Stenciled Welcome Pillow

Hi there lovelies!

Today let’s make a Stenciled Welcome Throw Pillow!

My living room is decorated in a western theme, mostly browns and tans.
I thought a team roping throw pillow would be fun, and it was, but the space was screaming for some more COLOR! Turquoise in fact. :)
{Remember talking about this here…?}

fabric painted throw pillows, western home decor

Materials needed:
Envelope pillow cover – I use this tutorial for all the pillow covers I sew.
Fabric paint or craft paint (the team roper pillow was done with craft paint!)
Stencil – I designed the Welcome and the cowboy boot (purchased through the Silhouette store) on my Silhouette software then cut it out with my Silhouette in vinyl to make my stencil.
Paint Brush

making a stenciled throw pillow

I sew the envelope pillow cover to make the face of the pillow, but stop before sewing up the sides.
This makes it WAY easier to stencil and paint!

Peel and layout your stencil on the face of the pillow.

stenciling a throw pillow

Then fill the stencil in with the fabric/craft paint, very carefully, with the paint brush!
I leave mine to dry at least overnight before sewing up the sides of the envelope pillow cover.

western home decor

Viola! Your very own stenciled throw pillow!
I could make these all day! So fun! :)

stenciled throw pillow

Adds a nice pop of color to my otherwise fairly plain living area, don’t you think??

country home decor

Thanks for crafting with me today lovelies!

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P.S. Hope you enjoyed this post! If so, we’d love if !

Bottle Cap Magnets

Hello pretty friends! Today I’d love to show you a FUN and EASY craft project!!!

Bottle Cap Magnets

 

Supplies Needed:

Mod Podge Dimensional Magic
Bottle Caps
(I got mine in a deal from Pick Your Plum, but you could just as easily save them from bottled drinks, or get them at pretty much any craft store.)
Small Magnets
Fun shaped brads or other trinkets like beads, charms, small toys, etc.
(I got each of my fun brads from .)
Heavy duty glue. I used E-6000.

You’ll want to use just a dab of the glue to adhere a magnet to the back of each bottle cap. Too much glue makes for a gloppy mess on the back. If you’re using the E-6000 just a dab is all it takes.

Next you’ll want to arrange your trinkets in the front (pocket side) of your bottle caps and fill with the Dimensional Magic. If you’re using brads as opposed to other little trinkets or beads, you can bend the backs down all the way for a sunken look when putting them in the magnet or you can bend them just a little for a more dimensional look.

I also found that using a dab of the E-6000 glue held the brads in place until the Dimensional Magic could dry and harden. I used toothpicks to move them around into the placing I wanted as well.

Tip: When making or working with magnets, a large cookie sheet covered in newspaper makes a great work surface!
It holds your magnets in place as you’re working!

Make sure you give the Dimensional Magic enough time to fully harden! If you move them before they’re ready bubbles can form in the surface where they’ve shifted!

And viola! Bottle cap magnets to pretty up your fridge!

Please don’t pay attention to my spotty looking fridge… The new ‘fake’ stainless steel is so hard to keep clean!
Am I right!?! If you have tips for that, I’d love to hear… :)

Happy crafting lovelies!!! 

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P.S. We’d love if ! Thanks new friend!!

Living Room Wrap Up

Did you miss the first two posts on my living room makeover? Here I talked about the before and after and here I talked about those really long curtains! Today let’s talk about everything else I missed, huh… 😉

This room has been (and will probably continue to be) a LONG work in progress!
A few of the little things I’ve done over the last few months to update the space include…

I made that stenciled throw pillow you see there on the long couch. You can find the tutorial for making a stenciled pillow here.
I plan to make at least several more of those… 😉
Here’s the tutorial from when my dad helped me make Nate those on the wall that hold his buckles and keepsakes…
If you were to look where that brown arrow is pointing in the photo above you’d see this area…

The doors here lead to the guest bedroom, the office/craft room and the guest bathroom.  The latter two are upcoming rooms to be tackled. :)

The barnwood frame on the wall was a Christmas gift for Nate from his step-mom. Those are photos of his mom, my mother in law. I talked about her here. It was/is such a thoughtful, meaningful gift. I literally cried all afternoon after she showed it to me.

 On the left side of that top picture is this little nook. We received this fun Family Home Evening sign as a wedding gift from my Aunt. I think it’s so neat and wouldn’t be all that hard to replicate! Those are horseshoe nails to hold each name. I need to make little name tags to hang there!

You’ll remember the saddle rack shown below from this post. I took a really old, beat down saddle stand and fixed it up, then stained it. Really like how the dark stain makes the lighter saddle pop!

The drawing on that wall was a wedding gift from my SIL’s mother, Edna Harper. She is a VERY talented western artist. She makes the most beautiful western jewelry too!

That green wall you can see through the door on the left is in the kitchen. It was the bane of my existence, only second to the when we first moved into our house.  But now it’s sort of grown on me. My kitchen is apple themed and it just sort of fits… 😉

And finally our mantel! This is my rustic/western/love my hubs mantel. :)
The painting was a wedding gift from our dear friend, Suzi Ley. You can see more of her western/country/wildlife art at her website, Three Hearts Art.

The clock in the center is a western clock that Nate gave me for Christmas.
The cowboy and cowgirl to the left of the clock was our wedding cake topper.
I wrote about the canvas (one of our engagement pictures) here.

So that’s it our rustic/western/comfy living area! :)

Hope you enjoyed this three post series on my living room makeover!
If you have any questions on how I made anything you see here, or where something came from, I’d love to answer those for you!!! Also, if you have a favorite western/rustic/home decor site, I’d love the link!!!!

Please, if you like what you see, we would love for you to !
There’s lots more home decor posts for the future!

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Living Room Curtains

As promised I’m back today with info on the curtains from our !

Those are some LONG curtains peeps. 120 inchers to be exact! Before purchasing my curtains I researched like crazy!
Yeah, we all know that means I pretty much just searched for long curtains on Pinterest… but whatevs… 😉
It also included combing through every website I could think of for exactly what I wanted at exactly the price I was willing to pay!

Enter CurtainWorks.com!
{By the way, this is NOT a sponsored post… It’s just a site I liked and thought I’d share!}
I had seen mention of it first on this post from Decor Chick
Thank you Pinterest!

Source: decorchick.com via on

 

Don’t you think her style of windows looks a little something similar to mine? Sort of.

Anyway, Curtain Works has all kinds of long curtains! There’s even separate pages depending on the length you need!

I ended up choosing these sailcloth, grommet topped curtains. They came in both the 120 inches that I needed for the taller windows and the 84 inches for the sitting room windows.

Word to the wise… this website was the best deal for what I wanted. Long, dark brown, affordable curtains. BUT. They had other options that I liked but were sold out and NOT coming back. I emailed to ask. For real. SO, if you see something there that you like, get it.
Or it will be gone with no return!

As far as the curtains themselves, I’m quite happy with my purchase. They’re just heavy enough to block out the light from the top windows, and long and dark enough to add some drama to the rooms.
And come on… ANYTHING beats the before… 😉

Yes, those ARE pillows. Don’t judge…. hahaha!

I got the extra long, extra sturdy curtains rods from non other than… Wal-Mart Online! I had them shipped to my store, so shipping was free, and they worked out perfectly!

The only negative with our living room curtains? I ironed and ironed those puppies late into the night that I put them up…
(FYI, I put them up by myself! So you can too! Hubs was out of town.)
I washed and ran them through the dryer…
I tried the wrinkle release spray and it seemed to help a tiny bit… but really….
Those dang things are STILL wrinkled! I was hoping the weight would pull them out a little, and I guess it has…

Some people, (like Kayli) say you can’t even tell… But I can tell. I see those wrinkles every single day. Ha!

So… tips on getting them to be wrinkle free would be awesome!?!?

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P.S. We’d love if ! Thanks new friend!!

Living Room Before and After

Hello there friends! 
So remember how we had that discussion about not judging one another when it took the other a really long time to post a project that they’d mentioned um, a really long time ago…. No? Was that just me?

Oh, well… Moving on. Welcome to my newly made over living area!!!

Before the makeover this area looked like this!

(Obviously I took that picture around October sometime…) 😉

And NOW that area looks like this!

How about another before…..

And another after…

Really all it took was an entire weekend of Kayli and I painting and painting and painting and…. You get it.
For real though… If Kayli wouldn’t have sacrificed her whole weekend to help me paint this sucker, I’d probably still be there!! There is nothing more fun than painting with your sister though! We had a great time laughing and sending in progress photos on our . 😉

The paint color we ended up with was Whispering Wheat by Glidden.
(We cracked ourselves up calling it Whhhhispering Whhhheat all weekend…) If you can’t tell the difference in the before paint and after in the photos above, you can really see it here. It was one of those colors that once it dried just looked like it had belonged there all along. :)
The sort of creamy buttery color adds a warmth to the rooms that just wasn’t there before, and I love it!

After that all it took was some curtain hanging, changing up of wall hangings and moving a few little things around!

(View of the other side of the room.)

I’ll be back later with more on the curtains and the mantel. But so far, what do you think??
I wish the photos could portray how much more like a home it feels. Our home.

A fresh coat of paint really refreshes and brightens up a room. Also, I’m thinking it needs a few more pops of color. Maybe turquoise. What do you think?

Happy decorating lovelies!

 Linking this here and here and . AND to Thrifty Decor Chick’s Before & After Party!

Painted Throw Pillow

Hello lovelies!!!

Did you know you can paint fabric?
Don’t laugh all you crafty smarties out there… I just had this revelation recently, so if it’s old news to you…
Don’t judge… haha.

With my new found fabric painting knowledge I made a Painted Throw Pillow Cover for our living room!!!

This tutorial isn’t about sewing an envelope pillow cover, but if you’re really looking for a few instructions this tutorial from Rae Gun’s Ramblings is a really good one.

To make a painted throw pillow I go ahead and hem the top and bottom (for the edges of your envelope) as well as sew the top and bottom of the pillow cover so that you’ll know where the ‘face’ of your pillow will be.

Then I used my handy Silhouette SD to cut a stencil out of some sticky backed vinyl. If you don’t have a craft cutter (Silhouette, Cameo, Cricut), you can always make your stencil using freezer paper and scissors.

I chose some team ropers for my team roping hubby and because our living area is western themed/decorated.
{Stay tuned for a full reveal of our entire made over living room coming soon!}
I centered the stencil on what was to be the face of my pillow cover. Using a soft bristle paint brush and some brown Enamels paint, I carefully filled in my stencil.

I let it dry completely overnight, then went back to the sewing machine and stitched up the sides of my pillow cover.
Note – It’s SO much easier to paint the stencil on before finishing your cover!!!

That’s it! Now you can display your pretty painted throw pillow in your home! 😉

You could do this with any shaped pillow cover, any stencil, and {it would appear} any paint…
If it’s going to be washed often, I would make sure to get fabric specific paint so that it can be washed frequently.

 Happy crafting lovelies!!!

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Guest Bedroom Reveal

I’ll just go ahead and apologize for skipping around with my projects… 😉
Like Mandi says, don’t judge me! haha. Life gets busy and you move on from one thing to another and before you know it, you haven’t blogged about what you said um…. that you would blog about… Oops.

SO here it is…

The Guest Bedroom Reveal!!

Before (view from the door) and After!

I still feel like it’s a work in progress. Aren’t our homes just one big continual project anyway… :) You know, someday I’ll get a new bed frame, someday I’ll add a headboard… That kind of thing. But regardless, right now, as it is, I’m happy with it.

So… I would LOVE to know what you lovelies think???

You can see we got rid of that entertainment center and replaced it with a small dresser that belonged to my .
The first TV was a hand me down, so we just handed it down again and put the one that used to be in our bedroom in there.

Don’t mind those weird off color spots in the corner of the photo below… That was just my camera picking up the glare I guess…
The painting in this photo was in the hub’s childhood bedroom. It really plays up the gray color of the wall!  The two photos on the right are of my husband (as a kiddo) with his mom and grandpa and then of us with my Granny.
I spray painted the frames as decorations for our wedding, then they found a permanent home in here.
The Scentsy Plug-In is Santa Fe… It has a turquoise center which matches the bedding.

This was the first room I ever painted at all really. The first room I painted entirely by myself.
I talked more about . Sure, there were some painting newbie mistakes, like how the mirror in the corner leaves scratches in the paint…

Probably should’ve done another coat. Or used primer or something… But oh well. You live you learn, right!?! :)

 I talked about . The wall hanging in this photo was a Christmas gift from my friend Meghan.
It’s that Mother Teresa poem, ‘Do It Anyway’ with a photo of a daisy. It was the MOST thoughtful gift… The poem was a favorite of my Mother in Law, and I love gerbera daisies.

The tutorial for the . I bought the teal colored sheets on sale at Wal-Mart for $12! The white pillowcases came from there as well. The comforter was on sale + a wedding gift card from JCPenney netted me that white pretty for $17!!! Originally priced at $110!!!

I won the horse photo print in a blog giveaway from  and spray painted the frame an off white. The mirror in the corner also belonged to my mother in law (as well as the small dresser).

I’m not sure of the overall cost since I worked on this for short spurts at a time over several months. But it wasn’t much! We only bought paint, the curtains and the bedding! Everything else is hand me down, gifted or won! Now that’s MY kind of room makeover!!!
Thanks for checking out our guest bedroom! I would love to know your thoughts!

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My entry into Strut Your Stuff sponsored by Appliances Online and the Bosch Washing Machines

 

Etched Glass Drink Set

Remember the I made?? Well I got a little braver and went a little bigger with this one and made an Etched Glass Drink Set for my friend!
*As first seen on The Simple Things. Thanks for letting me share, Angela!

etching glass
Etching glass REALLY isn’t that hard! It just takes a little bit of time and patience…
As well as the RIGHT etching cream!
First off, you’ll need the glass you plan to etch…
For this gift I chose a glass wine pitcher and four glasses. You can etch just about any type of glass though… For example you can to see those candle holders I etched awhile back…
You’ll also need etching cream. I have tried a few different kinds, but the EtchAll etching cream has worked the best for me so far.
Please keep your hands safe by wearing protective gloves and keep your table top safe by laying down at least a layer of newspaper.

You’ll also need the shape or words you plan to etch on the glass. I use sticky backed vinyl cut with my Silhouette SD for my stencils. This time around I cut out my gift receiver’s name for the pitcher, and ‘her’ glass, and some pretty swirly shapes that were included with my Silhouette software.

Glass etching is really as easy as sticking the stencils to the glass, smoothing it down… Then (while wearing gloves) use a small sponge (I used a makeup sponge) to apply* the etching creme inside the area you’d like to be etched… And wait.
*The key is by apply I mean really glob that stuff on there!
(The etching cream does come with directions for how long to wait, etc.)
Finally, you’ll peal the stencil off, rinse in cold water, and viola!
You have pretty, personalized, etched glass.

Just so you know… Sort of a disclaimer…
Etched glass is CRAZY hard to photograph! haha.
You can click the picture to enlarge it and really get a good look if you’d like. :)
Happy etching lovelies!! 

Etched Glass Candle Holders

Winter seems to be in full swing!
 Well… as much as it gets to be winter in Arizona… 
Don’t be jealous… haha. 😉

When thinking about decorating for winter… 
You know that time between Christmas and Valentine’s Day? 😉
I realized I don’t really have anything to decorate with that isn’t holiday specific. 
When I think of just winter I think of cold, snow, frost, ice
Etched glass has always looked liked frost/ice to me, so to bring a touch of that into my decor, I made some etched glass candle holders

I used three small glass bulb shaped vases (under $1 apiece at Wal-Mart). 
A sheet of vinyl for my stencil. 
My trusty Silhouette SD
(You could cut out stencils with scissors or an Exacto knife if you don’t have a cutting machine)
A small bottle of EtchAll etching cream 
Gloves and a make up sponge applicator
Because of the ingredients in the EtchAll, make sure you wear some kind of gloves to protect your hands. Also, carefully follow the instructions on the packaging!!!
Rinse in cold water after allowing the cream to work for at least 15 minutes. 
I left mine for a good half hour just to be sure. 
This was my first time etching glass… so of course, I learned a few lessons I’d like to share. 😉
Glass Etching Lessons Learned:
  • The etching cream really needs to be layered on there to make sure it etches the entire surface inside your stencil. 
  • Your stencil needs to be smoothed down completely. Otherwise the cream will leak under it and you’ll get weird etched shapes…
  • Taking photos of etched glass is hard!!! If anyone has any tips, I’d love to hear!


I had to include a picture of them all lit up… 
Even though it didn’t come out very well…

And yes, that was my Christmas tree in the reflection of the TV… 
We really drag out the celebrating around here! *wink wink*
Not really… I took that picture weeks ago. 😉


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By the way… Did you know you can find Truly Lovely here… 
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Christmas Ribbon Candles

Hello lovelies!!!
I am really enjoying fancying up these pillar candles for my two candles stands!!!
It’s fun to take something you use year round and adjust it for each holiday/season, don’t you think?!?


You can see my here and my Thanksgiving Candles here. 


For Christmas here’s another (EASY and CHEAP) candle decorating idea!!!
First seen on An Irish Italian Blessing! Thanks Katherine!!!

Christmas Ribbon Candles

Materials needed:

1-2 (or more) pillar candles
Ribbon of your choice 
(You could make these for anytime of year depending on the candles and ribbon you choose, by the way!)
Scissors
Spray Adhesive
Glue gun

Eyeball Carefully measure around your candles, then cut your lengths of ribbon. 
I cut three ribbons for each candle for a total of six ribbons, alternating the colors. 

Spray the adhesive around the inside of the ribbon then attach to your candle, pressing down so it adheres. 

Then to make sure it stays put… 
I just dabbed a little hot glue on the outside end of the ribbon. 

Match your ribbons on both candles if you want a cohesive look. 
If not, you can alternate ribbon placement.
And viola! 😉 
Really, this whole tutorial is a glorified set of instructions for glueing ribbon onto some pillar candles to spice them up! Easy peasy, right?!? Haha. 
We like easy and inexpensive projects here in case you haven’t noticed… 😉

What easy Christmas decorations are you/have you been working on?
Or not so easy… We’d love to hear about those too!
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