{Tutorial} Birthday Party DIY + TEMPLATE!

My family went on our annual Beach Vacation last week and it completely wore us out.  (Why do vacations do that? Just make you exhausted instead of re-energizing you??)

This is the beach where we were - totally beautiful?! Seriously - BEAUTIFUL!

Anyway, we came home on a Saturday, and baby sweet niece's birthday was the following Sunday.  And she wanted a Hello Kitty party. And we had not planned on this.

Knowing her full-scale party would be the next Saturday and it was rainbow themed, I figured I could make a run to the local dollar store and turn their supplies into Hello Kitty supplies with a little work.

I purchased:
2 accordion tissue flower decorations
1 pack of (3) hanging flower decorations
1 piece of posterboard
1 bunch of bright pink carnations
1 pk of (8) party hats
1 pk of party plates
1 pk of party napkins
1 set of HK sugar cupcake toppers
*** See Template at the bottom of the post! ***

Sweet Niece sporting her HK Party Hat!

The plain but brightly colored party hats came from Wal-Mart. Less than $2 I think. I made a template of a small HK head first, then a bow template.  I laid the bow where I thought it looked best and then made another template that included the edges of the bow on her right ear.  This will give you a place to color your bow and not have to glue a bow on.  It will be part of your template for each HK head.  I place the template face down on the backside of the posterboard, traced and cut it out. Then I used my bow template to lightly sketch in my bow on the front side so I could then color it in with markers.  Add some black ovals for eyes, a yellow oval for a nose (I outlined my nose in orange) and a few whiskers on each side and you are done! 

Once the marker dried, I put rubber cement on the back of the HK heads and on the front of the party hats, let it dry and then press together.  Dried rubber cement is one heck of a hold, so don't think you'll be pulling it off and re-positioning it - oh no, my friend. It's stuck. 

The hats are what people have loved the most. 

These decorations were from the Dollar Tree.  The blue and green tissue flowers were a dollar each. The three posterboard flowers with tinsel and dangling decorations were all three for a dollar.  So that's a total of three dollars hanging up there (no bad!!). 

The tissue decorations came with a flower you were supposed to put in the middle with a cardboard stick that would run in the middle of this poof thing. But I didn't want a flower - I wanted a HK head. Once again, using posterboard I made a larger HK head template, traced and cut.  Colored.  Used a drinking straw that I cut about an inch down the length in four places to splay out like four arms.  I taped this to the back of the HK head, leaving about 2 inches sticking up and one inch taped to the head.  The sticking up part went into the center of the tissue decoration, which let the HK head be flush against the tissue flower.  I have a feeling this isn't making sense, let me take a pic and show you really quick. 

Does that make more sense now? This nub sticking up will go in the middle of the tissue decoration. 

 The flat flowers had pictures of flowers drawn onto them.  That was so easy to cover up by gluing an HK head right over, making sure I covered up all the flower petals.  The dangling butterflies and lady bugs matched the plates and napkins I picked up at the dollar store, so I left those on.  

I did try to make a mask with white felt, glued to a party hat, but it didn't start low enough down her face.  She ended up looking like a cat unicorn. Cute idea, but not executed well. So that decor was a party #fail. But I still like this cute picture. :) 

Lastly, I used another drinking straw and two HK heads, glued together back to back with the straw in the middle to go inside the flower arrangement.  I found the carnations in bright pink, pink, and white for $5 at Wal-Mart. Mom snipped a few flowers from her yard that perfectly match and added to it (Daisies, Queen Anne's Lace and Cone Flowers).  Sweet Niece enjoyed spotting HK in the middle of the flowers. :) 

I didn't take a pic of the store bought cupcakes and the sugar cupcake toppers, but that wrapped up the HK madness. She loved it, I loved making her happy, and there was just enough HK to make it feel like we planned it all that way. :)  Hope this might spark some ideas for your own DIY birthday! :)

OK - Because I know folks want a template for Hello Kitty heads and bows, I'm including one here!  Feel free to download this picture, and do with it what you will.  I left the nose and bow uncolored for you to fill it in.  Or, use the bow image for a little "Pin the bow on the kitty."  Feel free to share what you make with me - I would love to see it (and feature it here!)  beth.covington at gmail.com 

{Tutorial} Kids' Artwork as Gifts

Do you remember the toddler artwork I featured earlier on this blog where my 2-year-old niece painted the background of four canvases and I added LOVE to them?  This is the same concept, except using both of my nieces!  They worked together to make a beautiful painting for my sister for Mother's Day - a very special gift that she will treasure.

I bought a pack of 16 x 20 canvases at Hobby Lobby (my favorite craft store) for super cheap.  Loaded up on acrylic paint, brushes, palettes, and water bowls. We were ready to rock.  The 2-year-old used three shades of blue for the background and went to town painting.  Once I convinced her painting her knees wasn't a good idea - to just stick with her hands - we got things moving.  Baby niece used a large craft paint brush and her hands to cover the canvas.  We flipped it around a few times to get all the white area covered (and helped just a little).

While baby niece was painting, teen niece used the back of wrapping paper to draw an artistic Palmetto Tree.  Next: cut it out, dry the massive amount of paint baby niece used on the canvas, and use the wrapping paper tree as a template, lightly tracing the tree onto the canvas in pencil. CAREFUL: you don't want to poke a hole in the canvas or make too dark of a mark.

Teen niece painted over the outline with dark blue...

Filled it in and then got crazy artsy with it. By mixing colors she had shades of blue for dots inside the tree.  She added a crescent moon in the corner, and gray "moonlights" to one side of the tree.  White/yellow dashes in the gray just to make it interesting.

She did such a good job, I love all the fun and unique things she added that created texture and movement to the piece.  Love it!

Since teen niece will be at her mom's house for Mother's Day, we celebrated a week early and surprised my sister with this coolness! She's a SC History teacher and she LOOOOOOOOVED it.  (For you non-South Carolinians, the Palmetto Tree is part of our state flag.  We are very proud of it!)
The best part is this gift is nice enough to be displayed in the living room; both girls feel a sense of pride and "ownership" in seeing their talents displayed in the house and for creating something so nice for their mom/stepmom; and my sister treasures a gift from her girls.

I really do encourage you to try it and share your experience with me! I'd love to see what you create.  Please don't think it has to be perfect - that's part of the special uniqueness of the artwork! Just let them go for it and see their pride when it's all complete. :)

Wanna pin it? Use this:

Painted Pottery

I had to wait to post until I gifted this new craft - it's a hand-painted over-sized mug! LOVE these types of things and the size is perfect for soup, cereal, whatever you wanna chow down on. A new paint pottery place opened up about 35-45 minutes from me and I had to try it out. And try it out. And try it out! This is the most recent piece I completed and gifted to my friend in Alabama when I went to go visit with her.

The cool thing about this place is they save the dried up paint from where people have squirted out too much paint for their object and turn it into paint chips. Then you can apply a layer of wet paint and "glue" the chips to your pottery.  When the paint is unfired, it looks NOTHING like what it does once it is fired, so you really don't know what colors the paint chips are - it's just a luck of a draw kinda thing.  So I knew I had to use that obnoxious yellow green, wanted it pair with blues and figured - heck, the paint chips can't make it any weirder looking so let's go for it!

I'm so glad I did because I LOVE IT! The paint chips melt down the curve of the mug and just makes such a cool effect.  My niece tried it on her pottery - one piece was a flat cross and one an owl figurine.  The cross paint chips melted but made colored spots where they were.  Only in the places with lots of chips in one small space did they mix together.  Her owl figurine had the colors melting together as they ran down the curve of the owl's back, so it was really cool.

On the outside I etched swirlies just to make it cute and girlie.  They aren't super noticeable but I'm still glad I didn't try to paint them on. That would have made  mess, I think.

Anyway, you can always use Pintrest for tons of ideas on what to paint on all types of pottery - from your child's handprints and feet prints, to just trying your hand at something that interests you.  If I find some more pics from our painting trips, I'll come back and post them here.  Until then - go try your hand at some creativity! :)

Toddler Friendly Gift Tags

I don't know about ya'll, but to me it seems those who want to be most involved in all the excitement of holidays are also the ones who can't read yet.  Our toddlers.  They want to be part of giving out the gifts and watching people open them, but when you can't read the gift tags, it makes it a little difficult. Yes, you could have an adult crouched down at the tree on Christmas morning handing out gifts and telling them who to deliver them to, OR you could take this idea and run with it.

Toddler Friendly Gift Tags

I love it! This is the second time I've done it, but the first time I was much more fru-fru about it.  I found cute tie-on tags and printed everyone's pictures out and glued them to the tags so they looked framed.  This Christmas was total chaos and the cuteness didn't happen.  

But guess what.  The toddlers still knew who to give the gift to without the fru fru tags.  Yup.  So fire up the computer, pull up some photos, print, cut and tape to the gifts (I printed on plain copy paper).  Now ALL your family can get involved in the gift-giving excitement while you prop your feet up in the recliner. :) 

Enjoy!

{Tutorial} Buttons & Burlap Heart

My weekend project to help decorate my house for Valentine's Day! Very simple, quick, and cute idea for those of you with tons of buttons lying about the house.  Let's dive in and I'll tell you how to make your own!

What you need:

--Burlap Canvas - I purchase a two-pack of flat 8" x 8" burlap canvas board at Hobby Lobby for $5. This however, means it can't be hung unless you glue a ribbon hanger on it, so I'm using an easel.
--Paper to draw a template heart
--Scissors to cut out the template
--Pencil to trace on the canvas
--Buttons. I used tons of red and pink together. Old and new, too.
--Hot glue (I used high temp, but it did singe my fingers a bit!)

Since my canvas was 8x8, I used a sheet of 8x8 paper, folded in half, to make a heart template that would fit well in the middle of my canvas.  Cut it out, make sure you love it and then trace it in the center of your canvas very lightly.  I just eye-balled the center but you can get OCD and measure if you need to do so.

Thankfully, I had sorted out pink and red buttons from my piles, but Sweet Niece #2 helped mix them all back up... but get your buttons together and get an idea of what works by laying it out first on your canvas.  I promptly messed up my layout as I was gluing, but it still came out ok.   Then, grab those buttons with the tabs on the back because they fit in all the bare cracks well and start gluing a second layer.  If you see burlap peeking through, glue more buttons on top.

It really takes NO time at all to finish this! And hot glue dries so fast, it's set and ready to decorate your house as soon as you are done! I watched TV and glued like nuts and finished in about an hour. Not bad for such a cute project.

Hope you enjoy! If you try it, send me a pic, I'd love to see! B_covington (at) yahoo.com  Thanks ya'll!

One More Fru Fru Pumpkin

It took me long enough to find the perfect pumpkin to make a Fru Fru Pumpkin for my house, but I finally saw it in a bin at the grocery store.  Huge fat pumpkins, so cute and so cheap! I fished around until I found the cutest of the "patch" and here it is.

I used the same materials as the pumpkin for my office (see it here) but added the cream lace.  I love the combo of burlap and lace, raffia and leaves, the blues and oranges - I  LOVE AUTUMN! And so there you have it.  My fru fru pumpkin for the year.  I regret I didn't do this on a fake pumpkin to have it for several years because I do love this combo of materials. *sigh*

Sooooo... what are you doing to decorate for Autumn?? Wanna share? I'd love to see!

The 2014 Fru Fru Pumpkin Reveal!

Each year, I make a "Fru Fru" pumpkin for the office and when it's time to send it on its way, I undecorate it and toss it into the back of the flower bed.  Finally, it took root and came back this year! So exciting!

Let me catch you up on the progression of this pumpkin - the plant (which for the longest time we had NO idea what was growing in this flower bed), then the pumpkin started showing up but was dangling outside of the flower bed!! We moved it into the bed and it really ripened quickly.  The bottom two pics were taken with 24 hours of each other. 

So back to the fru fru pumpkin - I hit Hobby Lobby last night (man, I love that store) and picked out what I wanted to do this year. And I'm in love with it. It cost considerably more than the dollar store finds I usually use in making these pumpkins, but it was SO WORTH IT when you see the difference. (By the way, I did a post earlier all about making Fru Fru Pumpkins, feel free to check it out for other ideas!)

TA DA!! I love the chevron and the blue/orange/burgundy combo.  The rustic colors and burlap just bring the look up a few notches compared to the dollar store glitter ribbon I've been using.  

This is last year's pumpkin with all items coming from the dollar store.  So this in total (not including the hot glue and stick pins) cost about $8-9 and will last several months. It will carry you through the entire fall season.  

I also did one a little tamer last year, still using dollar store items.  I bought a dish towel at the dollar store and ripped it into strips, fraying the edges for a more rustic look.  The fabric was too floppy on its on, so I used wide packaging tape along the back of one strip to form the bow shape.  I really liked this one, too. 

For today, I'm enjoying our new pumpkin in blue.  :)  AND I have enough decor left over to do another one for my house and I can't WAIT! We even have another pumpkin in our flower bed, so I may get two pumpkins for free! :)  If so, I'll show you how that one turns out, too. 

Ya'll have a lovely hump day! Thanks for joining me in my crazy fru fru pumpkin excitement!

{Tutorial} Pinned It Did It - LOVE Canvas + Toddler Art

I have finally finished this project that I've been working on for a while now.  Here is a former post where I was in the middle of it - and it includes the inspiration pin where I got the initial idea.  I cannot possibly tell you how much I LOVE this artwork! It's so special to me and makes me glow every time I see it. I'd call that a serious #success!

Let's start from the beginning of the project and you can see how easy it is for you to do with your own toddler. :)

WHAT YOU NEED: 
4 cheap canvases - I used 8 x 10 that came in 2-pks
4 cheap acrylic paints (you can really use whatever number you'd like)
small paint brushes for the lettering
computer/printer to print letters
Scissors to cut letters out
pencil to trace letters onto canvas
1 enthusiastic toddler

As I tell you how I did it, I'll give you advice on what I'd do different.  The inspiration photo had the word LOVE taped out on one large canvas.  I wanted four individual ones AND I wanted more definition in the font than tape would allow, so I decided to come back after the toddler painting and paint on my letters.

I let Sweet Niece #2, who is barely 2-years-old, enjoy finger painting the canvases.  She would call out which color she'd want and I'd squeeze it directly on a canvas and she'd smear like crazy.  What happened, however, is she over smeared and I have large patches of brown/grey.  I think if I did a redo, I'd leave out the orange OR only use one color per canvas.  It didn't really matter to me, though, she had fun and it still turned out cute.

I pulled this picture above into a photo editing program to see what it would look like with letters painted on top, to get an idea of fonts and colors.  This is what I ended up with to work from:

Using this as a guide, I found a font that was very similar and printed single letters that would fit in the 8 x 10 canvas.  I cut them out and traced them very lightly onto the canvas.  Thankfully, I have smaller brushes and was able to do a decent job of keeping everything neat while painting the letters (see photos at the end for the actual letters on canvas.  Remember the one above is typed on with a computer program).  As I was doing this, I kept thinking Cricut letters would probably work just as well. I did measure the distance from the top of the canvas to keep everything even. I eyeballed to get them centered from the sides.

I used the original four colors of acrylic paint and thought by adding black, I could achieve this slightly darker color that would stand out from the background.  THAT DID NOT WORK.  Every time I would end up with a grey color that blocked all the pretty color out... not good. Like a Grey Pink, Grey Green - not a darker version of the original color.

This looks like DUSTY ROSE, not my favorite color! 

See what I mean about the grey colors in this pink and the green above it? It didn't really darken it like I was thinking it would do.  So instead I used a base that was darker than the original, then added some of the original color to it - like hunter green and added the lime color to it.  That seemed to work out perfectly!  In the photo below, I used the top green, and the bottom three colors of blue, pink/red, and orange.

By making them several shades darker than the background, you could really see the letters.  This pink below wasn't quite dark enough - I ended up going back over it with the darker pink/red and I liked it much better.

Original pink 

Darker pink  Don't you think it looks better?

So here are the side-by-side views.  The left I typed onto of the photo just to get an idea of what it would look like.  The right I painted on after tracing the letters to the canvas.  Not bad! 

And here is the finished product on my wall in my bedroom! LLLLLOOOOOVVVVEEEE it!!! Having my baby sweet niece's artwork as the background makes this so precious to me.  I think I may do another smaller version of this for Christmas gifts this year... what do you think?

I hope you'll try it and please share with me! You can email me at b_covington@yahoo.com. I'd love to see your own masterpiece! :)

{Tutorial} Buttons and Burlap Monogram

I found this huge box of buttons at a yard sale several years ago and have been wondering what to do with all these buttons?!  On Pintrest (of course) I found the button monogram idea and kept thinking this can't be rocket science, so surely I can do something like it. Finally, I sat down and did one this week and I like it! It isn't rocket science!

What do you need?  Well, here you go:

--Computer/Printer
--Pencil
--Scissors
--Canvas of some sort. I chose burlap, found at Wal-Mart
--Hot Glue Gun and Glue
--Buttons. Lots of Buttons

First thing I did was measure the canvas and head for the computer. In Word, I made a text box the size of the canvas so I knew how large I could go.  Pick a font and print. Cut out your letter so you have a stencil to work with - remember this part when you are choosing your font. :)

I took my cut out letter and my pencil and traced it lightly onto my canvas.

Look closely, you can see my stenciled letter H.

After that I eyeballed my buttons and tried to keep things mostly straight and level on the first layer.  Glue glue glue.

I cheated and filled in gaps as I went along in some cases.

Then begin looking where you need to fill in with buttons to cover up gaps. I noticed with burlap, even in the places I didn't cover up the pencil markings you can't see them on the darker backgroup of burlap.  I'm sure this wouldn't be the case for white canvas, so be careful!

I haven't added a ribbon yet, but that's next on my agenda. Although, you don't have to have it - this would sit in an easel just fine, as long as it was proped on the wooden border and not the empty canvas section in back.

My favorite part of this one? The bits of thread and cloth still in some of the buttons. Just imagine the stories it could tell!

Anyway, this took me less than 15 minutes to glue, but I wasn't overly picky about my buttons. If you are pickier, you might need to do some presorting by size, shades of colors, etc.

SO, what do you think?  Share your thoughts and any photos if you try your hand at it!

Bunny Cake!

I saw this cake on Facebook and how to make it - someone had taken a photo from an old cookbook and posted it.  It looked pretty easy, so I decided to try it out.  I would think any cake would work - from scratch or a box - as long as you can get two round cakes from it.

My whiskers are a bit crazy, oops.  For the dark details I melted chocolate and put it in a plastic baggie and snipped the end.  Mom happened to have some blue gel icing in the cabinet for the blue details, so that was nice.  And I dyed coconut pink for the ears.  I trimmed the ends of my ears to be a bit more flush against the rabbit's head, but I'm not sure I would do that again.

There is the cutting pattern for you.  I wouldn't have seen it myself until I saw the cutting pattern, but it's so easy! So cute, too, and the kids loved it! What an Easter treat!  Or any kind of party that would need a rabbit - bunny themed birthday party? I'm sure you can think of other ways to use this cute and simple cake!  Feel free to share your examples with me-I'd love to see your bunny cakes! :)

Felt Friends

I started going through some older photos and found a few that I never posted here! I wanted to share with you my FELT FRIENDS! You know I stareted by making felt hearts from a Pintrest pin I found (see the original post here). Actually, I started by making felt food for my sweet niece #2 - I'll find some photos I took of those items soon...

 Anyway, once I started with felt, I fell in love.

 After I made hearts, I had a request for clovers for St. Patrick's Day.

Then I made tons of hearts not in a Valentine's Day theme.  I'm still holding these, trying to think of a nonprofit or something that would like to use them for something?  Any ideas? 

I did some with stars, thinking boys might like hearts with stars instead of hearts with hearts or buttons? Just a thought, maybe I'm crazy. 

Then... I discovered FELT FRIENDS. I wish I could find the website where I printed out the best patterns for animals.  Don't you know, I have searched and searched with absolutely no luck. But anyway, here are several I made for my niece and for a friend of the family. 

It started with a rabbit for Easter.  Goodness gracious, everyone wanted a rabbit.  And rabbit ears aren't the easiest... but it's so darn cute.  It had to have a cow to play with as friends.  Then someone wanted a PIG.  And the pig was C.U.T.E.

So then I just made a farm of felt friends.  Cats, dogs, sheep, cows, pigs... fun fun fun.  Some I added the loops to and others I just left as random heads.  Which do you like better?  Loops or no loops?  I've thought about making sets of these as baby gifts.  There is nothing to harm them as they have no buttons.  Everything is handstitched.

You know that once the gates open up, someone else asks for a random something... which was an ADPi lion.  So, I made up an ADPi lion. 

And a penguin.  Because every child needs a felt penguin to play with, right? 

So there are my felt friends!! Feel free to copy any of the ideas - some were patterns and some I made up on my own (lion, penguin). And give me feedback, a good gift or no? Better for one-year-olds vs. babies? I don't have kids, to help me out! :)