Home Decor – Stars & Sunshine

Free Halloween Friends Embroidery Pattern

October 8, 2015 Julia 2 Comments

Halloween is only two and a half weeks away! I’ve been looking for some quick decorations, and put together this embroidery pattern.

Halloween Embroidery Pattern

You can download the pattern for free here. The pattern includes basic instructions and drawings to trace for either a 4″ or 6″ round hoop (4″ pattern shown below).

Free Halloween Embroidery Pattern

Of course, I think the pattern looks especially great in my scalloped embroidery hoops! You can get the black ones here, or check out the rest of my shop for other colors.

Finished Embroidery Hoop Back

I finished off the back of the hoop using this tutorial, but used hot glue (which works great to stick the fabric to my plastic hoops). I made sure to use a dark fabric to keep the dark thread travels from showing through.

Pumpkin ghost and bat embroidery pattern

If you want to use the free embroidery pattern, click here and print or right click -> save as… and save to your computer.

Bloom Pillows

February 12, 2014 Julia 5 Comments

I love the bloomin’ quilt as you go tutorial from Let’s Eat Grandpa. I made one for our bedroom sometime last fall, and my mother-in-law liked it so much that she requested a couple for her couch.

We went shopping together for some fabric to match her couch, so the colors and patterns are mostly not ones I’d usually pick out on my own (although I did toss in some of my own navys, like those dragonflys from Japan!), but I really like how these came together. They also look great with her couch, which you can see in the background above. They’re much bigger than my first one, at 16″.

I love when people I love ask for specific handmade gifts so I don’t have to agonize over what to make for them 🙂

Felt Tree Skirt

December 9, 2013 Julia 3 Comments

Today I’m sharing a tutorial for this amazing felt flower tree skirt to finish off your Christmas tree! I shared this as a guest post at Sugar Bee Crafts last week, but wanted to make sure you all saw it here as well 🙂 I saw one similar to this on pinterest last year, and was completely smitten. Unfortunately, it had been $320 and wasn’t even available any longer, so I set out to make my own.

Supplies needed:

craft felt (I used 2.5 yards for a 36″ wide tree skirt and all the flowers)
scissors
needle and thread (in same color as felt)
or other felt adhesive
optional: pearls or beads to decorate flowers

First, you need to figure out how big you want your tree skirt to be. This is for a small area in our house and a relatively small tree, so I only wanted my tree skirt to be 36″ wide. I folded some red felt in quarters, and used a piece of string to make a quarter circle with a radius of 18″. This will actually give you a solid circle piece, so if you want it to fit around your tree you’ll need to cut a smaller hole (mine is about 4″ wide, so 2″ radius) in the middle and a slit from one hole to the other so you can get it around your tree.

These flowers are the main awesomeness of this tree skirt. It can take a while to make enough of them for a full tree skirt, but they’re not hard to make. I used two slightly different sizes – a larger size mostly for the outer ring, and the smaller size mostly for the inner ring of flowers.

Each of my felt flowers has three of these felt pieces. You can download a printable template to trace here if you want, or free hand yours based on the shape above. To download the printable template pdf, either click on the image above or click here. It will open up the image in a new window in your browser, and you can right click then ‘save as’ to save it to your computer.

To make each flower, cut out three petals. Fold the center of each petal in half long-ways, and then fold the edges back up (see right photo above).

Then fold each of these petals the other way at the center, so that the two individual petals are next to each other. Sew through the center of three of these a couple times to make each flower, making sure to go through all layers.

The flowers look nice from both the front and the back – just pick one to use for all your flowers. I chose what I think of as the front – the one on the left in the photo above. Once you think you may have enough flowers (I used 60!), start arranging them around your tree skirt. I did two overlapping layers, but more could look awesome on a bigger tree skirt.

Once you have figured out where you want them, it’s time to start attaching them. I started using a needle and thread to attach each one, but that was taking a really long time. I ended up using fabri-tac. It worked great on the felt! I had a couple fall off initially, but just stuck them right back on with fabri-tac. I actually made this skirt last year, and I didn’t have any more of the flowers fall off through presents on the tree skirt, putting it away in storage, and pulling it back out this year.

I also used fabri-tac to stick on little pearls in the middle of each flower. I think it makes them look more festive and a bit more like flowers.

For the edges of the tree skirt, I covered some buttons with the same red felt and sewed on loops of red/white baker’s twine.

Happy Door = Happy House

September 2, 2013 Julia 3 Comments

I’ve been wanting to paint our front door since before we moved in, and we finally got around to it this week. Doesn’t the whole house look so cheerful now?

To make a long story short, we were told we could have a bright red front door when we signed the contract for our house, but when it came time to picking out colors (we had our house built), we were basically told that that was a tacky choice and the neighborhood would not allow it. Which is especially crazy because there are entire houses that are bright red. Hmph. At any rate, we finally painted it ourselves a couple of weeks ago, and I love it!

I started by cleaning of the door with watered-down dish-washing soap (we have a lot of oak pollen in our neighborhood and it really collects on the panel frames on the door). I also removed the door hardware andsanded around the door knobs where there was a poor paint job and some rough edges.

Then I went over the whole door with liquid deglosser, and was ready to paint! I followed Sherry @ Young House Love’s lead and painted the frames around each panel, the panels, and then the pieces between panels, in that order, with a 2.5″ angled brush for each coat. Always follow the grain of the wood when painting!

We used Benjamin Moore’s MooreGlo paint. We had been putting off painting the door until Sherwin Williams had one of their periodic sales because we loved their paint when we painted our guest bathroom, but it turns out that Sherwin Williams does not carry exterior paint in a semi-gloss sheen – and neither the satin or high gloss were what we wanted. So Benjamin Moore it was! We went with their ‘red’ color. Even with the primer, it took four coats to really cover up the maroon we had going on before. Here it was after one coat:

Since I’m a grad student and was basically working on my research from home this summer, I did this over a couple of days before school started so I could stay home and leave the door hardware off and the door open just a smidge all day, but this could also totally be done over a weekend.

Bathroom Mirror

July 25, 2013 Julia 1 Comment

One of the updates in my guest bathroom makeover was putting a frame up around the mirror to make it a little less builder-basic.

I think it really helps transform our bathroom from builder-basic and plain to sophisticated and custom. I didn’t take any before or during pictures (bad blogger!), but I used a combination of these tutorials (and the pictures were great for convincing my husband that this was actually a good idea!): Design gal, This thrifty house, A little of this, a little of that, Impatiently praying for patience, and Thrifty and chic.

Basically, we got some trim from home depot to match our door molding ($8 for two 2.25″ thick, 7′ long, pre-primed pieces). We cut them to size and mitered the corners with our table saw, then painted them with some high-gloss white paint (left over from our bedroom shelf). We glued them directly to the mirror using this product, reinforced the glue with painters tape, and let it dry overnight. I then caulked the corners and touched them up with more paint.

Some tips I want to reiterate in case you want to do this your self:

Use a product labeled to work on mirrors for attaching the trim to the mirror. I went in just thinking ‘liquid nails’ because that’s what a lot of the tutorials I read used, but our store had many varieties of liquid nails, none of which said they were good for mirrors (they didn’t have the liquid nails mirror variety, but it does in fact exist). Again, we used this kind.
Check that your corners all line up by taping the trim pieces around your mirror before you glue anything down to make sure they line up. I found that keeping the other pieces taped up as I untaped/glued each piece helped keep my corners perfect.
Pay attention to the angling on the corners – front/back as well as the angle of the miter cut.

Make sure not to put the glue too close to the inside edge of the mirror – otherwise you’ll see it in the reflection (I have one spot where this happened – shown above). On the same note, paint at least the inner half inch or so of the back of your trim!
If you want the corners to match up, you need the trim to all be flat. The easy way to do this is to have the outside of your trim frame line up with the edge of the mirror, but I decided I wanted to have my frame extend over the edge of the mirror. The bottom edge of my mirror was flush with the granite sink top, though, so I had to sand down part of the back to make it flush. Hope that makes sense!