DAY 10

DIY Christmas present

Customize Charity shop treasures

Do you remember the pottery I found in a charity shop, when I was on a shopping trip with Kerstin in Edinburgh? Here is the article.

I really liked the shape of the bowl and the little plate, so I decided to buy them and to customize them. I also saw lovely plates at Anthropologie, but they were really expensive – so that was my inspiration. I only painted two bowls and two plates (still need to paint the other two).

The brand Marabou has really great paints, you can use them easily, they are water-soluble and tadadada! The best thing is: it is air-drying. This means you don’t need to use the oven.

TIP: There are also painting pens, they are great if you want to paint a shape (like my peacock), rather than paint them with a brush or leave them like this…

TIP 2: Use the stencil idea from the last Door (9) to create wonderful pottery.

DAY 6

Quick and easy DIY mercury-style glass

Bring the right light into your life

The right ambiance can change everything; I need to admit that I always prefer a date with candlelight. That’s romantic, everybody would say – ah yes, of course that’s why I like dates in candlelight, it has nothing to do with the fact that candlelight lets you look perfect, sexy and beautiful.

But anyway, when should you use little lights, if not at Christmas-time? So here is my little tutorial for you, where I will show you that creating a lantern can be easy and fast.

To create a light and mercury optic, I used silver fabric paint from my Crafty Creatives box. I think acrylic paint would probably have been better, but I didn’t have any silver when I had the idea for the light.  And that’s what I enjoy – using everything you have to get a result you like.

TIPP: You can also use another colour as background insteat of brown like these ones.

I think there are many other ways to make mercury glass, a lot of which probably work better or look more authentic – but I really like my lantern, because I like to recycle the things I already have and to find quick and easy ways to make nice things.

Here some other tutorials to make mercury glass:

• Makezine.com
• Take the side street
• Pepper design blog

DIY: CHALKPAINT VERSUS FRAME

Long, long time ago…

What a week. You probably noticed that I wrote nothing haven’t written a lot the last 5 days, but I was really busy. My mother was here to visit me, so we did a lot of things together and I enjoyed every minute. I could tell you about all the great things we visited or discovered, but it would be a lie – most of the time we went shopping. I bought some necessary winter things, like a coat. And, like always, I had a little peek in one of the numerous charity shops and…of course… found something, a frame for my Ikea Expedit shelf – but more about that below in the post.

My first Picmonkey picture 🙂

Colour of my wall 😉

2 Pound frame

What more can I say than that I enjoyed my week off and only started now yesterday, motivated and full of ideas, with more crafty things. This time (because it was such a long time without a post) directly with all the new things I created last evening.

Chalkpaint versus frame

I never really tried chalkpaint, so I bought some testers at B&Q in different colours to have an idea how they work.  I only washed the frame (yes the one from above) and started to use the chalkpaint. I was impressed; I didn’t need to sand before I used the paint – only negative thing: the layer is a bit streaky, which I disliked. Maybe it’s because of the paint’s texture but you are more than welcome if you have some ideas.

I needed three layers (probably two would be also enough). When everything was dry I sanded some areas. Of course I haven’t had any furniture wax, so I tried – don’t laugh – some of my hair wax, which I never use because it’s dangerous for my hair. I took a small amount of the wax out of the box and mixed it with the darker colour and used a pencil to put the mixture on the frame. Afterwards, I only polished everything so that the dark colour was only seen where I wanted and the frame was is ready.

Flowerpower

New white damaged frame

Second Step: I didn’t want to show you an empty frame, so I painted a fantasy-flower picture for inside, using some ink, watercolours and my imagination. I love to paint flower pictures that exist only in my mind.

And that’s the result of my evening activity. I really like it and all that remains is the explanation of how I will use the frame for my Expedit shelf. Tada, like this:

To not damage the shelves, I used a belt to fix the pictures on each side. I really like the look of the belt on the shelves. I only need now to decorate the shelf itself, therefore another post will follow. 🙂

Enjoy your day and your week and thank you for reading.

Nicole