Buttefly Mobiles and a Butterfly Collage

Google the term 'Butterfly Mobile' and you get an enormous response with gorgeous examples of butterfly mobiles that would be perfect for a nursery, kids room or birthday party decoration. I have seen many versions of this basic idea starting with the 'no longer available' white butterfly chandelier from pottery barn kids:

Project nursery has a great DIY based on this white version too:

Craftstylish has a great idea for using fabric butterflies to create a mobile for a wedding decor item:

Mimi Bella Boo has a great way to create a mobile using sticks as the hangers:

I always love to see the creativity with felt over at Bugs and Fishes by Lupin:

Ali Edwards has a version of the butterfly mobile:

I selected some of my favorite versions and these are only a few of the varieties out there!
(p.s. Paper Craft magazine has a very simple version in their magazine this month) I will not be taking credit for making this post into a DIY.....I just wanted to show you my inspiration and what I created based on all of the ideas out there!

Okay so I have seen this idea zillions of places. Anyway, my friend commissioned me to create a large canvas butterfly collage for her. I hand cut a bunch of butterflies and punched out a bunch more. I painted the large canvas, adhered the butterflies with glue dots, covered over the entire surface with modge podge, let it dry. Viola! A gorgeous butterfly collage that I am sure my friend will love--it is for her daughter's room!

When I was finished with the collage, I had some small punched butterflies left over so I decided to make a mobile with them.

I had a small blue emboridery hoop, and my sewing machine.

I made strands of garland and then I tied them along the hoop.

 Viola! A gorgeous butterfly mobile that I plan to surprise my friend with!!

I had a lot of fun sewing the garland and I know it is something I will do again....
 Design Sponge has a great idea for using this same sewing technique to decorate packages!

Hope you enjoyed this post. If you decide to make something similar, post a link in the comments, I would love to see what you create!

Junk Mail Garland--Perfect Decor for a Jammie Party!

While browsing The Crafty Crow for ideas, I found the best tutorial for Junk Mail Garland!

I usually have a giant pile of junk mail on my side table...I have to force myself to go through it to sort out the 'recycle', 'shred', and 'important stuff' into piles.

Recently my niece stopped by and wanted to paint.....hmmmm....I am an art teacher, but rarely do I have the supplies on hand for kids to get artsy crafty at my house, but luckily I had just read this amazing idea from Scrumdilly!

Quickly, I squirted some paint onto paper plates, snipped my junk mail into not-so-even sheets and let my niece and neighbor's daughter go to town painting the junk mail with pretty paint colors.

The paint dried quickly so I was able to bring out my paper punches and let them start punching fun shapes out of the garland.

While we did everything in less than an hour, we kept it fairly simple, but with a bit more preparation, you could use crazy scissors on the bottom edges or you could just cut it in waves like the tutorial shows....this garland would even be beautiful with some glitter! I didn't bother with that.

Later that night, once all the paint was dry, I used a long bit of ribbon to stitch the paper together to make garland.

Why would I need to create all this garland? Well I was planning a 'jammie party' with all the kids in my family for Saturday night and we needed decorations of course!

After creating one long piece to go across my fireplace, I took the pieces that were left over and punched holes along the top edge. When kids started arriving at the jammie party, I let them 'stitch' ribbon through the holes (over-under technique...even my 4-year old niece could do it!) and we hung the mini-garland pieces around the doorways at my house.

Supplies Needed:
Junk mail
paint
brushes
punches
ribbon

This was a really easy and fun craft project to do with kids...the garland was perfect for 'Our Rockin' Jammie Party'!!

It was super fun! We made chocolate covered strawberries, played games like Pictionary and charades, made popcorn and pizza and watched UP, tie-dyed shirts, this morning we ate waffles, played more games and went on a fun walk around the neighborhood.

Las Vegas Memory Album

Hello!! I am so excited to show you the first few pages of my Las Vegas  Trip Memory Album. You can read about my preliminary work, getting the pictures ready, here and here.


For this album, I decided not to use the 12X12 album and opted instead for a very versatile 8 1/2 X 11 three-ring notebook. I picked up a couple of pretty ones at Target recently and I knew that I had to use one for this book. When selecting an album, choose something you really like!

The smaller format allows me a fair amount of flexibility and I love being able to move the pages around easily using clear photo-safe page protectors. Normally, when I go on a long trip, I try to keep a travel journal so that I can jot down my thoughts and ideas while I am actually in the moment. Since I was sick right up until the day of the trip, a travel journal was at the bottom of my list of priorities. I am still able to recall quite a bit just by looking through the pictures.

On this page, I used a clear screenprinted page from Hambly. Since I wanted to use both sides, I just used two collages of the same size and put my titles in the same place on each side....This also covers any adhesive that might have otherwise shown through.

It is hard to photograph those clear pages without a glare! I absolutely love Hambly papers!!

I have a ton of trip ephemera and I wanted to keep this page from a magazine. I have always loved using things that are already printed, so I simply covered the original magazine image with a picture of me! Haha!!

This was a fun page to make it was so simple. Just some handwritten journaling, thickers lettters, and a pre-made photo collage. Oh, and I used up some stickers that I have been holding on to for ages!

I decided to create pages on the back of each page....her is what is on the back of the page above.

I had a mishmash of iphone photos from the plane ride...they aren't that great in quality, but paired up with the journaling, they tell a great story about flying, for me.

We ate a lot on our trip so I wanted to dedicate a page to our food experiences. I could have written a whole lot more about each experience (I probably will write more later) but this is a general page dedicated to the food. I used a receipt and snipits from a magazine about the various restaurants.

Okay, this is probably my favorite page of all! I knew I was going to make this page the second they slid my headbands down into the paper bag. I almost said, 'No thanks, I don't need a bag,' but then I saw how cool it was! I trimmed it down to 8 1/2 X 11 and rounded the corners. A photo from my shopping experience is paired with some magazine clippings and a scrap from the Urban Outfitters catalog. I also did some real stitching on this page with my sewing machine!