I wanted to make a rug with roses, so back to Pinterest I went and sure enough there were a couple of examples of crocheted rose rugs and they were gorgeous. That was it, I now knew exactly what I wanted to create, a beautiful crochet rug made to look like a bed of roses.
Have you ever considered purchasing a gourmet food gift? In many cases it can be the perfect gift. When you are stumped and just can't decide what to give, when the receiver is one of those people who has everything, when your recipient is someone you don't know very well, then offering a gift with a variety of flavors and choices can really fit the bill. An added bonus to creating your own gourmet gift plate, or basket, or bowl, or even a small mug is that you gave it your personal touch. It is so much nicer than buying a gift basket off the shelf.
When deciding what to collect you can opt for healthier choices or work with a theme. Here are some cute ideas:
Candy Boxes
Microwave Popcorn
Coca-cola in Glass Bottles
Hot Cocoa
Candy Canes
Decorated Cookies
Champagne
Champagne Glass
Candles
Chocolate Truffles
Cupcake
Dried Fruits
Nuts
Dried Vegetables
Spreadable Cheese
Deli Meats
Crackers
Pet Treats
Pet Toys
Collar and Coat
Clean up Bags
It is really simple to place your items decoratively, and wrap up your gift either by using plastic cling wrap and for even more fun try shrink wrap! Shrink wrap gives your gift a beautiful, professional finishing touch and it can be purchased in different sizes. This is a great item to keep on hand with your gift wraps and cards. In my video I had not planned ahead for this gift, so I used plastic cling wrap from Costco. This plastic wrap if very clingy, and works well in a pinch, but I would have preferred to finish this plate in the video with a shrink wrap.
Diamond Painting is a newer craft that is similar to a paint-by-numbers type of activity without the paint. The finished piece also reminds me a bit of a cross-stitched piece, but instead of using embroidery thread, like DMC floss, the image comes together by placing faceted resin diamonds to a sticky canvas with a design imprinted upon it.
While attending a craft group meet up, I was pleased to see that one of the group members was working away on a large piece that was colorful and had a gorgeous shimmering finish. I could not stop asking questions about this clever activity. She was working on a cheeky cow design where the cow had a brilliant mask of flowers and there were so many colors to work with that I was immediately inspired to get my hands on a kit and try diamond painting for myself. There was only one downside to this activity...I had no idea what to do with the finished design!
My home is full of antique furniture and art. These diamond paintings, although beautiful when they are completed and framed, are just to modern for my home. I wanted to find a scaled down option so I logged on to my Amazon account and starting searching.
There are some small card designs on Amazon and probably on other places on the web, but the selections were limited to holiday greeting cards. Diamond painting tools were plentiful as well, but the "diamond drills" or faceted resin diamonds were a bit harder to find. Fortunately, I did find two options that worked; one for square diamonds and one for round diamonds. Once I managed to find the materials that I needed (the "diamonds", the tool kit and the way to make my cards sticky) I was ready to create my own DIY Diamond Painting Greeting Cards.
Now I needed some designs, so I got to work. First I designed a beautiful Vintage Rose so I could created Mother's Day cards for my mom and my mother-in-law. Next I created a cute Narwhal design, then a simple Geometric design. These are all for sale in the shop. Just click here to see the whole collection.
One of the many things I have missed in my office is having a Month-at-a-Glance calendar where I could write in the upcoming special events-important dates such as dinners with friends, birthdays, appointments that I want the family to also remember, travel plans, etc.
There are calendars in many office supply stores that are dry erase, but my office has antique furniture in warm oak tones and the cold look of white board and metal did not appeal to me. Also I find that the dry erase boards tend to stain over time and not look great. One other feature that did not appeal to me was the overall size of the available calendars; they were just too big.
About a year ago I had purchased two 11”x14” frames that I wanted to turn into calendars, but it wasn’t until I bought the Cricut Maker that I knew how I wanted to make them. I created the calendar files using Adobe Illustrator and made my calendars and I wanted to share these files with you.
I am so very happy with the results and my calendars went up on the wall and right into use. They look great, they offer function as well as style. I hope you find that they work for you as well. You can choose any 11”x14” frame with glass, not plastic, and you can choose any fabric and any color pen. I chose light colors to work well in the office, but keep in mind that you will want to be able to write on top of the glass and have it show up. I think light colors work better.
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For Easter I was tasked with bringing a fruit salad for our family dinner. I like fruit salad, but I often feel like a large bowl of cut up fruit needs a little something, maybe a bit of sugar or honey, some fresh mint is always a nice addition and I could certainly mix in some yogurt. This year, however I had just started a new meal plan and I wanted to keep the fruit free from extra calories. I had never made fruit flowers or tried to create a fruit display so I know if I can pull this off, then anyone can have equally great results.
I have been a fan of Mason jars as décor and serving dishes for a long time now. They are rugged and hold up to abuse. They can go into boiling water and into the freezer and they do not break easily. For these bouquets, that would require transport, canning jars worked out very well. Also, I had plenty on hand and could make several small bouquets to put around the table. I started with creating the concepts so I would know what fruit to buy and how much. Grapes gave me a good base for the “soil” and would hold the skewers of fruit solidly, so they made a great foundation. Slices of watermelon added beautiful color and pineapple worked well in slices, also. I chose not to use apples or bananas because they oxidize to quickly and the color would not look good, but the apples would be an option if you spritzed them or soaked them with lemon water. Strawberries made the perfect rose.
I added blueberries, blackberries and raspberries as accents and I specifically made one flower with loads of blackberries to reserve for my dad…he’s a big fan of blackberries!
I was not sure how these would go over and WOW…they were a huge hit. As a crafter, I find that many times I am hard on myself and my work and look for perfection, but my family only saw beautiful displays of fruit and took great joy in eating them up. Lesson learned…just make them, they will be loved!!
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Creating this video was a difficult process. I went through several variations of how to heat the beeswax onto the fabric and most were messy and required too much dedicated equipment or supplies.
As a Beekeeper I have work with beeswax a little bit. I have separated wax from honey. I have purified wax to store for future projects. I have had wax in all colors from the purest white that only comes from brand new hive boxes to rich golden hues from matures hives. Sadly, to this day, I have not made candles. I have all of the equipment and I will make them eventually and I am sure it will end up on video for your viewing pleasure.
When my oldest daughter showed me Bee's wax Wrappers and told me about using them to store food, acting as a reusable replacement for plastic wrap and to cover bowls for food storage my first thoughts were how I would make these. My secondary thoughts were how I would keep my kitchen clean while I made these.
I scoured the internet and saw several methods and got to work. I bought aluminum trays so I would not permanently damage my cookies sheets and tried melting the wax onto the cloth in the oven. The was didn’t spread well, and I felt like I had to watch it like a hawk. Wax has a fairly low flame point and I didn’t want to start a fire. The oven method just made me nervous. My next attempt was to use an embossing heat gun to melt the beeswax, but it just blew the wax around too easily before melting it and again it did not spread well.
The iron and parchment paper method that I show on the video, on top of a folded towel was so easy, clean and effective! The wax spread, the mess was contained to sheets of parchment (which can be saved and reused) and the towel was there to soften the work surface and also catch any wax that may possible leak from the paper. I started with less wax and I could easily add more, so leaking didn’t really happen. It was controlled, simple and fast.
Keep these wrappers in mind for gifts. They last about one year, so like a dish towel, a hostess can always use some more. Plus, if you look for Fat Quarters in your fabric stores quilting department you will find a range of fun fabrics to match anyone’s theme or décor.
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I have long desired to play with quilling techniques and use quilled paper designs on handmade cards. I have purchased some of the basic tools over time and for one reason or another I had lost track of them. While perusing one of my local craft stores I saw a small selection of quilling tools and most of them were from Quilled Creations. This was a company I was familiar with because in the past I had purchased their Quilling Design Board and I loved using it.
I didn’t take long for me to decide that this was a craft that I needed to revisit and the Quilled Creations Beginner Kit ended up in my hands. Now as a working business owner, I could not just sit and play and that kit waited for me for a bit, but while it waited I just kept accumulating more tools and soon I had a collection.
In this unboxing video I will show you the tools I have collected and give a brief overview of how to use them. There will be plenty of follow up videos to show how to make basic shapes and then advanced designs. Ultimately I hope to provide a comprehensive set of videos to give you a one-stop-shop full of ideas and projects on the subject of quilling.
The tools I have gathered are extensive, but in the video I do not show a fringer or a quilling coach, and I have even begun designing an SVG file to see if I could use the Cricut to cut regular strips of all sizes and also the fancy strips for petaled flowers and the swirled flower designs as well. I will keep you posted on my progress with that Quilling SVG file.
Quilling can be used to create card decorations, wall art, jewelry and miniatures. Customizing and creating artistic names is also very popular.
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Winding thread onto bobbins and finding an easy storage solution for them became a necessary task when I got a new sewing machine that also had an embroidery function. The sewing machine I use is not overly expensive, but for the small purchase price (under $400) it is a real work horse. I have the Brother SE400 Sewing and Embroidery Machine. I can use it to sew a variety of projects on a wide range of materials, and even more fun, I can use the Embroidery functions to create beautiful custom embroidery designs. For the beginner it does simple work like adding a name or initials to personalize an item without much effort. I look forward to showing off several sewing tips and techniques through the Craft Curiosity on YouTube channel.
Because this machine has an embroidery feature, I purchased a beautiful set of embroidery threads in 64 colors. When you embroider with these colors it is typical to use a bobbin thread in white or black for the back of the work. In that instance, you would not need to wind the colored threads onto bobbins.
I found that the thread quality worked for many of my sewing projects and because I was using these colors for sewing I wanted to wind the bobbins with the matching thread. With such a range of colors it can be daunting to keep track of your threads if you store the bobbin separately, my desire was to store the thread spools and bobbins together. I purchased several bobbins and created a "pin" to pop into the top through both the spool and the bobbin to rest the bobbin on top of the spool. After considering many materials, I settled on bamboo skewers and wooden beads. I just found the right size beads so that it would be large enough to not fall through the spool or bobbin opening and also have a large enough hole that a bamboo skewer would fit snugly into that hole. I added a touch of wood glue to give this a bit of strength and keep everything together and quickly made a large supply of wood pins.
Last, but not least, I planned to store all of these bobbin and spool combos in a drawer and I did not want loose thread messing up the drawer and tangling with each other, so I put a small slit on the bottom edge of each spool, and I wrapped each bobbin with a ¼” cut of clear vinyl tubing by slicing several pieces of the tubing and making one cut to open the slice up. The vinyl tubing has just enough memory to stay wrapped around the bobbin thread and hold the loose end of the thread neatly.
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When you watch the video about making the Perpetual Annual Calendar on the Cricut Maker it is important to note that this is a follow up to the video about making the Perpetual Monthly Calendar. This video has a bit less detail, but all of the instructions are included from the point where the SVG file is uploaded.
This annual calendar, made with any 11”x14” frame, is so convenient and family friendly. It is a terrific “at-a-glance” overview of the whole year and the frame size of 11”x14” is an ideal size for most locations. It is not huge, but it is not too small to include important appointments and events. Additionally, using the glass surface of a frame works well because most dry erase white board material eventually stains. This calendar will look more stately than stained.
I must say that I am very pleased with the results. My home office is furnished with antique furniture, all American oak, and I wanted subtle understated accents for my office accessories. The fabric I used was found at Hobby Lobby and it is a light taupe or maybe ecru fabric with a white print. It is almost tone-on-tone and is perfect for a calendar that I want to write on top of. I have been using a black dry erase pen.
The accent color was drawn by the Cricut with a Cricut pen. I used Bronze, but with the Monthly and Annual calendars I decided that I wanted just a touch of gold, so I went over the written details with a gold fabric glitter pen. I’ll put the link below because this pen was AMAZING to write with!
There is a download file that I have made for both the Monthly and Annual Calendar that can be downloaded at no cost. Just click on the link below to find the file (if you are not logged in a registration page will pop up--sign up for free and you will be able to access the download).
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I was inspired to make this piece when I saw a similar necklace worn by a good friend. It featured brilliant crystals in a matched rainbow color combination that flowed to a centered tassel pendent of brilliant yellow silk. My friend paired the necklace with a black velvet top and ballerina skirt and looked sensational. My friend looked amazing and that necklace really grabbed my attention.
Hand knotting is beautiful! I love using this vintage technique to create long strands of beads or crystals. It has been used for years to create pearl necklaces and the knots would be placed between each pearl to protect these valuable pearls from spilling to the floor if the string breaks. The knots also keep the beads, pearls or crystals from rubbing against each other.
There are multiple methods available for hand knotting, some methods use a single strand and some use two strands. The material is usually nylon or silk, with silk used for finer pieces. I chose C-Lon cord to make this Vintage Style Hand Knotted Crystal Necklace because I wanted some of the cord color to show through the crystal and I wanted a larger, more obvious knot in between each bead. I also used the same C-Lon cord to create the tassel. I appreciate the lovely finish of this material and by using this cord for the tassel it allows the sheen of the material to really show through.
Repetitive projects like this, especially when done to create a piece of jewelry, can be completed in one night and keep your hands busy while watching a favorite show on the television. The same technique could be used for a bracelet, but I would include a clasp and use two or three strands of beads to add substance.
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