Pom Pom Flowers

It is no secret that I am obsessed with pom poms poof balls. I usually make mine out of tissue paper, but I decided to create some out of yarn to give them a different feel and texture. I love the yarn because it takes the paper poof and turns it into more than just a party decoration. You can truly use this flower poof as decor in your home and not feel like you have tacky fake flowers in your house. I have really struggled with this in the past, because I love the look of flowers in the home, but hate the price tag that goes with maintaining them weekly. I rarely have plants, because I pretty much kill anything that does not meow to remind me to feed it. I used to do fake flowers from time to time (don’t hate), but I feel like fake flowers suck the energy out of a room, where as real flowers add energy. The yarn poof balls are a happy compromise for the domestic goddess with a glitter thumb rather than a green thumb. 

Supplies

• Yarn
• Scissors
• Hot glue gun
• Wrapped floral wire

Directions

Step 1. Wrap the yarn around your fingers. Use 2 fingers with 75 wraps for a small poof, 3 fingers with 100 wraps for a medium poof, and 4 fingers with 150 wraps for a large poof. Be sure to not wrap too tightly!

Step 2. Carefully slip the yarn off your fingers and tie a piece of yarn (about 6 inches long) around the center of the wrap so it makes a figure 8. Secure the tie as tight as possible.

Step 3. Cut the yarn loops all the way around, creating a shaggy poof. Then trim your poof until the desired look is achieved. 

Step 4. Decide where you want the bottom to be and place a small dab of hot glue deep in the center of your poof, stick in your stem and allow to dry. Trim any remaining uneven areas, and then stick your flower in a vase and call it a day.

Notes: I would recommend using wrapped floral wire. I only had regular floral wire and it was a tad flimsy for my medium poofs. You could also get creative with the stems and use other materials, such as pipe cleaners or even real tree branches.

DIY Outdoor Dining Table

The hubs and I spent the last month putting together a beautiful outdoor dining table for our deck. Isn’t it pretty? It took us about a month, because we mainly worked on weekends with a few weeknights sprinkled in here and there, but is also turned out to be a little more labor intensive than we thought. Cutting some boards and screwing them together always seems like an easy enough process… Skip ahead 4 hours when you only have half a bench done and you realize, ‘Hmm maybe that $799 outdoor furniture at Patio World is totally worth it.’ We ended up spending about $180 on our little labor of love ($130 lumber, $30 stain, $20 screws), which is not too bad when you leave out the cost of the crappy miter saw that died on us.

It’s official, our brand new miter saw the hubs got for his birthday is broken. The blade brake totally stopped working, so after you make your cut it just spins and spins. More annoying than anything else, but I am sure it is dangerous as well. It is too late to return it to Home Depot (you only have 90 days). Since it is under a year old, you can apparently take it to some Rigid service center here in town and they will fix it for free. The only thing that sucks about that, is they are only open 9-5 on the weekday, which means the wifey (me) has to take the hubs’ big heavy miter saw and try to explain what is wrong with it. This probably is not going to go very well.

On a positive note, we were pretty much done with all of our cuts for our table and benches before the brake went caput. After all the cuts were made, we decided to stain our wood individually, since we were using untreated “mixed” wood. We wanted to make sure we were able to cover ever inch of wood, so it would weather well outside. I learned a lot about staining with this project, but mostly that I don’t enjoy it. Staining each individual piece was such a pain in the butt. I am a perfectionist about certain things, which usually gets in my way more than it helps me (I am working on how to use it to my advantage), so when the stain drips on the edges or rubs on the bottom it drives me crazy. It is totally impossible to stain an entire piece of wood at one time, but it is even more impossible to stain a 2×4 without it getting on the edges. In retrospect, I would have loved to be able to put the table together and stain it as one piece of furniture. Staining furniture is wayyyyy easier than staining individual pieces of wood. On the other hand, I have never stained a piece of furniture, but I would imagine my last statement to be true. I will get back to you on that one.

We got the plans for our table from the Ana White Homemaker website. (That is her beautiful table pictured above.) Ana White is a wife/mother/homemaker living in Alaska, who loves building and sharing her creations with the world. Her site is pretty awesome, you should check it out. Anyway, I stumbled on her site when we were looking for woodworking plans for around the house, and the cost of her plans were right up my alley. They were $FREE! We decided on her Simple Outdoor Dining Table, wrote down the cut list and we headed to Home Depot to buy some lumber. We made a couple of mistakes along the way, but we learned from them and now I am here to share our trials, tribulations and successes with you. For the complete plans click on the links above and they will take you to Ana White’s site. She has tons of great ideas that will totally inspire you to pick up a hammer.

Simple Tips:

Tip 1. First off, spend the money and get some good wood. We ended up buying “mixed” wood, which was cheaper, but still looked pretty. It worked ok, except it’s more delicate than real wood and had a tendency to split if we weren’t careful. It also warped when we stained it, but it is my understanding that all wood moves and warps with stain, time and weathering. We will see how this table does overtime, especially with winter just around the corner. Hopefully our Ikea grade wood table will hold up ok.

Tip 2. Sand  the wood splinters off the edge of your wood before you stain. This will help the table look more finished and those pesky slivers won’t end up getting in the way during the staining process. You will notice I was too lazy to sand my pieces prior to staining and those areas soaked up the stain more than the rest of the wood, making it look uneven. Laziness and perfectionism are not a good combo. Rah!

Tip 3. To stain your table, I recommend using a sponge roller… I repeat, use a sponge roller! I started with a paint brush and it was a disaster. It is very hard to control the amount and the movement of the stain with a brush and it ends up being a big ol’ mess. After the paint brush I tried the rag method, but I think that works better when staining an entire piece of furniture, not a flimsy piece of mixed wood lying on top of a tarp. The hubby suggested a roller twice apparently, but I only heard him after I suggested it and he agreed. However we got to the idea, the important part is we got to it and it worked. The sponge roller puts on an even coat and eliminates brush stroke marks. In my opinion, it is the way to go, but like I said I am a staining amateur and I am sure there are better ways to do everything I did. If you have any tips, please share in the comments below. I am always open to learning new ideas. However you do it, be sure to evenly apply your stain from head to toe. Never start or end in the middle of the wood.

Tip 4. When putting the table together getting the correct spacing is very important. No matter how many skew ups you make along the way, if the boards are evenly spaced, nobody will ever notice. To ensure even spaces we purchased tile spacers at Home Depot. They come in many different widths and luckily they had 1/2 inch and 1/4 inch. They worked perfectly and now we are prepared if we ever have to tile a bathroom. (I love how the spacers make it look like a mini graveyard. Morbid, yet kinda cute.)

Tip 5. Have fun and enjoy spending time with the person you are working with. My favorite thing about these projects is that we do them together. Sure there are times when only one of us is working, like while he is at work and I am out in the 90 degree Houston weather staining 50 boards at a time under the hot Texas sun cursing my Hubby’s name, or when I am too annoyed with the mosquitos biting my legs, arms, neck and face that I leave him in the garage to build by himself. ( Iswear I think bug spray attracts mosquitos.) Those times definitely exist, and there are moments where you think, ‘What the F are we doing?’ But at the end of the day, or in this case month, you can say, “We built this together.” I love that.

Notes: If you screw up, don’t give up. Just keep moving forward! Make the adjustments you need to make the table work for you. The slight alterations in the end will make the table unique and special just like you! If you fo’t have a kreg jig and have to screw in from the top, it is not big deal. Just buy some wood filler and cover up your nails. Nobody will ever know. We actually ended up doing both, but I have yet to fill in the holes.

Ikea Stool Makeover

I have tons of furniture makeover projects piling up around the house, so I figured it was time to start one of them to get the ball rolling. I started with a very small project, mainly to see if I liked the design. I’m sort of testing it out for a bigger project I have been mulling over for a while now. Since everything went well, and I really like the finished results, I think it is a go ahead. For this particular project, I took a basic Ikea stool and transformed turned it into a much more attractive Ikea stool. Like I said, we are talking basic stuff here… A little paint, a little Modge Podge and craft paper, and voilà! Now onto bigger and better things. I see a matching filing cabinet and a fabulous desk in my future.

DIY Toilet Paper Roll Wall Flower

Living in Singapore has been fabulous, but it has put a little damper on my creative side. Not having all my wonderful craft tools readily available at my finger tips has been giving me anxiety, but finally I found a project that is simple enough for me to do while overseas without having to spend $$$ on tons of new $upplies. I am serious when I say this project is LOW BUDGET, but it does take a little time collecting the necessary supplies.

Recycled Wood Pallet Table

Yay! The Hubby and I did our first of many DIY projects for the new house over New Years Weekend. I have been doing many different DIY crafts for a while now, but this is the first time I ever made DIY furniture. From my perspective it was super easy, but I also had a man with some tools helping me out. My job was to:

1. Get the pallet
2. Sand the pallet

Easy enough. The Hubby cut the wood and connected the legs. Thanks to my Grammy, we got a new miter saw for Christmas. So this job was pretty easy peasy for everyone involved. Here’s the play-by-play.

Supplies

• Wood pallet
• 8 foot 4×4
• Sandpaper (I used 60 grit)
• Miter saw
• Jig saw
• Drill and screws

Directions

Step 1. Sand the wood pallet. Don’t sand too much, you don’t want to lose the weathered look of the wood. Sand just enough to get rid of any potential slivers.

Step 2. Cut the legs. We used one 8 foot 4×4 and cut it into 17-inch pieces. Thanks for the miter saw Grammy! Can’t wait to do more projects!!!

Step 3. Cut holes for legs. We decided to use our jig saw (wedding gift also from Grammy) to cut holes for the legs. This would make connecting to the wood pallet easier and more stable than using brackets. We also thought it would give the table a nice finished look.

Step 4. Connect Legs. Try to make them as even and level as possible. Obviously, you are working with both old and new wood so it is pretty impossible to make it 100% level, but it is supposed to be a table made out of reused wood so it definitely does not have to be perfect.

Step 5. Age the 4×4. As you can tell the 4×4 legs have a beautiful green hue to them that does not really match the wood on the pallet. The Hubby doesn’t mind, but I can’t live with it like that. So, I will be distressing the wood to make it match the weathered pallet. After I do some research I will post a How-To and some updated pictures of the finished finished product.

Notes: If you look closely, you can see a couple of the projects that are next on our DIY To-Do-List. Get excited, because I am!