Quick Projects with Foam Stamps: A Guest Post

Today's post comes from Sara at Creative Jewish Mom. Sara and I connected a few months ago and I am a huge fan of her site where she shares the joys of crafting, decorating, cooking, and gardening. I think you're going to love her too!

A scrap of awning fabric stamped with fabric paint makes a casual table runner.

The craft of stamping images onto fabric or paper is always fun and satisfying, so when I spotted a collection of large foam stamps at the dollar store a few years back, I scooped them all up, and wish I had bought duplicates! Foam stamping does not produce the crisp results one can obtain with stenciling so I wouldn't recommend doing it on your walls, but there are so many other ways to use this quick decorative technique.

Cover the blank walls at a school or community function with long stamped banners!

I have used these stamps for projects with children as young as 5 years old and fun was had by all. Even imperfect results are charming and can be used as wrapping paper or for gift cards and tags.

Plain brown boxes : now wonderful gift boxes or decorative storage containers!

Stamping is the kind of thing you just can't get enough of, so before you get started make sure you have a whole bunch of boxes, paper and anything else you can think of on hand! I used one of these stamps on cracker boxes turned inside out to make really festive Purim containers, but you'll just have to wait awhile to see them!

Stamping on colored paper with white or creme paint is quite successful. Cut your paper to the exact height of some good recycled cans, and make useful containers that look great!

These are the stamps that I used to make all the above examples in this post!

How To:

1. Buy some foam stamps like these, if you can't find them sit tight, I'll hopefully be teaching you how to make something similar in the future!
2. Using acrylic craft paint, apply paint to the stamp with a large brush
3. Carefully place stamp on paper and press down
4. Lift from paper to enjoy the results

Note from Kimba: Thanks Sara! I've always wondered what to do with those huge foam stamps at the craft store. Now I know. Here are just a few of my favorite posts from Creative Jewish Mom:

Container Gardening with Houseplants
Dimensional Fall Tree with Felt Leaves
Floral Pomander Balls
Whole Wheat and Yogurt Pancakes

Sara was born and raised in California, educated in New York and now lives in the gorgeous rolling hills of Northern Israel with her Israeli husband and five children.

She left a high profile designer life in Manhattan for spiritual pursuits and ended up meeting her husband in Israel. They have chosen to live in the North of the country to give their children a quiet upbringing close to nature and away from the distractions of commercialization.

Make Your Own Stick Bundles

I love those expensive stick/grass/willow bundles (what are they called, anyway?) that you see in all the stores. But the ones I was looking at the other day were between $25 & $35. YIKES! Not happening!

Here's how to make your own. So easy and only $4.00!

Supplies:

• Tin can
• Brown spray paint
• Plaster of paris
• Grass, sticks or branches
• Jute rope
• Hot glue

Step 1: Paint your tin can brown (or another color that matches your sticks/grass/branches. That's so that if a bit of the can shows through the final product, you won't really be able to tell.

Step 2: Mix up some plaster of paris and put it in the bottom of each can for weight. You could use anything you wanted to give them some weight. But I wanted to make sure that whatever was in mine didn't spill out when my little hooligans knock them over.

Step 3: Hot glue a piece of floral foam into the can right on top of the hardened plaster.

Step 4: Start sticking in your sticks. My stick-grass stuff came in a big bundle from Joann for $4.00 (50% off!). You can find it at any craft store.

Step 5: Hot glue the sticks, grass or brances around the outside of the can. Don't worry if a bit of the can shows through because you painted the can brown, remember?

Step 6: A little rustic twine to finish off the bottom.

Step 7: Wrap it around a few times.

Step 8: Tie another piece of twine around the grass right above the top of the can. If you're using something stiff like sticks, you won't need to cinch it so tight.


This article was originally posted on October 16, 2008.

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Good Enough Curtains

I know that I've shown you this corner of my family room about eleventy-hundred times. At one point it was my quiet time/blogging spot. When we built this house, I had an image in my head of a bright corner with a couple of windows and a comfy chair.

Can I just tell you how much I hate trying to photograph windows? It took me 3 days to get these crummy pictures. Either the room is too dark or it looks like the Mother Ship is landing outside my window.

This is what it looked like before I hung the fabric. That "For Sale" sign that you see out the window isn't for our house. It's for the never-gonna-sell-in-this-economy lot next door. Who wants to come be my neighbor? Pretty please?

Something about this corner has bugged me since we moved in a year ago. It never felt quite right. Then as I was hanging the curtain rods, I realized that THE WINDOWS ARE DIFFERENT SIZES! Not a big deal but I can't believe it took me over a year to figure that out.

A few months back, I got my hot little hands on some Dupioni Silk fabric from Fabric.com for really cheap (like $5.00/yard cheap). Some of you got in on that deal too. I grabbed 12 yards of this beautiful khaki/gold/green silk. LOVE IT! Even at $10/yard, it's a great deal.

I used The Nester's Fold, Clip and Poof Technique, minus the poof. I tried the poof. It looked good, but I preferred no poof. The edges are completely raw but even the selvage of this fabric is pretty. I may cover it up with some pretty fringe at some point. But then again, maybe not.

Do you have any curtains that you usually look at from the side? This rod is primarily seen sideways from the kitchen. It always bugs me a little when the the curtains kind of hang away from the walls. Here's a little tip for you.

Take one of your ring clips and turn it around the corner so that it's hanging on the bracket rather than the rod. Then run the rest of your clips on the rod like normal.

It's a dumb little thing that bugs me and this trick fixes it right up. See?

One more picture just because I love it so much. I've got two more windows to do in this room but they'll have to wait until the painting is done.

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DIY Day is still going strong! Scroll down or click here to see over 250 project posts and link up your own. You might win a fantastic prize from Madison Reese Designs!

Today is the last day to enter our giveaway from Rondo Room. Winner announced tomorrow.

Speaking of giveaways, did you see that Remodeling Guy is giving away an Ipod Touch? My Walkman (my what????) just broke so I'm going to try and win this! Get yourself over there and get entered to win.

This One's For The Fellas

About 3,574 of you commented or emailed that you were showing my board and batten posts to your men to convince them it was time to give this glorious wall treatment a shot. And all of you asked the same questions...

"How long?" and "How much?"

Perfectly reasonable questions, especially when the fellas get involved. I need to make a t-shirt for The Hubster with those words on it. Those are his first questions whenever I reveal a new hair(hare?)-brained scheme. Not that I think board and batten was hayre-brained.

So in the interest of making a short story as long as possible, I'm turning my board and batten story into a trilogy. If you missed the first two installments, you can see all the glory shots from Monday and the nitty-gritty details on Tuesday.

Let's start with "How long?".

I would say that this was a weekend project, but let me put that in perspective for you. We did 2 fairly large walls. One was 19 feet long and the other was 17 feet long. Obviously, it would take way less time if you're covering less wall space.

If I had to guess at an actual number, I would say less 20 man (or woman!) hours for our whole project. If you're working together, you could easily do this over a weekend.

Here's a breakdown of the time that we spent

• 3 hours painting the walls (I did 3, yes 3, coats of paint trying to get an even finish)
• 2 hours cutting the wood strips for the crown and battens
• 4 hours priming and painting the crown and battens
• 2 hours hanging the crown
• 5 hours hanging the battens
• 1 hour filling in nail holes
• 2 hours painting the finished walls

Total estimate: 20 hours

Now let's get to the even more important question...How much cold, hard cash did we outlay for this project? Here's the approximate breakdown:

• 2 sheets of 3/4" MDF @ $20 each = $40
• 1 gallon of primer @ $22
• 2 gallons for white paint @ $26 each = $52
• 2" finishing nails for nailgun @ $15
• Caulk @ $5
• Wood filler $3
  

Total estimate: $136

In our case, we had less than $100 out of pocket because we already had the primer, 1 gallon of the paint and the caulk.

And that's my story. The end.

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DIY Day will begin at 10pm tonight! Do you have a post ready?

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Board and Batten ~ A Tutorial

If you or your man can paint and operate a table saw, then you can do a board and batten treatment on your walls. The great thing about this treatment is that it can be as simple or as fancy as you want. We went with a very basic, sort of rustic design, which is perfect for our room. I've seen plenty of designs that use more trimwork or only cover part of the wall. Whichever way you like it, this is something you can do.

Here's our "before".

And the "after". If you want to see tons of "after" pictures, click here to see another post about this project.

I'll bet that most of you could figure out how to do this without our help. I'll give you the rundown of how The Hubster and I made it happen but you'll probably end up doing it your own way. Here's what we used:

Supplies

• 2 sheets of 3/4 MDF
• 2 inch trim nails
• Primer (Kilz because that's what I had in the garage already)
• Paint (Fence Post by Behr in semi-gloss because I had lots left-over from painting my kitchen stools)
• White, paintable caulking
• Sand paper
  

Equipment

• Table saw
• Miter saw
• Nail gun

If you want a more detailed cost and time breakdown, click here for those details.

Step 1: Paint the walls. It may seem illogical, but the first thing that I did was roll on two coats of the paint directly on the walls. My logic was that getting that base color on with a roller would be way faster than doing it with a roller AND brush once the wood was attached to the wall. We had flat paint on the walls in this room so I didn't feel the need to prime (not that I ever feel the need to prime walls).


Step 2: Cut your crown pieces. The crown piece around our ceiling was cut from the 3/4" MDF. We decided to go with a 5" crown. No real designer-type reason. 6" seemed too wide (if we had 9' ceilings, I would have done 6") and I was afraid 4" would look like a 2x4. So we went with 5".


Step 3: Prime and paint the crown. Since this was made from MDF, it needed to be primed. It was going to butt-up against the ceiling so I decided it would be easier to paint it before putting it on the wall. No cutting in against the ceiling.


Step 4: Hang your crown. We started in the far right-hand corner of the room and worked our way around to the left. We miter cut each board where they butted up against each other then used a nail gun with 2" finishing nails to hang the boards. We used a power nail gun. You could do this by hand, but I don't think I would want to. It's a LOT of nailing. I would say rent or borrow a power nailer if you can.

You'll end up with little gaps where the boards don't line up perfectly. That's OK. You'll fix it later with caulking.



Step 5: Cut your vertical strips. We decided to go with 2" vertical strips (the battens). Not for any good reason. It just looked right. You could go wider or skinnier depending on the look you're going for. We used about 37 of the vertical strips.

We also cut a 45 degree angle at the bottom of each batten so that it doesn't overhang the existing baseboard where they butt-up against each other.

Cutting MDF is MESSY!
Step 6: Prime your battens. This was the most irritating part of the project. Priming each of those strips was a pain in the wahoozit. After about 45 minutes, I figured out that you could stack a group of strips and paint all the edges at once, then lay them out side by side to paint the top surface.

Step 7: Hang your battens. We decided to hang our battens 12" apart. It just looked right. We also did a little math ahead of time and figured out that 12" apart meant that none of the battens landed directly on the window trim. We cut 2 pieces of wood that were 12" long and used them as spacers. That way we weren't having to measure each time. It also helped make sure everything was plumb (that's the vertical version of "level"). We got the first board plumb and used a spacer at the top and bottom of each new board to make sure things were straight.

Once we got rolling, this part went quickly. Each batten needed to be cut to the right height as we went so The Hubster would do 4 or 5 at a time and we would attach them to the wall with the finish nails. Depending on your walls, you might want to use some liquid nail on each piece but ours were holding fine with just nails.

Step 8: Fill your nail holes. We used a lightweight, paintable wood filler to fill in all of the tiny little nail holes in the crown and on the battens. We also used paintable caulk to fill in an gaps in the crown seams and between the batten and the crown. I also ran a line of caulk between the top of the crown and the ceiling. It eliminated that tiny, annoying gap at the ceiling.

Step 9: Paint the whole thing. We used a brush to paint the sides of each batten and a narrow roller to do the flat surface. Since the main part of the wall was already painted, we just touched it up where needed. And don't forget to touch up the nail holes in your crown.

And that's about it. It wasn't a difficult process although it did get tedious at times. Here are a couple of lessons learned through this process.

1. I'm not sure that the process of painting the wall first was the fastest way to go. I could be convinced that it would have been easier to hang all of the wood first, then prime and paint everything (including the wall) at once. It's probably 6 of 1, half a gallon of the other. Is anyone still reading this?

2. It's HARD to get an even finish when you use semi-gloss paint on the wall. At some point, I might repaint with satin. Shhhhhh. DON'T tell The Hubster. Surely he's not still reading this.

3. This is addicting. I'm already dreaming of what we can board and batten next. The dining room. The master bedroom. The doghouse. We don't even have a dog.

4. I used the word "butt" 3x in this post. Heh heh.

So what do you think? Are you dying to try this? I'd love to hear if you have plans to try it out.

The Paint is Barely Dry

And there's nothing hung on the walls, but I can't wait one more minute to show you the board and batten treatment that we finally finished in our family room this weekend! If you would like a tutorial on how we did this project, click here. For a breakdown of the cost and time involved, click here.

I love it so much that I'm giddy every time I walk into the room.

We had an ocean of drywall that just couldn't hold it's own against the stone fireplace.

Now we have a room full of charm and character.

The board and batten was a stroke of genius. It has completely transformed the feeling of this room.

I especially love where it wraps around the windows.

We went with a simple rustic design that goes all the way to the ceiling and it works perfectly in this room. The paint color we used is Fence Post by Behr because I had a bunch of it left over from painting my kitchen stools.

Tune in tomorrow and I'll give you more details about how we actually did this project.