Organic Creations

I was on the computer today, doing jobs and Benji decided he needed to make a t-shirt with Garfield on it. I would usually be all enthusiastic and help but I was already entertained, so I told him to draw it on a piece of paper.

Diligently he did as I'd asked, setting up his toy Garfield so as to draw from life. Once done he went over it in black texta. The other two also joined in so I have three boys lying at my feet drawing while I am consumed by my mac.

Once the initial drawing was complete, it was off to my stash for supplies. Funnily enough I had white tshirts for all the boys, as well as sharpies and fabric paint. I gave them each a tshirt and told them to put their sketch inside and trace it out with the sharpie.

 Then I set the fabric paints up on the table with some paint brushes and they had to simply colour it in. I had a variety of different ones, and as it turns out, some puffy paint as well. Left to dry in the sun and then ironed (and the puff came out in Spencer's to give the basketball an extra diamention - much to his delight. )

The boys were all thrilled with the results and couldn't wait to wear them, so proud that they'd really done them all by themselves.

Now the only issue is how to get them off these kids!

another fencing tshirt

 When I made the tshirt the other day it left me with some nice words all cut our waiting to be used. Mr P also does fencing, so I thought I would try a top for him - but in reverse. I had a navy mens tshirt in the stash so I ironed on the words which were cut from freezer paper.

Then rather than paint I used bleach, or more correctly toilet cleaner. I had it in a dish and rolled it out. The colour very quickly came away. 

But the freezer paper did its job and gave quite a nice results in a matter of minutes. (I did need to get it int he was quickly to stop the bleaching process)

Stirrer

Two creative girlfriends have started a catering business together and they have just landed their first big orders. Exciting times for them and I wanted to give them a little token gift to mark the celebration. 

After much deliberation - teatowels seemed the most appropriate.

I happily found some plain white teatowels at Coles of all places. I really wanted linen - but with time pressure - this was perfect.

Image designed and cut using the silhouette on freezer paper. 

 Freezer paper ironed onto tea towel and used as a stencil to add the orange paint. 

 Peel the freezer paper off and ta-da! Perfect image. 

 Wrapped with a card all ready for a stealth-like delivery.

40's

Today a girlfriend is celebrating her 40th birthday - well celebrating isn't exactly how she sees it. Dreading is a better description and I think I know how she feels!

With thanks to pinterest for the inspiration, I actually made something I pinned! 

I had seen variaions on this theme - 40 sucks or 40 blows and went with the sucks:

 And I decided to combine it with this roses version - this is done with chocolates and crepe paper but  i thought I could make it work. http://www.usefuldiy.com/diy-romantic-chocolate-rose-bouquet/ is the link to the original post.

 I had plenty of time (!) a whole hour between pilates and lunch to make this creation and then at the supermarket found that crepe paper is harder to come by than I thought. I had to make do and chose serviettes as they are a bit more flexible than tissue paper. Really would work better in crepe paper though.

 So with my supplies i literally hacked into them. I cut circles for the petals and wrapped each with three. I found that a circle around the size of a 1/4 of the serviette worked well. They were swiftly attached with sticky tape.

 I tried the heart shape but didn't have time to make it work and adjust the size. The green needed to add to make it look more like a flower. A zig zag shape worked best and this was wrapped and used sticky tape again.

 Then I found a bucket in the present cupboard and these clear marbles were also lying around. Turns out if you do save something just in case it can be useful. I thought I had some florist foam but I couldnt find it - so this was me making do!

 Once all forty lollipop flowers were in the jar, attached a little card with some ribbon.

and she loved it! 

More minecraft shirts

Xandy's best friend is having a sleepover party - tonight. His birthday was back in January, but we hadn't given him a present. We were tossing around a few ideas, but kept coming back to this. Party Kid was really instrumental on our little minecraft explosion and his dad runs the server. Thus, the minecraft tshirt is really appropriate.

These were made using the same techniques as here. I spent a lot of time trying to work out how to print and cut using my silhouette. Every time I did a practice it was perfect and then the stupid stuff wouldn't coordinate when I printed it on the tshirt stuff. I had no time for minor technical difficulties, so cut the shapes out by hand and am really please with the outcome, particularly the grey one which just looks like a groovy shape.

We did need a trip to the shop for cards etc so after auskick and our traditional saturday hot dog lunch we were off to the shops. Benji was desperate to spend some of HIS money, so this was incorporated into the mission.

 Not to be left behind, Spencer bought himself a dinosaur egg which you did to discover something inside. He worked hard and got the thing out, but I don't even know what it was!

Benji on the other hand got his Lava lamp. He had given one as a gift a week or so ago and wanted one himself. He paid for it and has spent ages gazing into it and watching the shapes.

Three Little Pigs Necklace

 Goodness - it is so much better when the kids take the photos than the big squirrel. Every single shot was blurry - this the least so. Apologies - but you get the idea. I made this three little pigs necklace - yes that blurry silver blob towards the bottom. Some he even cropped that out! 

Anyway a really simple idea that you can use to transform some of the wonderful plastic paraphernalia into wearable jewellery.

 This is what I had. A statue from a Shrek collection, silver paint, eyelets (1.6mm Screw eyes from Bunnings) and a 1mm drill bit.

 Statue.

 Removed base of statue.

 Spray painted it all silver. Amazing how removing the colour brings out the detail. Then I drilled a hole in the top, behind the hat for the silver eyelet. Simply twisted the eyelet into the predrilled hole,

Threaded it with some orange china cord because thats what I had and on it goes.
I wore it to the shops and already got some comments!

Celebrating new beginnings

One of the knitting girls is embarking on a new adventure. She, and her lovely family, have taken the plunge and are sea changing. They have bought, sold up and moved in what feels to me to be lightning speed. Once these guys make a decision, seems the best place to be is out of their way!

Such a new and exciting thing and I wanted to join in the celebration of their new home, but also celebrating their family as that's really what its all about.

 This is their family tree which is papercut using my Silhouette and I really love it.

I designed the image on the Silhouette software, starting with the names in Times New Roman, and literally built the tree around it. The tree is based on a clip art image of a tree which I cut it up and replicated leaves and branches to build the trees around the names. I used the 'weld' tool to join it all together.

To keep the names together I joined the letters with a small line piece which was added individually to the letters to ensure best placement as some  letter by letter as sometimes the letters were joined by leaves or other pieces. Once all the hard work was done, I let the machine work its magic and give me this fabulous cut.

 The white card has some texture to it and with the intricacy of the cutouts, I had to take my time picking out the negative spaces. It was here that I noticed I had missed joining a couple of letters in Julia's name - the u and the i drop out so I needed to keep an eye on them.

 Final decisions were in relation to display. While I really like the subtlety of white on white, it really needs the shadow to set it off.

 I decided to go with a silvery aqua that takes my mind to the sea and is similar in colour to those Julia has been pinning.

Glued down and mounted in a soft silver 8 by 10 frame. 

The silver in the frame picks up the soft shimmer in the silvery aqua paper. The look is softer in real life. I think the next project will be making one of these for me!

Honey I shrunk the...

At the art supply shop for some paper for a future project, I got a little sidetracked.
I have seen shrinky plastic projects on pinterest but never seen the product in Australia, until now.
With nothing in mind to make, the internet became an image source.
First I traced a 1940 squirrel light for a brooch with a black sharpie.
Then I brought out my cutters - a 1" circle, the 3" butterfly. I trialled pencils and sharpies with various patterns.

A quick stint in the oven. I love the instant gratification. They shrink so much but get so strong.

Another go with a bit more focus. With 2" and 1" cutters circles for pendants and earrings. I worked with a woodgrain style pattern.

I think with a bit of leather and earring backs these could be a great little gift.

Cranky Pants

The twins had a playdate at our place and they wanted to decorate tshirts. A quick trip to Kmart saw us with 3 long sleeve tees and I grabbed a pair of trackies for myself.

While the boys were happy decorating and deconstructing their shirts i pinterested my trackies into my own pair of cranky pants!

Cranky Pants from Pinterest

Heres how I did it: 

Freezer paper template cut on the silhouette in Victorian Dots font but you could cut it out with a knife.

Ironed the template onto the lower leg of the pants.

Using neon 3d fabric paint, I filled the holes

 Once the paint was dry I removed the template to reveal this:

 I was quite happy with that but I was trudging through the ironing and thought I would give it a quick press to set the paint and much to my surprise it puffed up. Even happier.

I was all set with my Cranky Pants on today to face a Monday morning school run and for a change I didn't need them. 

Maybe these are the anti cranky pants? (Note I already had my matching cranky face on instructing Xandy to take pic!)

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

The little prince. One of my favourite stories. I used to read this to my babies when they were very little and I am inspired to bring it out again. When thinking about words I wanted to use decoratively,  I didn't want english - infact anything but. The little prince is originally in French is perfect.

 I started with a cotton scarf (this one was on special from Kmart) and a Stained by Sharpie fabric texta that I got in a pack from target. I chose to use the blue because I thought it would look good with denim

 A quick internet search led me to this site which had 13 quotes from The Little Prince in both French and English. WIth this displayed on the Ipad, I pinned my scarf to a cork board, but this was more about texta bleed than anything else and infact the pinning was a bit of a pain. It worked better if I stretched the fabric as I went.
I chose to write in a soft diagonal as I thought this would wear better. Straight lines either direction would look like text, whereas I felt a diagonal would look more like a pattern.

 You can see in this picture, that towards the end my sharpie actually ran out! I kept going because I wanted to keep my place in the text, thinking I would buy another one and go over it, however it ended up looking like a natural fade and I think I will keep it like this. Partly laziness but also the aesthetics are actually pleasing. To compliment the colour fade, I decided to write more, in a different colour and direction. The green text is the books key message and also the title of this post. Then I have the title and author.

 The touch of green not only lifts it, but means it looks great with all of the green items in my wardrobe - including the relatively new green jeans!