DIY dip dye and cut T-shirts

Last weekend we altered boring, solid colored tank tops into interesting, fun, summer shirts! It wasn't very difficult, but was rather time consuming.

Materials:

-Fabric bleach (about a pint)

-Colored shirt, preferably cotton

-Cold water

1) Pour your bleach into a bucket or large container of any sort. Dilute it with a little water. The more water you add the less dramatic and slower your change will be, but it's a good idea to add at least a little water to your bleach. Make sure to wear clothes you don't care about, because I learned the hard way that it is extremely easy to get bleach onto your clothes. 

2) Dip your shirt into the bleach, making sure to submerge it only as deep as you want the color to change.

3)Leave your shirt to sit for a couple of hours, checking periodically. The longer you leave your shirt in the more the bleach will change the color, so it's up to you for how long you soak your shirt.

4) Once your shirt is bleached how you want it, remove your shirt and soak it in a tub of cold water. This is just to wash off the excess bleach.

5) Wash your shirt. Make sure it is absolutely bleach free before continuing onto the next steps.
6) Cut off the very bottom of your shirt, where the stitching is. This makes it easier to work with

7) Cut fringe into the bottom of your shirt. It can be as long as you want, mine was about six inches long and 1/4 of an inch wide.

8) Tie knots into your fringe, going around and trying two strips together at a time, like this:

9) Once you have gone around once, you will go around again. This part is tricky, and will do my best to explain it. Grabbing one strip, skip two strips and tie it with the strip three away from it. If you continue this all the way around your shirt, you will get a sort of interlocking braid. But this is difficult, and took me multiple tries to get right. 

10) I washed my shirt one more time before I wore it, just to make sure the knots are really tight and will stay in while i'm wearing my shirt. 

That's it!

Days 3,4,5,6,7

Hi everyone! I'm sorry that we haven't posted any inspirational ideas for a while, we were on vacation! Anyways, here are a few, to make up for the lack of posts in the past week.

 This is a water color, with some Elmer's glue and sea salt sprinkled on. The glue and salt warp the paint, and give it a unique look.

I made this towel hanger from a piece of wood we had. I added a fresh coat of paint, chalkboard name plates and hooks for the towels. It turned out wonderfully and is used often, hanging on our bathroom wall.

 These magnets are just glass jewels with glitter on the backs of them glued to magnets.

 You can easily make a lovely vase by painting an old bottle a sharp color!

 We had an old, ugly electrical box in plain sight in our hallway. I easily dressed it up by adding some chalkboard paint fun tissue paper flowers. It's even very functional; being a great place to put reminders or notices for the family.

Hope you now have some new ideas! Good luck with your crafting!

Day 2

For today's bit of inspiration, we just have a piece of multi-media wall art that I made a few months ago. I used a wooden board, along with scrapbook paper, stamps, glitter, and a few bottle caps. 

Day 1

Here is our first quick, little creative idea for you: spray paint old bike wheels to create a neat hanging photo holder!

Our Newest Idea

Rosalie and I had a new idea. We are going to post one creative project a day. Most of them will not need tutorials, they are just quick, interesting ideas that we have tried and enjoyed doing. We will try to give you inspiration, and give you fresh ideas of things to try. We'll start today, and keep going with it until we a tired of it and want to give it up. Hope you find something that inspires you!

Home-made Pendants

We made these pendants a while ago, but it was really fun and I hope I can do more again soon!

Materials:

-Air dry clay (we even used Play Dough sometimes and it worked fine)

-Paper clip

-Metallic silver paint

-Thin wire

-Scissors/Wire cutters

-Some object to press into clay to create design. These are some of the things we used:

(Stamps, shells, necklaces, lace, ect.)

1) Use your clay to create the size and shape of the pendant you want. Try to make it as smooth as you can, the smoother it is the sharper it looks

2) Press your object into your pendant shape, and be careful it doesn't go all the way through.

3) Using the paper clip, make a hole at the top and center of your pendant.

4) Paint your pendant. While doing so, make sure that the hole at the top of your pendant is still open, you may have to re-peirce the whole if you get too much paint in it.

5) Cut a short length of wire, around 1/2 an inch long. Now bend the wire into a hoop shape.

6) Once your clay and paint have dried completely, thread the wire hoop through the hole at the top of your pendant. My picture at the top does not show the wire hoops through the pendants.

Your done!

Tulle Christmas Lights

This is a quick, easy little craft that I worked on today. It was extremely simple, but I love the way it turned out.

Materials:

-Strand of Christmas lights

- 1 to 2 yards of white tulle

-scissors

-Ruler

1) Use the ruler to measure out squares with sides of approximately 6-9 inches. You can also use strips for this, but I found that using squares makes it a little more full and fluffy.

2) At each light, tie on one of the pieces of tulle, and fluff it up so it comes around the bulb, like flower petals.

And that is all. It truly is super easy. Now, all you need to do is find somewhere to hang it!

Melted Crayon Art

Hey everyone! Today I made melted crayon art, which I saw on Pinterest and also all over the web. It took about two hours but was really fun and definitely worth it.
You need:

• About 50 crayons, depending on how big it is
• Glue gun
• Glue sticks
• Hair dryer
• Canvas
• Unwanted newspapers
• Paint (optional)

Here's the steps:

1. Lay you canvas on newspapers, to prevent  a big mess, then paint your canvas if you want, I painted mine black.
2. Peel the paper label off all your crayons and then break each crayon in half.
3. Once your paint is dry (if you painted your canvas), arrange the crayons how you want them, they could be in a heart, in a line, or in any other shape you want.
4. When the crayons are all where you want them, use a hot glue gun to glue them in place.
5. Then use a hair dryer on the crayons, keeping in mind which direction you are blowing it, this can take a little while because the crayons have to get very melty before they start dripping/running on the canvas.
6. Once you have gone around all the crayons, let them cool and your done! I did add a little, using stamps and black paper, but this is completely optional.

Toilet Paper Flowers

We're sorry we haven't we haven't been on for so long!  We have been quite busy and for a while we couldn't even get into our blog for some weird reason. We did however start an Instagram to publish crafts on as well, our username is starsandrosescrafts. Anyways, we are back. Today we will show you how to make flowers from old toilet paper tubes, like this:

Materials:

-Toilet paper tubes, paper towel rolls or rapping paper rolls (it takes quite a few, but depends on the size you want your flower)

-Pencil/pen

-Ruler

-Scissors

-Hot glue gun with extra glue sticks

1) Press down on your toilet paper tubes, so they are now flat

2) Mark every inch on your tube using the ruler. All of my toilet paper tubes happened to be exactly 4 inches long. Then cut them out.

3) Using the hot glue gun, glue 5 pieces of toilet paper tube into a flower shape

4) Start going in circles around your small 5-peice flower, glueing the pieces in the indent between petals. I tried to make mine symmetrical, but found it hard to tell how much I had done on one side sometimes, so it didn't end up perfect.

5) Hang it! I hung mine at the end of our hallway, and am in the process of making more too