Tag: brown

Craft Projects

A wreath for us

Jessica Smith

I showed you on Saturday how to make a wreath using fake flowers and a grapevine base — I had a few flowers left over, so I decided to create a wreath for our front door!

I had a wire form that I picked up from Michaels, but not enough flowers to go all of the way around it.

To cover the rest of the wreath form, I chose to wrap it in twine. To do so, I knotted the twine and started going around the edge of the wreath. It took about 30 minutes and an entire spool of twine, but I really like the look of it.

By the time I made it close to the end of the wreath, I realized I wouldn’t have enough twine to wrap the whole thing. That didn’t matter though, because I was planning on filling that void with the faux flowers.

So, I knotted the end of the twine and started to add the flowers.

Since all of the flowers are on wire, I was able to bend the “stems” around the wires of the exposed wreath form. Once all of the flowers were placed, I took floral wire and secured the flowers even more to the form.

It’s not pretty, but no one will ever see the back, so who cares!?

I embellished with a few leaves, adding them to the wreath with hot glue at each end of the flowers. And with that, my wreath was finished. It only took about an hour — not too bad!

Craft Projects

Lampshade refab

Jessica Smith

My coworker had a cute lamp in her office that another coworker left behind when she left. She loved the shape of the lamp and the shade, but the colors didn’t match the rest of her office’s blue theme with small pops of red here and there. The shade (I have no Before picture, sorry!) was covered in a bright red, orange and yellow paisley fabric.

In an attempt to redo the shade, she tore off that fabric, leaving the white backing in tact. I offered to help her refinish it because I have a problem and can’t say “no” to craft projects. So I stole her unfinished shade and took it home to make something purdy.

Here’s what I started with. Pretty bare boned, huh?

I had lots of ideas on how to redo her lamp shade. I ultimately decided to recover it with fabric because I thought it would work best in her office that way.

I grabbed a neutral fabric out of my fabric stash and started recovering the shade. I chose to use a dark stitch because I thought it would be a cute accent. I started at the top of the frame, stitching the fabric right through the white backing. I went around the top twice with the chocolate thread.

I don’t have a picture of this next step because I needed both hands to do it. Once the top was sewn onto the frame, I stretched the fabric as taut as possible around the bottom of the lamp and stitched it. Since the shade is smaller at the top, I needed extra fabric for the bottom half — this left me with an overlap of fabric. I didn’t want the unsightly seam to ruin Amy’s shade, so I added five grayish-blue flower embellishments.

For each flower, I cut a circle out of my fabric. I then pinched it in the middle and sewed it to the shade, folding the flower to get more creases as I sewed. Once each flower was on the shade, I sewed a chocolate-brown button to the middle.

I’m very surprised with how well this turned out. I thought for sure I’d be delivering bad news to Amy that I killed her lamp shade, but it’s alive and well!

What do you think? I think it’s pretty stinking cute, and much better than the bare naked shade!