canvas art – A Smith of All Trades

Happy New Year, all!

I disappeared there for a bit and took a much-needed vacation from any and all forms of work for the Christmas holiday. It was a blast. I visited with my family and just had an amazing holiday break. Luckily my break isn’t quite over yet — the hubby and I don’t go back to work until Jan. 7! Sweet! But it’s time to get back to blogging, and I’ve got lots of neat things to share.

First, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at 2012 for A Smith of All Trades. My 1-year blogging anniversary is Jan. 16, so I’ve almost been blogging for a whole year now. It’s been a really rewarding experience and I’ve done some really cool projects in 2012. Here are some of my favorites:

Canvas Art: This was one of my most popular posts from the year and is a really simple way to to make decor for any room in your house. All you need is fun fabric, a few canvases and a staple gun. It’s that easy!

DIY Device-Charging Station: I was always super pumped about this project. In a few hours I turned a cheap-o tray from a thrift store into a totally sweet place to charge all of my devices.

Our home improvement projects were definitely some of the highlights of my 2012, particularly our family room and our bathroom makeovers.

We started our family room almost immediately after moving into our house. Remember this beauty of a room?

Ohhh yeah, it was something else. Welp, after a few weeks we turned that monstrosity into our favorite room in the house.

We seriously live in this room, so it was awesome to get to redo the whole thing before we settled down too much in our house.

And then there was the bathroom attached to the family room. The fixtures, vanity and toilet were way outdated and gnarly, but otherwise the bathroom was in good shape. I painted it and the hubby and my step dad installed a new toilet and vanity. Now it is the prettiest bathroom in the whole house.

Last, but certainly not least, are my pallet projects. I think these are some of my favorite. My bar sign was a huge hit with the hubby and my ottoman is basically the best thing ever. I use it all of the time.

And here’s the ottoman…

OK, that’s it! That’s my year in review. There are a bajillion more things on the blog, so go forth and read your hearts out 🙂

Happy New Year, and a new craft project tomorrow!

I was hanging out with my 10-year-old brother this weekend and we decided it would be fun to do a craft project for the blog. I saw a post on Pinterest about melting crayons to make art, and I figured any 10-year-old boy would love the chance to melt stuff. We had a blast.

All you need for this project is a canvas, some crayons, hot glue and a hairdryer.

Pick out the crayons you’d like to use. For my first canvas I chose a range of blues. Elliott decided to go totally random and was excited to find two glitter crayons to melt. Round two I chose blues and oranges. Elliott picked the rainbow.

Figure out the order you’d like your crayons to appear on the top of your canvas. Hot glue them across one side of your canvas as close to the top to your canvas as possible. Since Elliott and I were using small canvases we broke our crayons in half.