Pen stand holder

Continuing on my passion to re-use stuff, I made a pen stand with - used toilet paper holder, magazine sheets, a small cardstock and some small pieces of left over pipe cleaners. Here are the steps:

1) I rolled up a magazine paper diagonally over a pencil, using some glue here and there on the paper as I rolled the sheet. The glue is to make sure the paper roll did not fall apart once done. After the paper was rolled, I gently removed the pencil. I wish I had a video to show this whole process. :(

2)  One paper roll of mine was more than twice as tall as the toilet paper holder I was going to use. So I cut one roll into 2.

3) Rolled up few other papers and cut them all into 2

4) Used glue liberally to glue the paper rolls on the surface of the paper holder. - Our structure is done

5) For base, I just cut up a thick card stock into the fitting size and shape and glues it to one end of the paper holder

6) Now we have one end of the pen stand open. How about decorating it?? I cut the pipe cleaners into small pieces - appr. an inch- to do the job

7)  Inserted one end of the pipe into one of the paper wholes and inserted the other end of the pipe into the next paper whole.

8) Repeated the process so that each paper whole has 2 pipes inserted into them

And that's all -- we have a pen stand - fully made out of used stuff - looking all cute at no cost to us.

The process was not as tedious as I thought, may be because of the paper holder I chose. I only had to roll approximately 10 papers.

I had seen a shoe box covered with these paper rolls in a friend's house. That was a lot of paper rolls - let's accept - I am not as patient. So this size worked perfect for me :)

Tulle flowers

I have always loved all the flowery hairbands that so many girls wear. They look so cute on them. And when I wanted to buy somethings like that for my daughter, I don't always get what I am looking for. Especially with my interest of making her hairband match with the dress she is wearing, it just gets more difficult. So I decided to make flowers myself and attaching them to the plain hairclips I got from Michaels and Walmart.

This one was for her yellow salwar (Traditional Indian dress). I had some (actually a lot) of tulle left out from Risha's birthday party. I googled for ideas and as usual I found one :).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zRoqXmqWbc

Inspired by the above video, here is what I did:
1) I cut the yellow tulle I had into small squares.
2) Folded them 3 times - First: Fold the square along the diagonal into a triangle. Second: Fold the triangle again into a smaller triangle. Third: Fold the triangle again vertically one more time (Please watch the video for a demo of the same)
3) I cut a small round out of a thick cardstock.
4) I found sticking the tulle to the cardstock with a glue gun was easier than stitching the tulle pieces together.
5) I used around 12 tulle pieces for each flower.
6) And finally added some beads in the center

I just couldn't stop with one.. it's so cute and so easy to make !!! So I went ahead and made one more - this one is multicolored - to go with the multicolored traditional dress Risha has. Customizing to all our needs... isn't that just lovely?

Felt flowers

I saw several posts about making felt flowers, it was time to try one now. I chose an orange a shiny red felt clothes to make 2 flowers. I cut out a 4 petal layout in paper and used that to cut the felt clothes. Next, placed petals one on top of each other, alternating the petals. I made red petals and orange petals. Finally, I stitched all the petals together along with a matching bead on the top.

I glued the red flower to the plain hair clip I got from Michaels. I tried using the hair clip directly on her hair, it was a little too tight. Just to be on safer side,  I clipped the hair clip onto my daughter's hair band so that she can use it with no side effects :)

Now comes the biggest challenge.. to get my daughter to keep the hair band on for a while!! After trying some things, my mom suggested to put the hairband on her and show her on the mirror. That idea worked and she loved what she saw :) !!

CD Photo frame

I saw this nice tutorial on reusing stuff.. and liked the idea very much. I am always for re-use :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KUh_eq2oAs
 
Steps I followed - 
Find some similarly colored un-useful CDs and a set of photos (preferably related). I used all CDs that had a blue shade. I have some of the yellow shaded CDs that I will be using in future. I used all of my daughter's casual pics that captured her curious moments :)
Cut the pics in circular shape of same sizes.
Glue one pic to the rear side of each CD
Glue the CDs together
I used a floral tape as mentioned in the  video to hang the frame.

 

 

 

Vardhini's baby shower

This baby shower came up just one week after my daughter's birthday. So I could not do much. Fortunately I had a banner that I had made for another friend's baby shower a few months ago. I just had to remodel that a little bit. And I used up the flowers and butterflies from Risha's birthday party.

To make the banner, I cut purple colored card stocks in circles, pasted a 4" doily over that. I cut the letters out of a glittery dark purple cardstock and pasted that on the doilies. I had strips of purple tulle cloth from the last party. I just stuck them around the purple cards at the back, gathering the cloth as I pasted those, to make frills.

I have seen diaper cakes in many baby showers, but never tried to make one.. This time I wanted to. I made one following https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5xtxAtHuSg. The pink border you see in the diaper cake in the photo is just tissue paper cut to make some border like design.

When searching for how to make a diaper cake, I saw this tutorial on making a diaper baby. We did have some diapers left over.. so why not?? Here is tutorial I followed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeJZ6wwV8OY. I did arrange the baby in sleeping position as shown in the video, I do not have a picture of it though :(

Though it was a quick planned party, I believe my friend enjoyed it thoroughly. And.. she had a baby girl just 2 weeks after the party :)

My daughter's First Birthday Party

This all began when I went to a birthday party hosted by my husband's colleague.. I was very impressed with all the work she had put in and how unique the party turned out to be.. Can I pull off some thing like that?? ...I started thinking... (oh ho.. trouble!!!) My daughter was soon going to be 1, which was a big deal for me.. (yeah!! i survived one year of motherhood.. kudos to me :D.) jokes aside.. I really wanted to have a good party for my daughter's first birthday.. that would technically be the first ever "party" my husband and I would be throwing to the gazillion number of friends we made over these years!

So.. Now I am all full of desires and dreams of throwing a hand-made party, but how.. ! That's where a friend of mine came to be very helpful + all the good hearts who share their hand-made party experiences online. So my friend and I started discussing and and searching online for ideas.. I got to know so many new things of which I had no idea before (glue gun was one such thing.. believe me!!)


I had to come up with a theme to kick off the process... I liked butterfly theme - it did not sound very common to me at that time and for a first timer like me, I thought it would be easier to find ideas with this theme. After some more thoughts, I stuck to the theme - "Butterfly Garden"


I started off making some simple butterflies to get my head around the whole thing..

Made a set of simple ones with thin card stock and pipe cleaner like the one in this link - http://www.thecraftycrow.net/2009/02/pretty-folded-paper-butterflies.html


First thing to do - invitation! I like sending individual invitation cards to people, but I know the cards will just be trashed after few days or weeks.. so I decided to make a personalized soft card and email those to the guests individually - putting in the guests name in each. I did some basic work using photoshop with the little knowledge that I have and my brother completed the rest to make this beautiful card. The most difficult thing about this invitation was probably getting a good pic of my daughter !! :)




I usually would have preferred to stick to 2 color theme, but hey.. it's a butterfly party.. it has to be colorful, So I went with 4 colors - pink, purple, yellow and orange (pretty much all basic colors to make my job easier.. hee hee).


The next big thing for me was the happy birthday banner. I saw the butterfly shaped die cut card stock in Michaels which looked like a sure candidate for the banner. I used the pink and dark purple card stocks for the job. I got matching glitters, covered one side of every card stock with the glitters using a mod podge and stuck glittery 3 inch die cut letters on the glittery card. I had bought the letters from Michaels too. Though I was not sure how it would turn out, I just tried putting few big card stock sheets side by side and trimming them to look like a big butterfly and I arranged the butterfly letters on the big butterfly. And lastly, stuck some blings on the edges and threw in some flower-stickers here and there to finish up the banner.

My friend came up with this great plan of adding flowers and Risha's pictures to extend and personalize the banner more.. So, I made a big 1 inspired by this website - http://ohhappyday.com/2013/08/giant-spiral-flower-number-diy/ and some flowers similar to what's shown here - http://www.thehomesihavemade.com/2012/07/3d-paper-wall-flowers.html. I just used some old beads I had for the center piece of the flowers. We arranged all those with some of Risha's pictures on 2 disposable purple table clothes.... and the banner turned out like below..





My mom graciously helped me with her sewing skills to make a tulle table cloth for the cake table . I got the idea from this site - http://eventstocelebrate.net/2013/07/butterfly-themed-birthday-party-decorations/. I got tulle clothes from amazon, but I realized later that buying from a store would have been cost effective. But the tulle I got from amazon was 6" wide, so i did not have to cut them a lot. Thanks to friends of mine who did a wonderful job with the balloons, our cake cutting stage was all set








For the side walls of the hall, I got some 8x10 pics of Risha from all these 12 months, simply stuck them a patterned card stock to form framed pictures. Also made some tissue paper pom pom flowers and butterflies with vellum paper (http://www.artsyfartsymama.com/2011/07/butterfly-wall-hanging.html). Also used the simple butterflies I had made at the beginning for the wall. And here is how one of the walls looked like..














My friend suggested having a face painter to entertain the kids at the party and I liked the idea. I came across a photo booth when searching for party ideas and thought that could be perfectly used with the face painting.. so here I am searching for a big foam board... found one in staples and got started with the board. I made something similar to - http://ohmyhandmade.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ila_6.jpg - but with only 2 flowers. I cut and pasted some tissue papers to form the petals. For the central pistil of the flowers, I rolled yellow streamers and cut them in circles -










Just when I was glad the photo booth was over, my husband came up with the question - what about boys - how will they be interested in a flower photo booth. We had almost as many boys as there were girls in the party!! And based on his suggestion, I made a forest kinda thing on the other side of the board - used green tissue papers for grass and cheetah and tiger patterned felt cloth from hobby lobby for the face and here we have a dual sided photo booth for boys and girls.









Made the center pieces for each guest table following this tutorial -

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vqpqu_sOgcM&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dvqpqu_sOgcM

And added some tulle colors to surround the flower...







This butterfly snack idea is so commonly seen online and I fell in love with that at first sight..Painted the clothes pins I had got from dollar store, added in the wiggly eyes and antennas made with pipe cleaner and used with a zip lock half filled with gold fish and half with grapes - and we have something to attract the kids :) Thanks to my dad who patiently helped with filling up the zip locks with snacks.









Along with the snacks, we had drinks for the kids.. and I made butterfly straws with the butterfly cut papers I got from etsy and paper straws from hobby lobby














And return gifts... of course i did not want to miss out on the butterfly there. I loved the burlap bags I found in papermart.com - not so expensive, different and cute. Got some butterfly felt stickers from Michaels. With an easy job of peel and stick, we have our butterfly return bags ready!!




Thanks to my friend for carving a butterfly garden out of veggies to decorate the food table.







A last minute thought -- why not include a butterfly in the candle. I just searched in google images and used the idea. Got a '1' candle from walmart. For the butterfly wings, cut a felt cloth in a butterfly shape and decorated with some blings. For the antennas, curved up floral wires. and inserted those into the candle.








Last, but definitely not the least... thanks to my dear husband not only for entertaining all my idea and efforts for the party, but also for making one of those idea real... I wanted to play some videos of Risha - but the idea came to me after talking to a friend just 2 days before the party. My husband, who is the techie person of the family, made that possible by quickly collecting some pics of videos of Risha and hooking up a TV in the hall playing all those in sequence.







After tons of visits to Michales, hobby lobby, walmart, dollar store and billions of online searches, we had a hand made party setup and the guests had so much fun.. and ... I have a story to tell my daughter when she grows up. For now, I just want to sit back and relax with all the good memories from the party and spend some time with Risha.. but can't wait to plan another hand made party :)