wood – Page 2 – A Smith of All Trades

Indoor Window Box

April 1, 2015April 1, 2015 Jessica Smith

IT’S APRIL FOOLS! No jokes in today’s blog posts (promise!), but big jokes at work today. I had the pleasure of creating an April Fools poster and web story to hopefully give our students a chuckle or two. We had such a fun time brainstorming ideas and I was tickled to design and write a joke-riddled poster and story. It’s not often we get to be super funny at the business school, so this was quite the treat for me.

Do you play any pranks on April Fools? When I was younger I remember my dad calling me to tell me he had just seen an elephant run by his office at work. I totally bought it! A few years ago, my officemate (now one of my best friends and a great craft night buddy) decided to tape the receiver of my phone down. I’m dense and couldn’t figure out why my phone wouldn’t answer when people called me. She had to tell me because one of our colleagues kept calling and I kept accidentally hanging up on her. Whoops. I am very easy to prank.

So who knows how many times I will publicly demonstrate my gullibility today. Too many for sure.

Anywho, I had some fabulous thrift store luck recently that enabled me to do a quirky floral project for my bay window. We’ll call it an indoor window box.

I have been holding onto this teak box for a while, wanting to do a floral project with it. I couldn’t decide what to do though. I thought of doing glass jars with flowers, but mason jars were too wide. So I prowled thrift stores and found a bunch of pretty white vases to fill the box.

The funny thing was the vases I found were all from different thrift stores. They must be a standard florist vase because of how common they are:

You can see one is more opaque than the others. Meh, perfection is overrated.

The vases fit perfectly in my indoor window box, so I happily skipped off to Michaels with a birthday gift card from my god momma to buy paper flowers for the project.

I came away with these beauties:

All that was left to do was put all of the items together. Not that hard, huh?

I think if I stumble upon one more vase I’ll snatch it up and add it to the box. There’s definitely room for one more. Couldn’t hurt, right?

My indoor window box looks really great in the bay window. It fills the space nicely without blocking the view. Plus, I am really digging the pink, wood and white combo! Looks pretty sweet with the gray and mint combo I’ve got going on in the living room.

Happy April Fools! … do people say that?

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, Holiday

Wooden Tree Decoration

January 5, 2015January 5, 2015 Jessica Smith

One of my favorite gifts that I made this year I of course failed to take a nice picture of. Just my luck.

I made my godfather a decoration of trees and a graphic design print with lyrics from his favorite song, In the Bleak Midwinter.

The print is simple and has the first verse of the song. I wanted to create a decoration to sit beside it, so I used pallet wood to create a tree scene.

First, I cut out pallet pieces using a jigsaw. I didn’t care for the lines to be perfect, so you’ll see that the trees aren’t all straight or the same size. Imperfection is the name of the game.

Once my trees were cut out, I sanded them down and laid them out in a way I thought looked pleasing.

I pulled a piece of scrap wood from my stash and cut it down to size. I wanted just enough behind the trees to help the whole decoration stand on its own.

Next, I stained the trees. I used a darker brown stain and a light green stain, choosing to leave the tree in the middle untouched.

Once the stain dried, I screwed the piece of scrap wood into the trees so they would be permanently affixed together.

Last, I used a small piece of scrap wood to create a star — I wasn’t able to cut a star out of wood, but instead stained an itty bitty piece of wood yellow and used a wood burning tool to add a star. I added this to the center tree only.

Ta da!

Like I said — not a good picture. It really doesn’t do this decoration justice. My godfather loved his framed graphic art and the accompanying tree decoration. I almost didn’t want to give the trees away!

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