Make a lenten cross with it! We started this as a family tradition a number of years ago and it’s become woven into the fabric of our holiday seasons. I love the continuity of celebrating Advent and Christmas with our Christmas tree, decorated with years of family ornaments, then using that same tree through the season of lent leading up to Easter as a reminder of the reason that we celebrate.
Category: Create
One of the most valuable tools I have isn’t a woodworking tool at all. It’s software & it’s indispensable when I’m building a woodworking project! I’m of course talking about SketchUp, the 3D modeling program that’s available for free.
Now that I’ve gotten her windows replaced and room painted (lots of funky, girly colors), my daughter has been asking for a desk to do her school work. “This will be easy,” I thought, “a couple file cabinets and an old door on its side will be perfect!” Not exactly what she had in mind… ah, the difference between boys and girls…
Categories
Awesome DIY Cork Art Project
I’ve been saving wine corks for as long as I can remember. I can’t bring myself to throw them away – the natural ones – because I just think they’re cool. I even find myself picking bottles of wine based on which ones have real corks vs. synthetic. There’s something tactile and visceral about them that totally intrigues me, from the smell of the wine-soaked end to the elastic resistance I feel when I roll them about with my fingers, to the almost limitless variation of patterns and colors. And I’m amazed by the fact that cork comes from trees and start out living and organic.
You’ve got to be kidding right? Why would anyone want to read about this? I mean, last month alone, Pat Flynn made almost $120,000 so who cares about a measly $1,500? Most people think that ‘www’ stand for World Wide Web, but I have a special URL where it stand for World’s Worst Website. Here’s the start of my story.
Categories
DIY Farmhouse Bed – King Version
I’ve had a number of questions about converting my Farmhouse Bed post plan to a king sized version (the original plan is a queen). While the construction techniques are the same, the king version changes quite a few of the measurements to stretch the headboard and footer. This post is a detailed plan for the king version. To give full credit, the original version of this plan is from Ana White’s website (the queen version) which you an see here and I’m also working on a full version. I think Ana has done a king version as well, but this plan is a little bit different.
I just uploaded a video tutorial series on YouTube on how to create a brochure in InDesign. For this series, I’m taking a brochure Beth created in Pages and I’m re-creating as a lesson in using InDesign. I find tutorials creating something “real world” to be more helpful than a generic lesson and I’ve tried to explain each of the steps as well as the features of InDesign that I used. For those of you already very familiar with InDesign, this will probably be more basic that you need. My target audience here are folks who are generally working in Word or in Pages and want to move to InDesign where there’s more flexibility than the basic word processors allow.
I’ve been wanting to build a dresser for some time now and finally decided to take the plunge. After searching for a long time to find one I like, I settled on a modified version of Ana White’s Kendal Extra Wide Dresser. This has an overall clean design and I like the way the drawers are inset into the frame & Ana did a great job with the design.
Unless you are purposely making a custom sized canvas, One of the things I recommend with DIY art canvases is to stick to standard sizes mainly because you can save big money on custom framing. Especially if you paint or print on large canvases, the difference between a custom frame on a non-standard canvas vs. a standard canvas can literally be hundreds of dollars.
I just uploaded a new video to YouTube on making a canvas, specifically a gallery wrap canvas. This is the first video I made, but it’s just the middle part of the process that I shot for a complete painting. I’m going to try to get to a video on the building of the frame which is easy and cheap if you do it yourself, then the whole process of priming it and then, maybe, painting the whole picture. For small canvases I recommend going to the local art store and buying one, but for the larger ones, you can definitely save money making them yourselves, assuming you have the tools.