NEW SEASON = NEW WREATH

Since Caleb and I got married and moved into our first apartment, I've made a new wreath for each of the seasons. These wreaths were made without spending any money, too. That's because we're on a bit of a grad school budget over here (aka: only the necessities). But really, it hasn't been hard to make nice looking wreaths while just using materials I already have lying around.

Here's what I did for fall and winter:

For the fall wreath I used a coat hanger, paper clips, hot glue, pinecones spray-painted teal, and chevron burlap ribbon (the ribbon and pinecones were leftover from our wedding).

For the winter wreath I used cardboard, hot glue, paper straws, jute twine, and white acrylic paint (again, the twine and straws were leftover from our wedding).

For spring I wanted to break away from the color scheme we used for our wedding. I also wanted to do something that I could leave up for spring and summer because we'll be moving (temporarily) for the entire summer.

I found this gorgeous wreath on Jones Design Company and knew I wanted to do something similar.
I followed her tutorial for turning coffee filters into paper flowers. It seemed daunting at first, but the more I made the flowers, the easier it got.

I only used three colors of paint: white, yellow, red. I toned down both the red and yellow with white and mixed water with each of them, thus resulting in two colors. For some flowers I only used the red mixture to dye the coffee filters. For others I used only the yellow. And for a third variation I dipped a filter in red and then in yellow. I just played around with the tones and diluted the filters if I thought they had too much color. For the final wreath I also used undyed coffee filters for the white flowers.

Here are my filters as they were drying:

Once dry, I shaped them all into flowers and hot-glued them to a cardboard circle. It took a little while, but I really like how it looks (and it was free!). I think I may even make a few more and attach them to sticks to look like stems...because the flowers looked real pretty in a glass jar.

EASTER EGG CRAYON BATIKING

Hopefully everyone had a great Easter. My husband and I traveled to Connecticut for a long weekend with some family friends. We had a good time...we always do.

One of the things we did was dye hard-boiled eggs. I got out a white crayon and tried my hand at some amateur batiking. I thought the eggs turned out pretty well.

It's very easy to do: Just outline in crayon what you want to keep white. Then dye the egg (preferably, you want to dye your egg with the lightest color first). Once dry, use the white crayon to color over the areas you want to keep the color you just dyed the egg. Then dye with your next color. You could go on with several colors. I liked the three-color look.

I love the look of actual batiked eggs, but doing crayon batiking was within my abilities...for now. Maybe in the future I'll take it up :)

Here's our whole carton:

DIY PICTURE FRAME CHALKBOARD

Finally it's been feeling more like spring in upstate NY! It's been a loooong winter for sure. (The second coldest on record I heard.) So I was definitely on top of it when the first jacket-less day rolled around...full on spring cleaning with opened windows. I love getting fresh air into the apartment and getting that dank winter smell out.

With all that spring cleaning came my first DIY for the blog. I've been thinking about adding a chalkboard to our little dining room area for a while, but didn't really want to spend much money. So I used a cheapy frame I had lying around. Sorry no "before" picture, but the frame below is very similar, and I had all of the supplies already: chalkboard spray paint, white acrylic craft paint, paintbrush, chalk.

This was all very simple and didn't take long to transform at all. I just removed the glass from the frame and painted on several coats (like 3-4) of the chalkboard paint, making sure to let each coat dry completely before adding more. The frame was a very gaudy gold, and I wanted to tone it down a bit but still allow the gold to show through. So I painted the white acrylic paint lightly over the cleaned frame with a brush and then wiped away areas where I thought there was excess. Once everything was dry I put the frame back together and seasoned the chalkboard. The part that took the longest was the writing.