Housebound Arts & Crafts

We have had an eventful couple of weeks culminating in me having a week's stay in hospital. I am therefore, going to be housebound for the upcoming weeks, so I'm probably going to turn to some arts and crafts to keep me busy.

Twine bottle with paper flowers

I've seen these a few times on pinterest and decided to have a go at making them.

What you need:

Empty wine bottle
Scissors
PVA glue
Super glue
Lace ribbon (I bought mine from ebay - there's lots of choice)
Pearls/crystals (I had some pearls from a broken necklace)
Old book
Twine (I bought mine from Wilko £1.49 for a large ball)

First take labels of your wine bottle and make sure it is thoroughly washed. I put quite a decent blob of superglue to stick the beginning of my twine to the top of the bottle. Then I started to wind the twine around the bottle. I used the PVA glue to stick the twine to the bottle and the twine together so there wasn't any gaps. I didn't glue all the way down the bottle, but just used PVA glue and then superglue at intervals. It holds without it all being glued. 

Whilst your bottle is drying you can make the paper flowers. I used pages from a charity shop book for the paper. (It was in Spanish so I was unlikely to read it.) Remove a couple of pages and draw on three spiral designs and a couple of stalks and leaves. Cut along the line and cut out the stalks and leaves.

Once you have cut them out they should look like this...

You then need to glue along the inner edge of your spiral and stick it together lifting up the outer edge, so it creates a flower shape. Once you have created your flower shape stick a pearl or a jewel in the middle or it looks pretty just as it is. 

I let my bottle and flowers dry overnight. I then added the ribbon to the twine bottle and arranged the flowers and glued with PVA glue. 



This is really an easy project that I think is really effective. Hope this has inspired you to give it a go. 



Valentine's Day

We enjoyed a very relaxing Valentine's Day this year, in the company of our little niece. We made the decision that we would buy something inexpensive for Valentine's Day, as we have had quite a lot of expenditure getting ready for our new arrival. I, therefore, decided that I would make a couple of presents for my husband.

Embroidered poetry journal

My husband is a keen poet and has a room full of books and journals. I thought it would be a nice idea to make a personalised poetry journal for him to write some poems for our baby. I bought a cheap A5 plain notebook for £3 from paperchase. The paper inside is taupe and cream and surprisingly good quality. I have bought these previously and they hold ink really well. As I am constantly buying material for future projects, I already had some quite thick brown material that I thought I could embroider with cream thread. I have recently been looking at lots of classic artwork using silhouettes, so decided to turn a profile photograph of my husband into a silhouette. I then embroidered this and 'Poems from Daddy' and my husband's name. Once I had embroidered I simply cut this to the size of the book and glued using standard PVA glue.

First dance lyrics picture frame

I found a box picture frame with quite a wide mount and placed two photos from our first dance at our wedding. I then wrote out the lyrics from 'Here, There and Everywhere' which was the song we had our first dance to. I picked a frame that was a bit more modern and masculine than the decor in the rest of my home, but thought my husband would appreciate it for his study.

Sketchy image from a photo

For my husband's Valentine's card I drew a picture using GIMP and the trace facility. GIMP is a wonderful program that is free to download. First I selected a photo from our wedding day.

I cropped the image and then clicked Layer -> New Layer and clicked to create a transparent layer. (You may want to name the layer so you know which you are clicking on later)

To make sure that you are drawing on the transparent layer click Windows -> Dockable dialogues -> Layers and make sure you are clicked on the box that is a grey chequerboard. You can then pick how big you want your brush to be and trace over the image. I think it looks best when you make it look quite sketchy and imperfect. 

Once you have sketched over as much detail as you like then you need to go back onto the Layers box and click on your original image and press delete(the little trash can at the bottom). Then click Layer -> New Layer. This time you want to create a white layer. Then right click on the transparent layer and click Merge down. 

The image is now ready for you to colour in as you please or leave as a sketch. To get a watercolour painted feel, I experimented a bit. To get the paintbrush options open double click on the paintbrush. I used the round brush and made the opacity 39%. I changed the Dynamics to Pressure Opacity. This means that you can layer the colour up as every time you click your paintbrush down your colour becomes darker.

I thought that I would make the front of the card this simple design as then the card could be put into a photoframe later. I will definitely be using this technique again, as I think that with a bit more practice you could create some really stunning designs.