Love Birds

I joined StumbleUpon a couple of weeks ago. If you want an interesting time-waster, you should sign up to this site. It allows you to put in your interests and then everytime you hit the "stumble" button on your browser, it will search the entire web and pull up sites it thinks you will be interested in. I listed one of my interests as crafts/DIY and I have gotten so many cool ideas! The sites really got my creative juices flowing, so I did a couple projects....

Bird's Nest Necklace

I saw the original idea for this on another blog, but the girl used heavy gauge wire and large beads so the result was much larger. I liked the idea of a delicate charm, so I used very small gauge wire and tiny beads. I started by threading the beads onto the end of the wire; I then twisted the wire together to hold the beads in place in a group of three. I then began winding the wire round the beads to desired thickness. To secure the wire from coming unwound, I added three small wrappings at three points around the nest. I attached the bird charm and loop on the top with metal jewelry making rings (found in the bead section at our local craft store). Finally I created the chain by cutting the desired length and adding a clasp (all found in the jewelry creations area of the bead section.) The result was a nest about the size of a quarter. A little time consuming, but easy and I love the final product!

Love Painting

 Oh boy, was this an adventure. To start with, I tried a similar painting on the canvas earlier this evening, and HATED the final product. I tried too many languages all hodge-podge in the background and it looked sooooo messy. I painted over the whole thing and started again. I started with my graduating color scheme of acrylic paint from light on the bottom to dark on the top; while the paint was still wet, I stood the canvas upright and misted the entire painting with a spray bottle, mainly focusing on the top row of dark color. I left the painting upright to dry. If you are doing this, put down plastic or do it over a sink/tub...it's messy.

  I then chose three languages: French, German, and Spanish and translated the phrase "I love you" into each. I painted these phrases in rows in black acrlic paint and allowed to dry. Over those, I painted the larger English "I love you" with a heart in ivory with gray shadow.

 I love the way it turned out....so much better than the first. I almost gave up and turned it into "dumpster art"; I'm glad I gave it a second chance!