Skull Chandelier

So as I previously said, I absolutely love Halloween decorations.  So today the focus was on the chandeliers in the house.  Very simple.  Added styrofoam skulls on each candle rung.  Then we used leftover mardi gras beads, black, dark blue and one that looked like pearls to accent it all.  Ran out of beads, cause the more we added the better it looked, back to the party store we go!

Monster Heads

So with Halloween coming up my sewing and crafts have taken a backseat to decorating, and I LOVE Halloween decorations.  So we have this shelf thing that we never really know what to do with, just somehow ended up in our possession, so we finally just started decorating it with the seasons.  Hands down my favorite decorations are these monster heads my father made.  We got some cheap monster masks in the post holiday clearance sales.  He put ping pong balls in the eyes and poked holes in them so we could put Christmas lights in the back so they light up.  Personally, I think they look bomb, one of my favorite decorations :)

More to come as the fabulous Halloween season continues!

Glass Drawing Shadowbox

I guess I didn't realize how much I love shadowboxes because here I am making another one.  I went to Alaska over the summer and it's much more simple than my last couple boxes but still unique.  I started off by using glass paint, whatever they had at Michael's or A.C. Moore, I have no favorite brand.  

I put the paint on the inside of the glass, that way the outside would have a more finished, as professional as I could possibly get it kind of look.  To do this I drew my template backwards (I had to redo it so ignore the extra black line at the bottom), put it under the glass and outlined it with the glass paint.  

Once it's done have to let it dry a while, it said four days but I gave it a couple hours before I finished it up, it'll have plenty of time to dry on my wall.  

Once I put the picture I took in the back I didn't like how empty it was so I printed out a picture of my kayak and the whale I saw (greatest kayaking adventure EVER btw!) and put the whale into the background.  I put the whale on some cardboard so it gave it a more 3-D look.

So my finished product has the outline of Alaska and the symbols on their flag inside the outline in front of a glacier we saw.

Just trying to keep them original, don't want a whole wall (cause that's where this is heading) of the same style shadowbox.  Until the next trip! Portugal in two months :) 

Decorated Wine Bottle

So Pinterest is trending all these decorated wine bottle lamps so I thought I'd take my turn at it.  Combining a bunch of little things I liked from other people's onto my own bottle.

So first off I drilled a hole in the bottom of the bottle, I have another post on how to do that if you need or you can find other tutorials on Pinterest.  Then I decorated the bottle with mancala beads to make bunches of grapes.  I made the biggest bunch on the bottom since they add a lot of weight onto the bottle.  If you go to A.C. Moore or Michael's or any other craft store they should have leaf shaped beads I used for the tops of the bunches.  Thankfully for my friend's 21 birthday we had custom bottles of wine with nice labels so I could use that.  If you want to take the label off your bottle and work with that you can try peeling it off yourself or put the bottle in a pot of boiling water and the label comes off fairly easily.

Here's some close ups of the bunches of grapes if you're like me and it helps to see something to copy.

Definitely going to make some more parts to the wine bottle decorating, I have a couple more ideas for more bottles already.

Beach Shadow Box

So I absolutely love shadow boxes, I love to make them of my trips.  For this one I went to Barbados.  Used a picture I had taken and added sand to the bottom of the box and whatever I could find from my trip. I have a shell, a Bajan penny, my plane ticket and a $2 I had leftover.  Love how it turned out :)

Foreign Currency

So next shadow box I made from my travels, made out of the change I had left over.  Went to Barbados, all the leftover change I had I hot glued to a piece of black paper and put in a frame.  Black on black, looks more rich and it pops more now.  New and interesting way to display foreign currency!

Drilling Holes in Bottles

So this was a fun little adventure I tried.  Do not start this unless you have a lot of time on your hands.  Make sure you have the right bit too.  Put masking tape down on the bottle then just start drilling.  Go very slow and keep it wet.  The water will keep the dust (which is carcinogenic) down and the drill cool.  It may take an hour or more but that's okay.  If you go slow it won't crack.  The average drill runs at 900 reps a minute and you're going to want to go at around 280-290 rpm, so I really mean slow.  But there are so many things you can do with the wine bottle once it's done!