stud – A Smith of All Trades

DIY Button Stud Earrings

February 1, 2013 Jessica Smith

I ordered earring stud posts about a month ago and they couldn’t have arrived at a better time. I got home yesterday and found the tiniest package waiting for me on the counter of 50 silver studs — talk about a great way to break me out of my creative rut! I love to make earrings, but I never wear any of what I make because they are all dangle/drop earrings. I am trying to get into the habit of wearing dangle earrings more, especially after receiving a beautiful cobalt blue pair from my neighbors and a mint green pair from my family this past holiday season. But, old habits die hard… or should I say my insecurities die hard. Confession… I am super sensitive about my ear lobes! I have attached ear lobes and think they look funny. My hubby is so sweet and tells me sometimes how nice my lobes are (sounds really weird when I write it on my blog), but I still am not super adventurous in calling attention to my ears with big statement earrings.

Long story short, I really like stud earrings. I think they look a lot better on my ears. Until now, I’d never tried to make them! Last night after an impromptu dinner date with my dad and after watching an episode of Glee (another confession… I love Glee. Don’t judge too much!), I sat down in my craft room and actually crafted! Woot!

Since I’ve never worked with studs before, I made several pairs of super easy earrings using buttons.

For this project I used:

Buttons
Stud earring backs
E6000 glue

Yup, that’s it!

I spent about 20 minutes sorting through my mounds of buttons, hoping to stumble upon two purple buttons that matched. No such luck (which I still cannot believe)! So I pulled out a bunch of other matches that I liked enough to sport on my ears.

Then, I placed a small dab of E6000 onto my workstation (a Neiman Marcus box) and grabbed an old needle to spread the glue with. You could use a toothpick or a rolled up piece of paper. I just grabbed an old needle because I was planning on tossing it anyway.

Using the needle, I scooped up some glue and carefully spread it on the backing of my stud.

Then, one by one, I placed an earring stud onto the back of each button.

I let everything dry overnight before adding plastic earring backs to each pair.

These gold ones are my favorite. The best part is that the buttons are made of plastic, even though they look like metal, so they aren’t heavy on my ears at all.

In fact, I wore them to work today (bad photo alert). I look so happy to be wearing them, huh? Haha… I swear I love them even though I look slightly pained in this photo.

Here’s another cute pair… cobalt blue! Love them.

I can’t forget about the orange ones I made for Dana. She loves orange and she just got her ears pierced (well… a few years ago). The novelty of making her earrings hasn’t worn off yet.

I made a black pair, a teal pair and two pairs of super teeny buttons. I love them all. Now, I really need a jewelry box to store them all. Anyone have any recommendations on where to get one? I am super picky and can’t seem to find one I like online.

Hopefully this project was just the start of getting out of my creative rut 🙂

Home Improvement

Peg Board organization

September 26, 2012September 23, 2012 Jessica Smith

This past weekend I finally got around to putting up some peg boards to organize our storage room and my craft room. Phew. Thank goodness.

Have you ever installed peg board? It’s pretty easy. You find your studs and screw in a long, narrow strip of wood to each one. Then, you screw your peg board on top — it is that easy.

Once it is installed, you can buy all sorts of hooks and such to help keep you organized. Here’s the peg board in our storage room. Holy organization!

My peg board in my craft room is even more awesome… mainly because it is in my craft room. I screwed in my strips of wood directly into the studs, but they were unfortunately a little far apart for the peg board to fit perfectly. *groans* So I painted the exposed wood white. Then I still wasn’t satisfied, so I painted the entire board the same color as the wall. That was good enough for me! Look at all those tools! My glue guns look particularly bad ass on my peg board.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how this weekend project turned out. Go me.

Craft Projects, Dollar Store Crafts

Fabric-Covered Pumpkins

September 22, 2012September 24, 2012 Jessica Smith

It is the first day of fall. Hooray!

Did you see the adorable pumpkin I transformed yesterday from a sweet Dollar Store find? If not, check it out here.

I had two pumpkins left over to complete my fall decor trio, so I decided to cover both of them with fabric. I had a gold tablecloth I’ve been wanting to use for a project, as well as some burlap remnant I picked up from JoAnn’s. I also picked up silver tacks at the dollar store, so I chose to use them as little studs in my fabric-covered pumpkins.

I started with the gold fabric, cutting the fabric into scrap strips. I started pinning them to the pumpkin using the silver tacks.

Once the pumpkin was covered in studs, I painted the stem of the pumpkins gray to match the Mod Podged pumpkin. Love it.

I did the same thing to the third pumpkin with the burlap strips.

The only thing securing the fabric to the pumpkin are the tacks, but I used about 150 per pumpkin (wowzer), so I don’t think that fabric is falling off any time soon. Having said that, I found it important to overlap the strips of fabric since there is no glue underneath the fabric. With the overlap, there is a nice texture of rough edge on smooth fabric, and there is total coverage of the bright orange pumpkin underneath.

The tacks run down the valleys of the pumpkin — it is OK to adjust your tacks as you go. If your lines aren’t exactly how you want them, fix them!