A Little Chalkboard Craft!

I decided to make a little something for the women in my family and came up with this... Well not this: This is the before, of course! I went to goodwill and bought a bunch of cheap Christmas tin trays

sprayed them with Chalboard paint... At least three times...

Then I had Joe drill two holes in each tin and tied a cute ribbon on top!
That's it~

Days Til Christmas...

Way back in November I saw this and decided that I wanted to make one of my own!! Luckily Joe had been cleaning out the garage (one of his never ending tasks!) and dug out these old cupboard doors, which were exactly what I needed!

First I dusted them off since they had been collecting dust in our disaster garage!

Then I painted it black with some magnetic paint... Although this paint didn't do what I had originally planned...

While the paint is drying you take your little paper mache boxes... Mine were from Walmart and Michaels... I cleaned both stores out... Maybe I wasn't the only one doing this! I wish I had a little more shape variation, but it didn't really matter too much!

Then pick out your fun scrapbooking paper in several different patterns!!

and using an Exacto knife to cut the scrapbook paper- I just outlined the boxes...

and glued the paper to the boxes using this stuff!

Then I used a sharpie and put the numbers on the boxes... That was after I figured out how I wanted the boxes to be layed out! This actually took a lot longer than you would think! I didn't want any of the same shapes next to each other or the same pattern of paper etc.. so it took some arranging!

Then came the fun part... I painted Mod Podge on top of each box to seal it... If you've never used this stuff you should try it out.. It's super cool! This was the first time I've ever used the stuff and I can see using it for a lot of fun stuff!

Finally I glued all the boxes to the frame... Added the "Days Til Christmas" on top and the ribbon to hang it !! A fun little advent calendar for Christmas.. and like the blogger before me... I put the kids vito-bears inside the boxes for their treat! Maybe next year I'll be organized enough to put little projects/fun stuff we can do together inside too! Such as, "make gingerbread houses" or "Go look at Christmas lights" Two things we still plan on doing before Christmas!!

What are you Thankful for?

Remember this little arrangement of twigs... Well, I've been seeing a bunch of little Thankful trees on other blogs and decided to convert this for Thanksgiving!

First I emptied the Candy Corn

I was really wanting to use acorns, but the squirrels beat me to them, so I used almonds since that is what I had a lot of!

I had bought a couple bags of these from Target
from their dollar bins a few months ago- not
really sure what I would need them for...
Now I'm glad I grabbed them!

I had Chloe help me punch holes in the leaves... She loved doing this so some leaves have quite a few holes in them!! Then we wrote with a Sharpie what we are thankful for!!

It makes me smile whenever I see it... and reminds me of all we have to be so very thankful for!



So... What are you thankful for this year?

A Festive Fall Chandelier!

Oh how I wish I had a chandelier... but alas I don't! Not even a little tiny one. Lucky for me my sister-in-law told me about something she had seen on Marthastewart.com.

I decided to give it a try and have been loving my little lights ever since!

If you have some of this you are good to go... If not, Jo-Ann's has some for really cheap right now... I got mine for $4.00 and that was a few weeks ago... In fact they are probably out of fall stuff and only have Christmas stuff-crazy stores!!

Then I got a box of these from Walmart for $5.00

and I had one of these lying around... I had actually just got it at a garage sale for 25 cents a few weeks earlier!

Hot glue it all together and ta-dah!! A festive fall chandelier!!

The only thing that was a minor pain was cutting the holes in the pumpkins so the tea light candles would fit inside... but even that wasn't very hard... I just traced around on the pumpkin and then using a sharp knife started cutting away at the foam pumpkins!!

By the way I use the battery powered tea lights! No fire hazards that way!
Oh yeah, and I hung it using some twine I had gotten at Target in the dollar bins... That stuff is so handy I'm planning on picking up a ton more the next time I see some!

I'm so in love with it, I'm planning on making a new one for Christmas and any other holiday I can figure out a way to make one... Hey-if I can't have a real chandelier at least I can keep making them!! :)