Hopping on the Burlap Bandwagon

So everyone seems to be using burlap lately. I feel like I can't open a blog without seeing something burlap.

I've had an aversion to burlap that I couldn't put my finger on, but I decided to go for it today and went out and picked up a yard of the stuff to make some place mats with.

Here we go!!!

 

Materials used (and picured)

• 1 yard of burlap, bought at JoAnns for $2.50
• Red yarn, inherited from mom who knows when
• Scissors
• Tape measure
• Tapestry needles.

Step 1 - cut the burlap to your desired size, making sure to first cut off the selvage so you've got no threads bound at any edge. After seeing some awesome square pace mats while out to lunch in Vegas the other day, I decided to go for 15.5"x15.5" squares. (I'd love to show you a picture of the ones I saw, but it was a business lunch with my boss sitting next to me and I didn't think it was really a good idea to whip out my iPhone and take a picture of them right then.)

Step 2 - allow the edges of the burlap to fray a bit, but NOT to the finished point you are hoping for, throughout the rest of the process here, it will fray more... so if you want a half inch fray, and you get a half inch fray off the bat, you'll end up with an inch fray. Be forewarned. Oh, and be prepared for lots of fuzzies.

Next up - and I'm sorry for the super blurry picture, I didn't realize 'till downloading that they looked like this... Anyway, Next up, measure in about an inch, and pull on one of the strands of burlap. Then pull the whole sucker out. It might break, that's ok, just fish out the rest with a needle and keep pulling.

Then pull out 2 more...

Step 5 - Thread your tapestry needle with your desired color of yarn and begin weaving the needle through the space you opened up being sure to go opposite of the threads to the right and left of where you are weaving.

 

Step 6 - Keep on weaving all the way to the end. 

 

Step 7 - Count over a bit, I counted over 7 strands, and then pull out 3 more strands from the burlap and weave another length of yarn through. (You can see here what I mean about additional strands fraying on the edges while you're working.)

Step 8 - From here... do whatever you want... you might want to keep right on going all the way to the other side of the place mat with the stripes. You could turn the mat and go perpendicular to the first 2 strands you've woven in (which is what I did.) It's up to you.

I decided I only want to frame the top and side of the mat, it seemed how ours were meant to look. After I'd gotten everything the way I wanted, I clipped the ends of the red yarn, and cleaned up the fray.

Here are our finished place mats:

I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, we don't usually do place mats on this table,  still want to see every inch of it after all the hard work that went into it. But I did want a little color and texture on it right now. I imagine after Valentine's day is over I will store this away and perhaps do a runner down the middle.

Linking this up to Saturday Night Special at Funky Junk Interiors and Make Your Monday.

Letter Plates

I gave you a sneak peak of these last week...

We've got a plate rack in our dinning room that was a gift from my husband for our first Christmas in this house. Throughout the year I put different plates in it depending on the season, here is what we do at Christmas:

But I don't have any plates that we just generally use that aren't seasonally specific. I decided I wanted to do something with my cricut... I thought I wanted to do each of our monograms, there were room for 4 plates, we have 4 people. Perfect.

Until I started working with the monograms and just didn't like the way they were turning out.

But then I decided to just do our first initials because the monograms had so many common letters but our first names are all different. I created the artwork in illustrator and saved the file as an SVG to open in Sure Cuts A Lot and then cut with black vinyl on the cricut.

Here are the materials I started with:

Pictured are:

• My cricut expression
• Netbook with Sure Cuts A Lot software
• 12"x24" matte for the cricut
• 4 dinner plates
• 12"x24" sheet of black vinyl.
• Contact paper to transfer the vinyl from the backing paper, to the plate
• Cricut tools including a spatula to lift the cut vinyl and a popsicle stick to burnish.

Step 1 was to open the file I created in Illustrator into Sure Cuts A Lot.

 Step 2 - Cut the Vinyl and then remove the portion that you do not want to transfer to the plate.

Step 3 - Cut a piece of contact paper and place on top of the letters and then use the popsicle stick to burnish over the letter to help get them stuck to the contact paper and give up the backing paper.

Step 4 - Gently pull up the contact paper making sure all the vinyl letters come with you. If not, put the contact paper down and burnish again.

Step 5 - Position the contact paper with the cut letters over top of the plate and then burnish over the letters again.

Step 6 - Peel up the contact paper and you've got yourself a decorative* plate!!!

Here is the plate rack with the finished collection of plates:

And close ups of each of our plates:

 

 

 

I'm beyond thrilled with how these have turned out and I really enjoyed the process of making them... I'm toying with the idea of refining my process and selling them. You may notice that I still have a lot to learn. Some of the fonts I picked really didn't work with some of the letters and I had to pull them off... but not one else, well, except you - know that.

*note, these are DECORATIVE plates, they shouldn't be used to eat off of, serve food from, submerged in water or put in the dish washer. 

Sneak Peak

I'm working on a project that I'm really excited about... Here is a sneak peak.

The $200+ light fixture vs. the $18 solution

Pretty much every home in Northern Virginia was built with this light fixture in the dining room.



I cannot even begin to tell you how much I hate this light fixture. But we don't really use the dining room all that much and most of the light fixtures I was looking at to replace it with were running $200+. That's a lot to spend on a room you don't spend a lot of time in. At least in my world it is.

But, I hate that light fixture. (My apologies if you like it...) We actually had it in our previous townhouse and I hated it there too.

Then came my hero, a simple can of spray paint. $4 worth of matte black pray paint + 6 $2 lamp shades from JoAnn's = a light fixture I can live with. (And have been for 4 years now.)


Please ignore the single shade trimmed in black, I thought I was going to do that to all of them and was living with it for a few days when I decided against it. I was too lazy to take another picture. (We also centered the table, but yet again... too lazy to take another picture. Note to self: work on laziness.)