Handmade Ornaments Day 3 : Clothes Pin Star (Tree topper)

Hi Friends,

How is the preparation for the big holiday coming along? Are you all done with last minute Christmas decorations and ready for gatherings with family and friends?

Here is another handmade ornament tutorial using Clothes pin. Very simple, easy on money ornament. I had some Clothes Pin at home left over from one of the projects for Laundry (yet to be posted). I made a star tree topper using the clothes pin. If you have smaller pins you could use them as ornaments too, since I had little bigger,I just made a big star.

All that I had to do is remove the spring, arrange them like star and hot glue. I finished it with in Blue paint and dry brushed the gold paint. Next time, I might paint all of it just gold, for now, its ok :)

 

Hope you like it!!

Here is the link for other handmade DIY ornaments
Ombre Painted Pine Cones
Scrabble Tile Ornament

Have two more tutorials, but I am not sure if I can pen them down today, fingers crossed!!

Thanks and have a blessed day!!

Handmade Ornaments Day 2: Scrabble Tile Ornaments

Hello friends, I am back with another tutorial of handmade ornaments.

Scrabble is a hit board game at our home. These days we play pretty much on iPad instead of the traditional board. Mostly because most of the tiles are missing as we have had this set for a long long time now. I made the ornaments using few of these tiles.

Another simple project which you can whip it in 10 mins. All that you need is hot glue gun with glue stick, string or tape and scrabble tiles. I spent zero money on this :)

  Materials:

I just glued the tiles on to the tape.

I felt something was missing. so I painted two with the gold paint and added a bow tie at the top.

Few photoes with the tree.

If you are looking for ideas for handmade ornaments, here is a simple idea Ombre painted pinecones

Happy Decorating!!

Thanks,

Handmade Ornaments Day 1: Ombre Painted Pinecone Ornaments

Hello Everyone!!

Christmas is fast approaching. If you are still working on decking up the tree, here is one simple DIY ornament. Today I am sharing the first ornament in the series of 5 handmade ornaments.

On the other day I picked up some pine cones near our office parking lot. I was planning to put some glitter and use it for Christmas decor. While painting the lampshade (You can read about it here) , I poured more paint than needed on to the tray. Instead of throwing the unused paint, I started painting the pine cones.

All that u need for this project is pine cones (available at art and craft stores too), painting brush and acrylic paint ( I used 3 shades of blue). Its very very simple project, clean the pine cones, start painting in layers.

Hang it up on the tree or fill the bowl for Christmas decor.

Here is an after

 On the tree :)

One Close up
 

With the lights on

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Lampshade Makeover

Hello wonderful people!!

After a week long vacation, we got back home on Saturday during Thanks Giving week. While kids were busy playing on their console and hubby dear was busy catching up on some ZZZZZs, I was itching to work on some project. Though there is a project waiting for me in the Garage, I didn't feel like working in the garage. It was pouring outside and pretty cold.

That's when my eyes fell on these lampshades in the guest bed room. They were begging me to do something and add some color. It was a perfect project to hide under blanket and work on.

Here is the before and after.

I started working on the lampshades with the acrylic paint I already had at home (leftover from this project). I ran out of blue after the second lampshade was half done and I didn't have burnt orange at home. I spent whopping $1.38 and couple of evenings on the first lampshade.

you can see both lampshades with one finished here.

 

I could work on the second lampshade yesterday. Working on the second one was much faster as I just had to copy the design, no planning involved :)

    Here is how it looks in the guest bed room.

I am pretty happy with the way it turned out. It does have imperfections but absolutely love how some paint transformed these plain lampshades.

One more after before I bid bye for today.

One off of this to-do list for this room and 5 more to go..
1. Bring in a chair
2. Replace the nightstands
3. Something to go behind the head board
4. Gallery wall ? may be with travel memorabilia
5. Something for the lampshade
6. Bed skirt

Have a blessed week ahead!!

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Thank you,

Guest Bedroom over the years

Our guest bedroom has come a long way and it still has a long way to reach to some what done stage.

When we bought the house, it came with two painted bedrooms, both in hideous colors. One of them is Guest bed room (other one was master bed room if you are curious to know). I hated the saffronish hue used, no doubt that my "painting the walls saga" started with this room. Here is how bedroom looked when we moved in.

We painted the walls blue. We had the ikea norsund bed in our rental which we were using in the master bedroom. I had the plans of moving it to guest room after we buy a new one for master bedroom. Since that was taking long, I bought the bed, off of craigslist as a stop gap (ended up using it for good 3+ years, lol). With new curtains, bedding and the bed, take 1 looked like this.

The blue and chocolate theme was getting boring, I decided to change the look few months earlier. It all started when I picked up this set of curtains at TJMax. One led to other and I finally removed the old poster bed. Replaced that with the ikea bedframe.

This is how the room looks today.

In the following weeks, I am planning to finish decorating the room. I have been working on one of the projects for a while, started another one last week.  Here is what I am planning to do in the coming weeks

1. Bring in a chair
2. Replace the nightstands
3. Something to go behind the head board
4. Gallery wall ? may be with travel memorabilia
5. Something for the lampshade
6. Bed skirt

Can't wait to show you the two projects, both are related to painting. I am hoping to finish both by end of the week. We have something exciting going on in the garage this week. More on that later.

Enjoy the rain and have a beautiful week ahead!!

Thanks,

Happy 1st Birthday Techie's DIY Adventures

Today marks first anniversary of "Techie's DIY Adventures".

Thank you so much, all of you who come here, read and leave comments. I am forever grateful for all the support and encouragement you have given me. I’m incredibly thankful that you’re with me on this journey. 

We have been doing lots of home improvement projects ever since we became home owners, but I never ever thought I would one day blog about those projects. Thanks to hubby dear and couple of my close friends who encouraged me to start sharing the projects.

This first year has been a big learning for me in terms of designing and managing the blog. I know I haven't been posting as often as I should,  will try to be more punctual with my posts this year.

All the projects are dear to me but these are my favorite three projects from my last years posts

1. Paper mache Elephant
  
This is one project that will be my favorite forever. How many people get a chance to build almost a life size elephant and have most of your friends (and their families) help you to build one? I know, I know, I have been lucky :)

2. Painted wallpaper in laundry room

This is my most viewed post. I always love projects that's low on cost and high on wove factor. This is one of such projects. All that it took was 2 fl oz of acrylic paint which I already had at home, the template made out of cereal box and some patience.

3. Stenciled wooden cornice

This was my very  first post. I had seen inlay work on the tables, dressers but inlay work on the cornice felt like a very fresh idea. Every time I walk past this room, it brings smile on my face and I am sure that's the first, people notice when they walk into our home.

Do you have any favorites? would love to hear from you on that.

Thank you for stopping by. Have a good rest of the week.

Garage Organization with overhead racks

I am so excited to be able to park the car back in the garage, finally!!!

During the initial days, we brought two garage cabinets from OSH. These two cabinets are bursting with our power tools, Christmas decoration, left over paint cans, camping related stuff, paper towels, paper plates etc. with no other storage in the garage, most of the items were on the floor.

Over the years, Our garage has become more of a junk yard than the home for our cars. It is a two car garage, we put everything else in there but the cars. It has been overflowing with all the left over wood from our projects, 4 bikes, my unfinished projects, furniture/toys/clothes to be donated, kids basketballs/soccer balls,  gardening tools and also loads of junk.

We are planning to do the epoxy on the garage floors soon, so I have been on a mission to remove as much as possible from the floor. So, now most of these things are moved to ceiling :) !! Yes, we installed overhead storage racks in the garage.

We ordered safe rack from Costco. Delivery was pretty quick and it came in two packages. Most difficult part in the installation was locating the joist. After using stud locator to mark the studs, we punched couple of holes in the ceiling to make sure joist indeed exists there :) Once first joist was located, it was much easy to find rest of them.

Hubby was so impressed with the overhead racks,we ended up ordering one more. Installing the second one was a breeze, we did that in less than 4 hours.

We have put all our large suitcases on these racks, Camping related stuff and also the wood. Still there is some wood left on the floor. With Special fall cleanup from the city, I was able to get rid of bed, palettes and other junk from the garage.

It looks so much better already. How do you organize your garage?

Thanks for stopping by and have a fabulous week ahead!!

Happy Deepavali (Festival of lights)!!

Dear friends,

The spreading light of happiness.....

The eternal victory of Light over darkness as Good over evil

May this divine light fulfill your wishes on this Deepavali and always !!!

Wishing you a very very Happy Deepavali!!

Thanks,

Tutorial on how to make paper mache elephant (almost life size)

Welcome back friends!!

I am back again with the tutorial for paper mache elephant. This post is one super lengthy and picture heavy!! Please excuse me for the messy garage, we were working on multiple projects with a tight schedule. Big shout out to all my friends and their family who helped me on this project.

I referred to http://www.ultimatepapermache.com/lindas-paper-mache-elephant which is for a elephant calf, with few tweaks.

Materials Used:
-- TV Box
-- zigsaw to cut out the shape
-- Costco Milk Cardboard boxes
-- Foam bowls, Cups
-- water bottles
-- Old News paper and time magazines
-- Empty cereal boxes/cereal bar boxes
-- Spray adhesive/Construction adhesive
-- Duct tape
-- All purpose flour
-- Paint
-- Pallet
-- Rolling wheels

Only thing we bought for this project was duct tapes, construction adhesive and rolling wheels for the pallet.

- Drew the elephant on the cardboard (you can use the plywood instead if you want it to be more sturdier). Used big TV box for the body and the legs

- Cut the cardboard on the traced line.

- U will have 4 legs and body cutouts by the end of this step.

- This is the very important step as this will decide the proportion of the elephant. I Used the milk cartons as the spacer to attach the legs to the body using construction adhesive and the duct tape. Placed weights (whatever heavy thing I could grab from garage) on the top so that whole structure glued well.  It was left like this overnight.

- This is how the elephant looked at this stage

- It's stuffing time now. This is where I needed lots of hands to crumble the papers and stuff it. Few of my friends, kids and their spouses helped me a lot during rest of the elephant making process. we couldn't get enough newspapers, so we used old time magazines for the same. we started with one side, as it got heavier on one side, noticed the structure wasn't stable. I had wood from the pallet, my husband and friend's husband made two rectangle wooden structures to go under the leg to provide stability.

- Continue the stuffing and securing it with the duct tape or spray glue. Around the stomach area, to avoid lot of stuffing, we used light weight boxes, water bottles, foam bowls/cups. Made sure the shape isn't impacted during stuffing. Wooden piece used as the support is peaking thru in the below picture.

- Using the all-purpose flour, made the glue for the paper mache. Applied the paper on the stuffing using the DIY glue. Sturdiness of the object depends on the glue more than the thickness of the paper.  we were working with pretty tight deadline, so used the hair-drier/heater to dry the paper mache between the layers. We did 3 layers of paper mache

- Then the fun part, painting the elephant in gray color. I had leftover gray paint from master closet/bathroom painting, black paint from another painting project. Kept adding the black paint to the gray to get desired shade of gray.

- If you notice, I added the ear after painting the elephant. My friend had wire mesh for the bird control which she happily let me use for the ear.  First I traced the ear and test tried it on the elephant. once I was happy with the placement and dimension, Placed the mesh between two papers and attached it to the elephant head with the construction adhesive and staples.  It took couple of tries to get to the ears that looked good :)

- I asked one of my artist friend to help with painting the eyes, decorative painting on the top of the trunk, also on the ear.

- Since we were using this during the procession, we mounted the elephant on top of the pallet with the rolling wheels.

This is one wonderful craft to make with kids.

Thank you for stopping by

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