Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Crafty, crafty, I'm so crafty...

Next week my niece Sophia turns 1. I sat at the computer for an hour thinking and searching for what we could get her to mark this pretty awesome occasion. If you haven't guessed by now, I LOVE homemade things. Love it. When Claire insisted on making me a card for Mother's Day I bawled like a little girl. I love it.
I went to Etsy.com (my favorite site in the WORLD) and searched name blocks. I thought it could be neat for her to have little stacking cubes with her name spelled out. I searched and searched and came to a seller that makes blocks with wood and glues paper to it and crafts out some really neat stuff.
So I totally stole the idea.
Kinda.
(For Bachelor Girl...tutorial if you please...)
I went to Michael's and bought 7 3x2 1/4" thick wooden plaques for 99 cents each. I sat in front of the large paper selection for what seemed like an hour and chose 3 different colors of paisley print, a funky striped paper, a black rough vinyl-like paper and one with stars on it. I then picked out a wooden precut star and a chair rail for frames.
When I got home, I sat and stared at the supplies forever. I had an idea in my head, but sometimes it's hard to make it a reality. I started by gluing the paper to the plaques. While they were drying, I started painting the letters onto the black paper with pink, purple and green acrylic paints. I also painted the star green.
When the glue dried, I used an exacto knife to get rid of the excess paper. I cut the black paper with letters painted on into circles and glued them onto each color coordinated plaque. Then I glued the star onto the star papered plaque.
All in all, it took about 2 hours.
Now, you can totally use stencils if you don't trust your letter writing skills, but it's so much easier when you realize that you can turn the paper in whatever direction you want to make the curves perfect. Once you get past that mental barrier that you have to keep everything upright, art is really very simple.
I also made Luca a door sign. I used a large pine wooden plaque, a smaller 4x3 1/4" thick plaque and left over paper. Now, the photo can totally be interchangeable, this is just the one I happened to have laying around.

Happy Crafting!

2 comments:

Bachelor Girl said...

Thank you for feeding my obsession. I am so totally making these!

Cassie said...

I can give you many more things to make. Just wait til my new sewing machine gets here!