new shop item & a project

  I listed these in my shop! Sooo cute with jeans and a tee!

they make a great gift too!

I've been playing with a new project using this stuff....

care to guess what I'm doing with it?

fun new linky party!

One of the coolest blogs I follow is trying out a new linky party! Remodelaholic is allowing those of us with Etsy shops to post a link to our shops for free! This is REALLY helpful to gain more exposure and free publicity! Plus, it's a great way to find other shops that you may not have known existed. So if you have a shop, get on over there and list it! Grab one of these cute buttons too!

vintage spoons tea-towel

I just listed my new vintage spoons tea-towel in my Etsy shop!

I just love the vintage image of the spoons! So cute for the kitchen!

the French Psalm pillow...

is now added to my shop and I've already sold one and shipped it off to it's new home today! I can do a different verse or saying. I love how the words look old, like an old French feedsack cloth that's been around forever.

peonie love

My first few blooms of the season....

needed a special place to go. So here's a little project I did today and I wish I'd taken a before. I got this adorable bucket at the thrift store a long time ago for like $2 on half-price day. It was a gross, ugly black but I knew I could give it some love and find somewhere to put it. I primed it well with metal primer and tried out the cheaper spray paint they sell at Wal-mart. It's a minty-greeney-blue color and for this project it worked great! After the paint dried I antiqued it and sanded it in a few small spots.

I tore a little strip of muslin to fray the edges and stamped it with a writing/script stamp all along in it then a little birdie stamp at the end and tied it on for a cute touch.

to put the peonies in I stuck in a ziploc bag which sprung a leak, I'm assuming from the rocks I put in the bucket to keep it from blowing around so much in this Oklahoma wind. Plan B was an old plastic gas station cup that I squished in but it showed through the cut-outs so then I put a small square of burlap along the inside to keep it from showing. Sounds kind of like "If you give a mouse a cookie...."!

The plus side of the wind combined with the oh-so-lovely smell of my peonies, means that every time I walk through my front door, I get a little whiff of heaven.

                                                                     I'm linking up to...

I'm joining in..

I'm joining in the Marketing Mondays over at the Trendy Treehouse! Every Monday it's a FREE way to promote your blog, shop, etc. and get to find out about other sites! That's so nice of her to do this!

I've been featured on Tip Junkie!

Wow! I'm so honored to have my dress tutorial featured on Tip Junkie (if you're not familiar with this site, you must go check it out NOW)! And especially with all the other amazing projects featured! That just made my day! 

Etsy shop finally up & running!

Ugh! I am such a blogging loser! I've just been super busy trying to get my Etsy shop up and running (along with homeschooling my girls, laundry, yada yada) but I finally have a couple things listed and am working on more. Here are the items I have listed so far!

and here are some I'm planning to list soon...

faux grain sack pillow with French Psalm (I plan to do custom ones with the verse of your choice)

calling cards

I was featured...

Wow! What an honor to have my book page wreath featured here!

Go check out this blog...she has a bunch of super cute ideas and I love it!

male chauvinist book trashing~a wreath tutorial

I've seen all of these book page wreaths and I absolutely adore them so I decided to make my own Ginnie-fied version and share a tutorial so you can make your own. Honestly, it was a bit more work than I thought it would be....

You'll need:
a wreath form (mine was about 15 inches across at the widest point)
an old book (mine was over an inch thick and I used all the pages)
some patterned scrapbook paper and/or vintage images (check out The Graphics Fairy)
a hot glue gun and lots of glue sticks
burlap (about 4 yards of 4inch wide strips)
ribbon or seam binding(which is what I used, not sure how much)
Tim Holtz Distress Ink

First, you'll take your wreath and if it's like mine and you bought it for $1 at the thrift store (I seriously cannot believe anyone would think this was pretty! UGH!), you'll take all of the ugly junk off...

{click pictures to enlarge}

until it looks like this~

Next, you'll cut your burlap into 3-4inch strips (they don't have to be perfect or measured)

Using your glue gun, glue down the beginning end and start wrapping, overlapping as you go...

Overlap your strips and every so often put a little glue to keep it from sliding around. If your strip isn't long enough, just glue down another and start wrapping some more. This is not really going to show much.
Now you should have a wreath that looks like this...

Then you'll take your old school male chauvinist pig book...

and tear the crap out of it. It doesn't matter if they look "torn" when you tear them out (mine came out in neat sections), you can do that as you go...

When you start to make a roll for a bundle, take your Distress ink and 2 book pages or a book page and a piece of copied scrapbook paper (it's more pliable) or vintage image.

rub your stamp along the torn edges or you can use the neat page edges to age the paper

take your 2 pages and run a small line of hot glue (glue stick took too long to dry) along the top edge and stick them together. They don't have to be perfectly lined up and I actually prefer them to be uneven. It adds character :) Start rolling the paper into a loose roll.

When the paper is almost rolled up, run a line of glue so that the roll stays rolled up.

What you will have is this...

Again, take your ink pad and rub it on the end of the roll. You'll do this about 100 times!

Next, you'll begin combining random rolls together and tying them with your ribbon or seam binding. To make the best parts of the rolls show, I added a little glue to what would be the bottom side of the bundle.I made bundles of various numbers. I wrapped the seam binding around 2 or 3 times...

Begin gluing your bundles onto your wreath. If I did it again, I would probably glue single rolls around the whole wreath so there would be no gaps, then glue the bigger bundles on top. I wound up having to squish them in on the ends that were toward the center.

I wound up with spaces like this...

so I made some single rolls and cut them until they were the right length to fill in the space

and glued them into the space...

Keep making bundles and filling in the spaces....

until you have this! I love it's imperfect beauty~

you can see pieces of vintage ledger paper, french notes and labels...

I tried to give it an overall unifying neutral palette~

I love how the seam binding crinkles the more it's handled...

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and if you make one, I'd love to see pictures!

Edited: I'm linking this project up here!