More Projects and Pepper Wins A Major Award!

Here's another one I've been dying to try.  Glue flat glass blobs onto a bottle, stuff some lights inside and VOILA!

Sparkly!!!

I liked this design I saw online too so I made one.  Am kind of obsessed with the rainbow motif.

When I was younger, I thought the pink/white Christmas thing was ugly.  Now I find it really nostalgic and for some reason I associate it with the 1920s, 30s and 40s, but I don't know for sure b/c all the holiday pictures I've ever seen from those eras are black & white.  I saw a tutorial online on how to dye them.  I found small white ones & used Rit magenta dye.  But they were still missing something.

Snow! Right! So I first dabbed white paint on the tips, then painted the bases & branch tips with silver glitter pain

I tried a flocking technique with 2 of the trees, using silver glitter and then white/irridescent glitter, as well as the white-tipped-with-silver-glitter paint.  Put to a vote amongst my friends, the white tipped on the right was preferred, with the center tree coming in second.

I entered Pepper in a little contest on the Will Tree Poultry Farm Facebook page.  They make the best pot pies on the planet and I reeeeeally missed them when I lived out west.  They asked people to post a photo of their mix breed with info about them.  I posted a super cute pic of her, the one posted on the right side of the page in fact, and I got a message from Willow Tree almost right away saying that she was so cute that they wanted to send her a prize.  I was quite tickled.  The package arrived the following day.

Oh boy a new toy!

"Mama makes me poze wiff dis toy".  She was so impressed.  Not.  lol  Sagan, on the other hand, snatched it away seconds after I snapped this picture.

"Stop takin pitchers!"

Beautiful sunset that day too!

My New Toy & What I Used It For

I've had a new craft prepped for about a month now, but it needs a drill in order to assemble it.  I figured it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have a small drill around the house anyway, since my squeeze's is in his truck and, last time I saw it, also covered in grease and grime.  So he took me to Home Depot to pick out a small one for myself.  Surprisingly I couldn't find one by Dremel.  It has all kinds of attachments but no drill bits.  So this small Ryobi is what I ended up purchasing.

And also picked up a goody pack of bits and stuff.

This is why I needed the drill.  This is a small piece of driftwood that I found either here or on the west coast, I just can't remember.  I brought some with me from my last trip to the Pacific Ocean last spring, but now it's all mixed in with Cape driftwood.  I made these dangling fringe pieces with crystals, and all that was left to do was put the holes into the wood, so as to attach the fringe.  Those two jewels on either end will go on top for the hanger.  

The hardest part of this for me was doing the measuring for the placement of the danglies and hanger.  I suck at math, and my question of, "Is half of six and a half, three and a quarter?" emitted a bemused and sympathetic chuckle from my honey as he answered, "Yes."  I selected the smallest drill bit and brought the wood outside to drill.  While it looked and seemed to me as though I was going straight down, the holes on the other side didn't line up well at all.  Russell suggested that I reverse it and that way I was ensured that the danglies would be even, and probably no one would even notice if the top beads weren't perfectly aligned.  So that's what I did and it worked out perfectly. I really could not have done this without his help!   

Now it was time to make the hanger!

It was really hard to get a decent photo of it.  It doesn't look bright enough in the shade, but there was also bad shadowing in the sun.