Crafting Craze

Sometimes Ryan travels for work, and when he travels I usually hang out at home with Lola and we do "girly" stuff. Sometimes we watch marathons of Toddlers & Tiaras, and gawk at those crazy moms, and sometimes I do a little craft or decorating project to keep me busy.

But the last time Ryan was out of town, I went on a complete crafting craze. I remember thinking to myself on Sunday afternoon after he left that I should head to Michael's and get a few things to make a springy wreath. Well....springy wreath turned into blue vase, which turned into yarn balls, which turned into styling the mantle in our fireplace room and then finally sewing some decoration onto some pillows. I'm ridiculous, I do realize this. But once she gets goin' you better watch out! :)

Here's the real project I started with- a springy wreath. It was super easy. I took a foam core wreath, some robin's egg blue ribbon, and made these little cloth button flowers and voila! In less than 20 minutes I had me a wreath! It hangs on the door to our house. (there's more to come on the cloth flowers, but I have a gift that hasn't been sent yet and don't want to spoil the surprise)


After the wreath, I was trolling around the house trying to find something else to do. I completely overestimated the time it would take to make the wreath, so I was bored. I get bored easily. So I found my plethora of vases in the upstairs guest room and decided one of them needed to be blue. why not? I found some blue craft paint that I had from a previous project and just squirted some inside the vase.


After taking a foam brush to the insides of the vase, it turned out like this.

Now...it's definitely not perfect and I'll never put water and actual flowers in it, but it turned out exactly how I had imagined. And it now resides on our mantle.

While at Michael's, I had picked up some yarn to make yarn balls for spring. And since my last two projects took less than 40 minutes to complete, I figured I could whip up some yarn balls too. Wow- I never thought I'd hear that sentence come out of my mouth. haha. This project definitely took some time and a few trials to get it exactly right.

I picked some spring colors that would also transition nicely into summer. And since Ryan had purchased an exercise ball not too long ago, we had the perfect mini pump to blow up some balloons.

I grabbed a cookie sheet and covered it with some wax paper because this was going to be a messy project. And then I pumped up the balloons. Instead of using regular 5" balloons, I would suggest water balloons that are a little more elastic and end up in a more rounded shape...my yarn balls were a bit oval. But I guess they kind of looked like Easter eggs in the end :) After dipping a length of yarn in a water/glue mixture, I wrapped it around the balloon every which way. And in the end, I was left with this:


I let the glue dry over night and popped the balloons the next morning. They turned out pretty cute, and they now reside on the mantle with the blue vase. After adding a few other blue/green/yellow accents, my mantle was complete.

Now, sadly I didn't get an image of the pillows that I sewed some ribbon onto, hopefully that will be on the next post :)