Arts & Crafts Fun

Happy Hump Day everyone! I hope you’ve all been having a great week so far! It has been okay here, just wishing these work days would go by faster!

Today I wanted to share some of the latest arts and crafts I have put together for our wedding and my 2nd wedding shower happening this Saturday! I’ll start with the wedding DIY, dying my own mason jars! I should start off by saying that I really don’t know how I could have planned my wedding without Pinterest, it is the most amazing and helpful site. If you haven’t heard of it, I’d be surprised! It’s the most wonderful place to get ideas and learn how to do lots of DIY crafts. If you’re not a member, you need to join asap! Here is a link to my page! http://www.pinterest.com/AundreaLily23/

So for our centerpieces we are using different colored jars of different sizes for each table. Because my colors are pool/turquoise blue I wanted to find jars that matched that color. After research though the tinted blue ones seemed a bit priceyer then the clear jars. So after a little more searching around I found sites that provided instructions on how dye them yourself, and voila, I was ready to go! I read 5-6 different methods and settled on the most common one; pulling steps from each one. I purchased my mason jars on walmart.com and had them delivered to the store nearest me, super easy. Then from Michael’s Arts & Crafts, or heaven for some of us : ) I went looking for everything else that I needed. Here is what I purchased:

1. Hodge Podge with a gloss finish

2. Small sponge ended paint brushes

3. Teal icing food coloring, most instructions asked for “food coloring” but my       local Michael’s only had icing coloring

4. Spray can of sa finishing sealant with a gloss finish

And off we went! The steps were incredibly easy and from start to finish I think it took us about 1.5 hours to dye 12 jars. I say us because Mr. Tan Lines wanted to help me paint the jars :) Sorry I don’t have pictures of the step by step process, but here is what we did.

I mixed 5 tablespoons of hodge podge and 1/4 tablespoons of the icing coloring with 1 tablespoon of water. I mixed that well then proceeded to coat the outside of each jar with the glue mixture. I found it easiest to start at the top, then place the jars upside down on a baking dish and finish the bottom. After they were coated we baked them for 20-25 minutes at 200 degrees. This was much longer then the instructions I read, but I think our oven just cooks a little slower than most! Afterwards we pulled them out and let them cool. We sprayed them with the finishing sealant a few days later. Bam! We were done! It was one of the easiest crafts that I have pulled off of Pinterest and one of the most rewarding since it was for our wedding! Here is a pic of the finished jars after they were done baking.

One tip I would say is wear gloves!! The icing coloring was very powerful and took a few days to rid my fingers of the color!

Now the second craft I did was also for our wedding, a sign instructing guests that there was no “side picking” for seating at our wedding.  We had an old piece of wood in the garage that was the perfect size and I purchased a cheap set of paint brushes for $6 at Michael’s.

We found the perfect color at our local Lowe’s store. We just purchased standard wall paint in the color we wanted. Then I used the paint brush, a very thin one because I had to apply a good amount of pressure to the wood to write the letters.

Mr. Tan Lines will add the stake later so we can place it into the sand near our ceremony.

The third craft I did is for my wedding shower this weekend. I’ll talk about that more later but the theme is Breakfast at Tiffany’s, going with my teal/turquoise color scheme. I saw this amazingly cute sign on Pinterest that I just had to have. So Mr. Tan Lines and I purchased a large sheet of thin wood at Lowe’s, and sawed it almost in half, it roughly had dimensions of 36x40 inches. We then measured out the different sections with painters tape, painting the white first and the teal an hour later.

Then, it was my turn to shine. With the brush in my hand I was ready to go. I wrote the words as closely as I could to my inspiration on Pinterest. I think the entire writing process took me almost 45 minutes, it took various layers of the black paint to form thick clear lines.

A few hours later we sprayed both signs with the finishing sealant and we were done! It was so much fun putting all of this together and it was even more fun getting to do it as a couple! I can't wait for everyone to see!