Silhouettes Repurposed Yet Again

I am a lover of repurposing things I already own.  And I am a lover of antiques.  It just so happens that I have a small collection of silhouette pictures from my childhood, and I've always tried to find a place for them wherever I live.  It helps that silhouettes have been in vogue lately, but I would love them anyhow.  In our previous home, we decorated with them in our guest room:

Later when it became a nursery, I only had room for one, and we HAD to have ONE!

Well, in our new home, I was recently faced with a design challenge.  I needed something large-scale to hang above Claire's crib on the HUGE wall behind it.  We have luxiously high ceilings, and big spaces are nothing to complain about, but I'm not used to it yet!  And all my decor is small-scale because our first home was tiny.  So to address my wide open wall, I tried hanging a quilt above the bed but it just looked funny, and still didn't take up enough horizontal space.  I thought about buying a couple of big circus posters from Pottery Barn Kids too,

but of course this did not fit the "cheap or free" decorating mandate from my husband.  Which I am unfortunately forced to take seriously.  I started brainstorming... I do have lots and lots of fabric.  What if I framed it?  I've seen this done a thousand times on pinterest.

See http://pinterest.com/pin/64246732154433176/

See http://pinterest.com/pin/112871534380449830/

Brilliant!  I decided to go for it.  I hit up the Christmas Tree Shop (my favorite go-to place, you'll see I talk about it allllll the time) and scored these amazing weathered wood frames for $5.99 each (and I came armed with a 20% off coupon)!  Of course, I still needed to add more pink, so I picked up a spool of ribbon, thinking I might decorate the frames I bought.  And then it hit me-- I would "hang" the pictures using the ribbon, to bring in more pink and tie the look together.

Ta da!

I used pink and white polka dotted fabrics that had previously lived another life as a table cloth (speaking of repurposing), and the project took all of 5 minutes to assemble.  Not bad for $15 and some things I already had!  And by the way, I love instagram, and how it makes my iphone photos look artsy.  Now I just need a use for my other silhouettes...

Have you repurposed anything fun lately?

Hobby Horse Party Favors

My daughter Claire turned one in March, and since then, every friend or colleague who has seen the photos has asked me how I made the hobby horses that each of the kids received.  To start, I want to disclaim that only 3 children of hobby-horse-age even attended the party, and one of the three was Claire, so I didn't exactly have a slew to make.  Nonetheless, make them I did!

Originally, I had hoped to save some of my precious time buying horses from an etsy vendor.  And while there are so many cute ones to choose, from, none were in my price point.  If I WAS going to buy from etsy though, I'd buy one of these arabian versions, my goodness they are pretty!

Fortunately eHow came to the rescue with a series of wonderfully helpful tutorial videos.  I won't repeat the instructions here because the videos do a much better job.  But I did make a few adjustments that are worth noting:

(1) Rather than sew plush ears, I included the ear in my silhouette pattern of the horse head.  Does this make the horse look like a unicorn without ears?  Arguably.  But these are 1 and 2 year olds, I didn't think they would notice.

(2) I sewed buttons on for eyes.  In fact, all of my materials were things I had lying around, including the fabric leftover from other projects. 

(3) I added bridals to my horses.  They are not really horse-accurate in their design, but as an equestrian myself, I knew my horses needed some tack.

(4) To attach the horses to the sticks, I staple gunned the "neck" fabric to a wide wooden dowel, and then gathered with thread and covered my tracks with ribbon.  This held up very sturdily for me and looked cute.

(5) Blue ribbons- what horse show would be complete without them?!  Mine weren't blue, but they worked well- they were made by accordion folding 2 inch wide strips of paper, gluing them end to end, flattening the circle, and then adding a paper disk to the center.  I then cut paper tails and used sticker letters to apply each child's initial.  I used safety pins to attach the ribbons to the horses and denote which horse belonged to which child.  This was a small touch that was noticed by adults only.  And that's just fine with me.

My favorite part of making these ponies was making the manes.  Who knew stuffed critters could be so doable?  This is probably not a project for a beginning crafter, but it wasn't as hard as I expected.  Go forth and make ponies, see for yourself!