Das Shields Leben: Crafts!

Hey all! Sorry I haven't blogged in awhile. The Mr. & I are trying to still consolidate 2 households. It's a never ending process. Lots of cleaning, organizing, laundry, crafting, painting and refinishing furniture! Whew! We have been in the process of refinishing a dresser for our closet. I can't wait to post pictures. I hope to get this in the closet tomorrow! Woohoo. i do need to still get new hardware for the all the drawers. My mother and I have been working hard on a new dinning room set for our house. I did remember to take pictures of what it looked liked before. The table top needs lots of sanding and we have had to place this crazy gel/paint thinner on top of it to get that old old lead paint off. So it's really been quite the process. Not to mention the table & chair legs have tons of little spindels on them so it's really taken a long time to sand these puppies down. Brian helped us the other day by removing all the old seats. We will have to make some repairs to the wood before we recover them in new fabric! Sometimes I am so impatient and I just want this table to be done. Only because you will all DIE when you see it. EEEkkk it's going to be adorable. I cannot wait to get it done and reveal the pictures! Woohoo!

Since I can't post any pictures yet of those projects I am going to post 2 projects right now. My little sis SarBear recently graduated college so we had a huge celebration tonight at the farm with all our family. We've been dying to give her her present. Brian & I have been planning on this for awhile now. I came up with the idea back in May. However, I needed to use part of her present (an old window pane) for our wedding first. hehe. We used all these old vintage windows that Brian painted and distressed for our wedding. We hung them by twine from all the trees. It was beautiful! We loved how they turned out! :)

I got this idea to make her a weekly scheduler with an old window pane. Brian already had eye hooks on all the windows so it was perfect. What I did was get a window pane that had 6 sections. I was going to use each section for a day of the week & then Saturday & Sunday could share a section. I already had chalk board paint that we used for the wedding and I painted one side of the window with the chalk paint. I had to do 6 coats for it to be thick enough. I then outlined each section with 2 rows of twine via hotglue (burnt myself really bad too). I purchased small wood letters at hobby lobby for each day of the week. I then chalked part of the top of the window for the month. On either sides of that section I made gray rosettes. This is the other craft I will blog about and show you how to do. I then tied ribbon through the eye hooks and tied a bow. TADA! Sorry for the quick explanation. Here are the pictures:

The next craft project I will blog real quick about are rosettes. Aw I love them. I actually ordered one million from Etsy for our wedding and I attached them all over to anywhere and anything to give an extra vintage feel. I really wanted to make a million myself for our wedding but it was one of those things I just did not have time for. It was less stress for me to just purchase a ton. I found a great seller that sold them for an extremely reasonable price so it really was worth it in the end.

I used these gray rosettes that I made for Sara's Graduation gift. They are the gray rosettes you see next to the month in the pictures above. I will tell you very briefly how to make them. They literally take maybe 1 minute to make, I KID YOU NOT!

All you need is: a 3ft long piece of fabric that is about 2.5 inches wide & a hot glue gun. Easy enough? Oh yes easy enough!

My sister in law is making burlap ones that are sooooo stinkin' cute. I am going to start attempting burlap ones soon. These rosettes you can literally attach to anything & everything. I have made them into headbands, clips for your hair, added accesory for Sara's weekly calendar & my sister in law attached them to a purse she made. Oh yes and I attached them onto twine and then put them on all the blue glassed mason jars for our wedding. You see some in the above pictures. We used all the blue glass mason jars for part of our center pieces, I will be blogging soon about the million & one wedding crafts we did.

The options really are ENDLESS for these rosettes! And I'm obsessed! Here is how you make them:

1. Cut a piece of fabric that is about 3 ft long & 2.5 inches wide. As you can see my picture below my cutting job is really trashy. BUT hey it doesn't matter that's the great thing. ha! Once you cut the piece of fabric, you are going to take one end and tie a knot. I did a double knot on mine & I didn't make it extremely tight.

2. Next you need to straighten out the loose end of the fabric. I folded mine in half.

3. The knot is going to be your center. So you are going to take the fabric closest to the knot and wrap it around the knot. You will then use your hot glue gun to add dots of glue. I suggest gluing atleast twice for everytime you wrap the fabric around a complete rotation. The key to wrapping it around the knot is taking the fabric and folding it up/crossing it over and glueing it to the sides of the flower. You have to cross the fabric up and over. You do not want the flower to be loose or really tight, just attached the fabric with glue well enough so that it feels sturdy.

4. You will continue to wrap the entire piece of fabric around the knot. You will need to glue about 2 times per rotation around, just so that the fabric is constantly sticking to the knot.

5. Once you get done you will have a little tail left over on the back from the other short end side of the knot. What I did was glue it down on the back. This time I did not need to place a backing on the back of my rosette I just glued it onto the weekly calendar I made. Although, if you were making a hair clip I would suggest cutting a round piece of felt to the back and then attaching a clip or pin of some sort.

(This pictures is of the back of the rosette.)