gutter garden

This old piece of rain gutter makes an easy and inexpensive planter

 It's nice to have strawberries, lettuce, herbs and peapods right outside my front door.

Curbside Trash to Garden Box and Trellis

Here's how the assembly and painting looked like when it was finished. All that's left now is to install it. Now I'll walk you through the steps that got me to this point.

#1. I always start by looking around to see what I need and what I've got to fill that need with. This time of year my mind is always on the garden so I decided that I needed a trellis. These leaves were part of some broken wall art given to me by a friend who was cleaning her storage space out.

We built this planter several years ago from scrap lumber and salvaged siding. 

Here's a couple of old garden cages and the seat support from an old recliner.

A bit of spray paint and some pieces of an old sculpture should help with it's looks.

 I already consider this a vast improvement and am considering taking things a step further by adding some color to the leaves and flowers.

I wired the leaves, flowers and vines to the base piece before painting it.

Of course there was left over paint to use and as you can see I had a bit of fun with that too.

What I really liked about the whole thing is  the view. I can sit back and enjoy looking at my work from the living room no matter what the weather.

Yes, I'll continue adding flowers to the rails whenever I've got an extra bit of paint handy. It gets a bit more interesting all of the time.

Super Easy Wheelchair Tote Bag

If you don't want to make a bag you can modify any tote you've got by simply moving the handles from the middle of the bag to the corners and reattaching them by any method that works for you.

Here's a bag that I sewed from fabric scraps, buttons and a small piece of webbing:

There's only one number to remember: 12 inches. It's the finished dimension of the bag (both height and width) and it's the length of the straps before they're folded in half and attached to the corners of the bag.

This bag is different on each side because I was using up all of the scraps of fabric that I had sitting around the house.

I'll probably add more buttons, beads and embroidery as I come across odds and ends around the house so it gets a bit more interesting all of the time.

Projects, ideas and patterns

I printed photos of some of my butterflies and have taken them to my scrap paper to make lots of fun stationery and cards and have already been asked to paint some more butterfly garden stakes so that will bring even more design ideas.

I'm just finishing the granny square afghan that I'm crocheting for the Veterans home and deciding what I'll be crocheting for people next.

There are more Dala horses in progress because I'll be teaching a class on painting them next week.

As if these were not enough projects for a day I also spent quite a while this morning decorating letters with watercolors and collage from clippings out of the "junk mail" everything turns into something useful here...even me!

The point of this letter paper is that my friends and I are trying to decide how we can have my artwork on shirts like this. What companies do it? Should I look for work as a fabric or clothing designer? I love letters! We write and write and try to solve all the worlds problems and sometimes just our own. We continue to dream of the day when we open a catalog and there I am.

Saving money on centerpieces

Remember that almost anything can be used as a container for artificial flowers. Don't just shop in the usual places. Check in the office supplies or kitchen sections of the stores as well. The containers I'm using here were organizers in a bundle of four for a dollar. They were an assortment with yellow, green, red and blue. I'll be using the red and the blue ones this summer and the other colors this fall.

I used some odd bits of leftover ribbon. with this type of bow it doesn't matter whether all of the ribbons are the same width or not so it's a great opportunity to use up your scraps.

 The total cost of these were under five dollars each and they'll be good for years of use.

More heart designs

I clipped these from a photo of a painting that I did last year. I'm looking forward to exploring new ways to use and improve them while using them as part of other projects. I  love it that old work becomes part of new projects. Everything just keeps growing and changing...including me!

Wildflower Revival

While cleaning the studio I came across these scraps of pink papers and some stickers and couldn't resist taking some time to combine them and turn them into a card.

It's nice to see last summer's drawing find new life and keep brightening up my mail.

Running with scissors, inspiration is EVERYWHERE

I tried to get some photos of the squirrels chasing each other around the front yard and the few birds that were at the feeders outside my window this morning but I didn't have any luck so I returned to the worktable where I "found" scissors, tape and a couple of photos of different crazy quilt Christmas stockings that I had made years ago. I know you can make a collage on the computer but it was a lot more fun to cut them up and combine them into one image by hand.

I'm listening to a bit of music and deciding where to start next. Living in such a small space means that EVERYTHING is handy and inspiration is EVERYWHERE which as you can imagine is both good and bad but always fun.

Recycling fun with and for my friends

Everyone knows how much I love my mail (both creating it and receiving it) so today's project will be something that we all enjoy.

Thank you's go out to Margaret for the great desk calendar. I was enjoying it so much that I just couldn't bear to toss the pages when I'd finished with them so I'm recycling them into note cards with the help of blank cards, card stock and envelopes given to me by Colleen and scrap booking paper scraps given to me by Mary and Sharon.

Thanks everyone! This will be a project that will make people happy at the mailbox all year long. With all the bad news we're getting these days it will be nice to have a little fun to go with it.

I plan to make some cute stickers with some of my drawings and paintings on them to make the envelopes bright and interesting too...or I may just grab my colored pencils (Thanks to Irene and Esther and Colleen) for some of those) and just draw directly on the envelopes. Either way they always make the mail carriers and the people getting the letters smile.

Scrap Crafted Cards

Believe it or not this is (or was) my living room. I just tell people "the creeping craft monster ate my house" and we all have a good laugh.

I'm making progress through that scrap pile and several of these will be going out in today's mail so that makes everyone happy...except of course my husband who is always tripping over my trails of paper bits and misc. craft supplies strung around the house.

Cat Drawing

Creating a new drawing from some of my favorite things.

Mornings in the garden

I like to go to the garden first thing in the morning when you can hear birds instead of the traffic in the city.
I toss on an old denim dress, grab my coffee and out I go.
Today I was still feeling a bit sulky about not being able to afford all of the plants I see people walking out of the garden centers with (when I 'm just there for a bag of good soil) and then I got over it, grabbed a trowel and wandered around the yard gathering wild violets and filling a basket planter with those.( It's a 3 tier wire stand that I rescued on the way to the dump and found liners for at WalMart)
I also moved a few things around like dragging that stand down next to the arbor and pulling another table up from the back yard.
Ever hopeful I even moved one of the really large planters up by the house that  I want to fill with a tomato surrounded by a ring of marigolds and one of lettuce.

I just finished another patchwork bag!

 I like the first side a lot better but was too tired of cutting and piecing to do the same on the back (as well as being out of most of the other fabrics)

I'm using this one for a set of art books,workbooks and sketchbooks that I've been working with.

I like this view of the bag best and as you can see it's really big and strong so it should handle the weight of the books fine. The nice thing about this photo is that it shows you the boxes that I wrote about earlier.

Past and present projects

 I just finished embroidering the edges on another of the scrap felt cat.

This is an enlargement of a photo of one of my toys when I was 9 months old. I guess it explains my fondness for dala horses...I've been thinking of them for a really long time.

Scrap Felt Project