Things I'm loving Thursday...

1) How gorgeous is this purple floral print sweater from Uniglo? An Autumn must have for sure...

2) And an autumn fleece for him from baby Uniglo. Isn't this just the cutest? So snuggly and warm.

3) Since 'mini scrapping' is how I roll these days, I have pinned all of these pages by Jen Jockisch. Love the layers, the cute prints (especially the camera print - need this!) and that middle pun.

4) Love the pretty colours of the autumn leaves and plenty of walks with the family in the brisk autumn air. I, of course, wear boots rather than bare feet.

5) Since joining in with Julie Kirk's Going Postal I have been hyper aware of using traditional office supplies in my scrapbooking. I found this tutorial on pinterest for printing onto post-it notes and love, love, love this idea! Expect to see it used around here soon.

6) In the same thread I also loved this stamp...

7) Baby and I are loving baby sensory. It is giving me ideas for ways to play with him and that it is never too young to start reading - score!

8) Lastly I am loving my friend Steve's homemade chilli - he uses dark chocolate in it and even makes the pita bread from scratch. Yummy! An action shot of him in the kitchen...

 

9) Lastly looking forward to this event tomorrow...launch of Trinity Kitchen Northern Street Foods. I love the street food and food truck trend and have always felt that Leeds was missing a treat - now Leeds will be a more complete day out in my opinion.

  What are you loving at the moment?

Come on lurkers - reveal yourselves!

Elephant canvas for the nursery...

 I mentioned in a few previous posts my intentions to make canvas' for our nursery - ready for our new arrival in July. We are only in rented accommodation so I don't want to commit to a project too big - like wallpapering or painting a feature wall. So canvas' seems like the happy medium.
There are many tutorials on blogs and youtube and I took inspiration from these but went my own way with it too. Below is a step-by-step tutorial - including lessons that I learned along the way.

Step 1 - Decide upon your colour scheme. Prep canvas with gesso allow to dry. Paint one coat of acrylic paint - I applied mine with a foam applicator, but a sponge would work as well. Allow to dry. Apply second coat.

Step 2 - Decide upon your design. We originally wanted elephants and giraffes, but the giraffe silhouettes looked a bit strange and didn't look as cute or convincing as the elephant - so we went for one big elephant and then two little ones. I just got the picture from google.

Step 3 - Cut the design out and then trace in pencil onto chosen fabric. Remember that it will be in mirror image. Cut the design carefully out of the fabric - my fiskars scissors come in hand here.

Step 4 - Attach the fabric with modge podge to the dried canvas. Modge podge all over the top (see third picture) don't worry it will dry clear. I added heart buttons for the eyes with modge podge too.

Step 5 - Allow the whole thing to dry. On the top canvas I decided to outline the elephants in black fabric paint to add more definition.

Tips:

• Pick a dark coloured fabric as the yellow was a bit see through and up close you can see some of the glue underneath.
•  Be very careful that you flatten the fabric down before the clue dries - as you can see the second elephant has a bit of a crease on it. Some bloggers recommended reinforcing it with modge podge first or backing with cardboard.
• The yellow canvas also shows up some of the plush from the fabric and it dried into the modge podge. This, as I am sure that you can tell, was the first one and I might redo it as I think the little imperfections will annoy me.

  I made some canvas' of our wedding in the summer and the tutorial for these can be found here.

Pinning Projects to Paint...and other things!

It's no secret that I have been having a crafty drought these past say four and a half months.
I think there are many reasons - mostly relating to the baby growing in my belly.
For instance:

• feeling too sick and lethargic to do anything more creative than channel and web surf
• barely having any photo's from the last few months
• especially lacking pictures of Christmas - where I was being sick a few times a day
• realising a distinct lack of storage space and rapidly accumulating scrap albums
• trying to clear out my scrapbooking room - ready to transform into a nursery

However the nursery is giving me some creative yearnings and I have spent the week pinning craft projects that I hope to work on over this half term holiday.
I will post the top four here to share with you all and to commit myself to completing at least two!

1) Firstly since we don't want to find out the sex of the baby we have decided that colour scheme will be yellow and grey with polka dots and a jungle theme. I loved these spray painted and decorated zoo animals over at Spearmint baby and think this would be a fun project and would look great displayed on the window still or book shelf. With yellow and grey accents of course.

 

2) For me the most ambitious project (since I am useless with a sewing machine) and the one I will probably save for nearer to the birth when I may be able to get some direction from the lovely textiles teacher at my school. I love this honeycomb material - any ideas where to source it in England? Elephants and giraffes are going to feature most heavily in the decor. The tutorial is found here at Sew 4 Home.

 

 3) I love this shadow box idea from Our Day by Design. I have ordered some elephants punched out in greys, blues and yellows from ebay - cheaper than the actual Martha Stewart punch which is £15. I just need to get the shadow box - I seem to think that Ikea stock these quite cheaply? Am I right? 

4) And lastly the project I will be tackling first I think is this animal painted canvas - here is the youtube link. I brought the supplies yesterday and have printed the pictures off ready to roll.  I think I might make the silouette with material and have ordered some grey and yellow fat quarters off ebay this morning. So it may look more like this...

How cute is this? From here.

So there you have it. I do pin a lot, but I also try to actually make some of the things I pin. Hopefully I will have some projects to share with you all by the end of the week,

Step-by-step tutorial for making a canvas...

Have you seen those cute canvas' on pinterest with quotations to put up in your hallway?
I was forever pinning them and eyeballing them in shops - but they always seemed too pricey for what they were.
My solution?
Make some myself and here they are...

If you want to see my step-by-step tutorial - check it out here. I am doing another guest post over at Sumo's sweet stuff blog....yep now I have time in the summer I am sharing the love - or 'pimping myself out' as i have heard it referred too. Ohh err!

Do you have pinterest?

Well I managed to avoid joining up till school was *almost* over as I can see how addictive and time consumming it could be, but I have joined up to pinterest. I am using it to pin recipes, scrap pages, pictures of my teenage crushes (hello Joshua Jackson!!) and of course to post pics of California (just one week to go - CANNOT WAIT!!!)

So follow me and I will follow you.

An actual layout to be posted later - yay!