DIY: Bird Canvas Wall Art

Blue Cricket Design has a great blog on creating your own canvas well art that looks professional and vintage.  We love the way this looks - very coffee house feeling.

Supplies Needed:
Two Canvases
Permanent Marker
Printed Birds to trace
Scissors
Paint, Wallpaper or Vintage pages to create a canvases back ground
Glue or Mod Podge

It’s easy to find images of birds online by doing an image search. Print your images on card stock or mount them on card stock to create a firm template. Cut them out and your ready to go!
To create some fun texture and interest cover your canvas in Scrapbook paper, Paint or Vintage book pages! To adhere any sort of paper mix two parts water to one part school glue or Mod Podge. Paint your paper with your glue mixture and lay smoothly on your canvas. Once the entire canvas is covered let it dry over night before moving onto the next step.
When it’s dried completely lay your two canvases next to each other.
Use a pencil to free hand your tree branches. Be sure to continue your branch from one canvas to the next.
Outline your penciled sketch with your permanent marker.


Color in your branches completely.
Place your bird images on the branches and trace them with a pencil. Remember you can make a bird face the other way by flipping them over!
Color in your birds.
Now we’ll add our details! Draw on leaves and smaller branches and color them in. Lastly you’ll want to color it all in one last time to insure a deep dark silhouette and to cover up any uneven marker strokes.
Hang them side by side and enjoy!

DIY: FallBook Page Paper Wreath

Design, Dining + Diapers blog has a step-by-step tutorial on how to make these wonderfully gorgeous book page paper fans and put them together into a wreath.  You probably have most of these supplies already in your house! 

I started out by cutting a circle out of an old box we had laying around and then covered it with book pages to create the base for the wreath.

Then, I made these accordion style flowers out of book pages (each flower has 3 small accordion pieces) and layered the flowers until they covered the entire wreath. I love how layering the flowers gave it some depth.

After the wreath was complete I accessorized it with some old buttons that my grandma recently gave me.

After trying out the wreath in several rooms in the house, I finally found it a home on a shelf in our family room! I’ve been all about big pops of bold color lately so I added some ribbon to top it off. The colors might not be for everyone but it works in this space.

DIY: Book Page Pumpkin Tutorial

Halloween is just around the corner, and this tutorial can be made in just a short time, so it's perfect for last minute decorating!  We love this idea which is from Creations by Kara's blog - so check her out!

Book Page Pumpkin Tutorial

1- Make a pumpkin shape out of a piece of paper. I roughly drew one, then folded the paper in half and cut it so it would be symmetrical.  

2-Take the cover off of your book and place the pumpkin pattern with the fold on the binding edge. If it doesn't fit, trim it a little.  

3-Trace around the pattern with a pencil.

  

4-Now it's time to cut out your pumpkin. You can use an exacto knife, but I found that it was easier just to use scissors. I could cut through 5-6 pages at a time pretty easily. If you don't have fine tipped scissors to cut all the way to the edge of the binding, you can use an exacto knife there.  

5-After you cut all the way around, pull the excess pages over to the binding and they should tear right off.

  

6-Now trace around the pumpkin shape and cut through a few more pages. Tip: cut slightly inside the pencil mark, or your pumpkin will keep getting bigger. Yep, I learned that the hard way.   

7-Keep tracing and cutting until you have all the pages done.  

8-Now put a thin strip of glue on the very edge. I'm the impatient type, so I used hot glue.

  

9-Now bring that back page around and attach it to the hot glue, keeping the outside edges as even as possible. Then add a stip of hot glue to that page, and glue the next page to it, just on the inside edges. I sure hope that makes sense.  

10-When you stand your pumpkin up, it will probably look something like this:  

11-Don't panic! It just needs to be "fluffed". Just go around pulling the pages apart and arranging them how you want them. If I had a space where the pages just refused to come together, I added a little hot glue right at the inside seam. When you are done, it should look more like this. It's OK that there are some spaces. We'll fix them later.  

12- At this point I decided my pumpkin needed a little color. I could have inked all the edges with my orange ink pad. But I knew that would take awhile. So I turned to my best friend Krylon. Spray paint that is. Yep, you can totally spray paint book pages. Just use a very light touch, you don't want it drenched or anything. One light spritz is all you need.  

13-Now it's time to add the stem. I just used a stick from my yard. If you have any stubborn pages, now you can bend them to your will. Bwaahaha! I used a bunch of hot glue, then forced the pages where I wanted them and held the stem in place till the glue dried. Voila!  

14-Next I tied a ribbon around the stem. Not only does it look cute and add some color, but it hides all the gobs of hot glue. Yay!  

And just because I love it so, here is another shot of it sitting on my entry table.

 

DIY: Stitched Heart Bookmark

These could be great gifts for anyone - especially avid book readers, but we think they might also make wonderful stocking stuffers for the holiday or keep this on hand for Valentine's Day next year!  This tutorial comes from Thirty Handmade Days - and they have other wonderful DIYs, so check them out!  (they also have a free template you can use for these on their blog!)

Supplies:
-felt
-white embroidery thread
-paperclips
-hot glue gun
-scissors
-fabric marking pen 
They are really easy and quick to make. Read on to see how I made these sweet little bookmarks.

Start by drawing your shape onto felt. To help keep the felt in place while cutting, use a straight pin to stabilize the two pieces.

 

Now that your felt hearts are cut out, it is time to stitch. 

 

 

Stitch a running stitch along the perimeter of the heart. It is the simplest stitch – just up and down through the felt.

Once you stitch all the way around, you can secure your thread by running your needle along the very top of the felt, pulling though and cutting off the excess. You will be gluing the heart down with hot glue, so you don’t have to worry about this string coming out.

Now that the stitching is done, you can glue the bookmark together.

Put a small dot of glue on your plain heart and glue down the paperclip. Add more hot glue over the surface of the plain heart, and very lightly press your stitched heart down on top. If you smash the two hearts together, two things will happen: hot glue will ooze out of the sides, and you will be able to see the outline of the paperclip. Pressing lightly keeps the surface smooth and pretty.

 

You may have already noticed the sweet cards that these bookmarks are clipped to. Since Photoshop tends to send me into fits of hysteria, I asked Mique to design a card for these bookmarks so that they can be given as Valentines. She, of course, came up with something fabulous with very little help from me.

Download your Homemade Valentine bookmark cards for 30days subscribers and personal use only.  Thanks!

DIY: Animal Bookends

We read all the time - we actually have so many books that it has gotten pretty ridiculous...so this book end tutorial is wonderful for us!  Perhaps we could find it in our hearts to get rid of two or three books to make space for these to sit on the shelf??

Thanks to Hi Sugarplum's blog we just might get motivated to donate a few books just to have these bad boys on display.

.....Plastic elephants from the dollar bin! I found these at the Target Danger Dollar Zone for $1 each, and the spray paint I already owned (duh). As for the rocks, you can find them in the garden department of the hardware store, on walks in park, or stone yards. I happen to have a stone yard nearby (kind of random, right?!), so I grabbed my 'Rattlesnake Rocks' (that's really what they're called) there. The poor guys were so confused by my request, they just let me wander around and take whatever scraps I wanted.

I originally planned to use stone tiles as the bases, but they were too small and not heavy enough to hold the weight of books.

I didn't love the tusks, so I trimmed them off with scissors, then gave each animal a few light coats of spray paint. I wanted the rocks to sit straight, so I filed the bottoms down using our concrete driveway. A dot of super glue to the bottom of each foot adheres the plastic to the stone.

Here are the mighty elephants now!