Think Spring!

We're in the middle of our third winter storm in the last two and a half weeks. This is what I'm looking at out my window right now: 

Another 6-10 inches on top of the 15 inches we got on top of the original 5 that fell almost 3 weeks ago.

I'm sick to death of winter. So what did I do with my snow day?

I made a bright, cheerful, fantastic spring wreath. Wishful thinking? Definitely. This thing is going on my front door, snow or no snow. I'm thinking maybe it'll keep any more of the white stuff from falling.

I'm loving it! I think the cashier at Michael's thought I was crazy when I checked out with an overflowing basket full of spring flowers. My friend said, "You know you'll never need all those flowers." I used ALL 16 bushes. But it's so worth it.

 

The sprigs of . . . well, whatever the yellow things are really added some depth to the wreath that I felt it needed and a little pop of vibrant yellow.

Spring fever, here I come!

DIY Clothes Pin Magnets



I needed some magnets to go on my new chalkboard and decided to head in the clothes pin direction. I've seen them a lot on Pinterest and it seems pretty popular.
 
Here's what you'll need:

Fabric tape

.97 cent magnet strips from Walmart



The handy-dandy hot glue gun



Clothes pins (of course!)

   

And scissors. I forgot to take a picture of those.
 
I just happened to have the fabric tape on hand from a card I'd made for my mom's birthday back in November. Washi tape should work just as well.
 
It's an incredibly simple 5 minute project, really. Just cut a strip of your decorative tape long enough to fit your pins and apply to one side. I found that cutting the corners of the tape at an angle makes it a little easier to fit it around the edges and corners of the clothes pins. Also, make sure to cut a line around the metal part of the pin so that you can wrap your tape more closely around the pin.

The magnets that I bought were pre-cut (which I didn't know when I picked them up - I saw .97 cents and sort of went blind to the rest of the packaging). I ended up having to cut the strips in half lengthwise and then in half again to make it fit the clothespins' back.

Even though the magnets were coated in adhesive, I've found that their idea of adhesive is not my idea of adhesive. I used hot glue to make sure that I got a tight bond on the back of the clothespin.

And that's all there is to it! Now put them on your magnetic chalkboard (or your fridge) and enjoy!





DIY Yarn Bowl

I have pets. And they shed - a lot. Because I make things to sell, I either have to lock myself in my pet-free craft room (and away from everyone else in the house) to make anything with yarn or shove my skein into a bag and hope that it doesn't escape and roll across the floor while I'm crafting.

There's nothing worse than having to spend your time meticulously cleaning every project you make to be sure that your yarn didn't pick up any stray hairs.

To solve my problems, I turned to yarn bowls. The beautiful ceramic ones that are so popular right now generally won't hold the large skeins I like to use and as it has no lid, I still struggle with hair. I needed a large container with a lid. 

When my boyfriend finished his jar of animal crackers a few months ago, I insisted that he save it. It was too cute to throw away and I knew that I'd EVENTUALLY find something to use it for. 

And I did.

There he is, all cute and unassuming. My parents bought me a Dremel for Christmas and this is the first project I've ever used it on. 

I used the drill bit attachment to start on the lid. After a few glancing blows, I had John hold it down for me so I could apply enough pressure. I don't want to say it got away from me, but it wasn't exactly pretty. Especially considering I didn't keep my finger on the on/off switch, so I had to flail around for a few seconds to get the thing cut off.

Not my best work, I'll admit. Apparently, I'm really scary with power tools, so John took it from me to finish it up. 

He switched to one of the sanding heads and worked on smoothing out the mess I'd made.

(He doesn't like me to photograph his face. He's one of THOSE.)

We made sure to cut out the side of the lid to make it easier to stash skeins inside when you're already working on a project. Just unscrew the lid, dump your yarn inside, thread the yarn through the side and screw back down. Voila! A cheap, recycled and super cute yarn bowl!

Please, please, please be careful while doing this project! It's super easy and really only took us a few minutes, but be wary of moving parts and flying pieces of tiny plastic. They can be very hot when you're using the sanding attachment. 

But so far, it's worked like a charm! 

I hope you like it. Share pictures of your Animal Cracker jar makeovers!

                                           Happy crafting!

Desk turned chalkboard!

Whew! The holidays really kicked me in the butt as far as blogging goes. I told myself that I wasn't going to let it get in my way but first came Thanksgiving and then my birthday and before I knew it I was caught up in the mad rush to Christmas.

I feel like I blinked and the last two months just sort of disappeared.

So here's to hoping that everyone had a fabulous Thanksgiving, Christmas and that 2015 is a great year for all of us!

On to the craft of the week!

My family owns property in the neighboring county that we've mainly used as a hunting camp for the last 20 years - its full of rolling hills and mountains, a river, some creeks, an abandoned cabin in the woods and a couple of old barns. My boyfriend and I explored one of the old barns a few weeks ago (risking life and limb on the rotten ladder joists that lead up to the hay loft) and discovered a treasure trove of forgotten old junk. I think my uncle's been using it as a dumping ground of sorts for the last two decades. There were huge piles of old lumber, twenty or thirty old tires, moldy hay, old school desks (score!) and huge glass window panes. Underneath all of this, covered in mouse poop and what I'm afraid is bat guano was a pile of furniture parts. We're assuming that after my great grandparents died, this desk was part of the estate that didn't find a home with other family members and didn't make it at the estate sale.

Sadly, I didn't take any pictures of it when I found it. I always do that and it drives me nuts! Maybe that should be my New Year's Resolution . . .

Anyways, I smuggled a side piece home with me, filled with ideas. It would've been a beautiful desk, but the top was missing and some of the pieces were too damaged for repair.

Here's the end result and I'll explain what I did to it:

I started with a magnetic primer on the inner piece. I have to say I didn't really like it that much.


I was so excited when I read the back of it at Lowe's - for only $20 and half an hour of your time you can make any surface magnetic! Exciting!

Except not. The stuff stunk to high heaven, the bottom was thick as molasses and the top was the consistency of stain. It took a solid 20 minutes of stirring to even come close to the "smooth gray consistency" that the box suggests and over an hour for the first coat to dry. I did the suggested 3 coats and was so excited that it will now hold a promo magnet from Pizza Hut. That's about it. Forget getting anything else to stick.

I dashed my dreams of being able to keep my bills posted on my new board and moved on to Valspar's chalk paint. This stuff went on like a dream. One smooth coat took only a tiny bit of my can, so I'm looking forward to a long line of chalkboard decorations.








The outside of the piece I painted with cream acrylic paint and rubbed with fine steel wool before it fully dried. It gave it a really nice, used look to it without tearing up the wood as I'm wont to do with sandpaper.

I love it! I'm still a little disappointed about the magnetic paint, but I can't help but love the lines on this thing. As soon as we buy a stud finder, we'll be mounting the chalkboard beside the front door.


Thanks for reading!!

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!