Birthday Cake Art

My cousin Megan and I made this amazing cake for my brother's birthday last Saturday.

We tossed around the idea of making him a gun (he has a lot of those), but didn't like it. In the past we've made him a racoon (when he shot one in my aunt's backyard) and a deer (he's shot one of those too).

And then, my aunt suggested we make him a kayak cake... and a genius idea was born.

We decided to create a kayaking scene!

Megan molded the kayak using orange starbursts
(I thought Mitchell's was orange, but apparently it's actually red... whoops)

We thought it would be funny if we depicted Mitchell crashing...
He loved it.

We used balloon candles as the paddle... it broke in the crash
and the arm (which belonged to a Bratz doll my aunt had lying around)
represents Mitchell struggling to grab one half of his paddle.

The rocks are made out of chocolate raisonetts and donut holes.
The trees are icing-, sprinkle-, and dyed-green noodle- covered ice cream cones.
We also used Swedish fish 'cause we thought they were cool.
The cake itself is funfetti cake (best. ever.) with rainbow chip icing.
We used a spray to "paint" the icing blue and green

A side note: The Bratz doll that I cut the arm off of is now a resident of my apartment because my aunt refused to let me leave it at her house... she thinks it's going to haunt me and has advised me to dispose of it some where far far away from anywhere that I am.

Walls O' Happy

If there is one thing I really don't like in a room it's a large expanse of white walls and a white ceiling. 

Well, welcome to my new bedroom.

Normally, this is a problem I would fix by throwing a bunch of pictures on the wall, but I'm trying really hard to limit the number of screws I put in my walls (yes not nails, but screws, thanks to my cinderblock? walls), mostly so that it's easier for my mom to spackle when I move out eventually.

In my room at home I created a border made out of the large amount of postcards I've amassed during my travels across the country. It actually looks really cool and I have a postcard for almost every state (and several foreign territories and countries, too). But I don't have a postcard stash large enough to recreate that here. So that was out of the question.

My next thought was to do something like what my friends and I did in our dorms in college, which was to border our walls with quotes. But I couldn't think of a quote I liked enough, and it felt too collegey, so I got over that too.

And then, during my travels through pinterest and evening of crazy DIY fervor, I got hit with an inspiration. What if I lined my ceiling with words? Not quotes, but words.

So I hopped onto Thesaurus.com and started trying to think of a good word to cover my room with. I finally settled on Happy. It seemed like a good thing to expand on. With the help of my favorite word website, I found about 50 synonyms for happy. Who knew that was even possible?

The next task was trying to figure out how to do it. At school, we settled on our font, printed out one of each letter, cut those out, traced them onto pretty scrapbook paper, and then cut those out and taped them to the walls. It was quite the process. But I had found this pretty script font that I really wanted to use and I knew that tracing the letters wouldn't be able to do it justice this time. So, I decided to print the words straight onto the paper (something we would have scorned in school, since we tried to squeeze as many letters as humanly possible onto that 12x12 piece of scrapbook paper). 

After I'd gotten my words sized and figured out, and the paper cut to size (I had to cut the 12x12 scrapbook paper to about 8.5x12 so it would fit in my printer) it was time to print them. That was probably the scariest moment.

Then, I had to cut them out, a process that took about a day. I did the rough cutting with a large pair of scissors, then switched to small sissors to get the larger small details, and finally switched to an exacto knife to do the insides of the letters with holes and other fine details. It's a good thing I enjoy doing tedious tasks!

This is what they looked like all spread out on my bed waiting to get put up on the walls.

I didn't just want to put up a bunch of words, so I had the idea to use something to space them out. Luckily, I've been collecting paint chips for some reason, and Home Depot happened to make some of theirs in a decorative leaf shape, so I decided to use my stock of leaf shaped paint chips (and a bunch of rectangular ones cut to leaf shape) as spacers.

I put each word up on the wall with a ton of double stick tape and used a loop of normal tape for each leaf. I made sure that I never had the same color word (I had five colors with varying patterns) too close to each other and never repeated the same first letter (ie blissful next to blithe was not allowed). I also wanted to avoid getting alphabetical (ie blissful followed by carefree) but didn't always succeed in that goal.

I also decided to alternate the orientation of the leaf shapes, with the two pointed either up or down, because I thought it looked cooler.

In all, the "hanging" process took about five hours, what with tape sticking and color figuring. When I started this process, I was assuming that I would be able to fill the wall I see from my bed, and maybe one other, but certainly not the whole room. So, I was amazed to find that I did the whole room, and had a bunch of words left over... I'm not sure what I'll do with those yet.

I put this up last Friday and a week later I still love it. It makes me smile every time I walk into the room and I sort of can't wait for a "bad day" because I think it will absolutely make things better!

One side note, at least on my walls, double stick tape didn't cut it and after about three days, words definitely started falling off. Fortunately, Scotch's removable poster tape seems to stick much better, so I reinforced each word with that, and so far, so good!

I'm Getting That Crafty Feeling Again.

Well I've done it again. I've decided to take on another moderately intense (in man hours, not necessarily skill) craft/home improvement project.

Actually I have a few planned, but more on that later...

Yesterday I discovered a super cool website called pinterest. Actually, I guess I more re-discovered it, since I have been on it before. Basically it's this website where people "pin" pictures they like from websites onto their galleries (or something like that) so it becomes this huge virtual corkboard filled with fun things. My last foray into the pinterest world was with that apple crate bookcase I posted about a few weeks ago. Anyway, yesterday I happened upon the site because I was looking at my blog's statistics (oddly enough a lot more people read this thing than I realized) and I saw that one of the referring websites was pinterest. So I clicked the referring link and saw that at some point someone had looked at my blog and liked my post with quotables card about everything being ok in the end (my personal fav so kudos to that person for his or her taste!).

But, that simple 30 second investigation turned into an almost hour long search through various people's DIY pins. And boy did I find some fun things to do! All of which I'm pretty sure will be of little or no cost to me (added bonus! and very key).

I was so excited about it that I couldn't sleep last night.

Literally.

I got so fed up with trying that I got up, got my laptop, turned on PBS (one of my only rabbit eared accessible stations in my room and go to late at night channel), and researched/planned my projects some more.

Until 3:30 a.m.

That excited.

And today I put the first one into motion.

Here's a sneak peek.

it involves this wall

and these materials (along with a few more) 

And it better be worth it because, as you can see, it's thrown
the rest of my life (or at least my apartment) in shambles. 

Stay tuned to see how it all turns out! Fingers crossed for a good result!

I Want This Bookshelf!

The Eagles game is really depressing me right now, so I'm trying to distract myself by cleaning out my email inbox... an equally depressing task.

But in the process I found something really cool. I saw this picture in a book-based newsletter that I get and I am in love.

It's a bookshelf made out of antique apple crates. I want one!

Source: cgi.ebay.com.au via Anne on Pinterest

Mod Podge Makeover, Part 1

For the past few months I've been diligently searching Target for fun things to furnish my apartment... particularly things that were on clearance. I've found quite a few things, but this table (and more importantly what I did with it) is by far the coolest.

The first time I saw this table I thought it was incredibly ugly. I think it came in five super bright colors. It was also around $20. Way above my price line. Then, last weekend I found the hot pink version on major clearance for $4.00. Sold. (I needed one last end table.)

But it was still super ugly.

Yay for nighttime craft projects!

I thought that the table itself, and the shape and stuff looked pretty cool, it was the hot pink part that I couldn't quite come to terms with. So I decided that the best way to fix that, would be to re-cover the top.

A few weeks ago, I discovered this really cool store in Old Town called Paper Source. As the name suggests, it sells all kinds of paper products, including cards, calendars, and wrapping paper. Anyway, I went there looking for something to use to cover my light switches and outlet covers, when I found this amazing piece of paper. It was love at first sight. Unfortunately, the pattern on it was way to big to use on an (albeit slightly larger than normal) 3"x5" cover. But I was pretty sure that I would be able to use it somehow, so I bought it anyway. And I found some killer paper to use for my covers (you'll see that project soon!)

Fast forward to my table and craft night at Melissa's house.

To make my amazing table, I cut out a piece of paper to cover each part of the table top, making sure that there was about two inches of overlap on all the sides. Then I covered the top of each piece with mod podge and smoothed the paper over it.

Then, I folded the edges over on the two straight sides and glued them down. To negotiate the curved part of the table, I cut the edge into small sections (about an inch wide) so that when I folded it over, it molded to the curve without making any awkward creases. Then I covered the whole thing with mod podge.

I did that to each of the ugly hot pink sections and covered them with several more layers of mod podge.

When they were dry I attached them to the legs and....

This ☛   plus this ☛  

Equals this!

Ta Da! 

I still can't believe how well this turned out.

Give Peace A Chance.

Back about two months ago (although it honestly feels like it was about two years ago) you may remember that I gave a speech about Knits by Meliss at a convention. Cool, but not exactly the point.

Well, after I was done talking about myself, one of the participants approached me and asked if I could make her a peace sign hat. I agreed. I thought it would be kind of fun. And besides, how hard would it be to make a peace sign hat?

Very.

But this afternoon I think I've finally conquered peace — or at least the sign part!

It took three tries and a whole lot of patience...

For my first try, I couldn't find a pattern to make a peace sign that I liked, so I decided to knit a plain hat in the round and then make a peace sign applique to attach to the outside... It seemed like a great idea at the time, but unfortunately failed miserably....

The applique looks OK from the front, but when viewed from the side it looks pretty silly. Unfortunately, even if it hadn't popped out so much, I would have had to redo the peace sign part because I sewed it on too high on the hat, so it sits awkwardly high up on the forehead. Whoops!

Next time I try this technique, I'll use thinner yarn so that the effect isn't quite so 3D...

For my second try, I looked up peace sign cross-stitch patterns and found one that I could alter to work for the hat. This version totally would have worked but I miscalculated how many stitches to cast on and accidentally made the hat 4.5 inches wider than I meant too... I was going to try make it work, but when I started knitting in the pattern, it went all wonky, then I dropped a stitch, and things got awkward when I tried to fix it... so I decided to start over. Again.

Third time's a charm! This time I think I made it a good width (slightly larger than I would normally have made an adult hat, per her request) and I managed to knit in the pattern without doing anything strange or dropping any stitches.

I'm pretty sure it's a miracle!

Knits by Meliss

I did it! I made my very own website for "Knits by Meliss" which is the line hats that I created and have been knitting for the past two years for Grandma's. 

Well technically I made a blog... but "Knits by Meliss" looks like a website, so I'm satisfied.

I've been toying with the idea of making a site to display my hats ever since I made special labels in the fall,  and now my idea has become reality! I plan on posting pictures of different hats pretty regularly and I'm also going to try to post patterns for some of them so that any crafty readers can knit them for themselves. I think the hardest part of this endeavor is going to be naming each different hat... so far the only one I've posted a picture of is my flower petal hat which I've dubbed "Blossom" and coming soon (ie tomorrow afternoon) is my snowman hat or "Snowy." Those were easy... I'm going to have to start getting creative when it comes to the plainish ones.

But I digress. Knits by Meliss can be found at www.knitsbymeliss.blogspot.com.

Check it out! 

Got an Extra Old Book or Two?

This article, "10 DIY Projects for Your Old Books" by Sam Schlinkert, was recently featured in an online book newsletter that I get and I thought it was pretty neat. It showcases 10 different ideas for ways to refurbish and reuse old books that you don't feel the need to read anymore.

The DIY projects were collected from different blogs and websites and each project includes a link to the instructions. Some are pretty intense but others don't look so bad.

These two are my favorite...

Check out the rest of the projects here!