Iron Craft Challenge #1: Fifth Anniversary

It's the fifth year of Iron Craft challenges, and that means challenge #1 is the fifth anniversary present ideas: wood, silverware, or daisies.

Of those three options, I was immediately drawn to daisies.  I love flowers, and I've been wanting to add some more art to the girls' room for awhile.  So why not make some myself?  

I got a Hobby Lobby gift card for Christmas, so last week when we were near one, I picked a few crafty supplies, including a 14x18" canvas.  Can I confess something?  I've never felt like enough of an artist to paint on a canvas.  And also?  I haven't painted a picture since high school.   So the canvas just sat there for several days, waiting for me to be brave enough to put paint on the brush and start.

For awhile I was kind of paralyzed by fear of how it was going to turn out.  I actually just finished it about an hour ago.  But in the end, I just started.  Amidst children building Legos and reading books, I pulled out some newspaper and my paints, and started.

They all stared and wondered, and it was actually really cool to be able to explain to them some of the techniques that I was using that I hadn't even thought about in 10+ years.  I was also really proud to be creating something in front of them.  It's so good for them to see me doing something creative that isn't about them!  I forget that sometimes.

I've participated in at least a few of the IronCraft challenges every year, although I have yet to come close to completing all of them.  Will this be the year?

Iron Craft Challenge #24: Lego Ninjago Ornaments

It's been awhile since my last Iron Craft post.  Crafting has kind of taken a backseat to life at this point.  But I did do a project this time around that fit with the theme.  Each year we like to add one ornament to each kid's collection, with the goal of them having their own collection of ornaments when they grow up and move out on their own.  My parents did that, and it's a tradition I love!

I also like the ornaments to reflect something the kids are interested in (like these Thomas the Tank Engine ornaments made from toy trains from a few years ago).  This year the boys are really into Ninjago (that's Lego ninjas, if you're not in the Lego stage of life).  And there are really not a lot of options to buy Ninjago ornaments, unless you just hang the minifigures on the tree and call it an ornament.  

So I decided to make them.  I found a pattern for keychains here.

I used the trick of using a gluestick to glue the paper pattern to the felt, which I think I learned from the Iron Craft-y ladies.  It peels right off, but it sticks while you're cutting.  Then I followed the directions to stitch the details on these guys.  I sewed a ribbon loop to the top and voila!

And then the boys hung them on the tree.  Hannah got a Rainbow Dash pony for her ornament, and I still have to find something for Elizabeth for this year.  Jesse bought a little Superman and Wonder Woman for us as well.  Ornaments for everyone!

Iron Craft Challenge #16: State Fair

The challenge this time around was to create something you could enter in one of the Minnesota State Fair categories.  I picked needlework for my category, and I embroidered a large cloth for a kitchen towel for my brother and his fiancee for the bridal shower my mom and I threw last weekend.  

I've seen so many embroidered towels on Pinterest, and it's been one of those projects I've wanted to do for awhile, but I hadn't found the right towels and I hadn't found a design I wanted to do.

So for this one, I picked colors I liked, made up a pretty looking font on some scratch paper, and traced it along with their wedding date.  The whole thing actually didn't take that long to do, and it gave me hopes for future embroidered towels for my own kitchen...

As a side note, this shower was the first time baby Elizabeth got to meet my Grandma, who she was named after.  It was really awesome for me (Elizabeth missed her nap, so she was not as impressed)...

Iron Craft Challenge #12: I'm Your Biggest Fan

This was supposed to be up last Tuesday, but we were on vacation.  Better late than never!

For the last Iron Craft Challenge, I made a Superman/Wonder Woman wall hanging for our room (I've since painted the sides in accent colors and I really like how that turned out!).

The boys saw that and wanted one for their room too.  Even though their dad is a Superman fan, the boys actually like Batman and the Joker.  So I wanted to make a Batman themed hanging for their room.  

I did my google image search to find appropriate silhouettes to print.  The hardest to find was a Joker that wasn't too scary or Heath Ledger (he's awesome, but not very black-and-white-printable).  I finally found one, along with Batman and Robin together, and Gotham City. 

I didn't mess around with finding the perfect book page texts this time, because I don't know Batman lore as much, and also because the kids can't read yet...

A little mod podge, a little paint, and voila!  

What a nice pair of superhero pictures!

Organizing Trouble Spots: Craft Cupboard

Yesterday I posted about paper clutter.  Today it's all about the craft cupboard!  This was another area I wanted to tackle for I Heart Organizing's Wait-No-More Challenge.

Let's start with the before and after shot:

It's still crowded, but more things are contained, and pretty much everything has a spot of its own, which is super important for kids ages 5, 4, and 2 to be putting things away.

So before.  Big problems were the bottom two shelves.  That third shelf is actually not a true "before" picture, since I added the boxes before I took the photo.  Just picture a really messy pile there instead...

One thing that works is that the top shelf is "Mom's shelf" and they know they can't have anything up there without asking.  It's still a cluttered mess, unfortunately, but I wanted to post anyways.  I need some sort of bins for holding the different art supplies up there, and I haven't gotten them yet.

The second shelf now has a white baby wipes bin on the left for smaller notepads that were getting lost with all the bigger ones.  The glue is all in one green container now, the crayons and markers each have a bin, and the pens are all back in the pen cup.

I had several of these Bob's Red Mill flour boxes from my big box of baking supplies I got a few months ago, so I used those to corral notebooks/drawing pads, coloring books, and sticker books.  This way the kids can grab what they want and put it back.

They weren't the prettiest things to look at though, so I covered them with pretty blue floral shelf liner.  That also brings some uniformity to the bins, and even though it's a busy pattern, it makes the whole thing look less busy to me because it's more streamlined.

And then the bottom shelf.  It's supposed to be paper on the right, projects on the left.  The "projects" were really just everything they didn't want to put away or recycle.  Most of that went into the recycling bin, although they each picked a few things they forgot were in there to save.

Here's after:

(Sorry for the terrible lighting - this is in a corner of the living room without much natural light).  More boxes covered in shelf liner!  Again with the uniformity...Now the box on the right has all the construction paper organized by color, so they can grab what they want instead of telling me we're out of something when we actually aren't.  And the box on the left has scraps for when they don't need a whole piece of paper.  We're going to find a different spot for any projects they want to save, and really limit them.

I also condensed the stickers to one green baby wipes container.  I went through and cut down the big sheets into smaller pieces (and got rid of the ones where all but one sticker were gone).

This is probably my favorite shot of the whole project.  These two shelves just look so awesome now!

This is a project I've been meaning to do for awhile, so I'm glad this challenge motivated me to get it done!  We keep tweaking this corner to find what works, and I think with this we might finally have a system that works.

Organizing Trouble Spots: Paper Clutter

I mentioned in my most recent Weekly Goals post that I was participating in I Heart Organizing's Wait-No-More Organizing Challenge.  I had two areas to focus on.  The first is paper clutter.  Papers end up everywhere...  

On the footstool...

On the desk...

On our "appliance island" in the dining room...

On what used to be our garden table inside...

Even on top of the fruit dish on the dining room table. (Go Twins! But boo clutter!)

I had that lovely tray in the first photo, so I decided to use that to corral all of the "I need to deal with this, but not right this minute" papers.  Invitations, medical papers to file, stuff for the church newsletter, plus the cords for my camera and Kindle.  All in one spot instead of several across the house.

The other paper problem I wanted to deal with was the paper under the printer table.  We have a ream of unused white paper still in its packaging, which is fine.  But the other random papers under there are from the kids' school work, mail, and so on that are only used on one side.  I slide these in the printer when I'm printing off coupons or recipes, since the backside doesn't matter.  But they get messed around without being contained.

Enter the shoebox!  I covered a shoebox with some pretty shelf liner, and contained that paper mess!  I would like to eventually get one for the regular printer paper as well, but someone will have to go shoe shopping first...

Finally, the one part of the paper clutter chaos that was already working for us:

If you ignore the mess in front of it, the three-tier filing system with my purple budget notebook, along with file folders for "Bills to Pay", "Scan", "Shred", and a few other specific file folders, is working really nicely.  Everything there has a spot, and it's all organized until I can get to it (I like to do a bunch of scanning and shredding at once instead of bit by bit).  At least one organizing system works!  Now here's hoping the rest of that paper clutter can be contained...

Stay tuned tomorrow for the craft cupboard (and you might see some more of that pretty blue shelf liner)...

Iron Craft Challenge #11: Super Wall Hanging

This week's challenge was paper, and it could be any kind of paper.  I used several, and this project was a mixture of several ideas I've had floating through my mind for awhile now.

The inspiration actually came first from these:

Yep. Price tags from a pajama set and a tshirt.  And then there was a little bit of this:

An old book I have specifically for crafting.  Those, plus an internet photo search, plus a shoebox lid and a bunch of mod podge, equals:

Custom wall art!  So here's where I confess that I am a bit of a geek, and I spent way too long searching for the perfect pages to use for the background.  Superman is printed on a page with a poem about "the man of Kent", and Wonder Woman was supposed to be on an essay entitled "On Truth", which started "What is truth?", but the paper jammed in the printer so she got a poem called "The Defenders" instead.  There's also references to a shooting star falling from the sky and a red and blue dart.

The boys got really excited about this project, so there's a Batman/Robin/The Joker one in the works for them.  Stay tuned...

Iron Craft Challenge #8: For The Home

That's an 8x10 frame, in case you can't tell the size from the picture.

I'm cheating a little bit, because this isn't for my home, but it is for someone's home, and I made it within these two weeks, so I figure that counts.  For Iron Craft Challenge #7, I did the design for this cross stitch, but as usual, I changed it up once I actually started making it.

I really like how it turned out, although for future wedding gifts (because I'll be using this one again), hopefully I'll start with more time so that I can add some little flowers or embellishments of some sort to the empty spaces.  Still, with such a short time frame, I think it looks nice!

Iron Craft Challenge #7: D Is For...

In this case, D is for Design.  I designed another cross stitch, using this site here, which makes it really easy!  You can do one of their fonts, and patch it together on the printable graph paper, or just print out the graph paper and design your own.

I did a combination of the two, and designed a wall hanging based on 1 Corinthians 13 for an upcoming wedding gift.  However, it's going to turn out way too huge if I do all of the lines, so I picked 6, which you can kind of see marked on the sides in the picture.  I do think it would be cool to make the whole thing at some point though.  I'll post the finished project once it's done...stay tuned!

Iron Craft Challenge #2: Love Is In The Air

Challenge #2 was to make something for someone you love.  I chose to commemorate the trip Jesse and I took this past April to Paris.  Also, the idea of doing this travel shadow box has been on my radar for at least four or five years.

This was actually a really simple project to do.  I totally didn't need to take so long to get to it!

First I painted what would become my shadow box. Any guesses as to what it is?  (It's from this) There are a lot of nooks and crannies to get to in that thing, by the way.  I have one more, which I'm thinking of making Minnesota Twins themed, but for now, this was enough painting.

Then I played with the layout of the things I wanted to use.  A map of the city, ticket stubs from the metro and a few of the museums we went to, business cards from some restaurants, a 5 Euro bill, the plastic bag from the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, a card from Laduree bakery (the home of some of the yummiest macarons in the world), and a few souvenir medals. When I actually put stuff in, I moved a few things slightly, but kept most of the layout the same.

Also, the reason I left the part of the map showing at the top is because that is where most of our travel was based around.  Kind of hard to see in these pictures, so you'll just have to trust me...

Once I got all that in the box, I realized some of the edges on the flat part were showing through, so I added a thicker band of black around the middle.

Luckily craft paint dries quickly, and I was able to get everything mod podged and hot glued in there after a quick coffee break.  I added two picture hangers to the back once everything was dry, and hung it up in our bedroom, along with some postcards we got at one of the art museums. I am also planning to hang up one of my 8x10 prints of the Eiffel Tower on the left side, but I need to get a frame for it.

I love this little decorative corner of our room now, and it's a fun reminder of an awesome trip!

Iron Craft Challenge #19: UFO

This is the challenge I have been waiting for: the unfinished object challenge.  My nesting pregnant brain of course immediately thought of about seven different things I could be working on, but I thought it was only fitting to finish the unfinished Iron Craft project from way back in January, challenge #2.

Behold, the finally finished plastic canvas magazine holder!  Even with working on this project for the past week or so, I still didn't quite finish it by the deadline of yesterday for the challenge.

But after spending all day yesterday celebrating my oldest's fifth birthday, I was tired.  So I finished it this afternoon.  All told, this project probably took me 40 hours.  That's crazy.  Most of it was while I was either watching tv at night with my husband, or, in the case of this week, listening to several hour-long online seminars about various aspects of healthy living.  Those came with an ebook bundle I bought last fall, and they were from January-February of this year.  I guess that's another unfinished project checked off the list?

The magazine holder isn't quite as sturdy as I had hoped, but my magazines are also all wonky because they've been shoved all folded together in a tiny nook under my side table, so I'm hoping that as I get more recent issues, that problem will fix itself.  The magazine holder fits nicely next to our library book bin in the living room.

Now to continue to work on my knitted blanket (in the red bag in the picture above), which I started when Matthew was still in my belly (he's three).  A crafter's work is never done!

Iron Craft Challenge #16: Summer Whites

I really thought a project for a color challenge would be easy to come up with.  And then we got one, and I drew a big fat blank.  Finally, last night, I looked at what materials I had that fit with the color, white.  White felt stood out, especially as something I could whip up quickly.  At this rate I'm going to have enough Christmas ornaments to decorate a whole tree, just from Iron Craft challenges!  But I like making them, and they're usually quick and easy.

I wanted to do a poofy tree with rounded branches, and I think I accomplished that.  I drew a pattern on felt, and cut it out.  I sewed the crystal beads (leftover from Challenge #1 this year) onto one side, then sewed the two sides together most of the way.  I flipped it right side out, stuffed it, and sewed up the rest of the seam.  And that was that!

How many Christmas ornaments am I up to now?  How many more challenges will I end up making them for?

Iron Craft Challenge #7: On Trend

The challenge this time around was to do a project based on one of four trends: nautical, floral, geometric, or radiant orchid.  I really like the lines and colors I've seen in geometric projects, so I wanted to mimic that in a couple of felt Christmas ornaments.  Yes, Christmas ornaments.  Why not start early? (late?)

I cut up some scrap pieces of felt into squares, and cut each square into one larger and two smaller triangles.

This is the point where a rotary cutter would have come in handy, but I don't have one, so I just went with sharp scissors and approximate lines.

I used my favorite simple stitch with embroidery floss and sewed them together.

We'll call them imperfect geometric. Is that an oxymoron?  I still like them...