DIY Emoji Ornaments

I’d like to introduce a talented crafter and old friend of mine as a guest blogger on Funkitch.  Her name is Jen Grech.  We met when our first kids were small babies and have stayed connected through Facebook and through a mutual friend.  Only recently have we discovered that we share a passion for creating and crafting.  Jen has two sweet boys and an adorabe pup.  Here is a pic of  beautiful Jen and a pic of her kids –

beautiful and talented Jen!

Jen’s Kids

A couple weeks ago I fell in love with a craft that Jen shared on Facebook – Emoji Ornaments. She made them for a friend of hers that loves, loves using emojis. My girls are very into the whole emoji world these days and I immediately asked Jen for instructions on how to make them. She shared with me that she used instructions from a blog but made adjustments.  I really liked the way Jen’s came out and since she used entirely different materials than the original blog where she got the idea, I asked her to write out instructions and do a guest blog post for me.

It is 3 days before Christmas and this amazing woman sent me step by step pics and detailed instructions on how to make adorable emoji ornaments with Jen’s special tips and touches.  Thank you Jen!

Without any further delay, here are the instructions.

Here are some pic’s Jen kindly sent over to me with hopes that they will be helpful in putting these together.

Our girls had a ball making all kinds of emoji faces!  Silly, silly!

DIY Lazy Susan Serving Plate

Several months ago I made a rotating lazy susan turning tray based on a beautiful handpainted DIY Lazy Susan Serving Plate my sister-in-law, Stacy put together.  She used an ornately decorated plate she found at World Market and glued it to a Rotating Turntable Lazy Susan.   I have been on a quest to make something similar to that ever since.

Earlier this week I found myself at an annual holiday craft fair I like to help my mom with.  My mother is a master with fiber arts and makes beautiful things.  Part of the fun of helping with this fair is walking around and seeing all the handi-crafts and tasty treats at each table.  I found a nice older woman who had all sorts of hand-painted wooden things – trays, plates, little tables and small dressers.  I loved her designs, in particular a red stained large wooden plate with hand-painted flowers and leaves.  I instantly thought of my mother-in-law when I saw this plate and her amazing Thanksgiving decorations.  I decided to buy that plate from the nice old lady and make a lazy susan serving plate to gift to my mom-in-law for her Thanksgiving table.

Here is a pictures of the plate I found at the craft fair:

Hand-painted and stained serving sized plate

On my way home from the fair I stopped by at our local Ace Hardware store.  I called first to find out whether they had a lazy susan mechanism I could use to glue under this pretty plate to make it turn.  They told me they had a few sizes so I decided to go by and see the options.   I ended up going with the smaller sized lazy susan device (meant to be screwed into corner cabinets).  It had 4 flat sides on the corners so I figured there would be enough space to glue it down to the plate.  I spent around 5 dollars on the small turn table mechanism.

Here is what the turning device (lazy susan) looked like when I glued it to the back of the plate:

Lazy susan device glued to the back of hand painted plate.

I thought about using my handy glue gun to get the lazy susan attached to the plate but went with Tacky glue to get a flatter drying glue effect.  Glue gun glue sometimes clumps up on me unevenly.  The Tacky glue worked well.  If you go with Tacky glue remember it takes time to dry.  I let mine dry over night plus a few more hours in the morning.

I also picked up small Adhesive Vinyl Pads from Ace hardware to stick on each of the 4 corners of the lazy susan mechanism.  If you look closely at the photo above you will see the small round, rubbery pads.  I put these on to keep the plate in place when it is being turned.

So basically, aside from the serving plate, I only needed three things to put this lazy susan serving plate together;  the lazy susan mechanism, the Tacky glue and the adhesive vinyl pads.

Here is a photo of the glue and the pads:

That’s it.  I will put in a video of the pretty plate rotating.  It turned out so nice and I can’t wait to give it to my mom in law and see it on the table for Thanksgiving!

Hand Weaved Doggy Collars and Friendship Bracelets!

Hand weaved friendship bracelets made from upcycled t-shirt yarn

Today I’m going to show you how to make Hand Weaved Doggy Collars and Friendship Bracelets out of upcycled t-shirt ‘yarn’.

I’m super excited to head back to my home town, East Lansing, Michigan and then up to Torch Lake in Michigan to hang out with 3 of my close high school pals – one now lives in Nevada, one lives in Georgia, and one still in good ole’ Michigan. What I love is that we can be so goofy and carefree when we’re together. We have fun reminding each other of stories from when we were crazy teenagers. Hard to believe now we all have our own kids that age. We first started reconnecting at our high school reunions. A few years ago we decided the big re-unions every 5 years were not soon enough to get together. Now we do our best to have our ‘girls retreats’ with all 4 of us once a year. Last year we met up in San Diego. This year we’ll all get back to our home turf.

 Now let’s get to how to make these cute, stylish, chunky braided bracelets!

Here’s a list of what you’ll need:

Old t-shirt

Sharp fabric scissors

Reading glasses? (ha! Not quite yet!…am I in denial??)

Your hand!

First cut off the bottom seamed edge of the shirt. Next cut one inch strips across the bottom of the t-shirt. Cut your fabric strip in half. Do that again. Connect the two pieces.  Here is a very detailed instructional Video on how to connect two pieces of fabric yarn – you should be able to get the hang of it after watching the first two minutes of the video.

Now is where the fun begins!

Put your right hand out Michigan style with your palm up and your thumb facing the right. Take your fabric yarn and grab the end. Pull the end up from behind your hand and then between your pointer and your thumb.

Hand weaving Friendshiop bracelets

Weave the yarn through your fingers. It’s much easier to have a visual for the first steps of hand weaving.

Here is a picture of our younger daughter demonstrating:

How to wrap fabric yarn around fingers for weaving

In the above photo Ava let go of the tail end that she was holding with her thumb and it is hanging between her middle finger and her pointer – it worked out fine.

Next you take  your longer piece of fabric and wrap it around all three fingers – around your pinky, ring finger, and middle finger.  It is best described visually.  Here is Ava demonstrating what it looks like after it is wrapped around:

Fabric yarn wrapped for hand weaving

This is where the fun finger weaving begins!  Starting with your pinky finger, bend your pinky down holding on to the top piece of fabric yarn and take it under the lower piece wrapped around your finger.  Do the same thing with your ring finger and your middle finger.  Repeat rows.

After you have done about 4 or 5 rows this way, pull the tail end from the back so it looks like this:

pull the end of the weaving – looks like this when it is close to finished

The whole process from start to finish is best described by watching my YouTube video here:

So now you’ve hopefully been able to follow my YouTube tutorial on how to make chunky braided friendship bracelets.

Hope you enjoyed that – I pasted in a pic of my high school gal pals and I all sporting our friendship bracelets at the very end of the video tutorial.  Now I am back home in Cali just missing the good times we had together.  You can see Torch Lake in the background and the cute Michigan shaped teak chairs Debbie has in her cottage yard.  We had a super fun dinner and laughed to tears that night out!  Miss them all and can’t wait for our next girls trip!!

Well when I got home from my girls trip to Michigan, our younger daughter Ava and I took our dog Oscar to the groomers for a haircut.  He looked so cute when we brought him home that we just had to make him a braided collar.  It was Ava’s idea.  Here are a couple cute shots of her putting the collar on Oscar and how sweet he looked afterwards.

Our dog Oscar modelling his new hand weaved pup collar

Fun dressing up our cutie pie pup hand weaved doggy collar

Thanks for reading this post and I sure hope you try making your own hand weaved doggy collars and friendship bracelets soon! If you do please let me know how it went – I would love to hear. Subscribe to this blog for more inspiring ideas and tutorials of how to make well, nifty stuff 🙂 xx o -Bita

Oops!  Don’t forget kitty – Bluebell seems to like sporting her new kitty collar.

Our kitty Bluebell sporting hew new friendship collar, hand weaved by Ava

Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she wonderful?
Isn’t she precious?