Whimsical Tree Board

Thanks for your sweet responses to my last, rather emotional post. I still have a few things I never published that I posted about when we were still in EA, and  I used my slooowww internet over there to upload pictures and I'm sharing them. And they are all things that brought me lots of joy, and I need closure. So here we go. 

I made this a really long time ago but never shared because i wasn't quite content with it and didn't think it was blog worthy. It kinda turned out how I wanted but seemed a little off. SO I never shared. How silly.

I wanted to make a unique, abstract-esque something to hang over the bed in the guest room so I bought another calligraphy board like the ones I used for my fabric panels. 

I wanted it to kind of be a collage with paper, but still have some sort of a scene. So I used different sized rectangular pieces of paper to make a sky, and then made rolling hills out of a few different patterns of green. I cut clouds out of this woodland creatures paper, and crumpled it up to give it texture. 

After I mod-podged all of that down, I painted a big tree with black, brown & gray paint. It is the tree that I didn't love, but didn't want to go back and fix it after i had finished. After the paint dried, I cut different sized circles in different patterns for leaves. I crumpled them to give them texture as well, and lightly mod-podged the on. 

I wanted to put some kind of "sleepy" quote on the bottom. I've always loved the Dixie Chick's version of "Godspeed" that it a lullaby that says, "oh my love will fly to you each night on angels' wings, godspeed, sweet dreams,"so I decided to use that line: My love will fly to you each night on angels wings. I didn't do a good job with the spacing but I think it goes pay with the whimsical look to it. 

I lined the whole board with this brown & blue paper for a finishing touch. 

And there you have it. A little whimsical tree board. 

I was really unsure about what to do with it when we left- it was too big to come back with us and I didn't know if other people there would think it was too odd to use themselves, but would never want to make someone feel like they had to say yes or no either way, and I was afraid that it would get thrown away and that would be really sad. 

But it had the perfect purpose. One of my dearest, most wonderful EAian friends who lives in a different city than we did came to visit right before we left and walked in the guest room and said, "I love that!!!! Did you make it!?" to which I said, "DO YOU WANT IT!?!?!" and she did! So we wrapped it up, tied ribbon around it so she could carry it on the plane with her, and now sweet Lydia has it at her house and hopefully thinks of me every time she looks at it :) 

So glad I decided to share. 

Homemade Christmas Cards

In November a friend from America came for a week, and I took advantage of the opportunity to send somethings homemade back to America with him to be distributed. I sent lots of fun EA-ian goodies back for people, that my mom and Jamie so graciously mailed out for me for me. I also ordered something else online {I'll keep it a secret for now just in case anyone who got one hasn't opened theirs yet} that is my new favorite of this kind of thing for some friends, and had them all shipped to Jamie's house. I wrote a card to {most} everyone that I sent them to, and Jamie put them in with said gift. She's kind of pretty awesome. 

For the notes, I decided to make my own Christmas cards, and then write notes and glue them inside. 

I started out a little over-zealous, and spent quite a bit of time on the first few I did.

This one is my favorite:

I used brown embroidery floss to write out "for unto us a child is born"

You can see how I wasn't going to be able to keep that up for a good 20 or so cards.  

For a couple, I went with using the recipient's name. 

With paper...

and paint....

And I made a little rhinestone Christmas tree

Then I went with some little presents using paper and more embroidery floss. 

Then I went with "joy" and stuck there for a while :) 

For this one, I made little ornaments with buttons & embroidery floss. 

I really like this one. I used foam letters to write joy, and made this cute little paper ornament. 

And then it was getting really late the night before our friend left, and so I kept the paper joy theme going, adding some ribbon here and there as I went along.... 

in different sizes....

with lots of different patterns of paper

There wasn't any rhyme or reason (for the most part) for who I gave each card to- I started with writing them all, and then glued them in the already made cards according to size. I made a few more, but didn't get to take pictures of all of them. I would have made more, but I spent a long time writing notes to everyone before hand, and then had to finish them all at 1am 

{When I also took these pictures, hence why they aren't so great}.

I'll tell everyone what the secret present was after Christmas, and then highly recommend that everyone runs out and gets one too. 

Joyfully Carded,

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My Fall "Mantle".... A Little Late

Well hey there. I haven't posted in over a month. Oops. I feel a little shame that I am just now posting on all of my fall decor, but I loved it too much not to share. Better late than never right? Right.  

So I posted last month about my new "mantle" that we recently hung with great care. 

Here is my fall mantle {that is now getting ready to come down/kind of already has...}

I got pretty creative with things that I found around the house to use. 

I found these old jars {EA-ian jelly & mayo} and covered them with scraps of paper. I painted a letter on each one to spell out "fall", and then embellished the rims of each jar. I think the last "L" looks like it has one of those old school doctor mirror headband things on. 

I found a couple of cute printables- this fun leaf one from The Crafty Scientist & this fun one from The Project Girl. I found this natural wood looking frame somewhere around here and thought it looked nice and fall-ish with the fall printable. I also had a few fun fall smelling candles that just happened to match. 

I've loved all of the Yarn letters out there  so I used the cardboard from a milk box & fun teal yarn to make my own. 

Ta-Da. I also used 2 embroidery hoops with it. 

AND my fall bunting!!!

I got creative here....

First, I made candy corn bunting. I wanted to paint it, but used water color pencils and it just ended up looking like i colored them with crayons. Kinda cute though. 

To make the circle bunting, I used watercolor pencils and went to town doodling. Then I painted over it with water & let it dry. I used my circle cutter and made lots of little circles. I glued brown and gold paper to the back of them, with thread in between. 

I'm kind of a fan. 

I pulled together a few little random things to put on the table under the shelf.

And there you have it. My fall mantle that I enjoyed for a long time. 

Now I'll go take it all down & decorate for Christmas. 

Now I think I'll try to blog a little more frequently.

Joyfully Falled-Out,

Mosaic Magazine Mod Podge Orbs

More ORBS! and mod-podge and ping pong balls and playground balls. 

This time I went with different colored magazine scraps. 

I went through a couple of magazines and just went to town, cutting out large chunks of colors from different things- everything from eye shadow and nail polish to grass and wheat fields. 

Then I sorted them out into different color "genres." And then I ripped them into little pieces, and mod-podged them in kind of a "mosaic" pattern to the ball, making one in....

Purple....

Yellow.....

Pink....

Blue {Janessa actually made this one for me}.....

Orange.....

and Green.....

And then I was half way to crazy, crossed eyed and really sticky, so I had to stop. 

I put them in this bowl and added this yarn to the top. 

They are now making a centerpiece on our dining room table. They definitely brighten my day! 

Joyfully Pieced Together,

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