How To Make Your Own "Places We've Been" Map

What you will need:

1. 6-7 square canvases for each continent. We didn't include Antartica because we're guessing we'll never make it there.  

2. Double sided tape

3. Different colored pins (at least 3 different colors)

4. Map of each continent (we got ours out of a vintage calendar so they were already in square shapes)

5. Ruler

6. Pen

7. Scissors

Cut out your maps and place them on the cork board to see how much cork board you need to cut off. Then with a ruler draw a line to mark where you need to cut the cork board and use scissors to cut it. Using double sided tape, stick the map onto the cork board.

Place pins in all the places you've been. Since my husband and I were both doing it we used pink to signify the places I had been, blue for the places he had been, and white for the places we both had been.

Hang it on your wall (we used pins) and you're done!

Check out how great it looks in our wall collage:

Small Hand-Painted Green Lattice Pillow

This pillow was made for my friend Kathryn who is an awesome friend and ordered a few pillows from me to give as Christmas presents. This one was for her grandparents. It is very similar to the other green lattice pillow, only it is much smaller (17''x17''), it's a different shade of green, AND It's cheaper!

To Purchase this pillow click here.

How To Make Your Own Movie Ticket Cork Board

Here's what you need:

1. Movie Tickets. This can be movies you have seen with anyone, with your significant other (which was my case), with your family, your friend, etc. It may take a while to save up enough to fill up a board, unless you've already been saving tickets for years like me. Also, you can always leave room like me, for movies you will see in the future.

2. Any size cork board, mine started out black, but I painted it white to go with the rest of our frames

3. 1 pack of thumb tacks, I also bought white to match the white theme, but you can choose whatever works best for you.

Assemble Tickets on the board so that they all fit nice and close together, just to warn you this takes a lot of rearranging. Then pin them on with thumb tacks and you're done!
   

Plum Ruffled Pillow With White Piping- Available in Other Colors

Here's a pillow I made for my cousin, it's basically the same as my plum ruffled pillow I made in the fall. The only difference is I used white fabric for the piping and cotton fabric instead of the silk tafetta for the purple background fabric. 

To purchase this pillow click here.

DIY Burlap Table Runners- By Mary Kay and Grace

My friend Mary Kay and I got inspired by pinterest and decided to make burlap table runners. The idea originally came from this blog. We bought about three yards of White Burlap,  actually Mary Kay bought the fabric and shared it with me (such a sweet friend). It was sooo much fabric! Since we were each making one we folded the fabric down the middle and cut in in half so there were now two three yard long pieces that were now skinny enough to pass for table runners. Next we ironed the very wrinkly fabric enough so that it was manageable to work with, but still pretty wrinkly (don't worry about it too much because once it's on the table for a while the wrinkles settle out). Then we folded the edges in on both sides twice about 1/2 inch to create a seam so that it wouldn't fray and to give it a more finished look. To hold the fold in place we ironed it down.

Then I put my handy dandy sewing skills to work and sewed down the very very long seams, leaving about 8 inches unsewn on each end so that we could unravel them.

When I finally finished sewing down the seams the table runner looked like this:

Next we got to to work plucking out the thread. I found that if you pull the thread from the middle of the strand it comes out easier than from the edges, although I'm sure there are probably lots of good thread plucking techniques. Mary Kay made the very true comment of how upset she would be with us if it was the old days where people still had to weave fabric by hand, and here we were ruining their hard labor. Thankfully we didn't have to feel too bad ruining the hard work of a machine. 

Once we had reached the end of my line of stitching we were done plucking and ready to start knotting.

We separated the thread into groups of eight (which sometimes varied from time to time, but no one is counting right?) and then tied them into knots. 

 Side one, fully knotted and ready to go!

And here it is on our dining room table! 

second view

Living Room Decoupaged Map Tray

My sister gave me this old wooden frame with a violin picture that I didn't think was too cute, but she gave me the idea of turning it into a cute tray to use as a table top for the basket in our living room. She also had a cool map that she gave me to put over the picture so all I had to buy was a bottle of white spray paint, some Modge Podge, and a sponge brush and I was ready to go.  Unfortunately I forgot to get a picture of the Frame before I did the first coat of paint so you can't tell how big of a transformation it went through. Just imagine a wooden frame and an ugly brown picture in the background.

Second coat of paint...

Next I removed the picture from the frame.

Here's the frame looking so much better white.

Next I laid the picture over the map to trace the shape and cut it out.

Then I decoupaged the map straight onto the picture and then decoupaged over it so it was glossy and wouldn't get ruined when we set drinks on it.

I let it dry for a few hours.

Once the map was completely dry I popped it back in the frame and here is how it turned out!

Special Date Lumbar Pillow In Cream and Brown - Available in Other Colors

To purchase this pillow click here

Dining Room Wall Collage- By Jad and Grace

We took down the unfinished three paintings by Jad and replaced them with this awesome collage of frames and other fun memorabilia. We were mostly inspired by the collage I saw on one of my favorite blogs, younghouselove. All of the frames started out black/gold/wooden except one, so a big part of this project was painting all the frames white, except for a few silver ones. What do you think??

We quickly whipped up this peice of wall art using a small canvas I had stored away in my craft room, a rectangle of cork board we had left over from the maps (seen below), some wine bottle caps we have collected since being married, and a hot glue gun to glue it all together. I loved the final result and think it adds a nice 3-D element to our dining room wall collage.

Below is an assortment of matchbooks I have collected throughout my life, mostly from thrift shops and antique stores, as well as our wedding! I simply glued them onto a small unpainted canvas.

This is one of Jad's favorite prose poems, "What Reconciles Me", by John Berger that we cut out of his book and framed.

Here is a cartoon we cut out of Jad's childhood Calvin and Hobbes book.

The next three photos are of some of my favorite fabrics framed, including one from an old shirt that unfortunately shrank.

Here is a really cool old horse shoe I bought at "Auntie Bellum's Attic", a great antique store here in Milledgeville. When I was checking out I was told it was good luck to hang it facing upward above your door. I didn't hang it above our door, but I did at least hang it facing sort of upward.

Here's one of my favorites, not only because I like the painting and the colors, but also because it is painted by my mom, Julie Jones. She is a great water color artist who designs stationary with her many beautiful paintings.

Our wedding invitation! No need to explain the significance here.

This is the first dollar bill I gave Jad right before we started dating to pay him back after bowling so he wouldn't think I just assumed it was a date. He still had it when we got married.

We backed maps of each continent, from a calendar full of vintage maps, on cork board and used different colored pins to show places only I had been, places only he had been, and places we had both been. 

This is probably my favorite item, mostly because I have been saving up movie tickets for so long to be able to make this. It's a cork board filled with all (or at least the ones where I remembered to keep the ticket stub) the movies we've been to together. And there's even space for a few more!