DIY Faux Plant Desk Decor

This week I'll be showing you how to make some cute faux plant desk decorations. I decided to make these because my sister got her first internship and she needs decorations for desk at work! First I'll start off with the grass. I thought it could make a pretty neat looking pen/pencil holder. I wanted it to be long, so I'm going to cut the grass chunk in half.

First I'll start off with the grass. I thought it could make a pretty neat looking pen/pencil holder. I wanted it to be long, so I'm going to cut the grass chunk in half.

Now onto the succulent plants. I decided to make a little trio.

DIY Pet Leash

So, I had been wanting to get my dog, Hobbes, a new leash. Nothing is wrong with the one he has now, in fact, I love the leash he has now. It's adjustable and really easy to clip around poles or trees or anything like that if we're out at the park and want to just sit around and hang out. Even though the leash we have for him already is adjustable, it would only go so short. I wanted something that was short and was simple, easy and quick to clip on him so we could run out the door for a quick walk.

In true chezlin fashion, I decided I'd make the leash myself. So of course I documented it all and I'm going to share it with you all so you can make one for your own pets!

Now, you can stop here and be done, but if you want, you can wax it. This is supposed to make the cord more comfortable to use and it makes it waterproof and, if you do it right, can give you an effect like leather.

I didn't get the "leather" effect I wanted, but I'm pretty sure it's because I only did this waxing process once. I'm going to go back and repeat it a few more times later and see if that works.

DIY: Studded Shoes

A while ago I saw some Jeffery Campbell skulltini flats, which are basically simple flats completely encrusted with skull studs. I thought they were super cute and I wanted them, but of course I ended up talking myself into making some of my own. So today I'll be showing you how to make some, too!

I absolutely love how these turned out!

Here are some affiliate links for some of the stuff in this project:

The flats

Skull studs

Anvil and rivet setter

DIY: Travel Watercolor Kit

The weather is getting nice so it's perfect for taking a trip to the park to hang out and paint a little bit. This week I'll show you how easily to put together your own travel sized watercolor (or gouache) kit that you can just throw in your pocket, purse, bag, etc. and be on your way!

Click here for an affiliate link for the aqua brushes.

I hope you like this weeks project! Now get out there and paint! :)

DIY: Paper Clay Projects

I showed you guys how to make paper clay two weeks ago, so this week I decided to show you a few different projects you can do with this clay! A shallow dish that you can use as a jewelry holder, coin holder, etc. and a lidded vessel that I ended up decorating to look like Totoro (of course you can decorate yours however you'd like!) Shallow dish:

Lidded vessel:

And there we go! I love how these turned out. Unfortunately I'm all out of paper clay now, but I'm itching to make more so I can make some more projects!

Boozy Beer Mug Fudge

Saint Patrick's day is next week so I came up with a recipe for some boozy fudge that you can decorate to look like cute little mugs of beer. These would be great as a St. Patrick's day party snack. There is alcohol in this fudge, so it's adults only, sorry kids!

Green icing is optional.

A normal cookie cutter probably wouldn't work for this fudge, because they'd be too short to cut all the way through the fudge, but a petit four cutter would be perfect. Here's an affiliate link where you can get your own circular petit four cutter(make sure to select the circle).

Here's how to make the fudge!

Once the fudge has set for at least 2 hours, it should be ready to be cut up!

I think these turned out so cute. They look like little mugs of a dark stout with a nice, thick head. Oh, and they taste pretty great too!

I wish I had bought the petit four circle cutter instead of being stubborn and trying to make my own. Then I could have made more little mugs instead of just cutting the rest of the fudge into squares. Oh well, next time!

DIY: Paper Mache Deer Head

A while ago I made a post about how to dress up a paper mache deer head to make it look like two tone faux mounted deer head. Unfortunately a lot of people were having trouble finding these elusive paper mache deer heads, so I started working on a tutorial on how to make your own from scratch. Finally I've finished it so I can share it with you all! Like with my turkey candles, I made a rough 3d model of a deer head and put it through a program to make it printable onto flat paper. Then all you have to do is cut it out, fold it up and glue or tape it together!

To get the template for this project, click here!

DIY Droopy Chain Necklace

This week I'll be walking you through how to make a necklace with some drooping chains hanging down. This is an intermediate level project because part of the necklace will be fabricated by hammering the metal and drilling into it.

Let me know what you think of this finished necklace! I quite like how it turned out!

DIY Nail Decals

This week I'll be showing you all how to make your own custom nail decals. I know this isn't a super unique tutorial, but I figured I'd still make it because it's something that I enjoy doing, and maybe someone will learn something new from my tutorial. You never know, someone might stumble upon this post and it's the first time they've seen this technique! Or they could be like me and before doing a specific technique, they research the crap out of it, looking at multiple tutorials so they can pick and choose which techniques to use to fit their needs.

I eyeballed the size and shape of my nails and drew them out onto a piece of paper. If you do the same, you can draw your design inside of the nail like I did for two of these nails.

I wanted to paint a floral pattern on the rest of them, so on the right you can see some little  sketches I did to use as a reference. You could totally just pull up a reference from online, or a book, etc.

Cut the paper so it can fit inside of the bag and stick it inside.

Here are the steps I did for this specific floral design.

Once the design was dry, I coated each one with some top coat.

Here are some more examples of different decals you can make.

Remove the decals with your tweezers and, if needed, trim them to size. With mine I painted over the lines I sketched out so I had to trim quite a bit to fit them to my nails.

Paint your nails with your base coat, and then one coat of your background color, if you're using one. Let those dry completely, and then apply a layer of top coat, or as in my case, another layer of the background color.

Let it dry for about a minute or until it's tacky and then stick the decal on.

Gently pat/smooth it down. Repeat for all of your nails.

Finally apply another coat of topcoat, making sure to hit all the edges to seal them up.

And here they are all finished!

I hope you enjoyed this weeks tutorial! Stay tuned next week for more~

DIY Valentine Heart Boxes

Today I'm going to show you how to make a cute heart shaped box that would be perfect for Valentine's day! You can fill them with love notes, jewelry, chocolates, or any thing else that will make your Valentine feel loved.

Supplies~ Click HERE for the template!

Spray the template with spray adhesive and stick to your foam core board. The template is two pages. On the second page trim it up a bit, up to the dotted line- this makes it easier to line it up with the first page.

Using a sharp xacto knife, cut out the pieces.

On the dotted lines you're going to only cut through one layer of paper and the inner foam core. This makes it so you can make the curves in the walls of the box.

Take one of the wall pieces, fold it in half, and starting at the bottom of the heart piece with the inner heart, hot glue the wall piece on. Use the inner heart to help line up the walls. You can give the boxes some lip according to how you position the walls. In the one I'm making for this tutorial, I was going for a small lip, so I glued straight onto the line. I have two other examples: one where I glued the wall right along the edge, giving no lip, and one where I glued along the inside of the wall, giving a slightly larger lip.

Since I wanted you to be able to customize how large of a lip you'd want, the walls will be slightly longer than what you need. Just trim them up with an xacto knife when you get to the top part.

Here's the trick to making the box fit together really well. Take the second wall, fold it in half, curl each end inwards and place inside of the other side of the box.

Again, you'll have to trim the walls a little bit.

One side cut, one more to go.

Now that you have it cut to size, carefully glue the wall together, taking care not to accidentally glue it to the other half.

Pull the inner heart wall up about 1/4 of an inch. It should stay up on its own, but if it keeps falling,  you can just use some scrap pieces of foam core to hold it up. Apply hot glue along the top of the inner wall.

Take the second heart piece and press on to the glue, lining it up with the heart from the other side.

At this point you can take it out of the first half and then press the wall down more to make sure it's secure.

Now for decoration! You really can decorate these however you'd like, but I do suggest at least painting them with a base color first. I chose red.

For the walls I measured how tall they were and cut some decorative paper strips to that size.

And then I simply just glued them down with mod podge.

I also put glitter on the edges because they were pretty rough looking. My xacto knife wasn't very sharp so it kind of tore up the foam and it looked really bad. Always use sharp knives!

Here's the version with a larger lip. I covered the the top face with decorative paper, applied glitter to the edges and used ribbon to cover the walls. This one was my least favorite, but that's mostly because I was really impatient when I glued down the ribbon so it doesn't look that good.

And here's the one with no lip. It's my absolute favorite one. I'm considering putting it up to display it even after Valentine's day, that's how much I like how it turned out. For the decoration on this one I started with a few layers of red paint for the base coat. I stuck on some masking tape and drew a design on top of that. Once I had a design I liked, I used my xacto knife to cut the tape. It's okay if you cut a little into the first layer of the foam core. As long as it's not cut like that all over, you shouldn't have a problem. I removed the tape but kept tape on the areas where I still wanted the base coat to come through. Then I sprayed it with spray adhesive and dumped a bunch of glitter on it. I removed the masking tape, and then to give it a nice shine and to keep the glitter from shedding, I sprayed on a nice layer of clear acrylic sealer. I let it dry and ta da~

Here they are all done, filled with goodies! To make the pillow for the jewelry one I simply traced the inner heart side onto some felt, cut it out, hot glued along the edges leaving a one inch hole, flipped it inside out, stuffed it, and sealed it closed with more hot glue. Then I cut a small length of ribbon and hot glued that onto the middle. Of course, you could sew it instead of hot gluing, as that would look much nicer, but I was going for speed with my heart pillow.

Again, if you want to see how to make those delicious chocolates then click here!

I hope you liked this weeks tutorial, stay tuned for more next Thursday!

DIY Simple High Heel Shoe Repair

Look at this face.

Meet Hobbes, the destroyer of shoes. Actually, I should give him a little credit because he has only ruined one pair of shoes, however they happened to be one of my most favorite pairs.Thankfully he didn't do too much damage to them, so instead of throwing them away I decided to try to fix them.

In this tutorial I'm basically just explaining what I did for this specific pair of shoes so hopefully this tutorial can be helpful if anyone else has similar damage to some shoes.

Supplies.First, I had to finish what Hobbes started. I removed the rest of the material from the chewed up heel, and then removed the corresponding material on the other shoe.I rolled the heel on the scrap leather to eyeball how much I'd need to cover it and cut the excess off.In small sections I glued the scrap leather on the heel and kept it taut as I worked my way up. When I got up to the top of the heel and underside of the shoe I cut a notch into the leather so I could stretch it to wrap around the heel.I applied the glue and then laid down one side of the leather.Then, using the grove in the middle of the heel, cut the excess off with an xacto knife. And then I repeated for the other side.He popped off the heel tip while he was enjoying my shoe as a chew toy, but thankfully there was almost no damage to it, so I just folded over the extra leather, applied glue and stuck the heel tip back on. Then I applied a good bit of pressure for a few minutes while the glue cured.On the other side, since I wanted them to look the same, I had to pop off the heel tip and then I repeated the last few steps to glue it back on with the scrap leather sandwiched in between.He made sure to damage just enough of the back of the shoe to where I felt like it needed to be covered as well, so I did that and added a little design element where the leather folded down towards the outside of the shoe. Then I cut the excess off, forming a little cap on the back.I did it a bit messy though and the edge looked really rough, so I ended up cutting a thin strip of leather to cover that ragged edge.And I repeated on all the edges, to make everything cohesive.And here they are, complete!

I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. What do you all think?

DIY Noren Curtains

I live in a shotgun style home, where we have no hallways and it's  basically just series of rooms, back to back. Some shotgun homes have doors to separate the rooms, but some, like mine, only have doorways. No doors. I've grown accustomed to the openness of being able to see basically all of the rooms if you look through a doorway, but I did also somewhat miss having a bit of separation between each room. My solution to this was to whip up a few sheer noren curtains. So of course, I'm going to be sharing with you this easy sewing project!

Supplies

First, you'll need to measure the width of your door and then how long you want the curtains to fall.

Divide the width by half. Add 1/2 of an inch to each side. Add 4 inches on top and 2 inches on bottom. Cut out these two measurements from your fabric.

Put the fabric together, right sides together, mark down 8 inches, 1/2 of an inch in. (Note: My measurements are twice as big because after cutting the fabric, I realized I didn't have to finish the outer edges of the curtains because they were the selvage edges. So instead of trimming 1 inch off every piece of fabric (I made 3 all together) I just made the seams twice as large on the inside.

Sew along the line and then fold open.

Fold 1/4 of an inch and iron that down. Then fold another 1/4 of an inch, iron again and pin. I skipped all of the ironing parts on the first one I  made, which was a huge mistake. For the other two I ironed after each fold and it made the job so much easier. So do as I say, not as I do.

Sew the seam down along the edge. This will encase the raw edge of the fabric in the seam, making them look nice and neat! Repeat this process on the outer edges of the curtain. Fold 1/4 inch, iron, fold 1/4 inch, iron, pin, sew.

For the top, fold down 1/4 inch, iron, fold down 2 inches, iron, pin, sew.

For the bottom, fold down 1/4 inch, iron, fold down 1 inch, iron, pin, sew. Repeat on the other flap.

And you're done!

Now from here you can either leave them plain or you can decorate! I was already thinking about decorating them, but after I put up this plain one to see how it looked, I decided I was definitely going to decorate them. They just didn't do it for me in their plain state. It probably didn't help that this particular curtain looks horrible because the tension of my sewing machine was off so it puckered the seams really bad.

But anyway, to decoration!

For this one I drew an ensō circle. It's supposed to "express a moment when the mind is free to let the body create." I thought it would be perfect to put up in one of the doorways to our office/studio/wood shop. For this one I just painted some pretty standard bamboo.

And for this one I painted the whole curtain, sans a circle in the middle, with a dark greyish blue. After that dried I painted the circle with liquid gold leaf.

And here they are all hung up!

I hope you all enjoyed this project! I'm glad I didn't give up after I hung that first plain one. I almost did. But I think they look so much better after painting on them.

What do you all think?

3 Easy Beanie Mods

I love beanies. Like shoes and scarves, I feel like you can never have too many. Since it's finally starting to get cold where I live, I thought I'd put together a few ways to spruce up some simple, plain beanies.

A summary of the video will follow!

For the first beanie I embellished it with two pom poms to give it a sort of teddy bear ear-esque look. Hover over the images or click on them to see instructions!

This second beanie mod is inspired by Korean fashion. One of my guilty pleasures is Kpop music, and I feel like I was always seeing the idols wearing cute beanies with really long bunny ear like bumps on top. I decided I needed to own something similar. And here it is! Hover over the images or click on them to see instructions!

This last beanie mod isn't reminiscent of any kind of animals like the last two were. This one is simply if you wanted to add a little edge to the thing. Hover over the images or click on them to see instructions!

And those are the beanie modifications I wanted to share with you all! I hope you all liked them. I'm super excited to add these guys to my beanie rotation now!

Cat Shelves

It's no secret I like to spoil my cat. A while ago I made him a cat tree to give him a space to get away from our (at the time) new puppy. Well now that puppy is a decently big dog and he can reach Gremlin's little cat tree sanctuary, and while Grem normally doesn't mind too much(Hobbes is like a annoying little brother) I still wanted to give him his own space to get away when he wants to. I also wanted to put Grem's food and water bowl up a little higher because Hobbes love that stuff and can still get to it when it's on my dresser. So I made one shelf with recessed food and water bowls and two more simple carpeted shelves. A quick video summary will be below!

Supplies. And how to cut your wood.

I did miter joints, so I cut the wood at an angle for the corners.

Figure out the placement for your food and water bowls on one of the shelves. Measure the size of the lip of the bowl (mine was 1/4 inch) and use that measurement to draw out another, smaller circle in the middle. You want to cut the wood out on that circle so the body of the bowl fits, but the lip doesn't, so the bowl rests nicely inside.

Cut the circle out.

Time to assemble! Use wood glue to stick the wood together and use the stapler to tack the wood in place with brads or finishing nails. You're going to attach the 32inch long piece to the 32inch side of the large piece of wood and then a 10inch length of wood on each side. Leave one side bare since it will be resting against the wall.

Finish the wood according to instructions. I used a dark stain.

Cut a piece of carpet out that's 32in by 10in. This is leftover remnant carpet I got for the cat tree. I still have so much left over...

Attach the carpet. I put down some wood glue first before laying the carpet down. I honestly don't know if that even did anything because I followed up with about a million staples, but it made me feel better so I did it. So after you lay the carpet down use your stapler to staple the carpet down. I made sure to use a lot because I figured Gremlin was going to use these things as horizontal scratching posts and I didn't want him to be able to rip the carpet off.

Here are the finished shelves! You can see the recessed bowls. I'm so happy with how they turned out!

Now hang up on your designated wall! I really wish we had splurged on nicer looking brackets, but oh well. They're up already so I just gotta deal with it. I can always change them later!

And here he is enjoying his new cat shelves!

I'm so happy these turned out pretty much exactly like how I pictured them in my head (beside the ugly brackets).

I hope you all enjoy, and I hope my instructions were clear enough! I didn't realize how hard it would be to explain wood working stuff.,. hah!