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I’m Not Afraid Of Yarn Anymore

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I’m always a little behind when it comes to {trendy crafts}. I love looking at what everyone’s doing and learning what craftiness is all the rage, but I immediately think that it’s too hard and will take too much time, blah, blah, blah.

Yarn wrapped frames, letters, bottles, wreaths, you name it are all over the blogosphere. I used to think yarn had no place in my life since I have ZERO interest in knitting ~ just not my thing.

This past weekend I learned from my craftabulous friend, Richelle, just how EASY it is to wrap a cheap, ugly oak frame from a garage sale and transform it in about an hour to this…

…how cute is that?

Just hot glue the end of your yarn to the back of the frame and wrap, push together and tighten the yarn around the frame. The corners are a bit tricky…I went all they way around the frame, skipping the corners, and then came back to tackle them separately. Once you have covered the whole frame {like I said, takes 30-40 minutes ~ but I am kind of a perfectionist when it comes to things like this}, cut and glue the end of the yarn to the back of the frame. Then, put a dab of yarn next to the corners and wrap away. You need to put glue along the edges of the corners to get the yarn to stick, but there is no rhyme or reason to this…just wrap away until the frame is covered, cut and glue down on the back of the frame. Do this process on all four corners and you’ll be all done and ready to find a spot on your wall or a home on your mantel!

I just framed the kids’ initials outside their bedroom doors and I love the way they turned out!

Definitely adds some pizazz to our whiter than white walls, wouldn’t you say?

You can also take fabric and cut or rip into strips and use that to cover your frames. This technique would be muuuuuch quicker depending on the width of your strips! I plan to cover a few with some fun fabric and will let you know how those turn out, too! Can’t wait….

Hammer Time!

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I’ve been wanting to do some sort of photo gallery in our stairwell. Something to “cover up” the white walls…..they’re killin’ me! I don’t like white walls, but since we’re renting, there really isn’t much I can do….I guess I could get the OK to paint from the property management peeps, but since I also don’t love to paint, I will just live with the white walls while we’re here and try to spice them up a little. I haven’t wanted to hang too much, but since I don’t know how long we’ll be here, I wanted to make the place as homey as possible.

So, I was at my second home last week (hint: red bulls eye) and came across a set of 10 black frames in differing sizes for $6.24! (marked down from $24.99!!) They even included some layout suggestions on the box. The frames are lightweight which is great so I was able to use tiny nails and didn’t have to drive big nails into the wall. Yesterday I grabbed a hammer, some nails and a measuring tape and went to town.

But the frames themselves were a little TOO simple ~ I needed something else to liven them up a bit…

At Michael’s I found some black letters with little hooks on the back for $1.00 each. I had a coupon for 20% off so they came to 80 cents each! So, for an add’l $3.20, I was able to complete my gallery and be pretty pleased. For a total of $9.44 (not including tax or the cost of the photos) I created this:

I’m pretty impressed.

Now, I am SUPER DUPER anal about picture hanging. Must. Use. Level. It was hard for me to kind of “eyeball” this project. What I did was get a large piece of paper from Elliott’s easel, layout the frames in the order I wanted them, traced the frames, hung the paper on the wall with tape, hammered the nails into the wall through the paper and then removed the paper before hanging the pics. This worked pretty well.

I am constantly going to be on the lookout for crooked frames here since that is another one of my pet peeves! But all in all, I think it turned out OK for a temporary fix! Now I just need to find four more of my favorite pics to complete the gallery…shouldn’t be too hard.

First “crafty” project of the year….cheap & successful. Can’t beat that!