03-07-08

Thank you all for your great suggestions for what I should do with my shelf. It always helps to have a fresh pair (or a dozen! LOL) of eyes, doesn't it? I'll keep playing with it and rearranging and I'll let you know what I finally come up with.

Today I have a few crafty things to share. I chose not to participate in any Easter swaps this year. I did too much for Valentine's Day and ended up a bit burnt out, so it has been nice to be able to craft without a deadline. When I was home last week my mom and I made our customary pilgrimage to my most favorite store in the whole world. Even though I didn't actually buy anything, just looking at the beautiful, unusual displays was inspiring. I did see a few interesting things that I knew I could recreate at home.


This is a papier mache letter that my mom got at Paper Source, and I know there are other stores who sell similar large letters and shapes. I simply squirted tacky glue all over, smoothed it out with a sponge brush, then dumped silver glass glitter all over the letter. The key is that I used very coarse glitter--it looks like little shards of silver. I ordered it last year with no idea that it would be quite so coarse and when I received it I was disappointed; I just couldn't see what I could possibly use it for. Now I'm so glad I have it! After I dumped off the excess coarse glitter, I then dumped fine glass glitter over it to fill in any open areas of glue and to add an extra layer of sparkle. I wish I could show you how truly sparkly it is in person--it just doesn't translate well to a still photo. Here's the best I could do:


In person, it glitters as if it's covered in thousands of tiny mirrors! One thing I learned is that you should do any inside or hard to reach areas first--I saved the inside of the H for last and it was tricky to get the paintbrush in there while holding onto the the outside. The glitter is so coarse that it's kind of poky, plus I didn't want to knock the glitter off the already-glued portions by handling it too roughly. Dear Lizzie also sold a line of boxes completely covered in the glitter and as soon as I can run to Hobby Lobby, I'm going to buy a few boxes of my own. I found some thrifted wooden eggs rolling around in my box of Easter decor so I did the same treatment to those as well. They're drying right now and they look great! Now I wish I had other colors of the coarse glitter besides silver. Wouldn't a whole bowl of pastel-colored glittery eggs be pretty?

The other crafty thing I have to share is for a church party in a few weeks. The women's organization is having a dinner with a birthday theme and we made favors to put on the tables.


We'll be decorating the tables to correspond with the months of the year and using holiday decorations for each month. So, the December table will be Christmas decorations, the February will be Valentine's, and so on. We chose to do the favors in primary colors because then they'll match all the different holiday decor, plus I like bright colors for a birthday party. I got the idea for the little jars from my mom, who sent me a couple filled with pink and red M&Ms for Valentine's Day. I copied her design exactly using the bright colors and used Skittles in the jars instead of M&Ms, just in case of peanut allergies. The little jars are from Michael's and Party America, I used cardstock scraps from my stash to punch all the shapes, and I got self-adhesive rhinestones from the $1 section at Michael's and used my 40% off coupon to buy a box of Glue Dots. We made 56 bottles and the total, including two huge bags of Skittles was somewhere around $40.00! Not bad, eh? I prepped all the pieces and then we put everything together in less than an hour at my meeting the other night. Easy as pie! Now the hard part will be finding a Maren-proof place to stash them until the party on the 19th.

Quin left today for the weekend; he's attending the wedding of a good friend in Georgia. I'm envious that he gets to go somewhere where it will be warm and there are flowers and green leaves. I would like to just skip March and April altogether and head straight to May's warm temperatures, thankyouverymuch. Spring is by far my least favorite season--around here and where I grew up in Utah it's just so wishy washy. Warm one day, snow the next. The crocuses get brave and push their little heads through the cold ground, only to be felled by yet another night of below freezing temperatures. The sun comes out and looks deceptively warm, but the air is still too chilly to spend much time outside without the burden of a coat. Blah. Give me summer or autumn any time! The only good thing about spring for me right now is that it heralds the beginning of yard sale season around here. It's still a bit early but I did see two yard sale signs when I was driving home from the commissary today, so that gives me hope! And you know where I'll be tomorrow morning. :)