impulse crafting

Usually I've got a couple dozen creative projects in all stages of incompleteness at any given moment, but every once in a great while I see or get an idea and within a few days I've banged out my own version.  Here are a couple such projects that I've done over the past couple of months.

On Anthro's website I saw this

And soon after saw this DIY version. . .

So a trip to the dollar store and a some quality time with my exacto knife and voila!

There was an indented square in the middle of my laptop instead of the Dell circle or the Apple light, so I decided to put my monogram in the square to give it purpose.  Close up?  Of course.

So this one may not qualify as strictly an impulse craft because the shoes have been in my closet for a while, but the other day it occurred to me that what these plain little denim shoes were crying out for was stripes of navy glitter.  I taped those stripes off  and mod podged the navy glitter on quick as a wink.  Much better don't you think?  The lighter stripes in the photo below are the glittery ones. . . a little hard to photograph.  (btw, I now have a life time supply of navy glitter if anyone needs to borrow some.)

Last show & tell for today was done back in the winter and have been used at a bunch of functions but I never remembered to photograph them.  (Melanie, do you have any photos from Mother's Day?)  Google "diy apothecary jars" and you'll think that is the only thing people are DIYing these days and they are super fun, easy and kind of addicting.  I think this is the tutorial that got me started.  A trip to a thrift store or two and mine came out like this

(Linn, this was my self-rewarding jar for the Happiness Project.  Sorry I never posted about it there.)

Since M is a structural engineer, it bugged him that the bowl I used as a lid could slide off center if you bumped it, not stable enough for our standards.  So with a washable marker, I marked the lid where I wanted it to sit on the jar, as shown below.  Then I whipped out my hot glue gun and gave it a little ring of glue around the inside at the same level as the mark, and let it harden before I put it back on the jar.  Problem solved.

Once you've done one of these, you start looking at all kinds of things that you could glue together to make fantastical serving pieces.  I glued a candle stick to a bowl.  oooooh!   ahhhhhh!

I glued a candle stick to a plate that is just smaller than my cake stand so I can use it to make a tiered cupcake stand. . . OH WAIT! I did photograph that one.  Remember back at AJ's jungle b-day party?  Anyway it's been fun and useful several times.

I learned something on this one.  You should make sure that you really carefully fill in any and all the little groves in between the base (in this case, the candlestick) and the cut glass plate.  See if you don't, then dirty dishwater could leak into the space between them and make you really sad that it's cloudy instead of sparkly down there.