Hey guys,

Remember the post I did about Dollarama awhile back? Remember those adorable animal-lidded jars I mentioned being obsessed with? Well, I finished making a set of my own and I wanted to show them to you.

It's a very simple project.

Supplies
Clean glass jars with metal lids (like old olive jars).
Plastic animals from the dollar store.
Epoxy glue.
White primer or other well-adhering paint in the colour(s) of your choice.

All you need to do is glue the animals to the jar lids and then paint the lids (and the animals) a solid colour. My animals were a bit too big for some of my jars, so I cut them in half (with a sturdy utility knife). The effect is a bit more surreal, with animal bums on some jars and partial torsos on others, but I like it. Here are the snaps:

Initially, I made these planning to give them to my niece, but I love them so much, I may have to keep them for myself.

Back in September 2011, I saw a photo in House & Home magazine that I really loved.

There were a lot of things I liked about the photo, and a lot of small DIYs I hoped to replicate, but the but that really stuck with me was the bedside lamp. (I've pointed to it in the photo.)

The inside of the shade was painted gold (a look I love -- I've painted a lot of my shades gold in similar fashion). But what you can't really see is that there was also a message written inside the shade. In black marker, I think.

LOVE! What a fun idea!

I've finally done it myself, using my desk lamp, which has a large black linen drum shade on it. I'd already painted the interior of the shade gold (a couple of years ago, actually), so all that was left to do was add the message.

I used a big fat Grand & Toy permanent black market (roundedge) and I loosely scrawled messages throughout the inside of the shade. I didn't over think it. Instead of agonizing about the words, I just free associated little bits and pieces of poetry I have memorized from my long years as an English student. There's a lot of Sylvia Path, a bit of Elizzabeth Bishop, some E. E. Cummings... it's not formal and it's not really visible from the outside. When the light is on, the writing can be seen only faintly from the outside, and it has a simple stripey quality. When I'm sitting at my desk, I can see up and inside the shade, and read the little notes.

It's not an amazing project, and it doesn't really make a big impact, but I'm really happy with it. I'd like to write secret little notes on the inside of ALL my lamp shades.

What do you think? Would you try it?

Since I was talking about kid-friendly stuff earlier in the week, I thought I'd continue on with that theme and share a project I did with my four-year-old niece last weekend.

We made rainbow crayons.

I had promised her an "art day" as her Christmas present (just me and her) and the crayon idea was one I had in my pocket for when we got tired of painting (which we did). It's a really easy one, and there are instructions all over the week. Google "rainbow crayons" and you'll see what I mean. Here's how we made ours:

Step 1: Pick out all the bits of broken crayons for your crayon jar (I know you have one!). This is a simple task that even a toddler can handle. It's about digging and selecting and little ones are good at that.

Step 2: Line a muffin tin with paper cups (or don't, but this will be easier if you do).

Step 3: Peel the bits of broken crayon and place the pieces willy nilly in the muffin tin cups. (If you like, you can organize the bits of crayon by colour. I didn't, because we were "experimenting" but you really can't go wrong, no matter what you do.

Step 4: Once the paper cups are about 1/2 full of broken crayon, put the tray into the oven at a low temp. (We set ours to 170 degrees F. because that's the lowest it would go.)

Step 5: Go off and do something else. Check on your melting crayons every 10 minutes or so.

Step 6: When you notice that the crayons have all melted, remove the muffin tin and leave it out to cool. (Or melting process took about 35 mins). If you put a lot of different colours in each cup, the tops of your melted crayons may look oily and yucky (probably greyish brown). Don't worry! Just be patient and let them cool.

In other words, even if your crayons look like this don't worry:
They need a little more time in the oven, and the murky look is not a problem.

Step 7: When the tray has cooled, remove the new, round crayons and peel off the paper cups. Even if the tops looked kind of icky, the bottoms will be vibrant and wonderful looking.

Step 8: Colour! You now have a set of round, rainbow crayons that will look a little like colourful peanut butter cups. Find some fresh paper and make some art!

At my house, the accessories are breakable. Highly breakable. I collect vintage milk glass, slag glass, and depression glass. I have living orchids curving delicately over my nightstand. My pet fish lives on a low coffee table, in a vintage glass bowl.

It's not a kid-friendly space.

My sister, however, has two small children who are (for lack of a better word) a bit willful (read: wild). And as such, her house has almost no accessories. Her few breakables are hidden away or gathered messily on high shelves, and her surfaces are either bare or strewn with papers. Her house is about practicality, and about foiling her children's innate need to break anything and everything of value she might get her hands on.

So I resolved to help her out. Why CAN'T she have a few glam accessories? Things that look pretty and posh? Sure, teaching the kids to be less destructive would be a good step to take, but I didn't want to set my sights too high. So instead, I set about looking for some posh-looking accessories that could stand up to the chaos.

Here's my first effort: a totally kid-friendly, totally-unbreakable, totally budget table orchid.

Let me tell you what this orchid display is made of:

It's 100% Dollarama.

Materials

1. A large plastic salad bowl (any solid colour you like).
2. A foam craft ball.
3. A bread knife and tape (you probably have these items already).
4. 2 or 3 fake orchid stems.
5. 2 packages of decorative moss.

The whole deal should cost approximately $7.

Instructions

Step 1: Using the knife, cut the foam ball in half or 3/4. (You're just looking to give it a flat side.)
Step 2: Place the flat side of the foam ball down on the bottom/middle of the plastic bowl. Using tape, secure it to the bottom of the bowl. Don't worry if the tape looks ugly. You won't see it once the moss is in.
Step 3: Drive the orchid stems into the foam ball. If the stems are too long, but them down with scissors or wire-cutters. (OR, just bend the wire stems back and forth a bit at the spot where you want to cut - they'll break eventually.)
Step 4: Fill the bowl with moss, covering the foam and the bottom of the stems.
Step 5: Bend the orchid leaves down so they are horizontal across the surface of the moss. And bit and bend the stems of the fake flowers in a way that looks good to you.

Done. You have a pretty, glam-looking accessory that your kids can knock to the ground with abandon. Sure, the moss will go flying, but that's an easy clean up. This is an unbreakable, creation, in my opinion.

Next, I wanted to draw your attention to the pressed glass bowl that you see on the arm of the chair in the first photo. Pretty right? Let's take a closer look:

On the left is a little depression glass dish, on the right is the bowl I was talking about. Glam! Sparkly! Posh, pretty and ... plastic.

That's right, plastic. I bought it for 99 cents at Goodwill.

If that's not a kid-friendly accessory, I don't know what is. Can't wait to take these items over to my sister's house to test them out.

First off, friends, my apartment was featured on Apartment Therapy today. Abby Cook took photos that are way better than anything I can imagine taking, ever, so you should really check it out.

In the piece, I mention my hall credenza, that I sort of built/upcycled from kitchen cabinets. Thought I'd use today to talk about how I made it. Here goes:

Initially, my front hall (which is also a main wall in my living room) looked like this:

And it was fine, I guess. But it was also busy. And it started to annoy me. I turned the spines of my books backwards in an effort to create more calm, but it didn't really work. How could I store all the stuff I needed to store, while leaving plenty of room for people to walk down the hall? Closed bookcases? A shallow console? What?

I hunted around, but I couldn't find a piece that suited my needs ANYWHERE. Billy bookcases from IKEA (with doors) were an option, but I just didn't want Billys. Traditional consoles were too fat. So I decided to hack something together.

Here's what I used:
3 assembled kitchen cabinet uppers (Home Depot)
8 fence post spires for legs (Home Depot)
6 pieces of linking hardware  (two-screw pieces, 3 across each seam)
Long wood screws (to drill down into the legs from inside the cabinets)
White primer and white paint + a "velvet" roller
6 ring pulls (Lee Valley Hardware) to attach to the centre of each door

Once the three cabinets were linked into one big long piece, and the spires were drilled into and attached as legs, the thing was a behemoth. I needed help to lift it upright. But it sure provides a lot of storage.

I stocked in my books and whatnot and lived with it in its dark brown form for awhile until I settled on painting it white. I should have used melamine paint, but I didn't. I used regular latex paint and primer. And such paint can chip easily. (It already has, in fact.) But oh well. Melamine paint is too hard to work with/too stinky. I didn't paint the insides of the cabinets. Only the outsides.

The final touch was adding brass hardware to the centre of each door.

Here's the end result, as shot by Abby for Apartment Therapy:

SO MUCH STORAGE and it's all hidden away. And in my opinion, it doesn't look like a set of kitchen cabinets anymore.

It's fantabulous if I do say so myself. (And I do. I do indeed.)

A long while back, I posted about a project where I decoupaged some birds onto an old stool. Here's a photo to refresh your memory.

I was never perfectly happy with how this project turned out. I felt it needed more birds. Or that the birds weren't well laid out.

But it was good enough, and for a long time, I lived with it.

Then, thanks to a hot cup and a low attention span, I ruined it. I scalded the top of the stool and a big fat chunk of varnish, bird and paint tore away.

This gave me an opportunity to start again.

Using my handy-dandy oscillating sander, I stripped away the old decoupage. (I should have used paint stripper for this. I'm so lazy. Don't be lazy like me. Do things right and you'll save yourself heartache.)

I brushed on a new under-coat of black paint, then found, printed and carefully cut out a picture of a water lily to take the place of the lost birds.

Here's how it turned out:

I used regular paper and my home printer for the water lily. Again, not wise. Decoupage works a lot better with thick paper and inks that won't bleed.

I re-decoupaged the top of the stool with the flower. The thin paper wrinkled and I had major bubble problems along the way. I tried to solve these with a needle and patience.

The result is imperfect. If you look at the stool up close, you can see that the varnish isn't smooth and the flower itself is a bit blurred, but nonetheless, I am very happy with it. It's better than the birds, I think. The water lily has more impact.

I did the whole thing while watching a movie on a Saturday afternoon, so it wasn't exactly hard labour.

Have you decoupaged anything recently?

Over the weekend, I hosted a little crafting get-together at my apartment. I wanted an excuse to work with the pine cones I've been hoarding for the last year. I've posted about these before. When my niece was three, she helped me gather a whole bag full, and I've been trying to think of how to use them ever since.

Here's what I finally settled on:

I got this garland idea from Twig and Thistle. Their DIY pine cone garland is really gorgeous. That said, the Twig and Thistle instructions are a bit difficult. I doodled around with a bunch of different supplies before I settled on a plan of my own that yielded a similar effect, but was less work to execute.

I didn't bother with drilling holes in the cones, using screw hooks, or even ribbon. Instead, I used an old beaded necklace and attached the pine cones simply, with white thread and basic knots.

As a result, my cones hang horizontally, with the florets opening out, as opposed to pointing down, vertically. But I think they look good. Also, using a beaded necklace rather than ribbon meant I could just count out the same number of beads between each cone to end up with an even placement. (No measuring!)

I used an uneven number of cones (so one cone would fall in the centre of the garland) and eyeballed the sizes to make that centre cone the largest, moving out from the centre with cones in decreasing sizes, and placing the littlest cones on either end.

I knocked a couple of new nails into my mantle and strung it up. Done!

What do you think? Rustic and festive, right?

This would be an easy project to do with kids. Even the littlest little ones can gather pine cones, and if you consider paint, there are a lot of different possibilities for pretty garlands to match your decor. Let me know if you try it!

So. The Apartment Therapy photo shoot for my upcoming house tour has happened and I've finally been able to relax and stop tweaking and rearranging and "fixing" in preparation. The fact that Apartment Therapy was coming really put a fire under my bum to finish some projects, and in the next few weeks, I'll be posting about them. This one, I finished literally less than 12 hours before the photo shoot on Saturday. It's a huge piece of DIY drip art for my living room.

See, I have this big living room wall that I've been debating about. What I wanted for it was something perfect. Some perfect piece of art. And I was willing to wait until something that looked right and affordable came along. But with Apartment Therapy coming, I ran out of time. So last Friday night, I decided to DIY a temporary piece to fill the space instead.

Here's how I did it:

1. I garbage-picked a big square of plywood from an alley in my neighbourhood (you could also buy a canvas, but this was cheaper).
2. I cleaned the plywood with a damp rag.
3. I primed the "front" of the piece with a couple coats of high-adhesive primer, applied with a smooth-finish velvet roller.
4. I decided which side would be "up" in the painting, and turned the makeshift canvas upside down, so the "bottom" was at floor level.
5. I used mat black paint (left over from a variety of other projects such as my front door makeover) to brush a thick black strip along the top (which would eventually be the bottom) of the piece.
6. I filled a plastic measuring cup with the same black paint and dribbled it along the black stripe so that globs and drips would start to crawl toward the floor. I kept doing this until I was happy with the effect.
7. I blow dried the whole thing so I could install it right away (drilled directly into the wall), but even now, some of the globs are a little wet.

No matter. It looks pretty good, in my opinion. Voila:

This is very much a "for now" piece. Something to do duty until I can find and afford something really special, but nonetheless, I'm quite fond of it. It was not a lot of work and it makes a big impact. Consider making something similar if, like me, you're looking for a space-filler, or even just a fun and messy art project.