Duct tape armor

  

Here are the beginnings of my duct tape armor! I'm going to be dressed up for my daughter's second birthday party!

Super Cape

For her second birthday, we decided to throw a "Super Second Birthday Party."  For this, we needed super-wear!  I am going to make a few capes for the attendees, however I had to make one very special one for my little birthday girl!

First, I started with a pattern.  I made it based on some I had seen online as well as just sort of common sense about what a cape looks like.

I let baby girl pick out her fabric at the store.  I have never worked with this sort of fabric, and it didn't work quite as well as I would have liked, but the construction is solid and she loves it!  I chose to do two colors and to make the cape reversible, rather than just one main color and one accent color.  I also used some scrap white fabric I had to make the letter I eventually put onto the back of the cape.

Please excuse the extreme messiness of my bedroom, but I had to snap a picture when baby girl decided to put on the unfinished fabric cutout and run around the house!

  

As you can see above, I had a little bit of trouble with this fabric puckering.  I'm sure that if I had more practice and knowledge, I could have done better, but I really don't do much with this special occasion type of fabric, so it isn't a major concern for me.  I put baby girl's initial on both sides so that  she could wear either a blue or a pink cape, depending on what she may prefer and depending what else she may be wearing.

Here is an iPhone pic of the cape when I first finished it.

  

Here are a few photos I took for her birthday invites and decorations to show off the cape!

Daddy Treats

I made this for my husband for his first Father's Day this year.  I got part of the idea off of Pinterest, by putting different things in old bottles, but I added all of the photos and labels to personalize it.  I think this project would work well for a great deal of holidays and recipients by changing the ingredients (think of putting in dried herbs for a cook or beading for a crafter).  So, here's how I made it!

Step 1: Buy a 6-pack of something in a bottle.  I chose these Smirnoff cocktails because I wanted to try them (not a huge fan, though) and I also thought clear bottles would be much nicer than the dark bottles beer usually comes in.

Step 2:  Drink all six drinks!  Make sure you use twist-off caps and keep them somewhere so that you can re-cap the bottles.  Once you've finished all of the bottles, wash them with soap and hot water.  I'm sure you could run them through the dishwasher, but I didn't think to do it until I was already done.

Step 3:  Dry the bottles.  I put this as a separate step because you need to make sure they are VERY dry.  I did one bottle before it had dried completely and the candy stuck to the bottom, so I had to re-wash it and get new candy.

Step 4:  Color the caps.  I did this, simply to remove the smirnoff logo.  You could spraypaint the tops, cover them with paper, or color them with a Sharpie, like I did.

Step 5:  Cover the cardboard portion of the 6-pack (I used brown craft paper).  Glue it either with a spray adhesive, or use Mod Podge, like I did.  No matter what you use make sure it is evenly distributed so that there are no bubbles in the paper.

Step 6:  Create labels.  You would want labels that can cover the labels on the bottle already.  I chose to make them as you can see in the photo above.  I also created labels to put onto the 6-pack.  Even though I could have just printed them at home on my personal printer, I was running low on ink, so I took mine to Staples and had them print it.

 

Step 7:  Affix all of the labels.  Again, I used Mod Podge, but you could use spray adhesive as well.  I sealed all of the labels with Mod Podge as well, so that they would be really stuck down.  As you can see above, I added some of the scraps of plain white paper over the small label on the neck of the bottles as well as the large labels.

Step 8:  Gather your fillings.  I did candy for all but one bottle, which I put peanuts in.  I had to end up getting extra Good n Plenty and Reese's Pieces, because they seemed to settle more than the others and took up less room.  Obviously, I chose treats that I knew my husband would like!

Step 9:  Using a funnel (or your hand, like I did), fill the bottles.  Twist the caps onto the bottles.  They will not make it completely airtight, but they will keep the candies from going stale and they will keep anything from coming out if you have to carry the gift anywhere.

Finally:  Place the bottles back into the cardboard 6-pack holder and it is ready to present!

Lily's Dresser

Progress on the dresser!  This is going into the baby's nursery.  It started as a plain brown armoire that has been mine since I was in middle school.  It is still in great shape, but the wood isn't the highest quality, so I decided to re-finish it in such a way that would look good in the beach-themed room.

First I took all of the hardware off and took the drawer and door fronts off.

Next, I used the Valspar spraypaint with the stone texture to texturize the doors and drawers.  The color didn't really matter, this was something we had leftover from another project awhile ago.

The next step was to paint the doors and drawers with the same sandy color I'm using for the walls in the bedroom.

Tools:  I used some packs of shells from Hobby Lobby and some liquid nails from Lowes to stick them to the doors.  

Here, I did the layout of the shells and decided how to position them onto the dresser doors.  The last one is the final product after everything was stuck down.  I also sprayed a thin layer of clear spraypaint to seal the shells and make the whole thing a little easier to clean.

I also added the shells to the drawers and sealed them with the clear spraypaint as well.

Here I taped and painted the dresser itself.  It is kind of her to see, because the lighting in the bedroom isn't ideal at the moment.  The photo on the left is the original and the one on the right is after the first coat of paint.

To be continued as I progress...

Nursery Decor

We are currently expecting our first little one!  As such, we are working on decorating the Nursery.  The whole room is being done in a beach theme with a lot of shells!  These vases are going to be used as decoration on shelves or on a bookcase.

The vases are from Dollar Tree, and are actually re-used from another project I did for work a couple of months ago.  The shells are mostly from Hobby Lobby, as is the sand.  I had some random shells from Michael's and I think from Dollar Tree too, which pretty much all got combined.

Wishes in a Bottle

Just a little craft I came up with after seeing some jewelry made with the same idea.  It's a wish bottle!  Save up all of your wishes in this bottle!  The corked bottle came from Michael's and the wish flowers (or dandelions) came just from my yard.  I let them dry out for a day or two so that all the little white parts came off of the stem a lot easier and just fed them into the bottle using tweezers.  Mostly just pretty/for decoration.