the Mathews Family Happenings: craft #1: wallflowers & did you see the Tonys?

Monday, June 13, 2011

craft #1: wallflowers & did you see the Tonys?

Happy Monday morning!

I hope you all had a fabulous weekend-

we had absolutely beautiful weather here in AL and even got a little rain,

which was very much needed.

So excited to share with you some things that I've been inspired by lately.

Maybe you'll be inspired by a few as well and can recreate them on your own!

Did I mention I made them all on the cheap?

Cause I did.

(psssst....to catch up on the other crafts posted this week,
see Day #2 HERE,
Day #3 HERE,
and Day #4 HERE)

First up is something I saw on the blog Young House Love a while back. Check out this room in their first home-

I loved several things about their office/playroom, like the postcard shelves above the desk, but my project for today was to recreate those pretty little flowers on the wall under the window.

see them?

They're made by a compay called Umbra.

Here's a close-up-

Urban Outfitter also makes a set of these, found HERE.

The Umbra set, which includes 25 flowers which attach to the wall with magnets or tacks, goes for around $20 online. The Urban Outfitters set, which also includes 25 flowers which attach to the wall with thumb tacks, goes for $40. I'd actually looked at them several times on the UO site and even been oh so close to adding them to my cart, but I just couldn't bring myself to buy something that I knew I could make on the cheap AND also couldn't see myself sticking anything in my walls with a thumb tack.

If you've never shopped at an UO before, they have some pretty cool stuff like these magnets hubs wanted for his car after seeing them on his brother's-

cool, right?

Anyway, you know I'm too cheap to spend $40 or even $25 on something that I could make myself, so here's what I did.

I picked up a white piece of posterboard and some Scotch mounting putty at Target (around 3 bucks for both), and grabbed a pair of scissors and a pencil from home.

please note, it's not necessary to use a jumbo pencil for this project.

This one just happens to have been in arms reach, so it's what I went with.

I wanted to really get a good look at those flowers before I started trying to sketch them out, so I pulled them up on the Urban Outfitters website and enlarged the photo-

I quickly realized that what I needed was a basic leaf shape. Since I wanted my flowers to all look the same, I decided to make a template that I could trace over and over. Remember when I bagged up my kids puzzles because the corners of the boxes were broken and it drove me crazy?

I kept the bottoms of the boxes because I figured I'd need some cardboard down the line...

I went to sketching...

and finally came up with some leaf shapes that weren't completely wonky.

I made 3 sizes since I noticed both the Umbra flowers and the ones from UO also came in different sizes.

I started with the medium-sized leaf and started making my 4-petaled flowers all over the posterboard-

I was able to fit 10 medium-sized flowers and 5 small-sized flowers on one sheet of posterboard.

Since drawing/tracing all those flowers and then cutting them out is the most tedious part of this process, you might want to grab a buddy to hang out with you. In my case, O was more than willing to sit with me, especially when I told him he could watch the Clone Wars on my laptop.

whew.

done.

Once they're cut out, they will, of course, be flat.

Here's where a special technique comes in-

Take a flower, curl one of the petals around your thumb a few times-

untili it stays curled.

Repeat 3 times.

Until you have this-

And then a table full of them-

don't they already look like the real ones?

Now it's time to decide where you want to put them, if you haven't already. I've had the perfect spot picked out for a while-

the nursery.

see that blank spot above the bookshelf and below the small wall shelves?

Right there-

That's where I wanted them, so, I grabbed that mounting putty,

stuck a small little dot of it on the back of each flower,

and just started placing them on the wall.

No specifics here-

I just stuck them on the wall sorta haphazard-like...

until I had something like this-

whatcha think?

I love them!

And that only cost me about 3 bucks (instead of $25 or $40),

AND

I can remove them in a New York minute if I get tired of them and want to change things up. The whole process also only took around 40 minutes, some of which was stopping to listen to O as he tried to explain the Clone Wars to me.

And that's our craft for today! I hope you'll tune in tomorrow for another cheap and easy craft!

And now, I just couldn't write a post today without mentioning the Tonys.

Did you see them?

My girl won!

Sutton Foster is my absolutemostfavorite Broadway actress, and last night she picked up her 2nd Tony for her role in Anything Goes.

I became just slightly obsessed with her when she landed the role of Millie Dillmount in Thoroughly Modern Millie, the role that brought her Tony #1 in 2002, and she's been going strong- landing role after fabulous role ever since.