Painting an Old Shed

Remember when we had the most ugly paint color ever on our house exterior?  Yes, I don't want to remember it either.  Remember when I still haven't posted about our huge task of painting the exterior of the house?  I do have a reason, I promise I'm just not being slack.  We have a few more things we are working on out front (like mulch and planting) and I would love to show a totally finished shot to you and right now we are still in progress - its coming though - as soon as we can get all of the leaves to fall off of this tree...

Its so pretty but I think it has more leaves on it than all the other trees on our street combined.  We can rake them all up and two days later we are right back to having a full yard of leaves.

So, we are kind of on hold on the front yard projects until we get this under control.  

Ok, so wasn't this post about painting our shed?  So let's get to that - since I don't have a big unveiling of our house painting project I decided to share our little shed redo in the back.  So here's a side by side - then and now shot:

I love this new paint color so much and painting the shed gave me a new found love for it so I decided to jazz it up a bit with a new wreath (that I made with dollar store things) and a little sitting area.  We also had an extra stone from our walkway project so we placed in front of the shed.  Eventually when we mulch everything we will add mulch around the shed and probably a few little plants.

I'll share a few details about our new sitting area soon.  I think its adorable and I used things that I found in the shed after we cleaned it out - fitting right?

It only took me about two days during naps to complete the shed painting project.  PS - Silas takes 3 hour naps (I know, I'm spoiled).  I think the purple door and white details make it for me.  It's adding the little touches like this to something that might usually get overlooked that make it lovely.

Our little shed went from one of my least favorite things in our yard to one my favorite.  Although, when we moved in most of everything in our yard was one of my least favorite things.  

Hope you guys are having a great week!  Thanks for stopping by!

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Giving Thanks - Making a Thankful Jar

I wanted to share our little November Thankful Jar with you.  Thanksgiving is usually a time when we reflect in thankfulness for our blessings and this year I wanted us as a family to take some time to step back each day and reflect on how truly thankful we are for what God is doing in our lives.  It's easy to get caught up in life, take things for granted and forget to view all circumstances in the eyes of our Savior.  God has said to us in His word to rejoice always and to give thanks in all circumstances - wow, those can really be difficult things to do and truthfully the only way to live life in this way is by the leading and help of the Holy Spirit (something I'm thankful for).  So this jar was born as a simple way to help to remind us of our thankfulness during this time.

This is super easy to do and all it took were things that I already had in my craft stash.  Somehow I even found stickers that had the perfect words for our jar.

 How it works for us - we have made a little station stocked with paper and pens and each day we take some time to write some things we are thankful for and drop them in our jar.  At the end of November, we will come together as a family and read aloud each one as an act of worship to God - since all blessings flow from Him and sets a great reminder to us of how much we truly have to be thankful for.

Sometimes its just the simple things like making a little thankful jar that lead us to a daily meeting with God.  

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More Party Details

So this is the last day of all things dinosaur party related, I promise.  I have a few more diy party details to share.  You really can do so much with a small budget when you are doing it all yourself and doing it yourself adds meaning and that personal touch that makes a gathering like this special.  It just takes a little bit of time an planning.  All of the things I did I started weeks in advance and just slowly worked on projects here and there.  These projects are super easy and I either used supplies I already hand on hand or bought at the dollar store or the Target dollar section (one of my favorite spots to grab a good deal).  So here we go!

First easy project are these mini chalkboards. 

 I started with dollar store picture frames, separated out the frames and glass and primed both pieces first.

After they were primed the frames received a couple of coats of spray paint and the glass received a couple of coats of chalkboard spray paint.  That was it, simple, easy and cheap.  I used spray paint that I already had on hand (I may be a little bit of a spray paint hoarder I have realized).  These could be cute for any occasion and any color.  

Next up is a little washi tape letter.

I found a cardboard letter in the Target dollar section a few months back.  You can get these at a lot of different craft stores as well.  Then I simply covered it using my washi tape (from Target).  

Washi tape is all the rage right now and it really is easy to use to create something fun.  You can see with my letter that I didn't take a lot of time making it perfect.  It's just haphazardly put on but I kind of liked it that way.  You can washi tape a lot of different things and it comes in all sorts of colors and patterns.  Here's a project I did a while back using washi tape.  Love this stuff.

Another easy project is creating a paper banner.

I just dove into my stash of paper and scrap paper embellishments to make a little banner.  I then wrote my letters with a marker - You could use a stencil, use vinyl letters - whatever you heart desires.  

My time was limited so free hand writing is what I went with.  Use a hole punch and a little twine and your banner is good to go.

Final easy project are the drink labels I made for the little plastic milk bottles.

For this project I used my paper punch that I recently bought on sale for $6 at AC Moore, pretty paper, some letter stamps and dollar store stickers.

Really easy and really cute.  This was a quick project and I love how they all looked together when it was all finished.  Once again, you could do so many variations of this with any theme you can dream of.

I had fun sharing all of our party details with you.  Next week we move on and I have more to share on what's happening outdoors, the status of our backyard shed and another craft project so come back to check it all out! 

I'm off to a retreat this weekend with the ladies from our church!  Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend!!

PS - Here is the original dinosaur party post and my post on how to make a painted burlap table cloth.

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Kids Party Ideas - DIY Dinosaur Burlap Tablecloth

Today I have a little dinosaur party project to share with you.  This project actually cost me nothing to make, just because I already had all of the supplies on hand but really wouldn't cost very much at all if you needed to purchase a few of the materials.  I had so much fun making this!  It's simple and easy and so cute.  It only took me a couple of hours one night to complete so if you have a lot going on this is not that a very time consuming project.

Materials needed for the project:

- Burlap cut to fit your size table

- Craft paint in your choice of colors

- Skinny tip craft paint brush & a fatter craft paint brush

- Dinosaur Stencils (you can see how I did mine below)

- Scrap Paper

- Fine tip Permanent Marker (Lighter colors work best)

So I started out by cutting my burlap to the size I wanted and then ironed my burlap on a medium-low heat setting (the steam was the best so if you had a steamer you could use that as well).

Next, I needed a few dinosaur stencils and I knew the perfect place to find a few dinosaurs - in one of Silas' dino books.  So I found a few easy shapes and traced them onto a piece of white paper and cut them out so I could then trace the pattern onto my burlap.

I decided on the placement and chose which colors I wanted to use.

Then I placed a little stack of scrap paper under each dinosaur template and traced around them with a fine tip permanent marker.  Make sure you leave the paper underneath while you paint so you won't get any bleed through on your table.  Also, the paper helps allow you to fill in a lot of the spaces in the burlap itself.  Some of the paper stuck to the back of my burlap when I was finished but I didn't mind because you couldn't tell when it was on the table.

Next I just used my skinny tipped craft paint brush to trace around the outline of the dinos and then used the fatter brush to fill it all in.  I did two coats of paint just to get a good coverage.

And then I had this!  I loved it.

It was ready for our little snack table set up.  

I love the look of burlap and you could do this with any shape, monogram, design that you wanted.  I actually have and idea of what I want to do with the tablecloth now that the party is over so hopefully I will be able to reuse it.

Thanks so much for burlap painting with us today!  Anyone else have any party planning diying going on?  Share with us!!