Quick Coasters

I seem to be doing a lot of recycle related posts nowadays. I promise, this would be last for this month. You must have seen my garden some time back which was a total wreck due to renovation and painting of our home. The good news is that the me and my husband have managed to resurrect it back. Yes, the plants seem to be forgiving and they have decided to cheer back. I would be soon sharing my garden.

Coming to my post, this is about making coasters out of your old CD's. In the age of pen drives, mobiles the CD's are almost obsolete. My son's few text book publications have have attached CD's along with them. I didn't know what to with them other than throwing them once the year passed by. I had this fabric which I loved and bought it cheap to wrap the boxes. I utilized the left over cloth for the CD's. The project is very very easy and hardly takes time provided you know the basics of stitching.
Things you need.
CD's, Cloth, Glue, matching thread, needle, scissor, something to trace the CD

With the CD trace the outline of the CD. Leave 2 cm more.

Cut the fabric.

Apply glue on both sides of the CD and lay down the fabric on both the sides of the CD. Let it dry. Take care to remove any creases.

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Using the matching thread, stitch the rim of the fabric, I chose the simple blanket stitch and dark blue color,three strands.
Trim any extra threads.
Do not worry if its not perfect and enjoy your tea/coffee!!!!

Linking this to Craft Schooling Sunday of 2nd July by CreativeJewishMom

Recycling for the Environment Day

Hello friends, how are you doing? World Environment day was over a few days ago but that should not stop you from celebrating this day whole year. Here is one very tiny recycling project that I did a few days ago.

There are many things in our daily life that we throw away when no longer working or finished their shelf life. My analog clock was one such thing which under went repair twice and often took change in the batteries. I am being a green person was thinking to recycle it instead of  throwing it. For many months it laid low as a small stand and finally one fine day it caught my husband's fury. It was the time to act upon and I thought a good way to use it. I removed the internals of the clock.

Before

Our native is on the west coast of India and its just 2 km from my home. For us the sea fascinating, the waves, sand and varieties of  sea shells. Visiting the beach is complete with few collection of shells every time.

What better way to store them in the clock, this way I had kill two birds with one stone.

It had plain brown frame so I just doodled something with acrylic paint. After painting it, I felt it didn't turn out to be that great. I sealed with the screws. For now it is more sitting like a photo, as I am a bit apprehensive about hanging it. 

After

So tell me how did you like it? Have a nice day!!!!

Linking this to Nifty Thrifty Sunday

I am back..

Hello friends

I have been missing in action for a long time. When kids have summer vacation I do visit my parents and in laws. Although the holidays should be carefree, its the hardest time of the year where we spend our days in hot sultry coastal weather. Seriously, after returning back to Bangalore I felt I was in AC room.
While kids enjoyed their long break, my days were very busy in my mother place, it was either helping her or taking care of the ailing grandmother. At my in laws place its complete the opposite. I am totally free there and have to devise few things to keep myself occupied. In those times  I completed two books by Anirban Bose. They both were good and interesting reads. I also half completed a small cross stitch project taken from here . Since I had chosen my own colors set, the end is sure going to look different.

My visit to native is never complete without visiting Airody Pai shop on Car Street of Udupi, Karnataka. This time I bought a brass utensil to use as a planter. The shopkeeper kept on praising how the utensil is hand made and blah blah, would not have if he had known the real reason I was buying it -:))

Have a nice day everyone. I will be back soon with my small treasure from the sea in my next post.

My small library makeover

With growing kids there is always a need for more room for toys, books, clothes etc. I love arranging, re-arranging things at my home, but arranging my sons books is always frustrating. I keep them in some fashion, after a while they are just thrown here and there. Besides there is constant fight library space, books among my sons.
This was how the kids library looked. It's usually worse than this.

I was looking for cheap and best deals online for bookshelves so that my younger one could easily reach them, take care of it himself.
One option was from Urban Ladder(BOEBERG BOOKSHELF) and another one from PepperFry( McAnna Storage Shelf, MollyCoddle).  I could not go for the Urban Ladder one, not yet since it did not get along with old computer table in the same room and for me to purchase it, first I had to dispose this computer table.
Since the necessity was urgent I bought these storage shelves from PF. They came disassembled in four packs. It was easy to assemble as it comes with instruction and people who have drill gun can easily do it themselves. However the PF carpenters will also do it for you in case you are not comfortable with it. These come in different vibrant colors perfect for Kids room, also you can have many options like closed, open, and different shapes and sizes. I bought four of them, 2 open ones and two with doors. Since they were of the same size I could arrange them in vertical fashion. These are made from MDF and easy on pockets.

By having two separate small libraries, I can entrust them the work of arranging the books for their personal libraries. This reduces my work and headache.

Kids crafts: Rainbow flowers

The summer vacation has begun for the kids in Bangalore and its two months of freedom from school activities. Well, my generation enjoyed the vacation in carefree ways, my kids are constantly complaining of boring holidays. It's my conscious decision to keep them away from tab, computer games, mobile in holidays.
It's Action time for mommy ME, to teach them art and craft at home. I spend at least some time with them with various art and craft activities, few simple and some complicated.
Here is a simple flower tutorial. My younger son(who takes after me in love for crafting)enjoyed doing this while my elder one as usual with an expression "what's all this nonsense?""Why I have to do this?"

What you need

Colored sheets, glue stick, glue[optional], floral wire or any thin stick or any craft stick to hold the flower, scissor, cardboard to stick the petals.

Make squares of colored paper, we made two sizes one of size 5 cm and another of 7 cm. From a square shape we can make two triangles and hence two petals from them.

Cut these squares to two triangles.

1.Fold the triangle in to half, opening it later to get a crease at the center.
2.Join the two edges into a rhombus shape along the crease.
3.Glue the edges in cross.
4.Take a circle shaped cardboard. Make a dot at the center.
5 Stick each petal around this dot.
6. Hold your flower with a wire/gluing to a stick

You can further make leaves to make it more beautiful.

Adding this craft to Craft Schooling Sunday April 09 link party by Creative Jewish Mom

Madhubani workshop experience

It has been few days since I joined the art classes and it is fun so far. When my art teacher announced that she would be conducting a 5 days Madhubani Workshop, I decided to jump the wagon. Madhubani is not new to me and I have been doing here and there and gifting them to my dear ones. The workshop has been a different experience for me since the painting had to done on the fabric. Doing on the fabric has advantage of long life.

Now few facts about Madhubani

Mithila/ Madhubani paintings are from Mithila region of India and Nepal. Most of these paintings have deities from Indian epics like Ramayana, Mahabharata, natural elements like fishes, trees, birds,Sun etc. Although originally people painted using the natural dyes, nowadays  people also use poster and acrylic colors. These paintings are popular internationally and popularity is on rise in India too, thanks to good marketing, craft fairs, online markets. If you observe these paintings they are typical with large eyes, pouting lips, colorfully dressed and mostly the figures are in side view. This is because these people used to paint these figures on their house walls more for religious purposes and they are not artists with a degree in art.

Detailed information about origin, types of Madhubani, here on Wikipedia

Coming back to the my workshop, we followed the below procedure to create Madhubani art. This is for the benefit of people who are new to this art or want to try one themselves. The basic idea of the workshop was to give information about Madhubani art, few works of famous artists and doing one ourself. Since this was for learning, we had to choose our favorite from the list of images from internet, trace it and color it.

Intially a A3 sized board is taken, this is to pin your fabric. We used off white poplin cloth.

Cut about the size of the board(slightly more than the dimensions of the board), folding them and tightly pinning them to the board using a heavy duty stapler. This is how it looks from back.

Now take the carbon sheet and stick it on the fabric board using the tapes. Put the tape only at the edges. For my design I used two carbon sheet side by side.

Now select the design that you want to paint. If you are creative then you can draw your own composition on the tracing paper/paper. I chose a design which was originally done by one of the artist from Madhubani, Bihar(unknown) and that design was available in A3 size.

Now stick the design on the carbon paper with tape, sticking it to the edges.

Slowly start tracing the design, from top to bottom. Take care not to stress on the other parts of the design since the carbon paper may leave unwanted color on the fabric.

After tracing remove the carbon paper and design.

Your painting is ready to be filled with colors and outline. Always do the outlining first, with 000 sized brush and black color.

This is how it looks after outlining. Now your painting is ready to be filled with colors.

I used the fabric acrylic colors and along with size 000 brush also used size 2 and 4 brushes.

After you are done with the painting remove the stapler pins, board.

Frame your painting on the fabric well and let it be a talk among your friends.

Tips:
Do not trace very minute detail like lines, since you can paint it later.
Try to use the earthy colors like blue, green, red, orange, yellow, use different shades of these colors.
If your composition is rich with colors and figures it is not a must to have designed border. A plain thick one looks always fabulous. The original painting in my case had no designed border, just a red one and I felt that looked more beautiful than mine.

Stitching Time: Cross Stitch project

Finishing off limited data pack means more concentration on the craft projects and less time on the Internet. Yes, I finished our subscribed data pack way before it's renewal date. I was Internet addicted and I had to find some ways to get de-addicted.
Taking inspiration from the fellow bloggers I returned to my half done cross stitch project. I had abandoned it because of lack of threads. First thing I did was to immediately get threads and set upon to finish it.

This one is tribal motif taken from the book by Dorothy Wood. It has beautiful projects few in Anchor and few in using the DMC threads. For this I used the home cleaning cloth(mop cloth) and 6 strands of the anchor skein and finished it in no time. Laugh at me for my choice of fabric but I found it cute to use as a microwave oven cover. The border in the book was a different one, in rhombus shape but I found it difficult to count on the type of fabric I had chosen. So I had my own border.
Meanwhile I am also working on recycling my aunts sari. The fabric is poly cotton and I am hoping that it would be good.

Have a nice month ahead everyone!!!