watercolour power tools

I've often mentioned spoonflower contests I enter. Recently I made it into the top ten for the first time which was incredibly exciting. The top ten designs are immediately set for sale and are part of a fat quarter bundle promoted on spoonflower for a week, which means more people see (and hopefully buy!) the design. Spoonflower also takes beautiful pictures of the fabric which are bigger than the fabric swatches I usually get. Here's the photo they took and this is where you can buy the fabric. I love how the colours turned out!

Watercolour power tools is a kind of strange combination, but I got inspiration to make this design from two people. My uncle is a fine woodworker and has an amazing shop where I love to hang out whenever I'm in Manitoba. I recently asked him for some photos of tools to use for a series of designs (here are some others I've made for the series: power saw and woodworking tools).

When I was in the Netherlands at Easter I visited my grandmother who has always encouraged me to try all kinds of things like painting, sewing, knitting and even leather work. I told her a bit about designs I've been working on recently and she gave me a beautiful block of watercolour paper. This was the first painting I worked on. I love the look of the watercolour paint on the fabric, and hope to do some more watercolour designs soon.

how to wallpaper a dollhouse

I'm making progress on my dollhouse renovation. I love the exterior paint colours and have been slowly building up layers of white paint inside to cover all the colours. Here are some work in progress shots. As you can see, there is a lot of bright paint to cover! One of the first things I did was remove the plexiglass windows which were dark and covered in paint. Then there was a lot of sanding and scraping and cleaning to do.

Yesterday, after a third layer of white paint that didn't cover the bright green on the upstairs walls, I decided to try wallpaper. Here are some pictures of the process and some tips if you want to try it yourself!

0. Choose some paper! I went to a few stores looking at wrapping paper before I found this paper in Flow magazine (it was a good excuse to buy the magazine as well, which I love).

1. Make a paper template of the area you want to cover, especially if there are windows involved. I have little window sills that needed to poke through the paper. Very important: measure at least three times before you cut the actual paper!

2. Cut out your paper template,

3. and try it on the wall. If you look closely, you can see that there is some wall showing through at the top of the window, so I adjusted my template accordingly. If you measure correctly, then cutting the actual wallpaper should go smoothly.

4. Cut the wallpaper. I used a quilters ruler as a guide to make sure everything was perfectly straight and squared up.

5. Try it on inside the walls. My paper didn't fit all the way around both walls, so its important to make a fold on one paper to go around the corner and start the other paper in the corner on top of the folded paper, so there is no gap.

6. Using your template, cut out the windows and window sills.

7. Another way to make sure the windows are positioned correctly is to place the paper inside, and mark the back with a pencil, especially if the corners of your windows are not completely square.

8. Once the paper is cut out, I used modge podge glue to attach it. This meant working quickly, putting down a layer of glue and smoothing it out with an old drivers license and then putting more modge podge on top to act as a varnish, that is especially important around the windows so that the paper doesn't tear when it is handled.

9. The finished room! And because I was so motivated, I right away laid the floor upstairs. I'll post a tutorial another time.

I'm very happy with how it turned out, and am thinking about whether I want to wallpaper downstairs as well (the white paint did a better job of covering downstairs, so it isn't strictly necessary). If I had had the time though, I would have gotten a wallpaper swatch from my spoonflower shop. The swatches are only $5 and are 12 x 24", so would have been the perfect size for the wall. Since they are peel and stick, I wouldn't have had to mess about with glue. So if you want to try this project, head over to my shop and buy a swatch of peel and stick wallpaper :-)

Here's a shot of the dollhouse how it looks now. You can see the exterior paint colours and the floor as well as the two different papers I used as wallpaper upstairs.

dollhouse renovation

I found a dollhouse! Carried it home and have been sanding, filling in holes and now painting. Here are some pictures from before I started renovating:

And now I'll get started on the second coat of paint. Its going to be white inside (bone china to be precise) with white trim outside and dark (breton) blue.

ps. today there is another free shipping day in my spoonflower shop, for 12 hours only!

kitchen before and after

what do you think of this before and after? The dark green was getting a bit overwhelming, so we painted blue and white stripes, which makes the room seem a lot bigger. Here's a close-up of one corner:

I made the little flowers out of paint chips that I had collected while deciding on what colour blue would look best. I folded the petals out a bit and fastened them to the wall with pins. 

cars and trucks

painted a few weeks ago for Lucas Brunner. I copied the designs of the cars and trucks from the curtains. While Damaris sewed curtains I painted.

more painting

These little stools are plant stands from ikea. I've collected them over the years. They've been painted differently at different times, but I wanted to have three the same that I can use together as a coffee table. I painted them all white and used serviettes and modge podge for the flowers.