Wreath

About a year ago, I came across an old orange bundt pan at a thrift store. It's really seen better days - the coating on the inside is flaking off, the orange on the outside is scratched in places and I really just didn't feel right using it to cook. Who knows how much of that inner coating would wind up in my cakes? Yikes.

Thanks to the trusty Pinterest, I came across the idea for a bundt pan wreath. I started with these materials:

Don't ask about what happened to the scissors - it involves an inattentive crafter and a teething puppy.


I also used my hot glue gun and some wire, but I forgot to throw those in there for the picture.


I strung my ribbon through the center of the pan to make the hanger and hot glued the ends together. Then I made a little bow to go over the top where I planned to actually hang the wreath. I used some wire to attach the bow to the strip of ribbon and made a little hook to hang it on. I could get the wreath to hang by slipping the nail through the holes in the burlap, but I wasn't sure how long that would hold before pulling the burlap out of place.

The pan looked pretty plain just sort of hanging on the burlap, so I surfed the web for some good felt flower DIY instructions. I found the perfect one here. Do be careful with the hot glue - I've got two nice burns on my fingers to show for my hard work this afternoon!

I'm really pleased with how the flower came out. The grey one is from the instructions on the diaryofamadcrafter blog. She used another piece of felt for the middle of the flower, but I used a little wooden bead that I had in my craft room. The little cream flowers were super easy - just use something as a template for a circle, cut the circle out of the felt and then cut the circle into a spiral. I just wrapped the spiral from the bottom out, putting a dot of glue on as I went along. Easy peasy.

I hot glued my flowers onto the pan and voila! The perfect kitchen wreath.

I love it, and it's available on my Etsy shop if you love it, too :)

Beach-themed Decomesh Wreath

My bathroom (like 90% of all bathrooms) is beach-themed. I've got blue walls, a nice line of blue and sea-green glass accent tiles in the shower, and a giant B-E-A-C-H glued to one of the walls. I had a big blank spot on the wall over the towel rack that was just begging to be filled.

On a trip to Michael's over the summer I saw a pre-made wreath that had what looked like netting and a slew of seashells glued to it. I tried to recreate it (minus the string of seashells).

The end result:

I started with 4" rolls of the dark blue and teal decomesh, 1 roll of the burlap netting, and the smallest wire wreath frame I could find at Michaels. I did one pass with each of the blues, keeping my loops pretty large, and finished it up with the netting. I just sort of poked loops in where I thought the decomesh looked a little sparse.

It took me a while to find starfish that I liked at an affordable price - I ended up having to get a variety pack from Michael's with a 40% off coupon. I think this is the first decomesh wreath I've ever made that I haven't used ribbon, but the starfish finish it off pretty well.

Revamped Mahogany Desk

I love going to Goodwill when they don't know exactly what they've got for sale. I found a solid Mahogany desk for $15.

Yup. You read that right - fifteen bucks.

It had seen some better days - the finish was wearing off in a few places and it smelled (strongly) like old people, but there wasn't anything wrong that couldn't be fixed with a sander, some stain and a little paint.

I have mixed feelings about the fact that I painted a Mahogany piece, but I can't argue with the results. I absolutely love it. 

After a light sanding on the body, I used a flat latex paint from Lowe's. It took about three coats to cover, but it went on nicely. I toyed with the idea of making my own chalk paint to use on it, but I figured I'd save that for a project I'm a little less attached to. Maybe when I redo the desk that this one is replacing ;)



During my research, I stumbled upon an article on A Bit O' Whimsy about using shoe polish as an alternative to the wax that Annie Sloan sells to use with the chalk paint. I've never used wax on any furniture I've painted, so it was certainly a learning experience. I tried sort of buffing the wax on but I didn't put down a base coat of clear wax (which is apparently VERY important) and I hated how it looked. I had to repaint that drawer and start over.

So, erring on the side of caution, I took q-tips, rubbed them in the brown shoe wax, and very gently applied it to the edges of the drawers.

It went well enough - it antiqued the edges without me having to sand off the paint I'd just pain-stakingly applied.

I applied the wax to the columns as well.

All in all, I think it turned out really well. It's a nice, elegant addition to my craft room. Next time I need to remember to take some before pictures, though!

Halloween Decomesh Wreath

Last week was my fall wreath and this week is Halloween! I know, I know - I'm a little early, but who can blame me? Decomesh is a great medium for a wreath, especially when you're looking for bright, festive colors. 

I always feel like "the bigger, the better" applies when making a decomesh wreath. Some people may not agree, but it makes such a statement on your front door. The colors, the shapes, the glittering tape in the mesh can all be seen easily from the road.

I picked up the witch's boot on clearance last year from Michael's and it's been patiently waiting in my closet all this time. At first, I'd placed the boot and was planning on it being the centerpiece, but it looked odd sort of thrust into all of that poofy, meshy goodness. I used an entire spool of ribbon to make the green bow and attached it with a pipecleaner (though now I think the proper term is "fuzzy stick" believe it or not).


To hide the other "fuzzy sticks" attached to the wreath form, I used little glittery styrofoam balls.

It worked pretty well, but fair warning: glittery balls covered in hot glue can be very dangerous when fumbled. I've got two nice burns on my left hand from them :(

Last, I added a few short, twirly pieces of orange mesh for a little pizzazz. They stick out a little, but I don't have a storm door, so there's no problem there. 

I hope you like it! Let me know if you have any questions about making your own decomesh wreath.

Fall Wreath 2014!

Even though the first day of fall is technically September 23rd, I jumped the gun a little. Fall's my favorite time of the year and the air's got just a hint of a crisp to it and some of the trees have even started changing here in the Blue Ridge. 

For my front door wreath this year, I had an idea that didn't turn out as well as I'd planned in my head, but I still like it. I went to Michael's and purchased some of those little 99 cents letters from the wood section to spell out "FALL" on the twig wreath I had at home. I rummaged around a little and found some chevron burlap and covered the previously white letters.

They looked really cute, but I think once I put them on the wreath they sort of lost their pop in that muted burlap color, especially from the road. I put them against some glittery burlap leaves that I got on my Michael's trip and continued to flesh it in with some fall flowers all around the bottom. 

To balance out the top, I made a big burlap bow with wire-lined ribbon and attached it to the top with a pipe cleaner.

I feel like it rounded out pretty well. I have to say that some of my wreath creations don't exactly match my maroon door (not that I let that stop me), but I'm really digging the look of all those fall colors against it.

Patriotic Burlap Wreath

While perusing the Memorial Day section at Wal-Mart today, I found some pretty nice patriotic burlap. I don't think that all of the Wal-Marts have the same burlap - I checked the one in the town next to mine and they had a more limited selection.

Anyways, inspiration struck. I bought 2 rolls of blue with stars, one of roll of red and one of the plain. They were $3.47 each, though the blue roll was a lot smaller than the others. I already had a wire wreath form at home. 

Burlap wreaths are incredibly easy to make. I made this one while sipping beer on my deck with my boyfriend. It took 20 minutes tops. I wanted an American flag look, so I started with the blue burlap. All you have to do is make a loop, poke the loop through the bottom hole, repeat for the final two holes, and repeat all the way around. 

Wire wreaths have 3 gaps and the entire form is separated into sections by the cross bars. In each section I did three sets of bottom-to-top loops. You have to scrunch the loops together a bit to make it fit, but it makes the wreath look fuller and hides the wires.

I did 2 1/2 sections of the blue, then switched to the plain for my "white" stripe. I filled in the other half from the blue and then did two more full sections. From there on out I alternated two sections of red and two sections of plain.

That's all there is to it! Just use a little bit of hot glue to secure the ends to the back of the wreath where you switched colors and remember to twist the blue so that the right side is facing when you pull up your loops. 

To hang the wreath, I've found that the burlap makes it too bulky to hang by the wreath form. I like to use index card rings. You can find them just about anywhere, but mine came from (surprise!) Wal-Mart.

To keep the ring from sliding all over the wreath form, make sure to hook it around one of the cross ties (which I totally didn't take a picture of, but here's the picture I took anyway).

And voila! You've got a beautiful new wreath for the front door. Or the back door. Or inside. Wherever. 

Good luck! Let me know if you have any questions :)