Bushel and Peck

For Christmas, my family is doing a "Secret Santa". We have never done it before, but now that (almost) all the cousins are married, we're trying something new. We thought about a theme, but ended up just going with whatev - so we'll see how this goes. :) Anyway, I decided to make a canvas (of course) of a song my Grammy used to sing to all of us kids when we were little. Now I just hope they don't somehow come across my blog in the next day haha. 

Merry Christmas!

We miss you Grammy!

1D

Here is a very simple One Direction canvas I painted for one of my girls that had a Birthday this weekend. She is in LOVE with them and wanted a canvas to join the rest of her poster wall. I couldn't turn her down! Surprisingly, for the perfectionist that I am, this didn't take me very long at all. It's an 11x14 canvas, and I used a thin red paint pen and a medium tip black paint pen. Took about 20 minutes! (This normally would have taken me about 45 minutes because something always goes wrong.) Maybe I'm just getting better. :)

Happy 15th Birthday, Natalie!

Patterns

This past weekend was wonderful. My mom came in to spend some time with me and do a little Christmas shopping. We spent the most time in Hobby Lobby (of course) wandering around getting idea after idea. I get my creativity from her. Although she loves fabric and sewing and I love paper and painting, we meet in the somewhere in the middle. Together we will think of some spiffy stuff.  :)

Anyway, I got to work on a project I have been putting off. I had bought some cardboard letters that spell "HOGS" a while back at HobLob but I never did anything to them. They were meant for a wreath, but they were too heavy to glue to decomesh. So they sat in my Papasun chair for a while. I finally thought of another idea and finally found the time to work on it.

First, I painted the letters white. Then I picked a print for each one. The H is chevron, O is houndstooth, G is argyle-ish, and the S is just vertical stripes. As I do on canvases, I drew everything out with a pencil. Once I stenciled every pattern on I went to town with a thin black paint pen. Now, the patterns were super easy - except for houndstooth. I looked up the pattern online, and imagined the process in my head. I'm not going to lie, it took me about 3 hours and a lot of double-checking. But once I figured it out and got the hang of it it was pretty easy. I will put a tutorial up later. After the patterns, I colored the sides of the letters black. Once they were done, I painted my canvas in a Razorback red and painted the edges black as well. Then I stuck the letters to the canvas!

 

This one was super fun to make!

Winter Thoughts

Soooo since I'm a teacher, I needed to come up with a "winter bulletin board" theme/saying. I've Googled and Googled and spent hours searching Pinterest and blogs. All I was seeing was "It's 'snow' secret..." or "There's 'snow' way...", which are all cute and fun. But I needed something a little, let's say, older, since I am a secondary teacher.  Anyway, after hours of looking, I gave up. Then one day (not even remotely thinking about my bulletin board) I came across a list of Christmas card ideas when - BOOM - I saw "Ice Ice Baby." I instantly sang the song and thought of a layout for it. I knew I would somehow use it as my winter saying. Yes, it is very cheesy, but it reflects a little more of my own personality...

Just start a singin'.

Now, here I went again with the canvases. I just used my paint pen and went to town. When I do these, I go to a font site first (usually dafont.com) and I search for a font that I like. Once I find one, I type in my words, draw on my canvas with a pencil, then go over with the pen. Fortunately, (and I have no idea how) I was blessed with a very steady hand. When it comes to tracing a straight line, it's not a problem. Wish everything was that easy for me (ha). Oh, and the snowflakes were another Dollar Tree purchase. :)