Thursday, March 29, 2012

Spring Crafting: Wreath & Terrarium

 moss

Chuck & I spent some time crafting over the weekend and we each had our own little craft project. Mine was the wreath (probably not a surprise with the pastel color scheme) and Chuck's was this cute little terrarium. 

First the wreath.  I've been really taken with so many felt flowers I've seen all over the craft-o-sphere for some time now, and a spring-y wreath seemed like a great excused to make a whole bunch.  I ended up doing a search and marking a bunch of tutorials for felt flowers through Pintrest. After some review I picked out three of the easier tutorials that I found. Most only required a bit of hot glue, though the purple flowers used just the tiniest bit of thread.

Here are the tutorials I used:
Pink Flowers: More Felt Flowers from Homemade ginger
Purple Flowers: Florets from a Floral Pillow tutorial on Martha Stewart
Blue Flowers: Felt Flower Headband from Shad and Lizzie

 

This turned out to be a really easy & cheap project, under $2.40 total in supplies. I picked up the wreath a while back at a dollar store and recently bought various shades of Eco-fi felt (made from recycled plastic!) to play with for only 34¢/sheet. I only used 4 sheets and got about 3 of each style flower from each sheet. That excludes the blue flowers. I only got two blue flowers from a sheet; It would seem that particular style is a material hog. I still have 3 small pink spiral/rose flowers and 1 purple petal florets to use for another project. If elt the composition was complete and I figure I can make pins or hair clips out of them in the near future.

 

Chuck's project was reasonably cheap as well. Around his birthday I bought a small round vase and some stones, again from the dollar store. I was considering assembling a little terrarium myself, something Chuck mentioned he'd like to do, but I'm really not the green thumb of the two of us. I knew he had done some research on soils and would probably have more fun experimenting anyway. We finally made it over the Pearl Ace Hardware (a particularly awesome hardware store) & Chuck got some Cactus & Charcoal Soil Mixes. Moss was easily gathered from...anywhere outside in Portland, especially right now. It's very moist and mossy out there lately. After prepping the containers Chuck popped outside for just a few moments and came back with a big bag of moss. He had enough moss and rocks to spread around all of our planters, including the steel one he made a few years back. The glass terrarium also got a cutting from another succulent we already had. If the moss and everything works out, I think I'll be on the look out for a larger glass container...having moss inside (intentionally of course) is pretty lovely.

So there you have our his & hers craft projects from last weekend. We really had a great time listening to music while we crafted, much to our kitty's dismay!

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Happy First day of Spring!

Field of Purple Heather Laurel Purple Gaultheria Shallon

Happy First day of Spring! I haven't posted for a bit, I've been pretty busy lately. One of the things I've been up to is trying to take a lot of walks. More exciting right now, with spring starting up. The pictures above are from Washington Park, but the cherry blossoms all around town are starting to bloom. None on the waterfront just yet, but it won't be much longer!

Irish cupcake from Petunias's at PSU market Vegan Shepard's pie Trellis & vine sweater in progress

We had a fun St. Patrick's Day. The PSU Farmer's Markets started up again just in time & we were able to get some really yummy vegan treats from Petunia's. I also convinced Chuck to make us a Shepard's Pie. He decided to make it in our skillet so we had a lot of leftovers. I started knitting a really tricky light green sweater, while wearing other green things I made. I definitely did not get pinched, but I made up an appropriate Etsy treasury just to be sure.

Craftsy Jan. Block of the Month 1  Phone Cozy Goccoed RSVP card and tulips

And I've been doing various crafty things lately. I finally got started on the Craftsy Block of the month on Leap Day, but so far I've only done one of the blocks. I'm way behind! I really enjoyed the first one though and I'm confident I can catch up sometime soon. I'm planning to stick with just a few solid color fabrics which I really like the looks of so far. I've also been rephotographing items for my Etsy shop for a more consistent look. I still have some of that left to do. And lastly I recently did a set of wedding invites for my cousin. I'm really happy with how the turned out, and hopefully I will share more of that project here soon! (Chuck bought me tulips very similar to the ones on the RSVP cards, which strangely seem to be Mutant Siamese Tulips. Interesting or Scary?)