Fringey Crepe Paper Decorations

Austin’s Komen Race for the Cure is coming up quickly!  It seems that every Saturday and Sunday from now until the race (on Nov 13th – register here!) is booked with a packet stuffing or handout or some other race prep meeting.  This weekend I’m kicking off the whirlwind with a survivor tent decoration party at my house.  It’s going to be a lot of folding, gluing, taping, and cutting.  We’re putting in a lot of sweat equity to pull off some fab decorations for cheap.

One of the projects we’re working on is the backdrop for our photo booth.  When I was searching for inspiration for projects with big impact for no $$, I ran across this post on Oh Happy Day about creating fringey monograms.  Michaela created a giant 2 for her daughter’s birthday.  I knew I could take this concept and run with it.

I picked up a few supplies and dug into the stash at home to come up with everything I’d need for this project:

• Foam board – on sale at Hobby Lobby for $1.50
• Crepe paper streamers in pink and hot pink for $2.80
• Pink spray paint -$5
• Glue stick
• Scissors

I wanted to create a giant fringey Race for the Cure ribbon.  But I didn’t have time to install it on a wall like in the inspiration blog so I hit upon the idea of using foam core as the base.  It’s light, portable and easy to find.

To get started, I needed the ribbon base.  I used a projector to resize the ribbon image and project the ribbon on to the wall.  I then simply taped my foam board to the wall and traced the shape on to my foam board.  Simple.  It’s like 3rd grade art class again. 

And when you finish, you have a shape that’s all ready to cut out:

I cut the ribbon out using an box cutter knife…and it’s now that I remember that cutting curves in foam board is a giant pain in the booty.  Here are my tips for not chewing up the foam too much:

• Use a sharp #1 X-acto knife with a #11 blade.
• Slice the board in three passes: First cut the top side paper, second cut the foam and third cut the bottom side paper.
• Use a sander to clean up any edges or a Dremel if you are obsessive compulsive – totally unnecessary for this project!

As you can see, I didn’t do the best job – I need a new #11 blade so I had to fall back to my box cutter…whoops.  At least the finished product won’t show the sides too much!

Not knowing what kind of coverage I’d get with my streamers, I decided to paint the ribbon.  It made for a nicely finished look on the final piece. 

Now to the tedious part: Clipping the streamers into fringe.  In the Oh Happy Day post they found some wonderful crepe paper that they folded and fringed.  That’s really lovely, but I don’t think far enough in advance to order things like this from the internet….and crepe paper streamers are so easy to find in the store….so lots of clipping for me!  I found that folding the streamer a few times and then clipping yielded a much better length of fringed streamer than making each clip one at a time.  

I clipped for an entire episode of Colbert to get this pile of loveliness.  On to the gluing!  Here’s the fun part – just start gluing those strips of streamer down.  I spaced mine about 1/4″ apart.I wanted to capture the overlapping effect of the ribbon so I ended and started in a few places. It would probably have been better to put the hot pink on after I finished the row of light pink, but it wasn’t too difficult to tuck a few ends under.  I did do a bit of trimming on the edges here and there to smooth out the look.  Overall, I think it turned out smashing! For $2 or $3 per ribbon, the price can’t be beat – I’ve got a ton of streamers left over and I’m ready for more!

Now to use this same method to create an even bigger fringey ribbon!

Personalized Ring Bearer Pillow

My cousin is getting married this weekend and she asked me to make a ring bearer pillow for her.  To start, we brainstormed a few ideas.  Since she lives so far away, it was a flurry of emails – sending a few pictures back and forth.  I was thinking bigger, she was thinking smaller.  But we narrowed in on a few ideas that we liked including this pillow with the personalized calendar detail: 

But I also like the use of burlap in this pillow – her wedding is on a farm and I think burlap has a nice rustic quality to it. 

So taking that all into account, we settled on a pillow made of burlap that is somewhere between 4″ to 6″ decorated with a calendar that has an embroidered heart on her wedding day.

This plan involves getting a calendar on the pillow.  The sample looks like it is handwritten, but I’ve seen several tutorials like this one out in blogland that show you how to print on fabric using freezer paper.  And you know how I love for freezer paper!  I had to give it a try.

For this project, I started with a 1/3 of a yard of burlap, a remnant of muslin, some fiber fill, embroidery thread, ribbon and the freezer paper. 

I might as well dive in and get started on the part that is concerning me the most – the fabric calendar.  I cut out a sheet of freezer paper 8 1/2″ x 11″ and then fused a piece of muslin to it.  I then realized that I probably should have fused first and cut second as I had to then cut the fabric to exactly match my sheet of paper.  But there she is in all her glory:  

That’s right – it’s a piece of fabric paper.  Now all I needed was a calendar.  I made a quick one in Excel and played around with different fonts and sizes to get the look and feel that I wanted with the right size.  I was shooting for a finished calendar block of about 4″ x 3″ once I’d stitched it to the pillow so I needed my actual calendar to be slightly smaller than those dimensions to allow for a border and seam allowance.  I ended up with Cooperplate font in 16 point, with an extra space between each of the letters in the month to give it a bit more gravitas.  In minutes I had a calendar on my fabric!  I know, I couldn’t believe it either. 

A couple of pointers here, go ahead and center your calendar on the page or at least increase your margins so you’ve got enough border room and seam allowance – I just barely made it with my calendar (shoved all the way in the upper left hand corner!).  Print multiple calendars – because my calendar was offset, I could print a few samples to dial in exactly the printer settings that worked best.

Let’s cut out some pillow fabrics!  I thought I’d make a 6″ x 6″ pillow with 1/4″ seam allowance so I cut my burlap into 6 1/2″ squares.  The burlap was a bit too open weave for my tastes so I stacked two layers on top of each other and zig zag stitched them to a 6 1/2″ square of muslin – I didn’t want any fill to come poking out of that burlap!

I picked the square that I thought looked “best” of the two and cut out the calendar from my printed fabric .  I peeled off the freezer paper backing which left the fabric a bit curled.  That was fine as I was just going to press under the edges anyway.  I smoothed it out, pressed the edges and pinned it to the pillow square. 

I then zig sag stitched around the edge twice.  I was only going to do it once, but going around again covers a lot of little minor imperfections. 

I picked out an embroidery color that coordinated with the wedding colors and free hand stitched a little heart around their wedding date on the calendar. 

Now I was ready to assemble the pillow.  I pinned the two sides together and stitched a 1/4″ seam around the edge, leaving a reinforced opening at the bottom for stuffing.  I then turned the pillow and was ready to stuff.

I think weddings are all about details and shouldn’t my ring bearer pillow have a little detail too?  So I thought I’d put a little heart in there with the bride and groom’s initials.  I grabbed a scrap of red fabric and quickly stitched in a CS + LG.  After that was done, I picked up one of my heart cookie cutters and traced the shape with a bit of a seam allowance.  

I cut out two hearts and stitched them together leaving an opening for stuffing.  I sealed up the heart and tucked it into the pillow. 

I then finished stuffing the pillow and stitched it closed too.  A quick ribbon detail to hold on to the rings and I’m done!

OK, well maybe I’m not done.  The finished pillow didn’t quite turn out as big as I thought it would be – it’s about 5″ x 5″.  The burlap, especially two layers of it plus a layer of muslin, was pretty bulky and a bit difficult to turn so I think that plus the stuffing ate a bit of my pillow size.  The calendar looked great, but overall I wasn’t wowed.

I don’t want you to think that I’ve abandoned my OCD ways.  I had just enough burlap to cut two 8″ x” 8″ squares and plenty of muslin.  Oh, and one of my extra calendars that I had printed…..so it just called for me to make another pillow! 

I followed the same process as above, just with one layer of burlap on each side rather than two.  I even made a second little heart to tuck into the pillow….It’s much faster to make something a second time  

This time, I love the size – I think the proportion is right.  Now the only problem is that the bride has to choose which one she likes better!

Congrats to Laurie & Chad!!

–Martta

Linking up here:

DIY Entry Mat

So the last few weeks I’ve been working on sprucing up my back porch.  One of the items I wanted to upgrade was the entry mat.  I’ve been sporting the mat the builder gave me when I moved into the house 5 years ago and to say that it could be improved is an understatement.  Here’s the mat with my lovely model Ginger.

So I decided to inject a bit of color into the situation with a few quick supplies I picked up at Home Depot:

• 1 Natural Fiber Mat
• Painter’s Tape (Which I had laying around)
• Spray Paint

I made a quick pattern taping off in two different colors so I could get an idea of the stripe color blocking.  In the end, I preferred the painter’s tape to the duct tape because it was so hot outside when I did this project that some of the duct tape adhesive left a sticky mess on the back side of the mat.

Now you’re ready to apply the color.  Just try not to shoot the spray paint at the sides of the tape and even if the tape isn’t sticking to the mat very well, you’ll find it makes a crisp line.

And for the big reveal:

Pretty nice edges if I do say so myself.  I let the paint dry throughly.  Since it’s 104 outside, this took all of 15 minutes.  I then re-taped to cover the red and painted on the green.

Excellent!  A color coordinated entry mat for less than $15 in about 2 hours.

–Martta