Made It Monday: Land of the Free

Wow! Can you believe it is June already? Where has the year gone? It is beginning to feel more and more like summer each day around here. I have a lot going on this month, so bear with me as my posts may be sporadic! I have a lot of fun projects I want to post, but a few need some finishing touches, and I’m not sure if they are going to get done anytime soon:( I will try my best though!

Today’s Made it Monday feature is a button flag picture I made for my Memorial Day/Independence Day seasonal table.

I had the idea to do this and it turned out to be fast, cheap, and simple. I started out by grabbing a few packs of buttons from JoAnn Fabrics, since my button jar did not contain that many red, white and blue buttons. My St. Patrick’s Day rainbow art depleted my button collection (which apparently, I never revealed that canvas on the blog, because I was going to link to it and can’t find it!). I think I spent a total of $3 on buttons, and that is all I spent on this entire project, everything else I had on hand. Not too shabby!

The first step was laying out all the buttons to make sure the final product would resemble a flag. This took the most time, since I had to redo it a couple of times because it was off center (my frame already had the fabric in it—it would have been easier had I done it on a new piece of fabric that I could just center in the frame after I had glued the buttons on). Once I was happy with the look, I hot glued those bad boys on.

I’m not going to lie—the picture stayed this way for a while. I ran out of time to finish it that day, but I wanted to add a saying. At first was going to put on “God Bless America,” until I realized that right below the picture I have something that says the same thing. Then I thought about how the flag symbolizes freedom and rather than just putting “free” or “freedom,” I decided on “land of the free.” I cut out “land of the free” on vinyl with my cricut to create a stencil.

I used transfer tape (contact paper actually) to put the vinyl on the picture. The transfer tape helps keep all the middles of the letters in the right spot.

Then I painted it with a red craft paint that I had on hand.

I removed the vinyl and had myself a lovely $3 new piece of art!

Lexi

Made it Monday: Ring Bling

Happy Monday! Hope you had a fantastic weekend! I had a fun weekend catching up with a couple of good friends from out of town.  I went to the  Mall of America with one friend and got to go to a Lorie Line concert with the other. Here is a picture from the concert—Lorie Line is an amazing pianist!

Over the weekend, I also ran into Joann Fabrics and found some really cute buttons. I thought they would make perfect rings for summer.

These were so easy (and cheap!) to make. All you have to do is cut off the back of the button (the button hole) to make the back flat. Then, I measured some elastic to the size of my finger and hot glued it on the back of the button. Super easy, super fast and super cute.


I had also seen a tutorial on Pinterest (via The Ribbon Retreat http://www.theribbonretreat.com/blog/ric-rac-rose.html) for another cute rosette ring that I wanted to try. It was made out of ric rac, so I picked some up on my trip to Joann’s.

I started with two pieces of ric rac that were 21” long.

I twisted/braided them together. I had some issues here. Mine was not looking like the tutorial did and it took me a while to get it twisted and still remain flat. I think the ric rac in the tutorial was a softer material. My ric rac was kind of stiff, so that may have had something to do with it.

Once I finally got the twisting figured out, I rolled it up.

Then, I hot glued the excess ribbon underneath the rosette.

I couldn’t get the edges to “bloom” like they did on the tutorial either, but I think it is cute as is.

You can buy a ring base to put these flowers on as well, but I had a lot of elastic at home and knew that worked just as well. Here all the rings are together:

On a side note, please excuse my un-manicured nails in these pictures. I am slightly embarrassed that the one time I show my nails in a post this is how they look! I also had marker and paint on my hands (in the pictures with the rosette ring) from helping in nursery at church earlier in the day.
I’ll be back tomorrow with another recipe for you to try, so be sure to check back then!
Lexi