reuse – A Smith of All Trades

Christmas, Craft Projects, DIY GIFT GUIDE, Gift Idea, Holiday, Pallet Projects, Quick and Easy Crafts

Wood Burning and Wooden Ornaments

January 8, 2015January 2, 2015 Jessica Smith

My last holiday craft involving pallet wood also involved a new skill — wood burning!! I’d never successfully tried wood burning before, but I figured out what I’d been doing wrong and had a blast playing around with the new technique.

Before I got into the wood burning, I simply was making trees from the pallet wood. The first I made was a gift for my secret santa at work:

I cut out the tree using my jigsaw, sanded it down, added a hole for the ribbon and colored the wood using the restor-a-finish product I always rave about. Cute, yes? My coworker loved it. I also gave him a Home Depot gift card — he and I love to chat about our ongoing projects. He’s my Home Depot buddy!

I made a similar tree for my godmother, but to girl it up a bit I painted gold dots all over it to look like ornaments.

Then I moved on to some simple wood burned ornaments. I tried it out on some scrap wood first:

After doing some research online, I learned that you can use a soldering iron as a wood burning tool. The only downside is the lack of interchangeable tips. I’d tried this before, but it turns out I didn’t let my iron get hot enough. This time I let it fully warm up — and that did the trick.

Once I’d tested it out on a few pieces of scrap wood, I started to make gifts for people. An “E” for the neighbors, an “S” for my mother-in-law and an “M” and “E” for Max and Eli, my friend’s sons.

Let me back track for a sec — all of these are from scrap wood, which I liked a lot because pretty much none of my pallet went to waste. I sanded everything down before burning it.

OK, back to the burning… once I got designs I liked, I added holes for ribbon or wire. Some I stained, some I left natural.

My buddy Maz really liked his little “M.” OK, he obviously couldn’t care less about it… I just wanted to share our selfie 🙂

The letters I did were fairly easy (Minus the “S”) because they were all straight lines. Since my soldering iron was a longer flat tip, that was the only shape I could do. Lots of dashes, exes and straight lines.

I got the idea to use those shapes to make wood-burned Christmas tree ornaments. These were my favorite.

If you smell them, they smell like campfire! LOVE.

I gave my sister and her BF the larger ornament with the star. The other I selfishly kept for us. I added a lumberjack-esque ribbon to it, too.

How adorable is that? It it cost me $0! The wood was scrap, the wire I add and the ribbon came off of a gift 🙂

I love to make Christmas gifts and I think these were some of my favorites that I made this year.

Christmas, Craft Projects, DIY GIFT GUIDE

Pallet Tree

January 3, 2015January 4, 2015 Jessica Smith

The hubbs brought a few pallets home from his mom’s house and they’d been sitting out back waiting to be turned into something awesome. I used a ton of the wood for gifts this year. The first project I’ll share is the pallet tree I made as a decoration for our house.

I used a reciprocating saw to remove the flat pieces of wood off of the pallet in between the supports. I didn’t care about the pieces of wood being even because I planned on trimming them further.

I lined up four pieces of wood, and screwed them all together from the back, leaving a portion of the back support uncovered so it would act as the tree trunk.

When all of the horizontal slats were secured, I flipped it over and traced a tree onto the front. To make it perfect, I measured the center point at the top of the tree, then traced straight lines to each corner from the top.

Once the tree was traced on, I used a circular saw to cut along the lines.

The final tree was adorbs, but still missing something.

I thought about staining it, but opted to leave it plain. Instead, I created bunting out of cardstock, twine and gold paint. So stinkin’ cute.

Of all the things I made this holiday season, this is one of two things I kept for us. I just love it. I made it right before Christmas, so it wasn’t displayed for long. When I find a better spot for it next year, I’ll probably add hangers to the back so it can hang on the wall.

All in all, the only took about an hour from start to finish. Super easy project and would make a great gift! Now pin it for next year since I didn’t share until after the holiday. Rookie move, I know.

Home Improvement

My mint tiles

January 28, 2014January 28, 2014 Jessica Smith

OK, guys. I have a new obsession and that obsession is Restore. Habitat Restore, to be exact. And it is amazing. AH-MAY-ZING!

My neighbor first introduced me to Restore in Baltimore and then Restore came to Columbia! Are we lucky or what? (Hint: The answer is yes!)

I go there pretty often now and had to share my newest find: Mint Green tiles!

${A Smith of All Trades} Tiles_Dirty Tiles$

I scored about 50 of these beautiful tiles for $.25 a square foot. Yes, $.25! I paid $4 total 🙂 Love it!

As you can see in the photos from the store, the tiles were pretty dirty. I scrubbed the tiles for over an hour and they cleaned up beautifully.

${A Smith of All Trades} Tiles_Clean Tiles$

Neither of those photos do the color justice, but this one is a better representation:

${A Smith of All Trades} Tiles_Color Shot$ **drools**

You might be wondering why I bought tiles? Well, for my birthday gift next month we are going to redo our master bathroom.

Here’s a couple of not-so-hot pictures of our bathroom. It’s teeny, so it’s hard to get the whole thing in one shot.

Out bathroom looks a little different now with a shower curtain and a few pieces of art hung on the walls. But it’s nothing spectacular.

Here’s what I’m thinking….

${A Smith of All Trades} Tiles_Sketch$

Yes, it’s a sketch. And yes, this will likely change. But anyway… I am thinking a faux wainscoting treatment to the bottom half in white with a neutral color on top. We’ll replace the vanity to get something a little larger in the space, update the medicine cabinet and the lighting…. and then add the mint tiles as accent tiles. Like I said, the final product probably won’t look a thing like this… but this is my inspiration for now.

${A Smith of All Trades} Tiles_Bucket$

And for $4, I was willing to take the risk that these beautiful tiles will fit into my not-so-final master plan.

Happy Tuesday!

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