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A Love-Themed Watercolor Art Piece

February 1, 2016 By Laura 16 Comments

Being in my art studio, is way up there as one of my favorite places in my very small world, to be!
For the month of February, I was inspired to create something ‘love-themed’, to add as a decorative art piece for our home’s double-mantels. I was very much in the mood to get into a watercolor project, and I had some text in mind that I wanted to make a part of it, as well.
In this post I’m sharing the general concepts I used in creating this fun little piece, with a little chit-chat along the way. I hope you enjoy it.


Although I have sold several watercolor scenery or subject paintings in my earlier years, I still do not consider myself to be  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Crafts & Creations, FALL Crafts and Creations, Holiday Crafts, Home Decor, Home Page, Seasonal Crafts and Creations, The Homestead, Tutorial Tagged With: arts and crafts, crafts, creativity, decor, February-decor, love-decor, love-theme-decor, valentines-day-decor, watercolor-painting-techniques

4-Leaf Clover Art

March 13, 2015 By Laura 1 Comment

After having a nagging urge to paint for a couple of days last month, I finally found some time to sit down with my watercolor supplies, to create something. As usual, I wanted to make something that would have a purpose; as opposed to just painting for the fun of it, and then wondering what to do with it. (I don’t really like this quality in me, by the way. I’d rather be more creatively spontaneous. So I am working on that in another creative process.) As I figured out what to paint, I realized it was almost the month of March, and so almost time to change our home’s February/Love themed double-mantels.

March….the beginning of spring, and St. Patrick’s Day. I don’t think there is a lick of Irish in any of us, but I decided to go with the theme somewhat anyway, and make a piece of art for our March mantels: 4-Leaf Clover Art.

I had a vision in my head. I got my hues of green ready to go in my palette, and then free-handed a 4-leaf clover, on my ~11×14″ watercolor pad.

As part of the art, I wanted to include a phrase [Read more…]

Filed Under: Crafts & Creations, Holiday Crafts Tagged With: 4-leaf-clover-watercolor-painting-art, 4-leaf-clovers, art, blessings, do-you-believe-in-luck?, four-leaf-clovers, luck, luck-of-the-irish, St-Patricks-Day-art, St-Patricks-Day-decor, St-Patricks-Day-decorating, watercolor painting

A Simple Buttons and Love-Themed Craft Project

January 26, 2015 By Laura 1 Comment

I have promised myself that this year, I will spend even more time in the space in which I get so very much enjoyment and fulfillment in; my art studio. And so this past Sunday, that’s just what I did for myself! In anticipating our home mantels decor, for the month of February, I wanted to create something love-themed, in celebration St. Valentine’s Day, of course.  I chose to do a simple buttons craft project. I have a certain kind of love-thing, for buttons!  Do you, too? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Crafts & Creations, Holiday Crafts, Seasonal Crafts and Creations, Tutorial, WINTER Crafts and Creations Tagged With: button-crafts, crafts, heart shaped crafts, heart-crafts, simple-crafts, Valentine-crafts, Valentine's Day Crafts

Vanilla and Wild Orange Sugar Scrub | Free Tags

December 10, 2014 By Laura Leave a Comment

I don’t know about you, but I just love my personal care routines!  It’s a bit of ‘me-time’ that I embrace and look forward to each day.  I choose to take my daily showers before a little reading time and bed every night, and it works out perfect for me. Because by the end of the day, I could not appreciate it and enjoy it any more than I do! I am usually exhausted by that time, both physically and mentally, and maybe even a little chilled to the bone, if I’ve been out and about in the freezing-cold temps that winter offers up around here. So that hot shower, and using my awesome smelling and soothing natural personal-care recipes, feels nothing less than a treat for me!

One of those recipes, is this sugar scrub, I am going to share with you today.  You can learn how easy it is to mix some up for yourself, or as gifts!  And just because I love you all, I also am sharing the tags I designed for the scrub.  We gave tagged jars of this this as Christmas gifts last year, and they were a very big hit!


Now, I call it a recipe, but I don’t really have measurements for you. I just wing it.  But please don’t let that scare you one bit, because:

1. I promise you, you can wing it, too!  And…
2. You can’t even do it wrong!

So if those two bits of info don’t encourage you….I don’t know; you may be hopeless!  And I can’t help you.
But be courageous!  And try making some of this wonderful scrub for yourself, or someone you love.  Because it’s really quite simple.


ALL YOU NEED:

Glass Containers with Sealing Lids (for shower storage)
Raw Sugar
Pure Vanilla Extract
*Grapeseed Oil
(*Or any natural carrier oil such as:
I prefer Grapeseed oil because if it’s benefits to the skin, and it’s rapid absorption rate.)
Wild Orange Essential Oil

WHERE THEY CAN BE PURCHASED:

Raw Sugar –  Supermarket
Pure Vanilla Extract  –  Supermarket
Grapeseed Oil  –  Your local Health Food Store,  Amazon or Rose Mountain Herbs
* Wild Orange Essential Oil –
* If you want Wild Orange essential oil and don’t have anywhere to get it, you can email me at TheRichardHome@aol.com, and I can direct you where to purchase some.



Note: We use our Wild Orange essential oil for all kinds of other things, besides in our scrub. We diffuse it (it’s *amazing* with Peppermint), we add a drop or 2 to our water, maybe to whatever we are baking, in our chocolate cake frosting, in our greek yogurt, in our homemade non-toxic house cleaners, in our air freshener spray, and to make our awesome Wild Orange Lip Balms.  It’s a scent/properties that really lifts your spirits.

So for storing your sugar scrub, you can use any kind of glass containers, depending on the size batch(es) you want to make. But since they will likely be stored in the shower, or taken into the shower anyway, I highly recommend a container that has some kind of lid that seals tight, to keep water out while not in use. Consider: canning jars, jam jars, spice jars, etc.

 

TO MAKE THE SUGAR SCRUB

 TO START:  All you are going to be doing here, is combining and mixing the ingredients.  So work in an adequate sized bowl. You are welcome to mix with your hands, with a large metal spoon, or use the help your Kitchen Aid.  It really doesn’t matter. You just want to mix well as you work.

ADD the RAW SUGAR, in the amount that would fill the container(s) you are filling. A good tip would be to simply fill the container with the raw sugar first, and then dump it into your mixing bowls. Then you’ll have exactly enough!  The benefit of the sugar is for exfoliation, but it also gives a nice scratch for itchy skin.
Option:  If you’d like a sugar that is less course, using regular brown sugar works nicely as well.

SECOND, ADD the GRAPESEED OIL: How much is really an ‘eyeballed’ kind of thing. To help you gauge how much, remember that you want enough in there to see some saturation within the sugar, because the oil definitely holds some of the benefits of the scrub, to the skin.  It’s moisturizing and soothing. Also, adding enough oil will help hold the sugar together more-so, to be able to scoop out and use it effectively, as opposed to loose sugar that is too dry. You just want a wet sugar consistency, to be able to handle with your hands. So those are your guidelines and line of thinking, when figuring out how much oil to add.

NEXT, ADD some PURE VANILLA EXTRACT: Just add a drop here and there over the surface of the sugar/oil mixture in your bowl.  There are no therapeutic benefits to the vanilla except for the scent and nice coloring that results from it.

LAST, ADD DROPS of WILD ORANGE ESSENTIAL OIL:  This is the best part!  Wild Orange Essential Oil does have therapeutic benefits; it reduces stress and anxiety, and yet is uplifting to the mind and body!  Again, add as many drops to acquire the level of scent you are wanting, also determined by the amount of sugar you are working with.

Smell to test!  Does it smell awesome to you? It’s the combination of the vanilla and orange scent, that makes this scrub so amazing to the senses, so add a little more of this or that, and keep mixing, until it seems just right to you!

 Our scrubs worked very well, in this style of jars, because it locks tight.
Want tags like ours?
Here you go!  You can visit our DropBox and download them right from there!
The sheet shown below is only a low resolution sample, for you to see what your sheet of labels will look like.


Also you need to do is cut on the lines to get your individual labels, and use a round circle cutter or punch, to make them into circles. Then we used a wider scalloped punch on some brown paper, to attach and embellish the tag more, using sticky tabs.  Use a paper punch to make a hole for your string. We tied them on with jute string, because I love that organic natural feel to it. But any ribbon or string will do!

It can be a beautiful and thoughtful gift, that someone will love you for! But be sure to make some for yourself. Because no doubt, it will feel like a treat to you, too. And no doubt, you deserve it!
<3


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Filed Under: Crafts & Creations, DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Project, Essential Oils, Free Printable/Downloadable Tagged With: essential-oil-recipes, homemade-gifts, spa-gifts, sugar-scrub, sugar-scrub-recipe, wild-orange-essential-oil-recipes

A Countdown Pillow | Sewing

September 3, 2014 By Laura 6 Comments

There is nothing like using crafts as a coping skill! Sometimes, you need to. And that is just what the 3 littles and I did this summer. My oldest daughter, Alexis Grace, (17)(and the littles’/triplets’ big sister), went away for 2 weeks!! (To a summer Catholic Collegiate program.)  Now, for some, 2 weeks may be no big deal. But for us? HUGE? Remember; for me, my kids are not away all day, most days, at school. My children are all homeschooled. I’m not even remotely used to this. We’re together most all of the time, except for extra-curricular kind of events. On the other hand, it’s not like my oldest has never been away. She has, numerous times. In fact, she’s away on a regular basis. 3-4 days at a time, with no contact, when she goes on retreats with her friends. But 2 weeks…. . And FAR away. Yikes.

It was a good thing. MANY very good things about it, that are now gifts for a lifetime for Alexis Grace. But one being, we all (she and us!) needed this trial run of her being away from home for an extended period of time. Because she’s a senior this year!  Which means she’ll likely be off to college next year!  So, we all had to give this separation-thing a temporary go.

This was the big-first, and well, needless to say, the kids and I…were struggling. I figured about a day in, that it would be fun to come up with a project the kids could make, that we could use to ‘count down’ the days until Alexis came home.  And frankly, I needed a busy-project!  The trio brainstormed, and came up with a few good ideas!  But ultimately they settled on one of them:
a countdown pillow.
Something that would serve it’s purpose for us, but end up being a memorable gift we could give her, when she came home.
And so that’s just what we made.

Now, I am no seamstress. In fact, umm, <gulp!>, I have yet to truly learn how to operate a sewing machine.
However, I do have my mother’s old one. And I do have a husband who knows how to use it!
(See? When I say I have a husband who knows how to do anything, I’m not kidding you!)

But of course, I really wanted the kids and I to do as much as we possibly could ourselves. The point was to have a project that helped occupy us, and kind of break up all of the crying jags! (Just kidding.  It wasn’t quite that bad. ) (Ok, I did have one big long boo-hoo in my husband’s arms, and I felt so much better afterwards).  Anyway, I did figure that creating a pillow slip-cover, would probably be easier than making a whole pillow from scratch.
So I got Googling, and found this easy and very helpful tutorial at the Happy Housie!   So if you need directions yourself, see her, not me. I am showing you brief descriptions and photo steps here, and my own musings to share. But I was following those directions myself.  Trust me.

It was this pillow that I decided to part with. It actually had beads dangling all around the edges, that the trio was happy to snip off before I got the pre-photo.
It was the perfect size for the pillow we wanted to create.
We knew the pillow would be kept in her room, and so we thought making one to be added to her huge, beautiful window seat, would be great.

To fit right in, we wanted to color coordinate with her other pillows there. So we took one to the fabric store with us, and then chose this pattern, ribbon and thread colors. They were perfect for our vision!


The kids and I got the fabric all measured, cut, pinned, and ready to be sewn.

Once the kids and I got the fabric all ready to be sewn, I set up my mother’s old sewing machine as best as I knew how, just in time for Michael to come home for lunch. (How convenient!  “Hi Honey!! Here is your lunch all ready for you!  Um, while you’re chewing, would you mind just sewing right up here, and here, and here…..like zip, zip, zip?  ๐Ÿ˜€  ”
He was happy to lend his domestic hand. We were grateful.

Now really came the tedious time consuming part;  hand sewing on each ribbon, right on each X that marked 12 spots.
See, Alexis was to be away for 14 days, but we weren’t counting the day we dropped her off, or picked her up. (No need to be dramatic, right!?  ๐Ÿ˜‰  )
This task really was a time-consuming pain in the derrie’re!   Because one hand had to be way inside the way-overlapped fabric. There barely room to receive and send a threaded needle in there!  I did prick my finger several times!
I cursed out loud every time. And Michael was like, “You should be using a thimble!”
Yeah, o.k. Mr. Martha!  Or you can!

The kids sewed some on as well. (And I chalked it up to things made with love rather than perfection, mean more.)
We were 3 days in before we got them all sewn on.

This is what the envelope-like opening on the back of the case looks like. It was a tight fit!  And it was not easy stuffing the pillow in there. I broke a sweat. I really made it to-size.

So we kept the pillow in an easy-access area, the sunroom, and we took turns as every morning, one of us tied a bow.
And we were one day closer to going and getting our girl!



It really did look perfect, on her window seat, all matchy-matchy with the others.

12 bows – 12 whole days.
We did it!  Is any one proud of us, besides us?
(I know. We’re pathetic. But we don’t much care.)


Alexis Grace really loved her gift. She felt loved, and thought of, and surprised!
And the truth is, she was happy to be home, too. If only for another little while.
Gosh, we’re going to miss having her around, most all of the time, next year.
But she’s got things to do int his world.
When she goes, I may have to cry in her pillow.
Unless, of course, she takes it with her.



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Filed Under: Crafts & Creations, DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Project, Faith/ Catholic, Sewing, Tutorial Tagged With: countdown-pillow-sewing-project, crafts, pillow-ideas, pillows, sewing, slip-cover-for-pillow

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