chezlin ·
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:
chezlin ·
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! :)
chezlin ·
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!
chezlin ·
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!
chezlin ·
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!
chezlin ·
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!
chezlin ·
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?
chezlin ·
A few months ago my husband bought a lathe, so I decided I'd learn how to use it. I've learned what I know from a combination of him teaching me and watching youtube videos so there might be some things I'm doing wrong or could do better. If anyone has any tips for me, please let me know! My most recent project on the lathe was a finial and topper for a sea urchin ornament. I decided to take video and share it with you all! This isn't a tutorial video or anything, but if you're interested in the other ornaments that make an appearance at the end, I'll be posting a tutorial for those tomorrow.
Hope you enjoyed~
For the Home, Other, Tutorials
chezlin ·
It's finally getting a bit chilly here and finally feeling like fall, so it's put me in the mood for all the autumn things. First things first, some decoration. My original intention was to make a wreath, but after getting my supplies home I changed my mind and decided to make some hanging wall decor instead. Here's how I did it!
Keep reading for a quick video recap below!
Supplies:
Cut all of the flowers apart.
With the flowers I bought, the leaves were loose so had I superglue them in place.
Find the center of a flower, squirt some hot glue in the middle and stick the end of a stem into it. Hold until the glue is hardened.
Repeat until the strand of flowers is as long as you want. I made mine four flowers long. Repeat to make as many segments as you need for your branch size. I made nine.
Tie a length of string onto the stick and then to the head of the top flower of one of the segments.
Repeat until you've attached all of your segments. I tied mine about three to four inches apart.
Here it is over my tv!
My branch was pretty lightweight and adding the flowers didn't add much weight to it so I was able to just hammer two nails in the wall and rest the branch on those.
If your branch is too heavy for that method, you could tie a piece of twine or yarn on each end of the branch and hang from a single nail like in the image above.
Hope you all enjoyed this project! I love it. I have a feeling like this piece is going to stay up on the wall for a while!
chezlin ·
Hey guys! Today I'm going to show you how make some nice Halloween decorations with paper mache. I found some small paper mache skulls at my local craft store, and yeah, they're not too pricey, but once I saw them I knew I wanted to make some on my own. I figured I could put a bit more personality into them, and I think I succeeded. I made two types of skulls; one that's a bit cartoony looking and the other a tad more realistic. I also made a little jack-o-lantern as well. This tutorial is best viewed in video format, however I'll provide some video stills with captions after the video!
Le supplies
Blow up your balloons; you'll want to fill them up only halfway. For the cartoony type of skull, tape around the bottom third of the balloon. Don't worry about being precise. Once you tape it up you can squish the balloon around a bit to alter the shape of the balloon until it's just right.
For the realistic type of skull, take some cardstock and tape it to the balloon like so. This is only going to be temporary so we can draw the face on with the correct proportions.
Roughly sketch a skull face onto the cardstock. Carefully remove the tape and cut the shape out.
Tape it back on. Yeah, you could probably just draw the skull face without taping it onto the balloon, but where's the fun in that? The best part is riding that fine line between almost popping the balloon and not.
For the jack-o-lantern, wrap a balloon with three rubber bands equally spaced apart, like so.
Draw on the face of the cartoony skull. Sure it's about to get completely covered with paper mache, but you need to sketch the whole face to see where the jawline will be. That's where we're going to stop layering on the paper mache.
So much paper. You can use newsprint or any similarly weighted paper. I'm using brown packing paper. Tear the strips rather than cutting them, as a torn edge blends more easily.
Glue mixture. Two parts glue, one part water.
If so inclined, don your gloves.
Dip a strip into the glue, wipe off the excess glue and place on balloon. Repeat x1000. But really, do about 2 or 3 layers of paper, let dry, and repeat until it feels thick enough. Mine ended up being about 7 or 8 layers I believe. Although, I wish I had done more layers on the jack-o-lantern, because, as you will soon see, after I cut the face out it wasn't very strong and it started drooping.
Anyway, once you layer enough, let it dry overnight.
Before you pop the balloon, gently squish it down around the edge of the hardened paper shell. This should help prevent any distortions on the edge that may arise after popping the balloon.
Snip a small hole in the balloon and let it deflate.
You re-drew the face back onto the skull right? Oh, well if not, do so now.
Cut out the eyes, nose and mouth with the help of an xacto knife and scissors. And here he is!
Here's a realistic-y skull. I decided to do an opened mouth one by cutting the bottom jaw and taping it on separately.
And here's the little jack-o-lantern dude and his droopy face! When I paper mache-d him, I covered the whole thing except for about 1/8in around the knot of the balloon. That's where I popped the balloon. After I popped it, I rolled up some glue saturated paper and stuck it in the hole to create a little stem for the pumpkin. I pulled out the balloon and rubber bands after I cut the face out.
And here they are! All done!-- Well, almost anyway. I'll be posting the fully decorated pieces on Saturday the 25th, so stay tuned!
