Showing posts with label crafts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crafts. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Late monday blogg madness

I am bringing back The Weekender that I had before, but am posting it on Mondays instead. Except, I already screwed up and didn't do it yesterday! Hehe.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, I will be posting links to some of my favorite blog posts in bloggy-land. They can include fashion, make-up, recipes, crafts... anything! If you've been featured, please feel free to grab a button from the sidebar!












Thank you to all of the bloggers for posting these great creations!!

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Barnfest

One of my favorite events held in my community this afternoon. Every year, we have an event call Barnfest/Fall Fest. Its basically a large craft show, to say the least. But the atmosphere of this event is great. I wish I would have taken some pictures. All of the volunteers dress very traditionally, in long dresses. Outside of the event, you can order homemade food. Every year, they sample a different soup, which they actually cook outside of in a very large kettle. This year was vegetable soup, and it was DELICIOUS!

Inside, there are a number of different vendors displaying their crafts. I picked up a few different purchases, which I'm super excited about! My first purchase was a 90 yard ball of alpaca/llama wool yarn, which is dyed brown and pink. I think I'm going to make a beautiful scarf out of it. My second purchase was a Corion cutting board. And then my third purchase was a ladder that, once we buy a house, I'll either use in the living to hang blankets on or in the bathroom for towels.

My #1 rule when walking around Barnfest is:

If I Can Make It Myself, Then I Won't I'm Not Allowed To Buy It

 I have some great inspiration now for some awesome projects! Oh, and there was a vendor selling Redneck Wineglasses. I make those! I'll have to do a tutorial on that particular project, because they are so super easy. Does anyone know the best glue to bond glass to glass? That's what I'm still trying to figure out.

There were two vendors selling one of my favorite creations! The one lady referred to them as Slub Wine Bottles, although when I tried to search for it to find y'all a picture, I didn't find what I was looking for. 


They are simply wine bottles that have been melted in a kiln. The reaction of each bottle is slightly different. They usually used as serving trays for cheese, but they have other uses as well. The best part is that my grandmother has a small kiln, so I'm thinking I can make these! I'm pretty excited. :)


My second favorite project was the lighted bottles that we found. 





They are simply empty bottles with a hole drilled through the back and Christmas lights stuffed inside the bottle. Some of the bottles we saw had a transparent paint, which was a super cool effect, and others were decorative liquor bottles. I'm really excited to make some of these as well, because I think they would look really neat, and give a nice effect in the evenings when you don't want the house all lit up.

One of the biggest projects being sold were fall wreaths. One of my favorites was decorated in black and white! I can't wait to make some wreaths. 

 Another project that you see all over the place were painted blocks of wood with cute quotes stenciled on. I bought one of these last year, and it looks really cute sitting on a table. A project like this would be really easy.

Maybe someday, I'll have enough projects to have my own stand at Barnfest!!

**please note that the pictures on this post were found via Google Images and were not taken by me at Barnfest.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Halloween Costume Creations!! CANDYLAND!!!! :)


Hey there everyone!! Here is my Halloween post about our costumes! I was pretty excited about them. & I decided to go ahead and put them up a little early, just in case you're still looking for a little inspiration. Alex & I, and a couple of our friends decided to dress up as characters from CandyLand. (Sorry, I have my jacket on, so you can't see the full costume. It was a little chilly).

King Kandy

Our Inspiration Picture for King Kandy
King Kandy's costume was by far the most difficult to assemble, because there is just so much to his costume! We also had to be the most creative with this one. 

The only aspect of his costume that we actually purchased were red and white striped tights from a Halloween store. The rest of the costume was hand made.

Starting from the top, we made his little cupcake hat. For the base of the hat, we ended up spray painting two styrofoam bowls brown. On the inside of one bowl, we hot glued a winter hat that was lined with red and white duct tape. On the other bowl, we created a base and then covered it with cotton balls. We then spray painted this a yellow-gold color. From there, we glued this whole piece into the bowl. We then used plain cotton balls to create the white "crown" shape, with peppermint tops and the sucker from a tootsie roll pop glued to the very top. 

We followed a similar process for the top of his staff... just leave out the second bowl, white "crown" and peppermints. 

Speaking of the staff, this was made with papertowel tubes (the thicker the better!). We taped the tubes together and then stuffed them with newspaper to help keep it sturdy. We then wrapped it with white & red duct tape to create the peppermint effect. Finally, we glued the cupcake to the top.

The next step of this costume was the armor. We made this out of posterpoard that has been spray painted gold. The skirt part was pretty simple, as we just created a half-skirt, and then cut the edges in a scalloped pattern and spray painted it gold. We then punched holes in the upper corners and tied red yarn to tie the skirt on. Finally, we hot glued a Tootsie Roll Pop (with sticks attached) to each section of the skirt.

The top piece was slightly more comp-
licated. We cut out a bunch of "scales" from posterboard and spray painted those. We then cut out and painted the armor shape and attached all 24 scales. Once that was assembled, we hot glued peppermint candies to the bottom of each scale.

Alex also wore a yellow-gold t-shirt underneath, that we found on sale at Wal-mart for only $3. To create the peppermint shoulder pads, you would just not believe what we did. We purchased a filter for a shop-vac and cut it in half (so that we had 2 circles) and then I cut the seams, so they would lay flat. We then wrapped each one with red & white duct tape for the peppermint look and hot glued them onto the tshirt.

The sleeves were made with bubble wrap & spray paint. Alex wore a gold long-sleeve t-shirt (that he already owned) for warmth, so we just taped the bubble wrap to his shirt sleeves and then around his arm, loosely, so that he could still move his arms. I also glued some thing batting that I had cut out, to create the cuffs.
For the cape, we created the top piece with yarn, cardboard, and some more batting. The actual cape piece was made out of a purple fleece blanket with some batting attached to the top edge, so it would blend into the cardboard piece. We just safety pinned this one, so I could keep the blanket after Halloween.
Finally, King Kandy has this peppermint belt, that is made with red and white electrical tape, markers, old cereal boxes, and yarn.


Mr. Mint
Inspriation for
Mr. Mint
 Mr. Mint was also relatively easy. For him, we also purchased a pair of red and white striped tights from the Halloween store.

For his hat, we covered an old ball cap with the red and white duct tape to create stripes. We then glued some red yarn to the inside of the cap, to create hair.

We used electrical tape to cover an old toy hatchet.

And he ended up wearing white, instead of pink... but for his sleeves, he wore a white thermal tee with red ribbon wrapped and safety pinned around his arms. Then he wore another t-shirt on top of that. We sort of forgot about his suspenders. :( And then he just wore a pair of red shorts that he owned, and we spray painted some batting and tied them to his boots for Mr. Mint's red boots. 


Princess Lolli
Inspiration for Princess Lolli
The most critical piece for Princess Lolli's costume was her lollipops. We made a trip to the candy store and purchased 3 smaller ones for her crown, and one larger one, just for her to carry. We broke off the sticks to the smaller ones and glued them to a toy crown that we found at the Halloween store. (unfortunately, one broke). You can't really tell in this picture, but we had to use packaging tape for them to stay, because the glue just wasn't strong enough. That was the one downside to her crown, was that it was quite heavy.

She purchased a yellow halter dress, which we safety pinned Tootsie Roll pops to the bottom of. For the top, we made circles with red yarn. (In some pictures, that top part is more of an orange color). We also used pink spray temporary hair color for the hair.

Just for fun, my friend used bright pink eyelashes that we found in the Halloween section of Wal-mart.




Queen Frostine
Inspiration Image for Queen Frostine
I was Queen Frostine, and this was probably the easiest costume of the bunch. The hardest part was finding the perfect blue dress. I found this one at walmart.com for only $14, and the only downside was that it was a very dark blue (much darker than in the picture). As you can see in the picture, She has two white sections on her dress. I only created the one in the middle because the top one kind of looked ridiculous with my dress. But I used a strip of batting, stitched the sides so it was tapered, and hooked it in the back with safety pins.

As for the crown, we used a little girls crown from the Halloween store, which had some boa-like material attached in silver and white. I also used the temporary dye to paint my hair blue.

The final step for my costume was the wand. Mine was made out of a stick wrapped in blue electrical tape with two small paper plates glued to either side. The plates were sprayed light blue, except for the edges. To create the points of the snowflake, we added sparklers (of all things!). Boy, was I scared someone would light them!! We also covered the plates with hot glue and craft glitter, and then used spray glitter to help seal (so we wouldn't have a huge glitter mess).




















So these were our Candyland-Themed Halloween Costumes! I hope you enjoyed this post. I really wanted to share it, not only out of pride, but also because of the creativity we used... from vacuum filters, to paper plates and bowls, to duct tape and electrical tape. 

Everyone have a happy & safe Halloween this year!!


Thursday, October 21, 2010

What I'm working on!

Hey there everyone!

I just wanted to show you what I was working on at the moment. (Oh, and I needed to find an excuse to try blogging from my brand new droid!)

Anyways, I'm currently crocheting some fingerless mittens. And as soon as I'm dine with that, I hope to do a hooded scarf. Exciting!

Okay, it is now time for me to day G'night World!
Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.3

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

My First REAL Goodwill Experience

I was bored yesterday, so I was going to make a trip to Wal-mart, but at the last minute, I decided to go across the street to Goodwill. I had been to Goodwill before, but when I was a kid, it was with my grandma and I was just "Yayy! Shopping!!" and as I got older, it was "Ugh, Goodwill... used stuff..."

I've been thinking more and more about this thrifting thing, and I might be moving soon, so I could use some cheap stuff. 

Well, I walk in, and at first I got annoyed... The people in there have no respect for the people around them! They were just walking in front of you and pushing their carts in your general direction with no disregard that you are standing there. Is this common? Or just where I live? And kids running around like crazy! (But I guess I can relate, because I used to be one of those kids). 

But I did find a few things that I wanted to purchase. And the more I looked around, the more I saw my crafty side come out.
  1. I found a white vase with red stringy-things on it (yes, this is the best way for me to describe it) and then another itty bitty vase that was orange with a hand painted flower and was made in Japan. 
  2. Then a large wicker basket that I thought would be perfect to hold my yarn. 
  3. And there was a few coffee mug holders, so I picked up one of those. I was going to paint it, and find a cute way to decorate it, and use that to drape my necklaces and bracelets on. I think that would have been really neat! I could have painted it white, and I don't know what I would have done to jazz it up! 
  4. But anyways, I also found a really cool shelf-thingy. I don't know what you would call it. But it had lots of compartments and the wood looked really neat, and it would have just been cool to put little tiny pretty things on (maybe that itty bitty vase). 
  5. And there was a tiny lamp, that I planned on repainting. It was like a clay ball and I thought it would be perfect for a bedside table. Not real sure what color I wanted to paint it though, maybe something bright?
  6. I had also found a HUGE mirror that I wanted,  but decided against because it was so heavy that I felt like I wouldn't have been able to use just a screw to hang it.  But I really wanted to clean it and paint the wood (White!).
But, go figure..  I had no clue exactly how much money I had. (Which, besides the mirror, Everything would have only costs $12 and some cents) and my card got declined!  That's just my luck! I'm going to try to go back Friday and see if any of that stuff is still there, but I doubt it. :(

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