Easy Watercolor Art

I originally posted this on CraftsUnleashed last year, but I wanted to share this just in case you missed my original post.  

One of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes is:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

I wanted to make an art piece for my house using this quote. So using a crayon and watercolors, I made the piece of art below.  There are so many parts of the quote that could have been used, but I decided on the first part.  I may take the other parts of the quote and put it on separate sheets to make a photo collage if I have time.

Materials:

• White Crayon
• Watercolors
• Paint Brush
• White Paper
• Tape

Directions:

Print out or free hand your favorite quote onto a spare sheet of paper. Tape the quote and the plain piece of paper to a glass door or light box, and trace the text with white crayon. Go over the text multiple times. You want to get a thick coat of white crayon.

Wet the watercolor onto the brush and brush the paper lightly with paint. The white crayon should show through with the text.  Note that depending on the thickness of paper your paper may crinkle a little.  You can iron the paper a little if there is a lot of wrinkling, BUT protect your iron with another sheet of paper so you don't get white crayon wax on it.  This is a cheap technique for resist, so some color will get onto the white crayon, you can scrape some of the water color off if it bothers you.

Now, how easy was that?! Let dry, frame, and enjoy your one of a kind art.

Bending Popsicle Sticks for a Wooden Helix Vase

The inspiration for this post comes from this blogger who showed how to make popsicle stick bracelets.  Bending popsicle sticks/tongue depressors seemed like a cool idea that I wanted to expand on.  I researched what the best way to bend wood (on a wood working forum), and came up with steam as a fast effective means to bending wood.   You can see my video tuorial on how to bend these craft sticks below.

The flowers on the right are fake so I did not add water to the vase.  If you are going to fill it with water I would find a smaller vase and put it inside.  Craft sticks are not finished wood and probably would not hold up to moisture well.

Used a steamer basket filled with enough tap water to last you about 20 min (or keep refilling water).  Steam sticks for 15 minutes and using heat resistant gloves remove from steam one at a time.  Bend popsicle sticks in same vase or similar sized vase that you want to decorate.  After sticks are bent and dry (about a day) you can spray stain them and seal them with polyurethane.  The words are wood burned on.  If you want to wood burn then do it before you bend the sticks.  I used a soldering iron to wood burn but I would not recommend it.  The soldering iron did not get hot enough and the stick was too long and hard to control.  Please see video tutorial for full details on bending wood.

You can put a whole message on the inside.  I was thinking about putting lyrics to a favorite song on each line.

Try different patterns.

Video Tutorial:

This Little Light of Mine

Our house came with all recessed lights, even in the dining room.  While I do love the convenience, I don't love the look of all recessed lights.  We wanted something to define our dining room area, and break up the openness a little.  I loved the look and price of these Eden Pendant Lights from CB2.  The only problem was I needed to figure out a way to convert a recessed(canned) light to a pendant without hiring an electrician.  We experimented with a few ideas, one being just cutting the line our self and doing a hard wire (too risky, as we are not electricians), we also tried the Can Converter which was the biggest flop in the world.  We finally found a 15 dollar recessed to pendant converter from Lowes.  This worked beautifully and only took five minutes to install.  The  Can Converter took over an hour to install each, was overly complicated, with a bunch of parts.  We also almost shorted a something and electrocuted ourselves.  Plus the can converter is 50 dollars each, the same cost as the pendant light!

One negative about the Lowes pendant converter is that it only takes candelabra lights, which are lower wattage, so if you really need to brighten up a room this is not for you.

One other thing to note is that the Eden Pendant comes with its own wire, but it plugs into an electrical outlet, so you would see the wires.  If you hire an electrician they can easily cut the wires and rewire for you.   You would have to buy a medallion to cover the hole.

From recessed lights to drop pendants for around 65 dollars each.

Converter from Lowes

Easy to install, just screw into the light bulb fixture.

Both lights installed

Candelabra light bulb, its blue because its one of the full spectrum light bulbs.  I did have to do some funky screwing in of the drum shade.

There Are Places I Remember

Remember my earlier post, about photobooks and how they are great. I mentioned in there that I have a box of photos that never got organized or put into albums. I decided to dig them up and display them. Displaying a large amount of photos can be tricky.  It is always a chalenge for me to tastefully display pictures.  On one hand I want to show all my memories, on the other you don't my wall/desk/mantle to look cluttered.

I took some of my favorite pictures and cut them into 3.5 inch squares and placed them in a frame.   Included are some of my favorite quotes to break up the colors.  The quotes were printed on a brown paper bag and then cut to 3.5 inch squares also.

The frame a cheap Ikea frame that was 2 dollars in the "as is" section.  I like it because it is plexiglass instead of glass so I can display it in my daughters room without worrying.