Littles!

No I'm not in a sorority, I'm on a dance team!  And we have bigs and littles.  This is my first time as a big and it is very fun!  I LOVE making things for people and giving it to them!  It is so much better than getting a gift to me.

I made several gifts as well as bought a few, but I am just going to cover the ones I made on here.
So I didn't intend to necessarily write a post about this so don't hold my pictures against me :)

This was the first gift they received (the dance group is called Extreme, fyi). I picked the colors based on what my littles said their favorite colors were.

These were the gift bags that I had for them, I got them from Michael's! Super cute colors and patterns.

These are their final gifts! Each one will get a shirt and hanging plaque.  I rolled up the shirts so that they would be a surprise and tied 'em up with pretty bows.  Note how the colors of the letters match the chevron frames :)

Here is another picture of the plaques. These were really fun, easy, and cheap to make!  I got the plaques ($0.97 ea), letters ($1.77 ea), and ribbon ($1) from Walmart.  I painted them and Mod Podged a piece of scrapbook paper on, then hot glued ribbon for a hanger.  I added the bow as a last minute decision and I'm so happy I did!  What do you think?

Here are some really bad pics of the shirts I made!  The pics don't do them justice, I tell you!  I embroidered the white letters onto the black fabric and then sewed the squares on using a zig-zag stitch.

For the front I embroidered their initials onto the same black fabric and created a pocket!  They turned out so cute I think!

What have you made for your littles?

DIY Nautical Cork Boards

It seems like the world is obsessed with nautical things lately and I am no exception.  Anchors, sails, and whales and let's not even begin to talk about navy blue and white stripped anything!  Something about these images and color schemes is so appealing to me and makes me happy :)

So of course when it came time to move back to school I wanted to bring the nautical with me to brighten my days!

I saw an idea on Pinterest (where else?) using little cork boards from IKEA and since I am lucky enough to live right by an IKEA I popped in one weekend and grabbed myself a 3-pack!

The Pinterest idea, you may have seen it before, its pretty popular, is to cover these cork board circles with fabric.  I however did not have any nautical fabric (tragedy!) so I resorted to another solution.

Paint!  I don't know what is wrong with me but I am in a painting phase lately.  It is really fun!

On to the tutorial! Yay!

Here is what you need to look for in IKEA:

Even if you don't have much time you can go in and get some, they are right by the registers (at least in my store) so you can just go in the exit to avoid an hour long maze!

Next you need to go online and find some nautical images.  Try to choose relatively simple ones, unless of course you are an expert cutter and painter :)

I just searched google for nautical shapes and copied and pasted the ones I liked into Microsoft Word.  If you can't find an image of just an anchor or just a sailboat, just copy and paste the whole image and then use the crop feature to select the area with your favorite image.  I then made the image bigger and printed in gray scale.

The next step is to cut them each out, very carefully.  This takes a while and isn't that fun, especially when you get to the middle of the wheel (I used an exact-o knife - be careful with those things!).

Here are my cutouts on my cork-boards.  So the next step is to outline the images onto the cork.  I forgot to take a picture after I completed that step (sorry about that!) but basically when you outline them you will create a slight indent into the cork with the pen which will help you keep the paint in check later.

So after quite a bit of tedious painting, here is my finished product:

What do you think?? I love them!  Leave me a comment with any questions or just to say hi!

Thanks so much for reading by blog :)

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Get new features added to Pinterest!

Have you ever been on Pinterest and thought "Oh I wish they had a feature where..."? Well I have and I've just discovered a way to tell Pinterest about your heart's desires!

Go to the help page on Pinterest:

Search for your idea: (my current wish is to have "sub boards", more on that in a second)

Click on the search result of your choosing:

Read the description to make sure its what you want and click Me Too!:

Confirm your vote gets counted:

It really is that easy and I had no idea they had this feature!  This makes me love Pinterest even more (if that's possible) as a company because this shows they care about their customers and want to make the site what WE want!  So awesome!

So anyways if you want to skip the above steps, go to this link:
https://en.help.pinterest.com/entries/21918998-Sub-boards

I really really REALLY want Pinterest to have sub boards.  This feature would mean being able to categorize your pins within your boards.

For example, I have a board for cards - if there were sub boards I could have Christmas, Halloween, Birthday, etc. boards within the cards board.

If I were creating the feature myself (and how I assume they would too) you would click on your, for this example, cards board and that would bring you to a page with more boards (the Christmas, Halloween, Birthday, etc. boards).

Simillarly if you were going to Pin something you would select cards board and then have the option to pick which sub board it would go into.

So if you, like me, would LOVE this feature, go to this link:
https://en.help.pinterest.com/entries/21918998-Sub-boards
And click Me Too! to vote.

Just think of the possibilities!



Keep calm and Pin On graphic from: www.empowernetwork.com
All screen shots and Pinterest logo from: Pinterest.com