DIY Life

If you are cut from the same indecisive cloth as I am, then you acquire a multitude of paint sample strips when you are choosing a new color to paint a room or a piece of furniture. Then, because you are also a packrat, you can't bear to throw them away.

Sure, you can give them to the toddler to play with, but isn't there a better use for these colorful strips? They are made from sturdy paper and the colors are true and deep. I know there is an art project in there somewhere.

Jackie of Jackie's Space agrees with me, because she has created some beautiful cards using old paint sample strips. I love that she has used the coordinated colors of the paint sample strips with three dimensional elements, like ribbon, gems, and a silk flower.

She's got me thinking, that Jackie: what if the paint sample strips were paired with a watercolor design in complimentary colors? Or maybe some copper wire and beads woven through the strips?

The possibilities are endless, and wasting the paint sample strips as mere trash is a thing of the past. What do you do with your old paint sample strips?

When I graduated from high school -- more years ago than I would prefer to admit -- the school had graduation announcements that we could purchase. They were simple and, well, a bit boring. But I've had several nieces and nephews graduate in recent years and the announcements they purchased from their schools were much more elaborate... and more expensive.

I'm not sure if my nieces' and nephews' announcements are the norm now-a-days, but if so, the cost alone would be reason for making your own announcements. Besides the money factor, DIY announcements mean you have a one-of-a-kind creation: something unique and wonderful for the grad in your life.

Shine has a beautiful and elegant DIY announcement idea. She used folded cardstock, vellum, a custom rubber inkstamp, and ribbon. Want more announcement ideas? Check out this post about Print Gocco, and this wedding invitation post, for ideas you can apply to grad announcements.

There is nothing sweeter than a child, arms spread wide, exclaiming "I love you this much!" Sure, it's a little cliche, but it melts my heart every time. This week's Kiddie Craft captures that precious exclamation, their adorable hand-prints, and their complete admiration for Mom or Grandma.

So, skip the Mother's Day display in your local stationery store, and help your children make her a personal card. Here's what you need:

• Construction paper
• Scissors
• Tape or glue
• Pencil
• A large sheet of paper
• Pens, paints, stickers and other things to decorate the card

This simple Mother's Day card was easy to make, and my boys had a blast spreading their arms wide on the paper, and giggling as I traced their tiny hands. Follow me through the break for full instructions, and take a look through the gallery for your visual step-by-step.

These simple homemade cards add a personal touch to any gift or greeting. In fact, packaging a variety of them in a box or simply tied with a ribbon makes a great gift in and of itself. You'll need the following materials:

• Card stock. Soft pastels, cream, or even black work well.
• Paper cutter. While scissors would work, a paper cutter helps you get a perfect edge.
• Fabric. This a great project to use up scraps of fabric. You'll need a green for the foliage, yellow or orange for the center of the flowers, and a variety of colors for the petals. For added interest, opt for subtle tone-on-tone patterns or mottled fabrics; solid colors tend to look flat and lifeless on the cards.
• Glue stick. Make sure to choose a glue stick that works with fabric and paper.
• Fabric scissors. Sharp scissors with a fine point (such as scissors made for quilters) work best.

I'll discuss how to make your greeting cards bloom after the break. You can follow along step-by-step in the gallery.

With so many occasions, and such crafty kids, I often wonder if the little gifts we give end up becoming more clutter, collecting dust at Grandma's house. For this week's Kiddie Craft, we set out to make a creative Mother's Day gift that is personal and unique, but also useful.

We're making fingerprint stationery. Grab some plain card-stock, envelopes, a colorful ink-pad, and your little one's precious fingers. Press their small fingerprints into pictures on the card-stock. Finish them off with a decorative ribbon, and you will have created a memorable Mother's Day gift. You won't see a washcloth in the materials image, because somehow I neglected to predict this oh-so-necessary item, but trust me, you'll need one!

You can check out the finished cards in the gallery. After the break I'll walk you through the flower, rainbow, and hand-print designs. Use those ideas, or take a little inspiration from our craft and come up with ideas of your own.

Are you ready for February 14th? If not, help is on its way: this year's round-up of Valentine's Day ideas from MarthaStewart.com has nifty crafts in several genres and adorable food ideas, all at several levels of difficulty.

The good people at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia have separated their tutorials into categories, with some overlap between them. A few of these projects might be suitable for last-minute scrambles, but you're going to want to tackle most of them as soon as you can.

Among the categories:

• Numerous Valentine card ideas: hand-stitched cards and envelopes, envelopes made from paper lace doilies, cards with attached flower seeds, heart-shaped string seals, "flowers" made from paper hearts, a small paper packet that both unfolds into a heart and holds other surprises, and more.
• Crafty hand-made Valentine gifts like heart-shaped soap with words stamped into the top, Victorian "Sailors' Valentines" (boxes decorated with a pattern of small sea-shells), and an easy heart bookmark made from two layers of paper. There's also a list of "green" gifts like a recycled wood picture frame and an organic cotton lace nightie. (Excluded from the categories, but still relevant, is this scarf stitched from wool felt hearts. You can make it from purchased wool felt, or recycle some old sweaters. )

Information about Valentine decor, recipes, and projects for children and family follows after the break!

Valentine's Day is the day when you show your special someone just how important they are to you by giving them a unique gift they wouldn't get on any other ho-hum day. Chocolate and flowers reign as the top gifts given on Valentine's Day. You didn't forget the card, did you?

Scrapbook Scrapbook has free printable cards to make in a hurry if you have forgotten to purchase the special mushy love card that you will be giving the one you have given your heart to. The site recommends using card, cover, or index weight paper to make your cards, and using a metal ruler to score the cards for easier folding.

With all the lovely cards to choose from, you should have no trouble at all finding the perfect card for your special loved one. Bookmark the site so that you can go back and print their cards for all your holiday and special occasions.

With a little over two weeks until Valentine's Day, how many of us are going to wait until the last minute before we make or buy our loved ones a gift to show them just how much we love them? If the kids have been bugging you to help them make something special for everyone they love, you can make the perfect gift with ideas from this list of A-Z Valentine's Day gifts for your special loved ones.

The kids can make a pretty collage and cards while you make pretty gift wrap to wrap up their finished creations. You can make chocolate and other candy to indulge in after the kids have gone to bed. Make a special "I love you" pie to eat with homemade ice cream.

With the list of gifts from A-Z, you should have no problem finding a special way to tell and show the ones you love just how truly important they are to you. The list is awesome too for other holidays throughout the year. While Valentine's Day is indeed special, it is my belief that we should be showing the ones we love our true feelings on a daily basis, and not just reserve all this love stuff for a special day.

Let's face it, that whole "resolutions" thing is tough. Remember that time you resolved to work out every morning, and all you ended up with was a dusty elliptical trainer? Well, here are a few projects that might help you achieve your resolutions, but even if they don't, they're fun, and don't leave big dusty relics behind.

Here are a few projects that might help get you started on those resolutions:

Be more organized:
Get your family on the same page by painting this chalkboard wall calendar, designed by the folks over at marthastewart.com. If you give up on the whole thing, the paint treatment still looks pretty interesting on its own. Or you or your kids/friends/cat-sitters can draw little pictures in the squares, making it a rotating chalkboard art gallery. (via ApartmentTherapy)

Clear out the clutter:
Corral all those toys, takeout menus, magazines and whatever else in this handy dandy hanging organizer from Burdastyle. If it doesn't help you get more organized, at least you can use it for shoes. Ditto for this car-seat organizer from MayFly. (via Craft)

Be more environmentally friendly:
Yes, you really want to avoid using plastic bags, but those canvas bags take up precious real estate in your purse, am I right? The solution? The folks over at WhipUp have a great pattern for a fabric tote bag that can be folded down to wallet -size. Now you have no excuse.

Be a better correspondent
If you go through the trouble to make these pretty little notecards from StillDottie, you'll just HAVE to use them to drop a line to your friends and family, right? Yes, that's what I tell myself too. But at the very least, if you embellish them with fabric only and use no lettering, they can be backup cards for when you forgot to buy a card for your co-worker's birthday.

Cassette tapes have been replaced with much more modern technology. I don't own an iPod, but I do own about 300 cassette tapes, so aside from disguising your iPod with a cassette tape, or digitizing your old cassette tapes, what else do you think could be done with those old tapes that are wasting space?

Turning a cassette tape into a business card holder should eliminate any more issues with loose business cards in your purse or briefcase which can be difficult to find when you need them, or worse yet, crinkled business cards in your pockets. All you have to do is remove the screws from the cassette tape, use pliers to break off the plastic pieces, insert your business cards between the empty pieces of plastic, and wrap the elastic around to secure the tapes together.

I don't know if I would go through all the trouble of tearing up a cassette tape. Why couldn't you just use the cassette tape case for holding your business cards? I would think you could get more business cards in the tape case than you could in the cassette tape itself. Either way, it is still a cool hack, don't you think?

Recently, we talked about screen printing: the versatile medium in which you can create anything from a simple t-shirt to a complex, multi-layered fine art print. Screen printing is easy, if you pay attention to detail, but people sometimes avoid it just because it can take up an inconvenient amount of space.

Another way you can screen print at home is with a small machine called a Print Gocco (pronounced go-co, not gah-co). It's made only by a single company, Japan's RISO, and uses proprietary supplies. It's compact enough to use in even a very small apartment, so it's a great solution for people with limited space... as long as you don't mind that it makes small prints.

Over the last few years, Print Gocco has become one of the most talked-about tool for artists and crafters. You can join me after the break to read more about it!

Do you have a few Hanukkah cards to get out? If you do, and you're feeling crafty, then these embossed cards are the perfect project for you. The images are stenciled in metal or vellum. You could choose one method, or do the front of the card in metal and a velum overlay inside.

Hanukkah themed stencils are plentiful and there are some beautiful designs to choose from. The Star of David and Menorah are some traditional symbols, but you could choose a 'Happy Hanukkah' stencil or a floral print too.

This great craft from HGTV has all the instructions with illustrated steps and helpful tips. These cards will sit on mantels for months after Hanukkah. You might not have much time, but if you can make a few moments for this, your friends and family are sure to be impressed.

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone the time to think about Christmas is fully upon us. The gift shopping season is in full force and closets are beginning to fill up with wonderful secret things. While I know you have gifts on the brain, have you given any thought to what you will put those gifts in?

If you have any little gifts to give why not try making your own boxes for them? Sister Dianne from CraftyPod has created a wonderful tutorial for making these fun little boxes. There are also several pictures to help you figure out exactly what she is telling you to do.

I have made the basic box before but never could figure out how to make one to fit in the other. Thanks to the CraftPod tutorial I know what I was doing wrong. Also, this can be done with any card stock. While the cards are a very cool idea, there are many interesting kinds of card stock in many patterns at your local craft store. You could make many more sizes of boxes that way.

Mainstream scrapbooking has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade, developing a much more sophisticated look than the one initially associated with it when it emerged as a major hobby in the mid-1990s. Nowadays, I hear a lot of my friends talk about how scrapbooking appeals to them, and how happy they are to have discovered "alternative" scrapping.

Until pretty recently, a lot of people felt neglected and unwelcome and in the scrapbooking scene, based on the products that were most readily available -- which can seem boring to them. Many of those people tend to be young, single people with full-time jobs and no kids, though they may have a pet who is like a child to them; they're hipster types who would rather do a layout about an indie rock show that they went to -- or that they performed in! -- than one about a two-year-old making bubbles.

(That layout is probably adorable, but it's likely that however cool she is, the mom in question didn't have much trouble finding paper and embellishments for it that she didn't find bland or embarrassing: she is the market's target customer.)

Of course, it's not true that hip, youthful scrappers were unwelcome, and since this demographic is a hungry market, plenty of products have come out for them in the last couple of years (though, even now, many ostensibly "youth-oriented" scrapbooking products actually seem to be aimed at the parents of teenagers, in a "we'll look back on your rebellion and laugh" sort of way). Today, I'm writing about some of the coolest scrapbooking stuff I've ever seen. Read more about it after the break.

I love office supplies. You know you do too. That's why this simple little pencil holder is a great project. It can be made in a few minutes while daydreaming at your desk. The result, a creative pencil holder that doubles as a photo display. Here's how.

All you need is 8 medium binder clips and 4 rubber bands. First set the binder clips in a circle with the metal handles facing out, and reinforce it with the rubber bands. Next you'll choose some photos or cards for display. They can be held in between metal pieces. Put your pencils in and you're set with a creative pencil holder. Check out this how to for more detail and pictures.