LOVE Canvas Art

   Hi, everyone!  Happy Labor Day!  I started laboring away on a beautiful, easy project last night.  It's a piece of art on canvas.  Let me tell you how I made it. :)

   I used my Silhouette machine to cut the word LOVE from a piece of pretty black scrapbook paper.  I also took a canvas out of my canvas stash to put the letters on.

I painted my canvas hot pink.  (If you want to get technical, the color is strawberry.)

Now, the reason I started this project is because I recently bought some of the new Martha Stewart paints from Michaels.  I just had to try out the beautiful pearly colors.  So I chose the Pink Taffeta Pearl paint to stencil a design onto my canvas.

School Spirit Shirt

   Hi, everyone! It's been a while. School started, and I got super busy! And while I have stacks of papers to grade at this very moment, I just had to post this project because it's just been too long since I've posted on here!

   Fridays at my school are casual days. We can wear jeans if we donate a couple dollars to the Relay for Life. (A very good cause, might I add!) Everyone always likes to support the football team on Fridays too. I went to a local store to buy a school t-shirt to wear this Friday, but they hardly had any shirts to choose from. So I decided to make my own!

   I stopped by Wal-mart on the way home from school Thursday and picked up these supplies.

I bought a $5 t-shirt, two spools of ribbon (I already had one to use at home.), matching thread, and buttons. Of course, I had scissors already.

Lampshade Redo

Hi, everyone!  School will be starting soon, so I have devoted some time this week to working on my classroom.  As I was arranging the items I keep on my desk, I noticed my lamp sitting beside my computer.  I looked at it and thought, "This needs to be pittered and glinked!!!"  So I brought the lampshade home with me today and started working on it.  Here's the before:

The first thing I did was paint the lampshade with Gesso.  Gesso is pretty much just a primer.  I thought it would help cover the purses on the fabric.  (Two coats.)  After the Gesso dried, I painted the shade pink.  (Two coats again.)

I loved the color of the lampshade, but when I held it up to the light, those pesky purses were peeking through the paint!!!  I thought about covering the shade with scrapbook paper, but when I held that over the shade in the light, the purses were still visible!  So.....I went to Plan B and painted the shade black.  I figured the purses would be barely visible through the black.  I was right.  I couldn't see them at all.

 While I waited on my paint to dry, I used a border punch I bought at Michael's to punch pages from an old book. When the paint dried, I starting gluing the strips to the shade using Mod Podge.

I covered the lampshade with the strips.  After the glue dried, I covered the shade in another coat of Mod Podge to seal it.

I knew I wanted something to embellish the shade with, so I gathered some ribbon, a needle, and thread and made some ribbon flowers with button centers.  (If you Google how to make ribbon flowers, there are many tutorials.)  The small felt flowers were left over from another project.

After the shade was dry, I used hot glue to attach the flowers.  I also glued rhinestones in the middles of the felt flowers. 

I have a brand-new old lampshade!  Having it to look at will make summer's ending not seem quite so bad....maybe. ;)