To celebrate the Holiday season, here are instructions for making a table runner with some of my favorite supplies – wired burlap ribbon, felt, beads, embroidery thread and sequins!
Read more on the Schnarr’s Hardware Blog:
Holiday Table Runner With Wired Burlap Ribbon
What do I normally do to prepare my garden for winter? I panic the night before a frost is predicted. I lay old towels on the floor to protect it from dirt and dampness and bring inside all the container plants that are not hardy. When I get time I then stick the plants where I can make some room in my condo which is for the most part not very well-lit. Some of my plants survive this kind of laissez-faire treatment for years but many of them although alive don’t look as good as they could. I think some planning is called for if I want to do better than have hit-or-miss results this year.
Read more on the Schnarr’s Blog:
Strategies for Maintaining My Garden Through the Winter
I finally made a card with the “Happy Thanksgiving” rubber stamp from my Carolyn’s Stamp Store collection. I also experimented with making backgrounds with a paint roller, wood dowels and string. With flower and leaf rubber stamps, some paper tape and scrapbooking paper I made a card design that can be adapted to different fall themes.
Read about how I did it on the Schnarr’s Hardware blog:
Textured Backgrounds For Fall Leaf Greeting Cards
I hope you can visit Schnarr’s Hardware in Webster Groves Missouri between October 6 and 15th to see my display for the Old Webster Art Walk!
The theme of my show will be things made from recycled materials. If you’re into upcycling and repurposing, you’ll get a lot of ideas! On Saturday October 7 and 14th, I’ll also be doing a demo in the store from 12-4 pm. On the 7th, see how to make art prints with recycled and found materials. On the 14th, I’ll show you how to make fun fall greeting cards.
Come join us for a self-guided tour of many different area businesses in Webster Groves, all with a different artist and art display. For more information: https://oldwebsterartwalk.com/
This project is inspired by memories of sewing kits that I used to work on when I was a kid. I remember one kit in particular was a calendar printed on burlap with certain areas of the design accented with sequins attached by running thread through seed beads. Here is an original design of mine that reminds me of all that fun!
Tools and Materials
Fall leaves
Scissors
Scrap paper
Heavy books
Marker
Scrap chipboard
Fabric scissors
Ball point pen
Masking tape
Wide burlap ribbon with metallic threads in it – about 9 inches wide
Harvest gold color wired burlap-look ribbon – 1 1/2 inches wide
Felt in a assorted fall leaf colors
Washable fabric marking pen
Gold metallic embroidery thread – six strand
Embroidery thread in off white, rust and dark brown
Assorted size sequins in fall and earthy colors such as ochre, brown, bronze, copper and gold
Copper or bronze colored seed beads – select ones with holes big enough for a threaded needle to pass through twice
Scrap fabric in a rustic color for the ends
Needles – tapestry and embroidery
Directions
Walk around your neighborhood and collect leaves to use as templates. Choose leaves more for their shape than their color – you want ones that will flatten easily and are roughly the size of your hand and smaller.
Place your leaves on a hard surface like a table between pieces of scrap paper. Stack books or other flat heavy objects on top and allow to sit for several hours to press leaves for easier handling.
Place leaves on scrap chipboard and trace around with marker. Loosely draw where the leaf veins are on the cardboard for future reference. Discard leaves in the compost if you don’t want them for another project. Cut out the chipboard leaves.
Cut a piece of wide burap ribbon the length that you want for your table runner, plus about 4 extra inches for hemming. Before cutting, tape a piece of masking tape just inside where you plan to cut. The tape will help keep the ends of the ribbon from unraveling.
Pin down the hems on the ends but don’t sew yet.
Fold wired burlap ribbon lengthwise and pin along the long sides of the ribbon.
Use tapestry needle and full thickness of the gold embroidery thread to sew the ribbon in place with a running stitch just inside the wired edge.
Trace around the chipboard leaf shapes with a ball point pen on the backs of various colors of felt. Cut out leaf shapes.
Place felt leaves on your runner in an arrangement that you like. Pin in place.
Split lengths of the six-strand gold embroidery thread lengthwise into pieces with three strands each. Use the three-strand pieces to sew a running stitch along the edges of the felt leaves, attaching them to the wide burlap ribbon.
Stitch leaf vein marks using a running stitch with the various embroidery thread colors. For example try rust color thread for the veins on the light brown felt, off-white thread for the ochre felt and dark brown for the gold and orange felt. If it helps to figure out where to sew the leaf veins, refer back to your chipboard leaves and draw the veins on the felt with the washable fabric marker. After you’re done sewing on the leaf viens, dab any washable marker marks that show with a damp cloth to get rid of them.
Accent the leaves with a few scattered sequins on each nestled among the embroidered leaf veins in a manner that suggests the spots and color variations that you find on natural fallen leaves. Hold the sequins on by bringing a thread from the back through a bead, around the side of the bead then back down through the sequin. Go back through each bead at least twice for durability. Sew a few beads by themselves among the sequins.
Pin and fold strips of fabric to the ends to cover up the raw edge of the ribbon. Sew in place with the metallic embroidery thread.
When the fall season is over, store your table runner rolled up so that the wire in the ribbon does not kink.
This is going to be a challenging review for me to write. The author is my aunt and the book is a memoir. Many of the stories are about my family and I was there for some of the incidents so there is no way to read it the same way a typical reader will.
My late Mom Lois was the oldest of three sisters. The middle sister, Marilyn, shares in this book a lot of funny stories about pranks, silly and embarrassing personal foibles, humorous Catholic guilt, plus touching anecdotes and observations. My Mom was not serious all the time but she was far more serious than Marilyn – many people have wondered aloud how they could be related! We know they are though, because they were not totally different. Both enjoyed teaching. Both were hardworking. Both were sincere about their faith. Both were tolerant and compassionate. Both enjoyed self-expression in the forms of writing, singing, dancing and acting.
All our lives the whole family has acknowledged that Marilyn is “crazy” – in the wacky sense, not the mentally ill sense. Most of my favorite parts of the book are about pranks and silliness. Some of the stories made me laugh so hard I was choking on my own snot. (It’s ok to say “snot” now and then, right Marilyn?)
Marilyn is not afraid to poke fun at herself in this book. Some of her prank anecdotes show that she has historically not always been shy about poking fun at others either. I don’t get the impression it was done maliciously. She can forgive herself for occurences that were thoughtless, silly or outrageously obtuse. If you’ve ever had experiences like that, you can laugh along with Marilyn and at yourself as she acknowledges some of her weirdness. Hopefully you can also pick up some of her forgiving attitude. It’s ok to own up to what you did and then let yourself off the hook. She lets a lot of other people off the hook for stuff they did to her too. Opportunities to throw other people under the bus have been passed by. That’s a sign of maturity, perhaps – from someone who has worked hard all her life to teach us that being mature is not always required! For example a bodily function reference is not the end of the world, right?
Life is too short not to bring out your inner child out to play sometimes. I’m in no way as uninhibited in my behavior as my Aunt but I’m unconventional in different ways and I have a high tolerance for and appreciation of eccentricity! Some of the stories in the book are about Marilyn’s father (my Grandfather) and his two brothers. See this picture and explanatory caption below to get a glimpse of the family that produced such as we…
This book is a gift to my family because it preserves a lot of family history. I learned some things about my grandparents, my Mom and others that I did not know before. What is the average reader going to get out of it? Besides some encouragement to laugh at and forgive yourself, this book provides a glimpse of life, culture and history in the greater St. Louis area, especially South St. Louis. It may also inspire you to give a gift to your own family by preserving your favorite stories for future generations to enjoy!
Click here to buy “My Crazy Life Stories from A to Z”.
When choosing containers, first keep in mind what style of garden you have. You can break design “rules” but you will have more predictable success if you try to match the style of pots to the style of home and garden you have.
Read more about container gardening on the Schnarr’s Hardware Blog.
One of my frequent landscaping tasks in summer is weeding at clients’ properties. Many of the weeds can be hand-pulled, but on a recent occasion there was such an abundance of Prostrate Spurge (Euphorbia maculata) that it was hopeless to try to pull it in a reasonable amount of time.
Read about how we decided to deal with the Spurge on the Schnarr’s Hardware Blog!
I recently made some abstract painted backgrounds for a class I’m going to be teaching at JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts. I will be demonstrating how to make mixed media pages for journaling with acrylic paint, watercolor paint, assorted markers and Fiskars gel pens. I embellished my sample pages further with decorative scrapbooking paper, stickers, paper tape and rubber stamps. The binding rings I used in these samples are by 7gypsies.
I hope these samples inspire you to take a class with JoAnn or experiment with mixed media journal and planner pages on your own!
See these Pinterest Boards for more ideas:
When a bar of soap gets worn down and is near the end of its usefulness, it’s considerably less appealing than when it was new. The scent has faded, it’s brittle or soggy – time to throw it out, right? Do you have some soap bars you don’t like? Do you have a collection of little motel soaps that you don’t know what to do with? You could throw these soaps out, but I prefer to save up my soap scraps and make them into laundry soap.
Read about how to do it on the Schnarr’s Hardware Blog.