craft night – A Smith of All Trades

“Love” pallet signs

January 15, 2015January 11, 2015 Jessica Smith

My girlfriends and I had a craft night last weekend and made small pallet signs.

Here’s the gist of how I made the signs (I had to make 3 in half an hour, so no pictures):

Cut the wood off of the pallet using a reciprocating saw
Line up the wood you want to use as the front of the sign face down, then place two pieces of wood perpendicular as the back supports
Screw or nail in the supports
Using a circular saw, trim the edges of the signs so they are straight
Sand down the sign
Add picture hanging hardware to the back

I’ve made pallet signs before, so if you’d like more detailed steps on how I constructed the actual sign, check out this post.

The only difference was my nail gun wasn’t working, so I screwed in the back supports instead of nailing them in.

Carrie found an adorable “Love” sign on Pinterest that we decided to do our own take on. We painted the signs using mint and metallic gold paint. The gold paint didn’t show up well on the pallet, so we covered the whole sign in stain to help the paint pop.

Here’s what we came up with:

Carrie’s Sign:

Amy’s sign (she wrote “my heart” in Gaelic):

And my sign:

They are so stinkin’ cute! I’m not sure where I’ll put mine yet — I was thinking in our bedroom, but it isn’t that big so I don’t know if it will look right on any of our walls. I’m also toying with adding it to a gallery wall I’ve been working on for months. I suck at putting gallery walls together and never seem to get them quite right. Plus, I always seem to hang the same photos over and over. So I want to rework the gallery with art in it, so this might fit in nicely.

Since I know I want to hang it up, I added picture wire to the back. I also added soft gel pads so it doesn’t muff up my walls.

Another successful craft night! Do you ever craft with friends? What sorts of things do you make? We are always looking for fun ideas.

Craft Projects

Driftwood and Sea Glass chime

July 31, 2013 Jessica Smith

My girlfriends and I got together for craft night last weekend, and, as always, we had a great time. Carrie came up with the idea to make driftwood and sea glass chimes (if you can call them that). After a delicious dinner and a bottle of wine, we began to tackle our craft.

We started with individual pieces of driftwood that Carrie collected on a family vacation. Apparently she was teased for collecting the wood — I think it was a fabulous idea, don’t you?

Once we picked which piece of wood we wanted, I got started on mine. Originally, I started to make mine with fishing wire. I got really frustrated with that, so I made mine with wire and chain. So to start my chime, I wrapped wire around each end of the driftwood and secured it around itself to create a hook to hang the finished chime from. Carrie and Amy used twine for this, and it worked great. It also looked really nice.

Like I said, I started mine with fishing wire. We watched a tutorial from Martha Stewart, and even she commented that the fishing wire was a pain. Clearly she, Carrie and Amy all have more patience than I do, because they made it work. I think the reason our wire wasn’t super easy to work with was because it was a bit thicker, so if you want to try this project on your own, I definitely recommend using a thin fishing line.

If you want to use fishing line, Carrie and Amy both did theirs differently. Carrie tied knots around each piece of sea glass and sealed the knot with super glue. Amy, on the other hand, avoided the knots and simply glued the wire to the glass with the super glue. She said one piece fell off at home, but it is holding up well.

Like I said, I got sick of the fishing wire and the knots, so I broke out the jewelry wire and chain. Sometimes working with a familiar material is just better.

After I created a handle to the driftwood, I lined the sea glass up in an ombre pattern. I ended up only using half of these, but you get the idea.

Then, I wrapped each piece of sea glass with wire, creating a loop at the top to attach it to the chain.

Once all of my glass was wrapped with wire, I attached each piece to one of my three chain strands. Then, to finish the chime, I attached the chain to the piece of driftwood using jewelry wire.

Sorry for the cruddy picture and the not-so-in-depth tutorial. It’s a girls’ night first and foremost, so blogging has to come second!

Anyway, here’s the finished product!

I love the colors of the glass, and now I want to go hunting for drift wood and real sea glass (these were from Michaels).

Have a great day!

Christmas, Craft Projects, Holiday

Salt Dough Ornaments

December 16, 2012December 16, 2012 Jessica Smith

Our main craft from last weekend’s craft night was salt dough ornaments. Carrie, Amy and I followed an east recipe for the dough so we could make our own ornaments.

All you need for the dough is 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of salt and 1/2 cup of warm water. I mixed ours together in my KitchenAid using the dough hook attachment, which worked great. When the dough was a little too tacky to roll out, I added a pinch more flour.

Then we set up these awesome SilPat mats and began to roll our dough.

When the dough was an even thickness, we stamped our shapes into it. Then, we removed the excess dough and put a hole in the top of each one before putting them into the oven.

I started to bake the ornaments at 200 degrees, but after a while I bumped up the temperature to 250. That worked great and the ornaments hardened in about 2 hours.

Once they cooled down, I hung them on our tree using silver and red string.

Here’s one for Remmy!

And a little tree for our big, fat tree.

I saved a few to paint, but I haven’t gotten around to adding color to any of them yet. I don’t think they need it either. They look very pretty on our tree just as they are.

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