Craptastic Crafts: Knockoff of a Knockoff - Butterfly 3D Art

So my friend Laura over at Live.Laugh.Photograph comes up with some of the most fun and easy arts and crafts projects and I just loved her Pottery Barn Butterfly 3D art knockoff. It took me a while but I finally got my butt into gear and made my little knockoff happen...TODAY! So here is my knockoff of her knockoff.

I bought this pack of paper for 5 bucks at Walmart. I tried to print out my own designs online but it was just way to much ink for me. 

I just googled "butterfly templates" printed out a few I liked and then traced them onto the card stock.

Here's what they look like after being cut out

I took them outside and sprayed them with a Matte Finish spray

I think I stood too close when I sprayed them because I was smelling fumes for a long while after they dried...ugh!

After they were dry I bent the wings up a little at the center of  each butterfly

I fastened these to the back of each butterfly and pasted to Maria's bedroom walls

Here they are above her dresser

I"m really happy with them!

Here's where I'll be linking up!

Craptastic Crafts - #1

Okay remember like  20 posts ago I was talking about doing crafts, well I finally completed my first craft. It took a totally different direction than originally planned but I'm uber happy with the turn out. So here it is. I've included a tutorial so that you can make the flowers yourself. Have fun doing this, I know I did and it was super cheap, seriously like 3 bucks cheap!

What you'll need:

• Construction Paper (Dollar Tree)
• Foam wreath (Dollar Tree) 
• Pins (I already had these)
• Yarn (I found this in my closet)
• Elmer's Glue or any glue for that matter (I used Maria's)
• Stickers (Dollar Tree)
• Paint (When they built our house, they left the extra)
• Paint brush (Home builder's left this)

Draw a swirl on a sheet of construction paper, completely filling up the page:

I used a black pen for this tutorial only, I used a light colored pencil so the outline wouldn't show up. 

Don't worry if your swirl isn't perfect, I discovered the more jagged and uneven the better the roses look!

After your swirl is completely cut out begin to roll it together:

After you're done swirling glue the circle at the end of your swirl at the bottom of your rose.

This is what your rose should look like:

This was my first rose so it looked like crap, but the more I did the better they looked.

Now here is where my craft changed. I was going to fill up my entire foam wreath with these cute little roses but after doing about 10 they weren't so cute anymore and I was just tired of making them. So I left my craft alone for about a month and while I was cleaning out my closet yesterday I found white yarn and suddenly I was inspired.

Wrap your foam wreath with yarn:

After you're done wrapping the wreath arrange your roses any way you like with pins. 

I love the way the yellow pins look in the center of each rose. 

I hung this on my door and again that's where my little craft continued onto my front door.

First I cleaned my door and then painted it with the original color and then I added these cute little stickers I found at the Dollar Tree.

And here is the finished product! I love my door!

Maria loved it!!


Here's where I'm linking up, check out these blogs, I get most of my inspiration here!!

Craftard

Remember that blog I wrote about a month ago, Craptastic, well I've finally started a craft. I started it Tuesday and I'm really happy with how it's coming out, it's uber crappy but that's the point right!? Actually it's not the point, I would like for it to look awesome, but this is me, the Craptastic Crafter, or the Craftard, I'm still working on my name...hehe!

So I haven't forgotten about my crafty endeavors, I will showcase it as soon as it's finished. I'm just super slow and I procrastinate like no other.

Let me tell you how bad I am about procrastination, I wait till we're starting to use paper towels or the baby wipes before I go buy toilet paper...I'm so bad!!

Pleasant Surprises

Life is full of wonderful surprises!

• Found out that Subway sells all footlongs for 5 bucks after 4pm
• Subway sells all footlong subs for 5 bucks all day on Sundays
• I found my first craft project: I'm totally making this http://www.bystephanielynn.com/2010/11/diy-faux-curled-rosewood-wreath-made.html 
• My daughter can draw a circle after watching mama do it (She's 2)
• My husband agreed to taking family pics this Sunday
• I can fly through e-books on my Kindle app for Droid---I'm addicted!
• If you smile while driving, people actually smile back at you

I hope you all had a wonderful day and hopefully you had a few surprises yourselves. 

Let's get craftastic future craftards, who's doing the above craft with me? 

Craptastic!

I don't even know where to begin to write a novel, I have no stinking idea what I even want to write about. I play around with different scenarios in my head but none of them seem to go any further than that.

I do have this one idea and I thought it would be kind of fun, but it seems more fitting for a blog that a book, but here it goes. So I'm not in the least bit crafty and I so want to be. I so want to be able to quilt like my mother-in-law does, I would love to embroider like my aunt, and I would love to be able to decorate a home like my mom can, but I just don't have that crafty gene, so I'm thinking about doing one craft a week, maybe one craft a month and I'll document my "crap crafts" or "crafty crap," I'm still working on the title.

You see, I go to all these crafty blogs like http://www.tipjunkie.com/ and all I do is call these women horrible names, I imagine them having no life at all, they're single, no kids, no job, they just sit around all day creating the most beautiful crafts in the world and then I go their bio, expecting a line or two when suddenly I'm reading paragraphs about their loaded husbands, their 10 kids, homeschooling all those kids, couponing, blogging, and all the while still managing to be creative crafttards. Ugh I'm so jealous!

So here it goes, here is where my crappy crafts series begins, once a month you will see an attempt at being freaking crafty, even if it kills me. Success or fail I will post a picture of my craft. I will warn you now, there's gonna be a lot of crappy crafts to look at.

So funny, I just had to share.

Crafty, Of Course...Not!

I've decided Sundays are my days off from writing, unless I'm inspired or need to jot something down before I forget it. Everyone needs a day off...or two.

So on my day off from writing, I decided I needed to pursue another type of creative outlet and I thought crafts would be a good idea. We loaded up the baby, picked up my mom and all headed to Michael's. Riley was bored out of his mind, Maria was getting sleepy, and my mom wanted to get back home to finish cleaning, I on the other hand was in arts and crafts heaven. I decided I was going to make Maria's birthday Thank You cards, so I found the dollar bin, bought white ink, green envelopes, coordinating ribbon, and a pretty thank you stamp. As soon as the baby was asleep and Riley was busy playing Black ops I set up shop. I laid everything out to start making my cards, well suddenly I had met writer's block evil sister, crafter's block.

How was I going to make this work, how was I going to make all the elements join up to create something beautiful!? Well I decided to just jump in, (a tactic I often use in writing) I just started stamping and then I found my rhythm. I created 8 cards, all different but coordinating and it was so fun. I thought I had done a great job. Well that was at 11:30pm last night, today at 11:30am they don't look so great. They look so elementary, so preschool, so much so, I believe my 2 year old would have done a better job. So I've come to the conclusion that maybe I'm not as crafty as I thought, or maybe, just maybe I didn't have the right tools, yeah let's blame the tools, after all they were from the dollar bin!

I think I'm going to stick to writing for the time being, maybe I'm not great at it but that's what they have editors for right?

Hmmm, who edits your arts and crafts, the poor souls who receive them as gifts?