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Styling the Basket – January

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Basket with snowflakes and a cardinal on a branch

Do you still have Christmas decorations out? Don’t feel bad! I’m not done putting my “holiday home” away yet either! I wait till after the Epiphany/Three Kings Day/Little Christmas on January 6th anyway, and then this past week has been crazy! I’m hoping by the time you read this, I’ll have it put away, but I’m not promising anything! But I have re-styled the basket for January.

Closeup picture of cardinal on branch

I found this cute cardinal right after Christmas when I went to the dollar store and I knew I was going to use him in the January basket. Then I had an idea to perch him on a branch, and I found a perfect stick for the purpose on the ground while walking the next day! You can see that I painted it with some glitter paint before clipping the cardinal to it. There’s never such a thing as too much glitter, right?

Picture of basket with snowflakes and cardinal on branch.

The snowballs came from last January’s basket, and the garland and snowflakes are actually Christmas decorations! My grandmother made the snowflakes for me many years ago, and I’ve had them on my tree every year since then. I recently read that when you see a cardinal, it means that someone in heaven is praying for you. I always knew seeing a cardinal had something to do with people who have passed – and I’ve had some crazy experiences with that – but I didn’t realize it means someone is praying for you. Knowing that made it even more special to use my grandmother’s snowflakes in this basket with the cardinal!

Picture of basket with snowflakes, snowballs, and cardinal.

Hope you’re having fun getting your home restyled for January!

My Holiday Home – Styling the Basket!

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I’m sure you were wondering where is the basket this Christmas (or maybe I’m overestimating your attachment to my basket, ha ha)? For some reason, it took me forever to get a look I was happy with there – I think I used some of the things I had in last year’s on the mantel and other places, and I didn’t want it to be exactly the same as last year anyway. I tried a bunch of things but ended up with this!
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I’ve had this snowman for years and done a lot with him, but I think he looks cute in the basket! I had done the little jars with the M&Ms in them during the week and so I decorated the big jar to go with them at the church Sip and Paint last Friday. I only bought the little tree in a pot from the Boy Scouts on Sunday – did I mention it took forever to get this together? I honestly thought we were going to be celebrating Christmas with the basket not done!

Anyway, more of the holiday home (and cookies) will be coming soon – I know I’ve been a little MIA lately, but I’ve been busy decorating and baking and doing a bunch of stuff I can’t wait to share with you! Hope you’re having a good holiday season!

More of My Holiday House (and a cork craft)

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Well, I’m almost done decorating my living room and dining room, including the trees, but in the meantime, I wanted to show a little of how I extend the Christmas spirit throughout my home!
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This is actually my bedroom dresser – for December, I remove almost everything that’s usually on it and put up this cute little tree. The snowflakes have been used all over the room at one time or another – they’ve been on the tree, hanging from drawer handles, and strung over the curtains, but this year, I decided to simply scatter them on the dresser, and I like it!
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The blue vase usually holds silk hydrangeas, but I swap them out for blue and pink pinecones.
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I love the quilt my mom made me, so I don’t bother changing it, but I did swap out the pillows that are usually there for a few Christmas-themed ones. I also have two little needlepoint stockings (also gifts from my mom) hanging above the bed – JP likes lighthouses and I like penguins, so these are perfect for us!
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Now that I work at home, I had to decorate the office too! Most of these are actually decorations I had in the office, and I’m even going to tell you how to make one of them! I had the green tree and nativity in the office and bought the pink one (bright pink is the company color, so I had to get it) and the white one this year.
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(It’s hard to see, but the stocking has my name on it – I used to sit in a “pod” of four women, and I gave us each a personalized stocking one year).

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This garland is made from prosecco corks! A while ago, I worked in an office where we drank prosecco fairly often, and for some reason, I started saving the corks. If you’re planning a New Year’s party or just enjoy sparkling wine, you can make an easy and cute garland from the corks. Simply paint them with craft paint (I used white and gold, but you could do whatever colors you like – they don’t have to be a holiday decoration, so you might want to use your favorite team’s colors – especially if you’re celebrating a championship, for instance). Once the paint dries, apply glue to the wide end and dip in glitter. Dry upright and then tie them together with ribbon. The only word of warning is that the garland is pretty heavy, so plan how you’ll hang it accordingly (or plan to use it as a flat decoration like I did here). You can also use the loose corks as a decoration on their own, as you can see from these two here by the penguins.
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Hope you’ve enjoyed a little more of the holiday house tour and I hope you’re feeling inspired to carry the holiday spirit throughout your house!

My Holiday Mantel

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So…the Christmas decorating is in full swing here at the Den, but for today I’m going to show off my mantel, because I am really happy with how it came out. I’ve been doing the same things every year on the mantel, but this year I picked up glittery candlesticks at Target a while back (as seen in my Thanksgiving tablescapes), and I found a few other sparkly pieces when we went away for Thanksgiving, and I decided to go for an all-out sparkly look.

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I made the “Tis the Season” sign myself – I used a metal sign from the crafts store, and I was very thankful that they came in a pack of five, because I discovered something while working on the first one (not pictured) – you can’t erase on metal without leaving streaks! I tried my usual trick of drawing lines and doing my first pass lettering in pencil and discovered that when I erased the lines, extremely visible streaks appeared! Sadness! So I re-did it freehand, and I think (if I say so myself), it came out ok! I’d rather have been able to use pencil, but those streaks!

Most of the rest of the decor was repurposed from other Christmas decorations – I bought the garland with the silver balls at the dollar store (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?) The light-up scene and the beautiful angel/butterfly (I said it looks like a butterfly with an angel in the middle, and JP says it’s just an angel) pictured below were purchased on vacation.

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The large balls in the basket were a gift from a friend and I usually keep them on a shelf elsewhere in the living room, but they look nice up here with the sign and some little balls (although you can’t see all three of them that well in this picture, they are more visible in person).
mantel3The glass candlesticks, cross, and glasses are up on the mantel year-round – I just moved them around a little. I found some other Christmas things that seemed to fit the theme and moved them in, added a string of rope lights around the back (I love my red living room, but it gets dark awfully quickly) and voila! Here are a few more close-ups, just because I’m so happy with it all!
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Please ignore the electrical cord – the lights have to get plugged in somehow!
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Hope you’re having fun decorating for the holidays – don’t be scared to try something new this year!

Easy Holiday Shirts!

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I didn’t want to share this till after our shirts made their debut on Thanksgiving, but now I can! I spent Thanksgiving with JP’s nephew and his family, and one of their family traditions is an “Ugly Thanksgiving Sweater/Shirt Contest” (they live in Alabama, so there are lots of years a sweater isn’t really necessary on Thanksgiving). Well, I couldn’t pass that up, although I can’t say ours were exactly ugly (see below). But as we move into Ugly Christmas Sweater season, I wanted to share how I did these.
JP shirtJP does love pie, so it was easy to think of what to do for him! I went with “Happy Turkey Day”.
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(No, I don’t know what’s with that position or why someone took a picture of me like that!)

In both cases, I started with white t-shirts. I bought his in a crafts store where I found them near the fabric painting markers and paints (I picked up a 5-pack of fabric markers and some red fabric paint as well). I strongly recommend using those ones, because I used a t-shirt I had on hand which was some kind of cotton blend, and it seemed harder to write on, even though the shirt itself feels smoother to the touch.

When I got everything home, I typed up and printed out what I wanted to write for each of us in a nice big font.  Here they are:
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(I was hoping the use of Comic Sans on my shirt might push it into the “Ugly” category, ha ha).

I then put each printouts under the appropriate shirt and simply traced over the lettering on each, using the fabric markers, except for the heart on the I Love Pie shirt, which I did using “puffy” fabric paint and a medium paintbrush. Here is JP’s “I Love Pie” shirt with the paper under it:
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I don’t know what I’m going to do about holiday sweaters (stay tuned!), but if you’d like a super-easy way to make a holiday shirt, you can’t beat tracing and fabric markers!

Have you ever made an Ugly Christmas Sweater (or shirt)?

How to Make a Paper Banner!

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One of my favorite things to do is make paper banners. They are easy and so versatile – you can use them for parties, holidays, school decorations – you name it! The easiest way to tell you how to make a paper banner is to show you, so this is the start of something new for Allybear’s Den – video! Hope you enjoy this demonstration of paper banner making!

 

Hand Letter a Wooden Sign

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270I’ve been waiting to do this post for about a month now, and I am so excited about it! I made this wooden sign for my niece’s baby shower, but I couldn’t show you how I did it till I gave it to her! The shower was Saturday and now I can share how you can do a hand-lettered wooden sign with nothing more than a little time, your computer, a white pencil, and some Sharpies and paint pens.

I started with a pre-made and pre-weathered 12 x 18 wooden sign I picked up in a crafts store.  The planks created natural “breaks” between words, which made measuring a little easier. To figure out the size of the letters, I measured one of the boards, went into Word and created a text box the size of the board. I typed each word of my saying into the text box and increased the font size until I filled the text box. I then removed the text box outline and printed it all out, as seen below.

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You can see that each sheet of paper contains one word and each piece of paper ended up folded in half. The reason for that folding is that I folded each sheet of paper right under the word, placed the half sheet on the board above where I was writing and then basically drew the letters onto the boards with a white pencil (I knew some of the letters would be white and I wanted to be sure that I could see them on the boards while not having pencil marks show through if they didn’t erase well (which some of them didn’t)). Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of this, but I started with the basic shape of the letter and then made another white pencil mark to indicate the full width of each letter. Believe me, my real handwriting looks nothing like Times New Roman! This is probably the part that took the longest – I used a ruler to make sure each letter was set up in the right place on the board both width and height-wise.

Once I had outlines for each letter, I simply took my colored paint pens and Sharpies and filled in my outlines. I then tried to erase the white pencil marks – luckily, the blue paint  pens covered pretty well and the weathering on the boards was white, because when I tried to erase the pencil marks under the blue parts, the eraser started picking up blue paint! Mind you, I let it dry for a full day before I went at it, so I’m not sure why that happened, but once I noticed that, I simply erased the places where the white was extremely visible (cleaning the eraser between each erasure so I didn’t smear blue everywhere) and went over the blue letters again as needed.

It’s not “perfect” and believe me, I see every imperfection, but it’s cute and my niece (and all the other guests who saw it) just loved it! Looking at it as if I didn’t make it, the imperfections actually work with the weathering to give it a real folk art look, like it was something someone’s grandma made and it’s been sitting in the attic for 100 years.

Hope this has inspired you to try lettering on wood – it’s not nearly as hard as it seems and it was a lot of fun!

snips and snails

Decals on Canvas? Yes!

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Have you ever thought of applying decals to canvas but thought they wouldn’t stick on well? You may be right, but here are a few tips to make it easier. Bear in mind that I don’t have a Cricut (yet), so all this is based on decals I have ordered.

The easiest way is to use a heat-sensitive decal. These can be applied to any surface, including canvas, and you use heat (basically, a hair dryer) to keep them in place. Here are examples of two that I did for my office.

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These are big pictures (16 x 20), and I would definitely recommend using this method for anything that large. This past summer, though, I was visiting friends and wanted to make them gifts with sayings that meant something to each of them. I couldn’t find anything that said exactly what I wanted, so I decided to custom order decals and affix them to 12×12 canvases. However…when the decals came, they weren’t the heat-sensitive ones…I honestly didn’t even think of it! I did a little research and a little trial and error, and I understand they’re holding up just fine!

First, put a layer of white paint over the whole canvas. The paint will be the first step in evening out the texture of the canvas. Note that all the painting is with regular “craft paint” – you won’t need anything that you can’t find at any crafts store.
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Next, if you want a background picture, this is the time to paint it on. In this case, I painted ivory hearts on the canvas (I used a stencil to do the big single heart, but did the smaller ones freehand because I didn’t want them to be exactly symmetrical).

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When the paint dries, go over the whole thing with Mod Podge. This dries clear but creates a nice smooth surface for your decals. Here’s one of them with a nice wet coat of Mod Podge.

Next comes the fun part (#sarcasm) – time to apply the decals! If you use a long saying in a complicated font, this will be a little tricky (hmmm…how would I know that), but go slowly and be patient. Make sure your decals are really stuck well to the canvas before the next step! Because once your decals are in place and stuck to the canvas, you’re going back to our old friend Mod Podge for one more coat. Be very careful when applying the Mod Podge that your brush doesn’t catch any of the letters and pull them up – if that happens, just take a toothpick (or your fingernail) and gently re-stick the decal to the canvas.

Here are the finished products and now you can see how I know that a long saying in a complicated font is do-able – it just takes patience!
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Hope this has inspired you to try decals on canvas! If you’ve tried it and have any other tips, please share!

Styling the Basket – Halloween!

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I have a confession – I am not a huge Halloween person. I like getting dressed up as much as anyone (possibly more than many), and I admire people who go all-out with decorating for the holiday, but it’s just not my thing. If I was going to decorate more than the bare minimum I do outside, it would be all scarecrows and pumpkins anyway. I was at the Home Depot the other day and found myself wondering who exactly wants a 6-foot werewolf that looked like a cross between a rabid dog and a rat on their lawn! No offense if you have or want one – that’s what makes the world go around!

That being said, Halloween is a holiday, it’s halfway through October, and I have styled the basket accordingly. This was fun – I had two jars that had one flat side (a company sent them to my old office), so I painted them white and drew spider webs on them. I bought some pumpkins at the dollar store and a few at Michael’s that matched the polka-dot pumpkin I bought last year. I also bought some Halloween garland at the dollar store for the fireplace. I moved the things I had for fall around and voila…Halloween decorations.

First I painted them with two coats of white craft paint.

jars 2Then I drew a spider web with a pencil.

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Next, I went over the pencil lines with a Sharpie. I erased where I didn’t write over the pencil completely. If you look at this picture, it looks a little smeary, but when you see the finished product, you really don’t see any smearing. Remember, most things don’t need to be nearly as perfect as you think (or maybe that’s just me who thinks that!) jar-with-sharpie.jpg
Next, I glittered two small battery-operated candles I had on hand. Yes…glitter. I know it’s the worst, but I generally manage to contain it by using a dollar store half pan lined with parchment paper. The half-pan gives the glitter no place to go (or at least fewer places to go), and the parchment paper allows for two things – first, you can pick it up if you need to use some of the extra glitter, and second, things with glue tend not to stick to it.
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After glittering the candles, put on a layer of Mod Podge. If you don’t use Mod Podge often, you’ll get nervous because it looks like you just put big smears of white glue all over everything, but no worries – it dries clear!
candles with mod podge

The whole thing took about two days, counting one trip to the dollar store and one trip to Target to find the pumpkin for the middle. Here’s the finished product: Halloween Basket

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(the plant looks a little scary, but it’s not dying, I’m reviving it!)

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Imagine what I could do if I liked Halloween! 🙂 Hope your Halloween decorating is a HOWLING success!

Styling the Basket for Fall!

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Styling the Basket

After it got chilly Sunday, I realized I was very delinquent in styling the basket for fall! So here it is…the pumpkin candle holder in front was a gift (as was the original basket, from a different person). Everything else in here didn’t cost me a lot at all!

The jars were a gift – I asked for and received a box of mason jars for Christmas a few years ago, which had my family asking if I was taking up canning, but I explained it was (so far) just for crafts purposes. The pumpkins were from the dollar store – I used some gold glitter paint I had on hand from an earlier project on the plain orange ones to give them a little sparkle, and it’s hard to tell from this picture, but there are two more dollar store pumpkins in there with flowers attached (the flowers also came from the dollar store). I bought the “Hello Fall” sign at an end-of-season sale. I’d estimate the whole project, including the paint I bought just for these jars, cost me no more than $15!

Fireplace

As you can see, I also did the fireplace – I think I paid full price for the Pumpkin Spice Season picture because I just couldn’t resist it, but the rest of it is all dollar store specials with the addition of some glitter paint and flowers!

Hope you like my fall decorating, and I hope this inspires you to look at your local dollar store for things that can be made into seasonal decorations!

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