Can you beer me another thumb tack?

You may remember that I blogged about making a super cute tack board last month.  I actually made some tacks for it the same day, but didn't get around to blogging it before now. I never took any after pictures of the darn things until weeks later.  Since the tack board sat around unblogged for a long time, this post is way overdue.  I'm a little slow on the blogging...

I've been saving beer bottle caps for a while now, and I've got about a million of them (Stephen likes beer) but I knew  I wanted to make tacks out of them some day.  I made one out of a budweiser cap back when they had that "beware the penguins" ad campaign, since I was in that "Penguins are Awesome" stage of life that everyone goes through, and the cap had a penguin on it so I couldn't throw it out.  I was too young to drink that beer, so I'm not sure where the cap came from.  Of course that's not really important at all...  I still have that penguin tack but it's all rusted so I didn't want to put it in my pretty fabric tack board.

This project was made entirely by stuff I already had on hand!  Awesome!  All I did was find all the flat backed tacks I had, and hot glued them into the backs of the bottle caps. 

The cap on the far right is my penguin tack.  I'm so vintage.

If I were to do this project more carefully, I'd probably put some sort of backing in the cap before I filled it up with hot glue, because the tacks sort of sink in, and this method takes up a LOT of glue, but at the time I was going for quick and easy results, and I'm happy what I came out with.

The boring part: watching the tacks to make sure they don't sink into the glue.

Although the tacks ended up a little short due to the sinkage, they stay stuck in the board just fine!  I'm really happy with how they came out!  Recycling is fun!!

Can you tell we are Shiner people?

Pom Pom Pom Pom Pom Pom Pom Pom...

Oh pom-poms (aka pompons, as I often see it written but I've never actually heard it said this way).  Pom-poms are great!  They are super easy to make!  I have piles of yarn sitting around, leftover from other projects when I used to do more crochet work.  Then one day back in February or so I was overcome with need.  The need to make pom-poms!

 My apologies for the crummy lighting! Our home is like a pit of darkness...

I made my pom-poms out of lionbrand homespun yarn.  I love this stuff!  It's so soft and cuddly, and pom-poms made out of it are simply luxurious (if there is such thing as a luxurious pom-pom that is).
One downside of making pom-poms out of homespun is that there are little yarn fuzzies flying around and making you sneeze for a while after.  This probably happens with a lot of yarns, but it is especially bad with this super soft, squishy yarn.

Making pom-poms is sooooooo easy.  You can buy pom-pom makers, which make it a snap.  You can go the more frugal route and make your own pom-pom makers (I really like this idea - I think I made pom-pom easter "chicks" - mine was more duck like - with this method in first grade).  I just went the lazy route and wrapped the yarn around my fingers and hands, depending on how big i wanted the finished pom-pom to be.  I think this method takes a lot more trimming in the end, but hey - who doesn't like to give things a haircut?  After I made this first little pile of fluffies, I went a little pom-pom crazy and decided to use up all my small balls of homespun for pom-poms.  Now I have all these:

They're multiplying like Tribbles!

After I took the above picture, I found that the pom-poms shedded all over the bedspread.  We'll see if the husband notices the big red and brown fuzzy splotch before he reads this blog post...

 Can you see all the fuzz?  No? Good.

This pom-pom is my favorite because I think it looks like a little lambie tail!

Hey Bo-Peep! I found one!

I didn't realize it when I took this photo, but now I think it's kind of a funny picture since Stephen has a giant knife in one hand and a little fluffy pom-pom in the other.  Ok, maybe it's not that funny. MAYBE we can pretend he just chopped the tail off of a cute little lambie.  Then the picture is not funny.  Then it is gruesome and sad.  I'm sorry I showed you such a disturbing photo.

What am I going to do with all these pom-poms?  I'm not really sure, actually.  But now instead of a big bag of yarn I have a big box of pom-poms.  That's progress right?

Fabric Flowers: Probably not what Waterford had in mind...

Seriously everyone - you need to check out the Polka Dot Pineapple blog.  I LOVE IT! There are so many wonderful flower crafts on there and everything Lettie makes is adorable! (plus she lives in Hawaii!  Can it get any better?) I've only tried a couple of her tutorials but the results have been great.  The first one I tried was her Wire Edged Fabric Flowers.  Since she's got the tutorial laid out so well on her site I won't go into it here.  I've made several bouquets of these things already and always got great compliments on them - a STRANGER even approached me one day when I was making them to say how cute they were.  If only I were creative enough to come up with ideas like this on my own!  Take a look at some of my pictures of the process!!

I've had this fabric for YEARS!  I made a skirt with it when I was probably 14 or so.  I knew there was a good reason I hung on to it for so long - it's perfect for these flowers!!

The colors in this fabric are so close together that I soon learned that it was easier to cut the fabric pieces apart before I glued the wires down.  I got stuck with wires a lot less this way...

Then I learned that my petals wouldn't tip over if I weighted them down with clothes pins!  I do learn new things when I practice (with Tommy's help of course)!!

This is the best new technique I learned with this tutorial - wrapping a piece of tape around the nozzle so the stream of glue is really thin!  I can't believe I didn't think of this before!

Smell flowers?

And here's the finished result!  A beautiful bouquet of flowers! And look! Some of my glass marbles got a new lease on life.  Now they have something to do while they wait to become magnets.

 Aloha!

Tommy loves flowers! No watering required, but dusting every now and again couldn't hurt.


 

Crepe Paper Roses: It's tight.

So back at the beginning of the month I got it in my head that I wanted to make some crepe paper roses using the tutorial here (the video tutorial is hilarious btw!)  So I headed over to the dollar store and shelled out a whole two dollars for some crepe paper.  Of course, living in Texas I thought that yellow paper would be most appropriate for my roses.  I watched the video a few times and tried to follow along and ended up with these:

"Oh the yellow rose of Texas, oh something la la la!"*

The fullness of the petals featured in the tutorial just isn't there, but I still think they are very cute.  And since crepe paper comes two per pack I've got plenty of materials to practice.  I'm notorious, at least I like to fancy myself notorious for my overly tight grip (grip my pencil too hard, my violin bow too hard, probably other things too...) so I'm guessing that's the problem.  Or I'm folding my paper over too much or not often enough.  These dinky little roses do work up really fast so practicing won't be any kind of hardship.  I was going for rosebuds this time anyways.


*That's how I sing that song

One Yard Wonders: Tack Board

Oh dear!  It's been over a month since I last posted.  Bad blogger!  BAD!
In my defense, I've been busy.  Well not really.  But Stephen has, and he had to use the computer for schoolwork and I felt bad taking it away from him for blogging purposes, soooooo here we are, a month later!  I haven't stopped making stuff though (although that has slowed down a little bit too).  To make up for it, here's a cute Josie picture:

"Hello?  Hello??!!  The reception on this thing is terrible!"

Now, let's get to it shall we?

For Christmas my sister gave me the most awesome of books!  One Yard Wonders is full of projects that use one yard of fabric or less.  It's got lots of fun looking patterns, and I have this idea that one day I will make everything in this book.  My stick-to-it-ness isn't quite what it used to be, though, so we'll see how many I actually end up doing.  


The first project in the book is a fabric covered bulletin board.  It was simple and really straightforward so I jumped right on it!  I got my yard of fabric, a piece of corkboard, and a cool weathered-looking frame to glue it into.  Enjoy these pictures of my making process and brief descriptions, as I'm not sure reading a story of me going through the project will be very interesting...  It's one of those fun to do, not fun to talk about kind of things.

Here's my cork board - it was longer but I chopped it off to fit in the frame.

I stapled the fabric to the corkboard.  An office type stapler works for this project, but if you have a "heavier dutier" one, I would recommend using it.

Voila!  My board pre-framing.

Tada! It's done!  This is actually before I glued it in, but I didn't take any after pictures, and it looks the same as this now, except with a few dried glue globs on the frame.

I tried to use hot glue to glue this in, but I was way too slow with it and the darn glue hardened up before I could get the board into the frame.  So I tried good old Tacky Glue instead.  Is there anything Tacky Glue isn't good for? Yes of course, but it's pretty good for most craft projects.  Anyways, the  Tacky Glue worked like a charm, but...

As Josie would say "Pfffftttttt! Sorry Mom"

Oops!  I glued my project to the carpet.  In the end, I got a really cute and beautiful bulletin board.  We did learn a lesson here today though.  If your project is so big that you have to work on it on the living room carpet, for the love, spread some newspaper under your workspace.