Make It Crafty March Challenges

I've been working really hard on this months challenges and it has been loads of fun.  This months  Make it Colourful Challenge #7 is "Spring is in the Air."  The easy this month is to color flowers and trees, while the hard challenge is to color wood to look realistic.

While they do the site challenges Make it Craft also has a wonder Facebook group. Here there is tons of inspiration and wonderful crafty people.  I highly recommend checking it out.  Each month the Facebook group has it's own challenge.  This months challenge is to create a card in a box. Now I'm not much of a card person but this looked like loads of fun so I figured I'd give it a go.

The tutorial for this card in a box is found at My Many Passions blog.  This tutorial is in metrics and I did use a converter tool to approximate my measurements before someone pointed out Splitcoaststampers tutorial in inches.  Both have excellent videos and Splitcoaststampers has a great step by step written and picture part as well.

So now we have flowers and trees, wood and a card in a box....hmm....How to combine all of these? I know it can be done.

So here's the stamps from Make It Crafty I started with:

In the Garden Digi Stamp

Cynthia Digi Stamp

I broke out the cardstock piles and decided on a brown kraft box.  I made my box, which I found easy enough to do with the tutorials.  I then mixed some of the garden stamps in Photoshop.  Took all my the digital stamps I wanted to use into my Silhouette Cameo resized them, printed them, and cut them out.  I was shocked at just how tiny I needed these stamps to be to fit with my box 2.75" max either way.

Then it was time for the fun part....coloring!  I was not sure how to tackle coloring the tiny very detailed stamps I printed but I was determined.  I started out with Copic Markers B0000 for the sky,  and YG03, YG67, and YG63 for the stems on the sunflowers.  But I soon realized that I was going to have some trouble trying to color in such tiny lines with the markers so I switched over to watercolor paints and a #1 Round brush.  I just use whatever was already on my pallets, Windsor Newton, SoHo, Van Gogh and Koi among them.

This made it so much easier, at least for me, to color.  Once colored I attached the figures in my box to create a three dimensional scene.  I added some colored cardstock to the flaps of the box.  Embellished the closed box with some jolee's by you flowers, Prima Marketing pearls and a stamp that I made in Photoshop.

I also made a envelope out of complimenting paper that I  had.  I found that with the thickness of the card a 9" x 9" piece of paper was big enough to make the envelope.  After much trial and error, a few scrap pieces of scrapbook paper, I figured it out.  Using my score board and envelope triangle I scored the paper at 3" and 3.5" made the envelope so that the card would fit.

This was a fun little project and I hope you all like it. :)

Garden Flowers

The garden is finally in full swing. Some crops are doing better than other. Spinach, onions and eggplant just are not going to be happening this year. I think all of 4 spinach plants are there and getting eaten by bugs and I have 2 onions growing. The rest of the garden seems to be doing good.

I was out weeding around the corn today, I couldn't tell were the corn ended and weeds began, and I noticed all these lovely flowers. I don't think people realize just how lovely vegetable and fruit flowers in the garden can be. I decided to take some pictures of my lovely garden flowers.

First up is my strawberry plant. I bought this as a plant from the plant clearance rack at Lowes. Let me tell you this was the saddest little plant I had ever seen. I wasn't even sure if the plant would live. It was only fifty cents so I figured I'd give it a chance. Now look at it. It grew a shoot and formed another plant so now I have two plants and it's got this love pink flower on the top. Not bad for fifty cents.

While weeding I was scanning the garden and noticed something that seemed odd to me, a color that I have not seen on anything other than eggplant flowers, purple. Now my eggplant isn't flowering so it took me a second to think about what exactly had the purple flower, it's my heirloom beans. I've never seen bean plants with purple flowers before, only white. I thought they were so pretty.

Lastly my peas are taking off. I also got heirloom peas this year. It still amazes me just how tall and how well they grow. I have to go get another piece of trellis for them to climb on. They seem to do so well in the garden. I love the white flowers that they have and trying to hunt to see which ones are going to give way to a yummy pod. Here is six peas in a pod that still have the white flower attached to the bottom:

My Garden Box Garden

I'm so proud. I worked extra hard on the garden this year to get it where it is. It's not quite where I'd like to see it but it's close. :)

I started out this year planning out the expansion of the garden and figuring out just how many more boxes we would need. Now if you've never gardened in a box you have got to try it. I was a long time ground planter, since I was little. We would till up part of my parents back yard every year and plant our plants directly in the ground, what I call a ground planter. Since I've discovered boxes I can't get away from them. I absoultly love them. It's so much easier than ground planting.

It all starts off with your box. You can really use anything, at least I do. I have some pallets that I've recycled into boxes and some plain pallets out there as well. I have two the I have left all the pallet boards in and just laid them down so that the side with the least amount of boards shows, this gives you more growing space and is fine for planting things that have smaller, shallower root systems. I planted lettuce in one and herbs in the other. Most of my boxes are made from upcycled wood pieces from house construction left overs and even some boards from an old waterbed. This year we were out of long feesible wood to upcycle so I had to come up with and economical - (in other words cheap)- way to build some new boxes.

I did this using dog eared cedar fence pickets. They worked out really well and are only about $1.50 - $2 a picket. I made four boxes for about $17-20 not including the soil. I bought 10 - 72" fence pickets. You need 5 pickets to make 2 boxes. This is how I did it:

These boxes make my gardening life so much easier. To get ready this year I added compost to the previous years boxes and turned them, mixing the compost into the soil...easy peasy! And the best part is no fighting with the tilling and the rocks in the ground. Now sure it's not easy the first year or when you expand, I remove all the grass before I put boxes down, but after the first year you'll love it. I also find that my plants grow much better in boxes. I probably should have leveled out the ground but I didn't really bother with that as long as there wasn't a significant gap between the ground and the box. This years boxes I filled with a mix of top soil and garden soil in a 2:1 ratio.
Here's what it looks like so far this year:

The wheelbarrow idea I saw on Pinterest and I had an old one that was just rotting away out by the garden so I figured I'd give it a go. Hopefully the flowers in there fill out more. You can see our rain barrel, the green round thing, and some buckets and totes that I used for moving things around. In the front of the garden is some squash, garlic (planted in the ground...well it just came up from no where so I left it), chives, parsley and a strawberry plant. In the back where the lattice is there are peas and where the wire cages are is tomatoes. Eventually basil will be planted in there for some companion gardening. Then there is a box for cucumbers, one for mint, tarragon, celantro, rosemary, and dill. A box for leeks (which survived the winter), parsnips, and carrots. Another for beans, onions and spinach. A box for more beans and eggplant. One whole box for peppers, and another whole box for lettuce. Then where there are no boxes I am yet again attempting to grow corn, yellow corn and strawberry popcorn corn. I have yet to have luck with corn, keeping my fingers crossed that this will be different this year.
So there's my garden. It's taken me a good weeks worth of work to get it all set up and mostly planted. I have a few seedlings that are still to small to be planted and some didn't make it. So I will like be planting those next weekend and eventually buying plants to replace the one's I lost. I'll try to keep you up to date on how things are going so you can see just how wonderful things are in boxes.

Bookmarks

      I've been super busy lately and slacked on writing. I worked on the garden a little, it still has a long way to go even for this year. I still have two more boxes to build, get into place, fill with dirt and plant in. I've planted all my seeds in newspaper cups I made and put them in the starter greenhouse, (it's tiny only 4 small tiers. One day I'll have a big one!) It's still getting kind of cold here at night so I worry about planting the seeds too early. One year I planted my plants apparently too early and it got to cold for them and they all died. I had to buy plants twice that year. This year I want to make sure I don't loose any or as little as possible. We still have leeks growing from last year. They survived the winter. Parsnips are coming up from last year already. The celery is sprouting again from plants that almost made it though the winter. Garlic and chives are already growing. So some things are well under way. The only unfortunate part is I wanted to move the bed with the leeks and parsnips in it but now can't because they decided to keep growing.

      Besides playing in the garden I've been busy making all sorts of things, one being a ton more bookmarks. I came into rather suddenly a bunch of beautiful beads and things and the ideas just kept flowing for different bookmarks.

Here are some of the large bookmarks I made. The Shepard's hooks on these measure just under 5" long. The left bookmark is beaded with light green glass leaf beads, green stone and pearl beads, a silver foil glass leaf bead and a silver dragon fly charm. The middle bookmark has different lengths of pewter colored chain with glass beads in black, green and clear blue colors. It also has a metal bird and feather charm hanging from the chains as well. The right bookmark has upcycled vintage gold puff hearts on a gold chain beaded with gold ball beads and light green Swarovski crystals. To find out more information on these and to see their listings click HERE

I made some smaller bookmarks too. These Shepard's hook bookmarks are just over 3" in length. They are more ideal for smaller hard cover books or paperback books but they will also work for the larger books too.

Along with all of these a really brilliant idea hit me (at least I think it was brilliant.) I love my Pandora bracelet and all the different charms that I have for it. This got me thinking. Why not make something for my Pandora/Pandora style beads and charms. I thus came up with these customizable bookmarks. You can customize them with your very own Pandora style beads and charms. Have your bookmark with a personal touch that's all your own. So far I have made these two:

Day 44 & 45 - Craziness

Yeah I didn't post yesterday...first time I've missed in well, 44 days. Not bad. Well actually it is bad. Have you ever had one of those days where everything is just wrong? Can't find anything to save your life? I did yesterday and am still there. I miss placed some cards and for the life of me can't find them. I've been tearing the office apart trying to locate them, with no luck. I can vaguely remember the conversation with my hubby about how I had to press them because they were curling really bad. Now I can't seem to find them. It's like they vanished into thin air. I've even been asking St. Anthony (you know that thing you say when you lost something...Dear St. Anthony come around, somethings lost and can't be found) to hurry up and do his magic a little faster. (I found my Hello Kitty sticker book, it was lost, but it's not what I really wanted to find.) Even pleading with St. Anthony hasn't worked to find these cards. I'm at my wits end and it's really getting to me. I'm going to lose it....soon.

***Deep breath***So yesterday, while in the midst of searching for these darn cards, the oldest wants to work on a piece of art for the art gallery. They are hosting a Children's Exhibit. I worked with her on her water colors and how to not press so hard on the brush. She, for some reason, wants to push the brush all the way to the paper so that the metal end is scraping on the paper. I tried to get her to use the tip of the brush, how to get different shades of the same color and how to even out the paint on the paper. She's doing good. I can't wait to see how it looks when she's all done.

Today, but of course, you guessed it, more card craziness. Still can't find them. Still driving me NUTS!!! To take my mind off the craziness I decided to decorate some garden stakes. Thinking about the garden makes me happy :) I plan on putting quite a bit of work into it this year and over the next few years. I really want it to be something wonderful. I found some garden stakes in one of the dollar bin at Michael's and picked some up. I took some Mod Podge and affixed some decorative paper to the fronts of them, trimmed the edges and sanded them down. I aged them with some vanilla paint and sand paper. The border around the yellowish one was done with water colors and a detail brush. The lettering I embossed on with wet embossing markers and clear embossing powder. Finally I sealed them with a couple of layers of Mod Podge and once it is nice enough outside I'll give the whole steak a good cover with some clear coat.

Day 39 - Update and Valentine Card

I ended up rooting two more green onions, so that now I have four. All of them up on my kitchen window sill. I figured I share with you just how well they are doing. I have to say that I am completely amazed by this. The far right one I just planted yesterday and it has not had a chance to straighten out as it was bent in the glass while rooting.

With Valentine's Day right around the corner I figured I'd post a Valentine card, or an I love you anytime card. :) Those are always nice too. It's made from card stock. There are a couple of heart brads affixed to the paper, a heart candy box that reads love and a tag at the bottom that says i <3 u!

Day 37 - Seed Tapes

Thanks to CRFM for another great idea. I find out so much useful information from them. They posted a tutorial on their face book page about seed tapes. Found here: How to Make Your Own Seed Tape. I thought this would be a great thing to do to prepare for the spring and planting the garden. Today I made up some paste, I used whole wheat flower, I don't think it matters. I made the seed tapes for carrots and parsnips. Both need to be thinned to 2 inches apart after they get growing so I figured I'd "glue" them at 1 inch intervals. I'm figuring some won't grow and I can thin them down as needed. I did find however, that with the parsnips some of the seeds popped off after they dried. I just glued them back on. I'm wondering if it might be that the seed size was to big for the amount of "glue" I used. I think they came out good we'll see in the spring how well they work. :)

Day 36 - Paper Pots

Today's all about the garden. I went out today and bought all, at least I think it's all, my seeds for the season. I've never started my whole garden from seeds. I usually buy a lot of plants from one of the farmers down the road. This year however, I've decided I want my garden to be all my doing. (Keeping fingers crossed that this all goes as planned or I just might still end up buying plants.) I bought all heirloom seeds. Yay for no genetically modified food! I got tomato, carrots, corn, parsnips, lettuce, peas, beans, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant, leeks, onions, squash, celery, basil, sage, thyme, and a flowering vine for - hopefully - a new fence. It's a lot...so much so that we well be expanding the garden yet again. Now it trying to figure out where to get cheap lumber (hard wood..preferably cedar) for building more boxes. I have left over floral fabric from a french drain I put in last summer that I'm going to put down over the grass to kill it off and keep the new part of the garden weed free. :)

Right now the next step that I can think of, out side of finding some lumber and skids/pallets for a fence, is to get the seeds ready for planting. I plan on purchasing a little greenhouse so I can start some of my seeds ahead of time. I heard from somewhere about paper pots and a light bulb clicked. Why should I pay for the decomposing pots when I can make my own seed pots for free by recycling my newspapers. So I looked for a good video on how to do it and found this one here:

I made a couple to see what it was like. I used a regular sized soup can for the larger of the two and a small juice glass for the smaller one. I'm thinking that the tomato paste can might work the best but I'm going to have to wait until I need to use a tomato paste to find that out.

Day 29 - Stamped Terracotta Pot

I planted my green onions today into some little terracotta pots. I hope that they grow okay in them for now until it's nice enough to plant them outside. The terracotta pots are nice because you can do so much with them to dress them up. I took these little pots that I had, some archival waterproof archival ink and a stamp and made a lovely flower pot. I stamped the image on both sides of the pot and put it on a little dish.

Day 27 - Green Onions and What to use on Black Cardstock.

I came across this video thanks to CFRM.

I of course had to check this out and see if this was in fact true. The whole thing seemed kind of weird to me. I'm use to cutting the top off something, ie pineapple, and rooting that or rooting branches, as in having things grow roots not having roots grow things. Could this really be possible?

I am pleased to say that after going out and buying some green onions to use on my nachos the other night that it does in fact work. It kinda creeps the kids out that there's a green thing growing out something that you just chopped off but it is also amazingly cool. I'm thinking that the white part of the green onion is similar to a bulb and thus why this works so well. Check it out:

To do this I cut the white part with the roots off my green onion and put them in a small glass, standing up the best that I could do, with some water in it, and placed it on the window sill. I read some where in the comments on the video to do this to get the roots re-hydrated. A few days later and you have what's seen in the picture. I went out today and got some potting soil and will be potting them this weekend (still to cold to plant outside.) What a way to save some money and grow some great plants both indoors and outdoors. :)

Back to the chalkboard book and the black card stock. I know people are probably wondering...What do I use on the black card stock you made your book out of? Well I have a picture of some of some of the things that I use. At the top of the left hand paper I used a silver gel pen, that didn't work very well and it's tough to see. Under that I used a white Gelly Roll gel pen and that is a nice bright white against the black. Just under that is a ordinary white colored pencil followed by a orange Signo uni-ball pen and another colored pencil, this one yellow. The paper to the left is all colored pencils from both Design and Prismacolor. I would also imagine that pastels would work as well on the black paper but I did not have any handy to try it out.

Day 17 - Think spring

Today we woke up to the five a.m. phone calls from the schools saying that there was a two hour delay. At least they had school. Though a two hour delay throws off the whole darn day. Nothing like getting the last kid off and have the oldest show up only hours later. It leaves little time for anything during the day. All that for like two to three inches of snow. My gosh you'd think we had a blizzard. Was it not just last year we were buried in the white stuff. The snow piles in the drive where taller than me.

Anyway I think the snow finally killed the leeks. I didn't make it out to the garden today to look but I also didn't see any standing up. The celery is covered so for all I know it is still alive. I'm going to try my hardest to get it to the next growing season. My flowers in my flower bed look sad now with the snow on them. They were still nice and green. Heck I had a flower out there about two weeks ago. Now they look cold and sad. All this had me thinking spring and how I can't wait for it to come. I'm excited about getting the garden ready and staring it. I went out to check the compost barrel the other day and would you believe a family of mice built a nest in it. They dug a tunnel from the outside all the way up to the top of the compost. I just added some things to their house, I hope they like it. Mostly paper but I'll have a some house scraps soon for them too. I plan on ordering my seeds soon and getting my veggie CSA for the new season soon too. I'm going to try starting my own seeds this year. This will be a feat for me to do as most plants in the house usually die fast. I blame the hot air heat on that but it could be the cats eating them/digging at them, or just my sheer lack of remembering to water them, either way it's not going to be easy to do but I'm going to try my hardest.

Thinking about spring today I came up with a drawing of a flower for today's creative bit. Drew it in pencil, inked it with archival ink, and colored it with Prismacolor colored pencils. I hope you like it.

Day 16 - Dragons and A Magnetic Little Flower Box

It never seems to me that I ever have a day when I can do absolutely nothing, nada, zip, zilch. I spent today coloring cards and tomorrow I'll do the same. There's a lot of them to color. So much so that I haven't been really making anything for my shops. The kiddos were home today from school and they will be going back tomorrow. I say that because we are under a winter weather advisory for tonight into tomorrow morning and they will be going to school tomorrow. I will not get the five o'clock in the morning phone calls from the schools saying that there is a delay or no school. It's just not going to happen. I want a day where I can sit in the tub with a good book and a glass of wine.....oh wait...that's not real...only in my dreams. It is a nice dream though.

Back to reality. So to keep with the fantasy theme for collections I made on today of dragons. I love how dragons can look so different from each other. There are cute and loveable ones, majestic looking ones, and then mean looking ones. All dragons but very different. So here's the collection:

Dragons

Curated By: CraftyDayDreams

ArtFire.com

Fine Art Paintings

Today Amazon had this book for free called "101 Crafty Gifts - Tips and Ideas" by Chris Thomas. It's a compilation of all different and neat things to make. I flipped though some of it and some of it was things that I have done in the past and some of it was new and cool. I decided to make something from the book for today's crafty creative thingy. You can find the instructions here: Credit-Card Flower Box (Fridge Magnet)

A few things I did change. One was that I didn't use a credit card. I tried to in the beginning and got as far as bending the thing and it snapped so instead I used and old insurance card that I still had laying around. It's one of those thick plastic coated paper ones. It worked out really well. I didn't use any scotch tape just making tape, painted it with acrylics and sealed it with a gloss sealer. I didn't use dirt or plants in it...it's winter and the hot air heat kills plants really fast so I put some dried ferns in it. I went for a smuggy worn look to mine. The yellow paint ran a bit when I put the sealer on but I'm okay with that..I like it that way.

Day 4 - Paper Plate Flowers

Today's creative crafty thing was a flower made from a uncoated fluted paper plate. It's something I have readily available at my house because...well I will do anything to try to avoid doing dishes. So this one isn't to hard to make and it's quite nice if you ask me.

So what I used: an uncoated paper plate, water color paints, scissors, glue, bone folder and a button. (Not a whole lot of materials required to make it.)

First thing is to paint/color the fluted area of the paper plate if you want it colored. If you wanted you could use markers, crayons, colored pencils, or no color at all and have a white flower. I chose water colors because I'm really enjoying them right now. Similar to this:

Next step is to cut the fluted part off and cut them into sections by cutting down between the flutes. After cutting out each little section the outer edge of where the plate was needs to be rounded and the inner edge needs to be more pointed sot that they look like flower petals. Here are a couple of examples:

Using a circle template I cut out a one inch circle from the middle of the paper plate. If you don't have a circle template you could trace something that is one inch and circular, like a spool of thread. I spread some of my glue around the outer edge of the circle and glued down some of the petals. Once those were down I spread some glue around the inside of the circle and just on the base of the otter layer of petal. I then glued down a second layer of petals. Some of these petals need to be trimmed and cut down a little smaller so that they fit. I then took a green button and glued it down in the very middle of all the petals. To finish off the flower I cut a leaf shape out of the middle of my paper plate. I water colored it with some shades of green and once it dried I placed it on a soft surface and used a bone folder to "draw"/imprint the veins of the leaf in. I took the leaf and glued it to the back of my flower and ended up with this:

Who knew a paper plate could make something so pretty!