Flower Cloud Wall Hanging

I've seen a few of really cute flower back drops made with cricut. I always wanted to make one of these, just wasn't quite sure what would I do with it after it's made....Well my friend is now expecting a baby girl and I thought really hard about what to make for her. I wanted something special. Originally I thought the babies name should also be included but that is very risky since before the baby is born, name isn't necessary definite yet. Then I was told what colors the nursery will be and thats where I started.

For the project you will need:
-2 Elmer's foam boards
-A craft knife strong enough to cut the foam boards
-masking tape or washi tape
-1 inch thick wooden rod 36 inch long (walmart or michaels have it)
-all sizes brads
-ribbon or fishing line
-glue gun & glue sticks
-1 inch, 1,5 inch and 2,5 inch circle punch
-paper in sellected colors for the dots and a lots of white sheets for flowers(I used michaels -recollection's paper)
-sewing machine
-cricut and some flower shapes and or 3d floral home decor cartridge
-Scotch quick dry adhesive
-cuttlebug (optional - for texture)

I punch out 3 different sizes of a circles in different shades of blue, white, pink and grey colors (I used punches simply because it is faster then pulling out cricut and because I could also make my 4 year old son busy...He pretty much cut them out all),then I cut out with cricut some clouds and then embossed them on my cuttlebug machine. Mixed all that together and then sewed it all on few strings.

I have tied the fishing line (or ribbon - which ever you'd like more) around the edges of the wooden pole and glued them in the place with glue gun. Your fishing line or ribbon should be at least 1.75 - 2x longer then the wooden rod you are using. Its up to you how long you want the string to be but keep in mind that longer it is higher you will have to hang it on the wall.
When the glue dried on the rod I hang it up and started gluing the strings with dots. I started with middle, then both sides, and then middle of the already glued strings...etc. This way the rod stays in place and wont tilt under the wight of strings.

I bought a foam board and cut it into two cloud shapes. At this point you can also paint it if you choose too. I didn't see any point in that since my flowers were going to be white anyways. The cloud shape wasn't quite as tidy as I wanted it to be so I used washi tape with some cute pink and blues to cover the edges. (If you choose to paint, I would suggest using the tape after painting the board. The tape could loose stickiness.)

Next step was cutting the flowers out with cricut and putting them together. I used only white paper for all the flowers. You can use pattern paper, it probably would look better too, but I only had plain one. I used some really cute brads to attach the flowers together instead of glue. That made it all much easier and less time consuming. Also majority of my flowers are just mixed matched shapes which I already owned in DS. All flowers are about 1 inch - 4 inches big and they are made by mixed match sizes and shapes. I'd start with biggest size then copy the shape and make it about a 1/4 of inch smaller and so on. You can play with it in DS as much as you want and get the exact shapes you like or you can use my DS link here:

DS3 file link

Some of the smaller flowers I used, were from 3d floral home decor cartridge which is just gorgeous. Flowers how ever need a little bit more of fidgeting as you need to use glue and hold them in place for a little bit and it can get messy).
I've also picked few leaves from the very same cartridge to put in between the flowers on the edges. When I had all the flowers I needed (and a few more), I overlap the foam board cloud shapes a little in the middle just so they were few inches bigger then the rod on both sides and then used glue gun to attach them together so instead of having 2 shapes I now had one. I arranged all the flowers and leaves onto the cloud and when I was happy with positioning, using glue gun I glued them all down onto the cloud and then glued the whole cloud onto the wooden rod. When doing that part make sure it is glued well as the cloud is quite heavy with all these flowers now

If you look at my pictures, I made the strings quite long, but it was for a reason. I wasn't sure how long my friend would like them so I went with longer as she can cut them on her own into the size she would want them in.
Let me know if you have any questions, and if you do decide to take a little bit of inspiration out of this post, I would love to see your finished project:-)

Making Art Journal

I recently bought zutter binder so I decided to put it in use and made my own art journal. I love the finish product so I decided I will share it. Here is what you will need:

Watercolor paper - I use on most of my projects. I love the quality, thickness and price is awesome.
Brush - it is for mod podge so it doesn't have to be the best quality
Mod podge - I used both matte mat and gloss depending on the page
acrylic paints - any would do
Distress ink pads and spray inks from Rangers - Love, love these. They come in any color you can imagine and for blending they are just the best for this because they don't dry very fast. How ever if you don't have these or don't really want to buy them you can pretty much use other inkpads or mix and match...
Blending tool from Rangers - To use with ink pads.
Stamps and Stencils - For decoration of the pages. Any will do as there is no rule what the journal should looks like. I love nature ones so I will use these. Inkadinkado has beautiful background cling stamps I love using a lot. (you'll also need a stamping block if you don't have one at home already. Make sure the size of the block is bigger the stamp you'll be using.)
When it comes to stencils, there is so many on the market by so many different companies, some prettier then others. I love tim holtz stencils but for this project I mainly used Recollections stencils from Michaels stores. They came out with large packs of cling stamps and added 4 stencils in each pack! (if you have a half price coupon for Michaels it is definitely worth the money!)
Black Sharpie Pen
Scizzor
Scrapbook paper for the cover of the journal and left over of some kind of patterned paper for flower petals
2 pieces of cardboard - size depending on how long you want the journal to be.

Now when you have all your tools and materials we can start making pages. To make these is the best part of the whole project. You just play with your paints and inks. 

These are my pages. Some are made only with ink pads with help of a blending tool to blend colors together nicely and then layered over with stencils. Other pages have acrylic background and are again layered over with stencils. On few background pages I also used spray inks. I love using these because they blend colors together almost all by itself after you apply some water over the ink. 

When I had my pages done, I cut all the pages in half, but you can skip this step if you have enough pages. Then I eliminated the ones I liked a little less and used them to apply large stamps over the top and then cut out the image and glue it to a nicer page I had made. Some pages I didn't even used stamps and just cut out some petals and circles and then glue it into the desired shapes (in my case - flowers) and then drew over it with sharpie pen to define the flower properly.

I also glued the scrapbook paper onto the cardboard after I decided what shape is my journal going to be. I like round corners so I made two of these on one side of the cardboard and left the other side with sharp corners. 

For the cover of the journal I picked black stripy paper from Heidi Swapp. You will also need another patterned paper for the inside of the journal. That one will be cut into exactly same size as the cardboard paper is and will be glued by mod podge to the cardboard (make sure you put it on the right site of the cardboard. If you cut the corners, it may be a little confusing, but this site of the page goes on the inside of the journal.

The top page, the stripy page, I've cut about an inch on each side of journal bigger then the the cardboard and also covered with mod podge and glued to the cardboard from the side that doesn't have a paper on it yet. Then just tuck the paper that is left hanging over the cardboard over into the other side to make sure that the journal is snugly wrapped. When you do the back cover of the journal remember the sides are reversed (only if your corners are cut.)

Now is the time to use your binder tool. I used Zutter tool but there are others on the market that you could use. 

Sort out all your pages the way you want them to go and then just simply follow instructions of your binding tool to make them into a journal. When I was done Ive started decorating the pages inside a little more. I used my sharpies to draw random designs to the page and made a little text around them. I also printed some photos and added them to the pages. There are endless possibilities of what your journal could looks like. Wish you luck and let me know how it went!

Free Fonts With or Without Commercial License, Where To Find Them And How To Install

I love fonts, there is so many to choose from and some of them are just so pretty. I've been going through them so many times trying to "downsize" the amount I have had installed on my computer (it can slow the speed of your computer if there is too many installed in computer) but some of them were just so nice that I kept thinking I just have to have them....I thought about it a lot and I realized, that I will probably never really use the fonts that are not commercial. There is a copyright on them and so if I would ever use those for logos or any kind of graphic I would not be doing the right thing. I always tried to use commercial fonts for everything anyways leaving the pretty fonts untouched so I decided Its time to get rid off them. I kept only the ones that comes with commercial license (the only way to determine if the licence is the one you need is to read the read me file that usually comes with the fonts when downloaded.) I went down from 1000 fonts to 200. Seems my computer is a little faster now too:-D Everyone does it differently, some may be happy to have them all in one place, I find it difficult to find what exact license goes with which font after they are installed so I solved my problem by doing this too.

There is plenty of sites that offer commercial fonts. One of them is fontsquirrel which is offering only commercial fonts. Obviously again, you do have to read the license that comes with the font after you download it, just in case...Another large site is 1001fonts. They also offer fonts for personal use only so you have to make sure that you tick the little tag button next to "your text" window. There is also fontspace that works similar way and you have to adjust their filter to get the commercial fonts to pop up. There are many more sites and blogs that offer free fonts too.

If you have a windows 7 or 8 on your PC the easiest way to install a font is to double click on a font file to open the font preview and select "install". Another way is to find file called 'fonts' in your control panel, open it and drag and drop in the actual font file you want to install.

If you have Mac, easiest option is to click on your font to open preview in Font book and then click install button.
Another option is first close any open applications, drag and drop the unzipped fonts into the Fonts folder in your user's library folder found here: /users/Your_Username_Here/Library/Fonts. (as of OS Lion, the library folder is hidden from users unless you hold down the Alt/Option key while clicking on the 'Go' menu in Finder.

Note for cricut users, you have to restart DS and your installed fonts should be visible from fonts drop down menu now.

Hope this helped a little

Some of my favorite fonts with commercial license.

Banners

Banners are awesome...They are pretty, very easy to make and you can make a banner for almost any occasion. I try to make mine about 5, 5 inches tall so there would be more of them fitting on the page. Obviously you can make almost any size up to almost 12 inches. But this way it does saves a lot of cardstock. I love 3D effect so my banners a usually made from 3 and more layers. I also use punch tool to create a little hole in corners to run the ribbon through. You can just use one long ribbon or tons of small ones to hold the whole banner together, but if you use one single piece, you can adjust the size of the banner for bigger spaces and spread letters a little more if needed. Here is a few pictures of banners I made

Wall Art For Kids Room

Ive been thinking about what to give for my friends son's birthday. I wanted something personal and at the same time something that would decorated his room that he could also keep when he is older. Ive ordered bunch of vinyl and decided to make something a little bit different. Picture with the name and positive or favorite things starting with the same letter as the name. Each word is in different font style and all are in blue and green shades. I didn't wanted to put any background there but unfortunately after Ive finished everything I realized that picture isn't going to hang on the wall without the back of it...

Yard sale treasures

The other day we went to a yard sale that was in my in law neighborhood where we found large decorative frame for one dollar. I wasn't sure what to make out of it yet but I knew that it would just be too good to pass despite the ugly color of the frame and funny flowery print. (Unfortunately Ive not made a photo of what it looked like, but it wasn't very pretty and I wouldn't get anyone to hang it in their house thats for sure). 

So we were debating if we should make it a chalkboard (about a year back my husband really wanted one and I told him that he isn't gonna get one because it would be all the time in mess....) or something else. I decided to go with chalkboard after all and started working on it. I painted the frame with Waverly Inspirations agave chalk paint made by Plaid, that I found in walmart.

 It came out really well. I also bought vinyl that I thought was pretty and if the chalkboard wouldn't work I could use instead.

Well at that point I realized that I don't actually have any black chalkboard paint at home, which I thought I did so I decided to go with the vinyl instead. I added some picture wires at the back and attached photos with pegs and this is what we ended up with....

Texture on canvas

This time I used 5x5 canvases. I used pink, teal and navy blue and green colors and blended them together on textured background.