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Showing posts from November, 2015

Popsicle Stick Button Snowflakes

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Last week I made some cute Christmas tree ornaments with my stash of popsicle/craft sticks , this week I'm making some button snowflakes. Last year I made some  starburst ornaments  using a similar method, but this time, instead of decorating my sticks with paint and glitter, I used a hot glue gun and buttons. I started with 4 popsicle/craft sticks. Glue them into a starburst buy layering them and putting down a drop of hot glue (or you cute use white glue or wood glue too). Next I grabbed my box of white buttons. My mom rescued these lovelies from my Grandma's house when she moved into an apartment and got rid of most of her stuff. My mom was nice enough to gift them to me (yay cool old buttons!). There are all kinds of buttons in this box, but I saved the real mother of pearl buttons for another project and focused on different sizes and shapes of white and off white plastic buttons. I glued a larger button in the center and then alternated sizes

Craft Stick Christmas Trees

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My mom gave me a giant box of popsicle/craft sticks a while back, so I have been trying to come up with crafts that use them ever sense. Last year I made a great giant snowflake for our door and some starburst ornaments , so this year I'm making Christmas trees. You'll need 3 popsicle/craft sticks for each Christmas tree (and a 4th if you decide to use popsicle sticks for the trunk). I laid out 9 sticks on a paper plate to paint. I painted them a shade of dark green with some craft paint and a foam brush. I thinned the paint by wetting the foam brush before loading it with paint and then painted both sides of the sticks. After they had dried, I touched up the edges of each one. I also cut about an inch off of both ends of another three sticks (so 6 one inch pieces) and painted them brown. I tried to take a picture of this step, but they turned out blurry--so you'll have to use your imagination. I cut them with a pair of  diagonal pliers , it didn

Shrinky Dink Snowflakes

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It's that time of year again--time to start crafting Christmas ornaments! I decided to give something a little different a try. A while back I used #6 clear plastic from cookie containers and take out containers to make homemade shrinky dinks . I decided it would be fun to make ornaments using this process. Snowflakes seemed like a good idea since they are clear-ish in the real world. So I gathered up some supplies--a craft knife (I used an xacto brand craft knife , the box cutter also in the picture didn't make the cut--literally), a scissors , a cutting board, my #6 plastic sheets harvested from the flat bottoms of bakery containers (you could use real Shrinky Dink sheets ), and some print outs of snowflake templates that weren't too intricate. I picked some from a Google search that used all straight lines, and then I blew them up in Word so they were about 5-6 inches wide. I knew from experience that this recycled plastic shrinks a lot (to less than half th

Printable Thanksgiving Banner

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I needed a little something to decorate my mantel for Thanksgiving. It's always easy to find Halloween and Christmas decor, but Thanksgiving is often left out. Well, time to show Thanksgiving some love. I found the printable banner/garland on the At Second Street blog that read "Give Thanks." With just a little bit of tweaking, I had a great banner for my mantel. I printed out the letters (which print 2 to a sheet) on some cardstock . All I had was white, so that's what I went with. The inspiration website used some brown card stock. I used to have some off white card stock with speckles that would have worked perfectly, so just use what you've got. I cut the letters out with a scissors leaving a 1/4 inch border of white along the edge. After the letters were cut out, I cut a slit along the brown border on each side towards the top with a craft knife to run some ribbon behind each letter to string it up. I'm sure there are other ways to do

French's Fried Onion Container Lives Again as a Holiday Gift Container

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If you follow the blog, you know that this isn't my first ( or second or even third ) time covering a French's Fried Onion Container with mod podge and tissue paper, but I had an empty container and it was just begging to be covered, so here it goes. This time, I found some adorable holiday tissue paper that I had floating around in my stash and created a cute holiday gift container. Wouldn't this work out perfectly for gifting some treats to a co-worker or neighbor? Be sure to run it through the dishwasher so that your cookies don't end up tasting like onions and you'll be good to go. To make this gift/storage container, you'll need an empty French's Fried Onion container (snip off the plastic shrink wrap label and wash it out), some cute patterned tissue paper, a jar of glossy mod podge, a foam brush, and a scissors (and a paper plate or wax paper to set gluey brushes or the drying container on would be a good idea too). Cut your tissue