Life in iPhone photos

police horse/foggy day/swan/daffodils/view master/vintage bottles/ship/kale chips/shark teeth/skull

I Heart Etsy

Vintage Stirrup/Sailor Dress/Book Clutch/Ceramic Buttons

DIY: Yarn Wrapped Initials

Sorry for the lack of updates this week! It was Eric’s birthday last weekend so we were super busy and then I was sick all this week—stupid spring colds! Today I am finally getting around to posting our latest wedding DIY, and it’s an exciting one! I had been seeing on different blogs giant initials wrapped in yarn and was inspired to do the same. For now they’re on our bedroom wall, but at the wedding we’re hoping to use them on the wall behind the head table or perhaps on the table itself. It was very easy to do!

Materials:

For three 11inch high letters

- 1 inch thick foam core (most commonly used as backing in picture frames and can be bought at craft stores)
- Yarn, twine, or thick string (we used the cheapest yarn from the sale room of a local shop because you don’t need the best quality)...we threw out the wrappers before looking at how much yarn it took, but we bought three standard balls of yarn and almost used the whole pack.
- Computer with a font that you see best fit
- Printer to print out letters in largest size
-Make shift projector or a real projector (we used a desk lamp and the plastic cover to our record player)
-Knife to cut through the foam core
-Glue

1) Making the letters: Start with finding a font that you like best for your letters. Eric and I used two different fonts because the ampersand looked odd in the font we liked for our letters. Make each letter the biggest size you can on a single piece of paper. If you can, set your font to print outline only to save ink (the font we chose apparently couldn’t print in outline, oops) and print your letters. Now you can cut out those letters and trace them on your foam core, but if you’re like Eric and I then it’s “go big or go home” and those letters just aren’t big enough for you.

2) Projecting the Letters: Eric had the idea to projector our letters in order to make them larger and still be able to trace our chosen font (if you’re skilled you could do it free hand, but neither of us are very good at drawing). He took the lid to our record player (any clear object will do as long as it’s large enough for your letter), placed the cut out letters on top and illuminated them with our desk lamp. He had to keep his hands very steady while I traced the letters, but in the end it worked out just fine! To make sure all of our letters were the same height we left a ruler on the page as a guide.

*If making the letters seems difficult I have seen people use already made wood letters, but Eric and I couldn’t find any that were cheap/nice enough*

3) Cutting out the letters: Eric and I could only find ½ thick foam core so we split our sheet in half and glued the two sides together, waited for it to dry, and then cut out our letters. We started cutting with a utility knife, but it was super difficult to cut through the foam core so we ended up using a serrated kitchen knife (be SUPER careful doing this). We cleaned up our letters a bit with scissors just to even it out a bit, but really it doesn’t matter too much. We had one problem were almost an entire corner fell off but we just remade it with duck tape (you’re just wrapping the letter anyway so any imperfections are going to be covered)

4) Wrapping the letters: This was not as easy as expected, but with some patience and do-overs wrapping the letters did get completed. We tried to start at difficult corners (like the M pictured below) and just went with the flow from there. The rounded corners of the ampersand took some time, but we found the more we wrapped the better it looked. At the end we cut out a few pieces of yarn and glued them to the ends we couldn’t wrap (the edges of the letters) and VOILA! We have beautiful wrapped letters!

Roberta Settels Sandals

I have fallen madly in love with Roberta Settels roman style sandals! We have the children's version at work and I like to stroke them and dream they're my size. It really is meant to be, to have fallen in love with these Swedish hand-made beauties, because Roberta Settels is a composer who studied with two of my all time favourite composers, Xenakis and Boulez. For your listening pleasure below is Charisma by Xenakis a wonderful piece for clarinet and cello that one day I hope to perform.

Dying Easter Eggs

Materials:

Hard Boiled Eggs
Vinegar
Bowls
Water
Food Coloring
Elastic Bands

1)      Create your vinegar water mixture: Adding vinegar to the water helps the dye adhere to the eggs. Use about a tsp of vinegar for every cup of water.

2)      Fill your bowls about half full of the water/vinegar mixture (anymore and you may overflow when you put the eggs in EEK!).

3)      Add drops of food colouring until you’re happy with the hue than add two more drops. I found that the eggs always turned out slightly lighter than the dye mix so making it darker achieved my desired look.

4)      Now start placing in your eggs! Eric and I used different sized elastic bands to create striped effects on our eggs, but you can also use some wax to draw on designs. This did get pretty messy so I would suggest putting down some newspaper.

5)  Use wire cooling racks to dry the eggs (or something equivalent). This allowed for air to get around the entire egg so it dried evenly and it prevented any smudging that might have occurred if the egg was left flat.

Weekend Update

Sorry for the lack of posting this week! I took extra shifts at work and only had a one day weekend, so Eric and I had a jammed pack day of crafting and seeing friends. We went to Forest Hills in Toronto and walked around Wychwood Park (where Eric and I will live when we're billionaires) with our two good friends and their two year old son. We also made a new craft project for our wedding and I will post about it later this week!

shadows/yellow/piggyback/swings/julius/frozen yogurt/crafting/wychwood

DIY Chalkboard Paint Matryoshka

Eric and I were on creative overboard last weekend. You saw my shoe clips and my leather clutch, but these Russian dolls were so much fun! They look so sleek unpainted and so goofy and homey all chalked up (mainly because I can only draw goofy). Here’s how we did it!

1) Find yourself some unpainted Matryoshka’s. Ours are from a local gift shop, but there are some really inexpensive ones on etsy like the ones here

2) Start painting! We used Hudson Chalkboard Paint, but there’s a great tutorial here that tells you how to turn any paint into chalkboard paint!

3) Admire your freshly coated Dolls!
4) Wait...wait...and wait some more while your dolls dry. Insert your own funtivity here, I chose to serenade Eric with my mad clarinet skills.

5) Repeat steps 2-4 until desired. We did 2 coats and the dolls seemed perfect to us.

6) Now that your dolls are nice and dry it’s time to season them! Take a piece of chalk, turn it on its side and try to cover as much of the doll as possible, then erase the chalk. This will prevent writing being burned onto the doll. Now draw your funny designs over and over again.

I think this would be the perfect gift! It would be so much fun as a child to be able to create your own dolls over and over again. I already bought another blank doll to paint for my nephew!