Mannequin

I worked in retail a few years back and acquired a body form when we went out of business (sorry I don't have a before picture.)  I again couldn't sleep last night so I finally desired to do something with it after several years.  I covered it in vinyl then in tissue paper.. paint, more tissue then drilled holes in the bottom to add a lamp... and this was the final product.

$9 Home Made Calender!

The reason it's only $9 is I went to the dollar store and purchased 8 $1 frames from the dollar store and glued them together with my hot glue gun.  I used scraps of paper I already had around the house (average about $1) and a little work I have this gem.

Sorry for the wonky angle but I have a very narrow hallway :(

I used dry erase markers to fill in our scheduled

Here is a close up of what it looks like

I used the Cricut design software to make the days and the cover using the Cuttin Up font.  I measured out everything so that all the words were the same height. 

Easy 5 step simple bacon jalapeno puff

I know cooking isn't really crafty but I decided to post this anyway (because it's so easy and yummy!)

8 strips of bacon (cooked then chopped)
2 Jalapeno peppers
2 packages of Pillsbury croissants
1 8oz package of cream cheese

 Step one: cook and chop up bacon

Step two: slice up the jalapenos (chop up as large or as small as you like)

Step three: Portion out spoon fulls of the cream cheese the 8 oz should cover all 16 perfectly

Step Four: place bacon and jalapenos on top of the cream cheese

Step Five: Spray cooking sheet with non stick spray after covering the content with pastry dough bake at 375 for 10 min or until golden brown.

Eat and enjoy!

Window makeover

I purchased this window from a antique store years and years ago. I used to have old photos behind each pain of glass, also from antique store.  I'm not sure how I'm going to put photos behind it now but i wanted to make frames with the cricut design studio, sophisticated and elegant edges cartridge.  I didn't use any of the pre made frames because of the shape and size I needed.  So far i'm quite happy with it!

I may not be perfect

I woke up at 3 am and needed something to do (as if cleaning my house wasn't enough ha ha ha) So this is the product of my insomnia.  It's currently hanging in my kitchen because I am running out of free space on my walls... lots of insomnia lately ... anyway I used my cricut software to cut out the letters on black vinyl using the font that came with the wall decor and more cartridge.  The background is actually a collage I made several years ago when I was in college at some convention.  It was a dream board of things I wanted in my life so I felt like it was the perfect background for this statement.  

Necklaces

First I started out by cutting out objects with my cricut or pictures from paper then after assembling the parts I covered them in Mod Podge Dimensional magic.  The people at Jo-anns where awesome in helping me get the correct Mod Podge, they know their stuff!

I then put a layer ontop of the paper objects, I chose to set them on bottle caps just in case they dripped.  Good thing I did because this was my first try and I put a little to much and it dripped (all over!) I suggest putting wax paper down first if you don't have bottle caps.

The next step is to be patient and let them dry for about 2 hours or so.  The mod podge said 24 hours but after 2 hours I took a small hole punch to them.  You don't want to wait to long because if you do it will crack the mod podge. 

Once they dried for another couple of hours I flipped them over and mod podged the back side of each necklace.  The reason I did this was I thought they were just to flimsy because they are all made of a couple of layers of card stock.  Next time I may back them with something more.

After the back side dried for another 2 hours or so I folded them in wax paper and put a hole punch on top.  I did this because they curled a little and I wanted them to flatten out a bit.

once dried I put rings in them and put them on chains and now the final products!

These 2 I just cut the pictures out of a paper pack I had to see how one section of paper (un layered) would do with the mod podge.  The power up necklace I colored with gel pens to test if the colors would run once the mod podge was put on. 

And now for my cricut necklaces (which I'm very proud of!)

The face shape was cut from heritage cartrage and the background was cut with sophisticated (which is becoming a favorite of mine!) I used the CDS software to design both of these necklaces then cut small sections of card stock on my cricut expression. 

This necklace was made with only the sophisticated cartridge I did hide some of the cuts to make the white section a little more solid, it was such a small cut for such detail at 1.3/4 inches.  I used a new mat for all the cuts and they tore a little and it took me 2 tries to get the pressure right using CDS I had to set my blade to 6 in order to cut the card stock.  

I'm quite happy with them and will be doing more, hope you like it!

Soap Dish

 Before

After

This is a small soap dish from IKEA we acquired for about $3.00 it needed a little help so I cut out SOAP with the Cuttin up cricut cartridge and used the design software to place the dots (soap bubbles) Hope you like it!