This was one of those projects I put off for 2 years and only took one day to complete: recovering the cushions on our dining room chairs.
Here is one of the chairs previously, with large, off-white cushions, spotted with circles and stains and one year old handprints.

I bought a remnant piece of fabric without measuring the piece or the chair cushions (impulse buy!) but I liked the fabric a lot and it was only $6 for the whole piece. When I got home I saw that it was about 3″ too narrow to work! So I bought brown lining fabric and sewed a 2″ strip onto the right and left sides. This gave me just enough width to fit these very large seats. I bought brown rather than white lining so just in case it showed on the sides it wouldn’t stick out too much. The hardest part was just wrapping the corners and getting it stapled down smoothly. An electric staple gun is a necessity to get the fabric snug with the cushion.

My living, dining, and kitchen are all in one long row in my house so I wanted to choose a fabric that was a little formal and also brought the colors of all these rooms together. What I liked best about this striped fabric was that it had a gold stripe that complements my yellow dining and living room walls, a brown and rust color that match my kitchen, and a little blue and green too to match the living room furniture. I am much happier with what seem like new chairs to me!

This is a great idea I couldn’t wait to share after visiting a friend’s house this week. I had never thought to ask if she had created this framed work herself. I assumed she had bought it this way, but I love the natural flowers with such a natural picture. It really draws your attention and adds dimension.

She bought the print on her honeymoon and the frame later. But my favorite part was that she got dried baby’s breath from a craft store to place around the print rather than buying expensive matting. She layered the flowers on the paper and then pressed the glass upon it, using no glue to damage the print. I loved this idea and her house is so inspiring! Thanks, E!

Can you notice a difference between the corner on the left and right?

In an attempt to go a little more green around our house I decided to make up a bunch of cloth napkins in fabrics I liked. The only frustrating part was trying to press, pin, and sew corners that never came out straight. There is always that little corner that sticks out like a tongue at me! Until I learned a better way to fold and sew them, (Thanks Mom!) and I wanted to share tips from my sewing misadventures with you.

1. Snip off a little diagonally in each corner. (You may find this step in unnecessary but it ensures a neater fold as you get to Step 4.)

2. Pretend that you have not snipped the corner and fold and press a 90′ “triangle”. You want this to be the width of turning your fabric over twice the width that you desire.

3. Now turn the edge over two times until the sides and ends match up to peak at a perfect triangle. This may take a little trial and error. You can see where I pressed the sides and unfolded the edge again.

4. I use an iron to do a lot of my sewing. Ironing really helps you to get your hem straight and with no pins! So once you have this lined up just right you can just sew across your hem.

I feel great when my homemade napkins look just as good as the ones I have bought! Great for tablecloths, tablerunners, placemats, etc. too.

My poor, neglected craft corner. I haven’t sat down at it in over three weeks and I’m about to pitch a fit. The hubby and I have been working our fingers off trying to spruce up the outside of our house. So while I wanted to be doing stuff like this, I was transforming this:

to this:

While we love the way the house looks, it’s not completely done but done enough to where I can busy my hands crocheting instead of painting. But now I’ve got so many ideas – seriously, it feels like a storm is brewing over my head – of things I want to make, I don’t even know where to begin and just trying to decide takes most of my energy that I would need to do it. So, any of you crafters out there who feel like you’ve got too many ideas stuck in the noggin’ too, how do you organize them quickly and easily so you can begin to complete them?

I’m in the process of redecorating my dining room. Because I could do some serious financial damage, my husband has put me on a budget. I’m always at a loss for what to do for a centerpiece, but always come back to the trusty candles-option. I found the perfect candle holders, but ofcourse they were totally out of the budget. So I opted for an even better idea that was cheaper and looked better.

Aren’t they great? And if you look closely, they are just bowls and plates glued together. That’s it! Find some bowls and plates that you like, or use ones you already have. Get some apoxy, let them sit over night, and you have fabulous and original candle holders.

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I was going to wait and post this next week but I’m just so excited I couldn’t wait!

While I was at JoAnn’s a few weeks ago, I found this yummy fabric that I knew would look great somewhere in the house. I hadn’t decided what I was going to do with it until I walked in the kitchen and this site stuck out like a sore thumb:

We have limited storage space in our kitchen, so I bought this roll cart to put food in and to add to our also limited counter space. So I decided to make a skirt for it to hide the metal part, and also it’s contents. My mom came over this morning to show me how to use my machine and the first seam that I stitched I was in love with it. I can tell this is going to be a beautiful friendship.

So I worked for two hours, piecing the skirt together, then I finished the edges, added some ribbons, and there you have it – a cute covering for a metal kitchen contraption.

I think it turned out great and I had so much fun doing it! I can’t wait to think up more things to do with my sewing machine (and I know the possibilities are endless).

If you know me at all, you know I am not a tea set kind of gal. I was a tomboy, and at the age of 25, I’m just starting to get a little girly. But I have been in search of the perfect tea set. My great grandma had one that I remember playing with, but after she died it got lost in the clean up, never to be found again. A lot of antique tea sets I have seen are super cheesy and well, ugly. Gold-rimmed, scalloped edges – totally not my style. But when I found this on eBay last week it was pretty and reminded me of the tea set my grandma had. So I began the frantic (and blood-pressure raising) bidding. Obviously I won and I can not tell you the relief I had when I saw the green check on the screen followed by the words, “You won!”

It arrive on Monday and I can’t stop looking at it. I think it’s one of the prettiest things I’ve ever seen. It inspired me to make some tea towels and embroider what else but tea cups and flowers on them. However, I’ve never made tea towels before. I’m just getting into sewing and learning about fabric, so I don’t even know the best material to use to make kitchen towels. I suppose I could just buy some plain white ones, but how fun is that? So dear Daisy readers, can anyone enlighten me as to what kind of material to use for tea towels?

As an avid scrapbooker, I’m always buying scrapbook albums on sale or receiving them as gifts. In the end, I always end up with lots of empty albums and I can never decide to just keep them for future layouts or use them for other things. I came up with a great idea to use a scrapbook album for CD storage, that keeps the CDs out of sight, and the scrapbook looks great sitting on a bookshelf or entertainment unit.

Closed…it looks just like a regular scrapbook album:

Opened…its a storage secret – lots and lots of CDs:

I started with an empty scrapbook album, an empty page protector and 2 pieces of scrapbook paper (for each page of CDs). I folded each of the 12×12 papers into quarters and then opened up. I put the papers into the page protector with the right sides facing out, and I sewed along the folds using my sewing machine. This separates the page into 4 pockets. I then used a ruler and a scalpel to cut about a half inch below the horizontal stitching, creating pockets to slide the CDs into. And there you have it – quick and easy CD storage that matches your decor, takes about 5 mins to make (per page) and holds 8 CDs.

This is a great project to get rid of some scrapbook paper you have laying around, as well as embellishments if you want. I chose to keep mine simple, but you could jazz the pockets up using embellishments, ribbon, colored thread…the options are endless!

In an effort to spruce up my kitchen some, I decided to make some wall hangings. I didn’t want them to be basic and painted flat colors and look one-dimensional. So I headed to Lowe’s to check out the painting finishes they have. I found one that was just what I was looking for: crackling.

I picked up these unfinished plaques at Wal-mart for a dollar each, and used some paint that I already had. I wanted the finish product to be light, with some dark underneath, so I painted the base a coffee bean brown.

Once that dried, I applied the crackling glaze with a sponge brush, letting that dry completely before I added the top coat of off white.

As you can see, when it dries, the glaze doesn’t let the paint adhere to the entire surface, creating cracks in the paint and giving it that great antique-y finish.

Next I decided on my shape (which would happen to be a bird, go figure – hey, atleast it’s not felt!), drew it, cut it out and then traced it on the wood with a pencil.

I then painted my bird and the branches, let dry and there you go – easy and inexpensive wall hangings with that old-world feeling to it.

The supplies cost about $10 (the crackling glaze ate up $8, but it spreads thin so a little goes a long way and you’ll be using this stuff for awhile) and all together took about 30 minutes, not including drying time.

We just moved into a new place, and my decorating is pretty much non-existent. I’ve always had the “poor-student- misc-junk-thrown-together” look but now that I’m an adult and we have a nice place, I want that to change. One of the things that I wanted to do was frame and hang up some professional photos that we got taken when Elizabeth was a newborn. However, I cannot find the perfect frames that would go with our color scheme and look unique at the same time. So why not make them?

I found unfinished wooden frames at Ikea for super cheap (3 frames for $1.99), the fact that they are unfinished allows someone to finish them as they want. I dug through my scrapbooking supplies and found some beautiful paper that was the style I was looking for, plus it was quite unique. I cut strips of the paper to match the width of the front of the frame, plus allowed extra to wrap around the sides of the frame. I then folded the bottoms of the strips to match the angles of the frame’s corners. My next step was to adhere the paper to the frame using Modge Podge.

I found the Modge Podge worked great for adhering the paper to the wood, and it adhered really fast. To make the picture frame unique, I found some coordinating embellishments and adhered them to the frame. I added some buttons and ribbon for a 3D additions, which looks very different but beautiful at the same time. One last thin coat of Modge Podge over the entire frame for protection, and I ended up with a beautiful frame that you’ll never find in stores, matches our decor and taste perfectly, and took only 45 minutes to complete from start to finish.