Peg Doll Nativity

This is a great Nativity to make for your children to play with and much cheaper than the plastic ones from the big box stores. I made this one for about about $6 using fabric scraps that I had on hand.

Later this week I'll post a tutorial for making peg dolls sans fabric clothes. If you want to make these, come back to learn how to make the faces and then add fabric clothes using your glue gun. Unless you're the Pioneer Woman because I heard she doesn't even own a glue gun! Oh the travesty. How does she survive?

I'm linking here: Go check it out for other great crafts.

Chalk Board Fall Leaves ~ Tutorial

I've been waiting to make something with homemade chalkboard paint for a long time. I had planned on doing pumpkins originally but then ran out of time before Halloween and decided to do more of a fall leaf theme with it. 

To make these chalkboard leaves you will need:
Chalkboard paint - either bought or made
paint the color of your choice
Eucaboard or some other type of hardboard with a flat smooth surface - can be found at Home Depot
Foam Roller
Fine grit sandpaper
jigsaw
Drill and bit

To start, make your paint if you are making it yourself.

To make your own you will need two tablespoons of unsanded grout for every one cup of paint.
All I had was sanded ground and I'm too cheap to buy a bag of unsanded grout (about $10) so I put the grout into a little pouch I made of loose weave fabric and tapped it onto wax paper until I had the amount I needed. It worked great, leaving the sand inside the pouch a nice pile of fluffy sand free grout on the wax paper.

Next I mixed the grout with one cup of flat paint.

Originally I wanted the color to be a dark cocoa brown but once again I was too cheap to spend money on paint so I used flat paint that I had in the garage and mixed in craft paint until I kinda had the colors I wanted.

Now you have chalkboard paint and are ready to begin the next step.

Take the eucaboard or hardwood and prime the whole thing with whatever light colored paint you have on hand. See how cheap frugal I am?

Then when the paint is dry, freehand leaf shapes or print out leaf shapes from online and transfer them to your board.

Now take your jigsaw and cut out the shapes, no manly men required. You can do it!

Those are not all my pencil marks on that leaf. My kids got hold of the pencil and went nuts, redrawing leafs to their hearts content while I wasn't looking. All this to say, before you start this project, lock all kids in the closet. I'm joking, I never lock them in the closet. That's what the bathroom is for.

Just kidding.

Now comes the fun part. You get to paint your leaf shapes!

I tinted all the leaves a slightly different shade of orange to make them stand out a little more.

Give each leaf two coats of paint and then sand it with fine grit sandpaper when dry.  Before you can actually write on it with chalk, you need to season it by rubbing chalk over the entire surface and then wiping it off again. Now you can write whatever message you have, or write thanksgiving blessings and change it each day.

Now use your drill to drill a hole in the stem of each leaf and hang with twine or rope.

My husband didn't realize they were chalkboard and asked me why I didn't spend more time on the words. Um.. because I plan to erase it and change it tomorrow? or in five minutes?

and here's how the look from the front door.

beautiful? I think so.

Faux Mercury Glass Pumpkins

The other day on Twitter someone was wishing they could afford the mercury glass pumpkins from Pottery Barn. The truth of the matter is that they are 1) sold out and 2) cost a little bit more than my grandpa's dentures.

So for the broke and loving it... here's a little faux mercury glass pumpkin magic.

First take a faux pumpkin. I had no patience when I came up with this idea to go buy a fake pumpkin so I just stole one of the mini real pumpkins off my mantle. Now I love the result that I got but will have to throw it away in a few weeks or it will be mercury glass via the old and moldy route next year when I pull it out of storage. So please start with a faux pumpkin if you want to keep it. They have faux pumpkins at the dollar store just in case you really want to break the bank.

Beside the faux pumpkin you will need gray paint, white paint, silver paint and a little black paint and magic glaze or diamond glaze.

I started with a foam brush just dabbing different shades of light silver and gray (from mixing it with the white) and dabbling it all over the surface. Use a lot of silver on this layer. The look we are going for is wild and crazy, right up my alley. Add lots of silver splotches all over this is what's going to give it dimensions in the end.

Next we're going to add some darker elements. Mix several different of dark gray shades using the gray and black and do several different random splotches, add a little bit of silver to all these colors as well. Then I used a skewer to do really dark gray specks. Don't totally cover the light gray and silver layer... just add a little to the top.

 Really you want to make sure at this point that you have a good mix of light and dark and it to have a little sheen over all. The pattern to making the faux mercury glass work will be a light silver layer, then darker layer and finally a lighter matte layer.

So now we need to add the lighter matte layer. Up to this point everything has been pretty shiny so leave the silver out of the picture this time. Mix up some gray and white paint and dab over the top using something with some hard edges.

 I used a Ziploc baggie scrunched up but I think something like aluminum foil would be better. I was out because my children like to unroll it to make spaceships.

 

Now as the final step, coat the top and sides with Diamond Glaze.  For those of you who don't know what Diamond Glaze is, it's a type of clear adhesive that will dry hard and give you incredible glass like shine. You could use other clear shiny adhesives if you can't find Diamond Glaze. I found it at Hobby Lobby.  You just need some type of thick hard drying glaze.

Don't coat the bottom or you will never be able to get it off your table. I actually set it on top of the diamond glaze jar to dry.

24 hours later and you have this:

Beautiful.

If I do it again I will do two things differently.

1) use a faux pumpkin

2) use something with sharper edges for the light matte layer

3) try to get more dark details in there.

4) do more than one!

I have to get to bed now so I can rest up. Tomorrow I have a big day of teaching reading and counting to young minds.  Aren't my kids lucky?



Laying' out and stampin' up

I made two things this weekend.

#1. This spiffy new blog layout that you are looking at. Friday I was messing around in the HTML code and deleted my old layout. Hehe haha... ohhh. ugh.  It was a slam your head against the wall kinda moment. I had all the old designs saved but I would have had to reload them and I wanted to redo it for fall anyway.  Now you'll notice a fabulous new navigation bar at the top of the page which also introduced me to CSS programming language. Honestly about six months ago I asked Damion if I could have a hundred dollars to pay someone to make me a nice layout. (that's about the going rate). He said to try and make it myself first. I know HTML a little (a real little) and I am pretty good at photoshop so he thought I could do it myself.

Now I'm so glad that he made me do it myself because I can sit back, look at my blog and really love it. Not just because I think it's beautiful but because I did it with a ton of hard work.  However I could not have done it without KevinandAmanda.com . I used her blog tutorials to make the past two layouts and it was so easy.  Not only does she have blog tutorials but it's just an awesome blog about life, photography, and everything else in between.

2.  Saturday morning after not much sleep I decided to play around with making stamped jewelry. Of course I can't do anything how it should be done and I was getting frustrated with it. So I just decided to whack it a lot with the hammer I was using. I started to like it more with every hit. So then I whacked the back of it with different letters and a fine point. After a lot more whacking, I was left with a distressed looking round metal blank. I stamped the word "love" into the front and made it into a bracelet. I really really like it.

I really love the rustic earthly look of it.  Just proves that perfection isn't always the way to go. Don't give up if something is going the way you planned! It might just end up even better in the end.