Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Heaven on Earth... AKA Priest Lake, Idaho

Over Father's Day weekend, my family went up to Priest Lake to help my grandparents open up their cabin for the summer. We had a great time!


 Lisa exploring the dock

Lisa stretching on the dock

Lisa sitting on the dock

Robin's nest above the boathouse!

old row boat








Potato gun!


I'm pretty excited...

My helper rabbit while I did yard work





Priest Lake sunsets are incredible
















Dad, Grandpa, Lisa, and Stuart went out in the rough waters to fix the water line! It was mostly successful :)



The grandkids (my two sisters, Andrew, and Lisa's boyfriend) will be heading back to the lake for the 4th of July weekend. There may be some crafts with Grandma involved... can't wait!

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Silk Flower Topiaries

I did this project sometime in early April when I was desperate for some spring flowers in what seemed to be the longest winter EVER! (For me, anyway.)

To begin, I used my Joann's coupons to purchase two styrofoam balls, a packet of Spanish moss, some floral foam, and a couple of green/white hydrangea stems. When I got home, I pulled out some little light blue silk flowers from my craft box, grabbed my pearl straight pins, and found some sticks outside.

{Sorry, no pictures of the sticks or pins... or the process... I'll work on that} :)

With my supplies all compiled, I began by twisting/braiding my sticks together. I twist-tied them on each end and inserted one end into one of the styrofoam balls to make a hole about 1 inch deep. Then I removed the sticks so I could attach the flowers.

I pulled every single hydrangea flower off the little bush and used the pearl straight pins to stick them into the styrofoam ball. I filled in some of the gaps with the little blue flowers. Using regular straight pins, I attached some of the leaves from the hydrangea stems to the bottom of my ball.

When my ball of flowers was complete, I used my hot glue gun to get the sticks to stay in the 1 inch hole I made earlier. Then I put the entire stick/ball contraption into the floral foam which I had cut to the size needed for the glass cube vase.


Finally, I stuffed the Spanish moss around the edges and top of the floral foam.

For the second flower ball, I just used some of the wire stems to secure it in the smaller flower pot, which I later mod podged (as is seen in the picture). To find out how that was done, see this post.


 An easy, fun project that can be done while watching a movie or relaxing with friends!




Linking up at
Crafty, Scrappy, Happy

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Candles + Tissue Paper = Awesome!

Once again, I was inspired by Jaime Lyn at Crafty, Scrappy, Happy for this project, with images from The Graphics Fairy. I grabbed some candles, tissue paper, wax paper, and a hair dryer, and I got to work! Check out her full tutorial here. Instead of using vellum paper, I used tissue paper, and it worked really well!

First, I cut a piece of tissue paper about 1/2 inch bigger all the way around than an 8.5 x 11 inch piece of printer paper. Then, I centered my printer paper on the tissue paper, folded the edges of the tissue paper on top of the printer paper, and taped all the edges down with scotch tape. (Sorry I have no pictures of the process, but there is a video on youtube that demonstrates what I am talking about.)

I loaded the tissue/printer paper combo into my printer and printed out my images. I find that it works really well to copy all of the images I want to print into a single PowerPoint slide, then just print once. This saves time and tissue paper!

{Sample PowerPoint slide}

Once printed, I cut the tissue paper away from the printer paper, and cut each image out -- pretty close to the actual image so there was little tissue paper overhang.

Next, I placed the tissue paper on the candle, wrapped the candle in a single layer of wax paper, and used my hair dryer to melt the tissue paper into the candle. That's it!


Most of my images are from The Graphics Fairy.


I combined a couple of images for this candle


I made this one for my sister-in-law who is getting married in July! I used this image from the Graphics Fairy, and made it entirely black and white for the candle.


 I made this candle for my mom. I did some work in Photoshop to combine an image from the Graphics Fairy with the lyrics to a song written by Horatius Bonar/Jeff Ling. I like the way the color image transfered and might be doing more color in the future!



Linking up at