by VioletLeBeaux | Apr 8, 2011 | Craft, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial
Project Make-My-Bedroom-Nicer is in full swing now and over last weekend I made my biggest project so far:
A chandelier!
I’ve wanted a chandelier since I was a little kid ^_^ The bedroom is taking a kind of romantic silver/gold/black damask theme to it so I figured that this would be the perfect accompaniment.
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What you need:
- Clothes hanger thing
- Crystals (mine were old Christmas decorations on sale at borders)
- Damask wrapping paper or paper and pens to draw your own
- Hot glue
- Paint
- Chain
- Black yarn
- Fishing line or thin light thread
When we first moved in here I bought this clothes airer thing and it’s legs broke almost right away >_< I didn’t keep the receipt though so I was stuck with the damn thing. So I thought long and hard about what I could do with it and the only thing I thought of was chandelier! Let’s get to work ^_^ |
From the top you can see it has 8 arms and is the perfect shape for a project like this.
First thing to do is to remove all the pegs and plastic chains.
Next it’s time to paint it. I decided to aim for silver and black and I wanted the main colour to be silver. I didn’t have any paint spare so I used some nail polish the lovely BGDino sent me 😀
It took 2 coats to get it looking silvery which amounted to around 1/4 of the bottle. Totally worth it 😀
Make sure to let it dry completely between coats no matter what kind of paint you’re using. You might want to undercoat it for a perfect finish but I figure that it’s very high up so it’s not going to have much wear and tear and also no one is going to see it closely XD
Don’t forget the bottom too!
Now lay out the jewels you have. I used large clear ones and smaller pink ones as well as a couple of little star beads.
The large clear ones were old Christmas decorations I got on sale from Borders and already had fishing line threaded through to hang them with.
The pink ones I bought from a closing down bead shop so I threaded them with matching blue/silver cotton to hang them.
Each ring will have the same jewels hanging at the same lengths so make sure to cut the threads evenly.
Each arm has 4 threads of jewels hanging at different lengths. This is the order of jewels I used for each arm:
Hang the jewels from the hooks and you should start to see everything taking shape!
At this point I hung mine up from a clothes rack so I could work on it more easily. To hold it up I just hooked some of the chain through the top and looped it around the rack.
At this point I thought it needed something to make it more impressive.
So time for damask!
Cut out sections of damask which at tall like this, they are going to take the place of candles ^_^
Fold in half…
And cut out the insides!
Glue each of the “candles” to the ends of the arm parts.
To make a center piece I cut out 4 of these little butterfly shapes from the paper and glued them so there was damask on both sides of two pieces.
Then cut half the way down the top middle on one of them and half way up the bottom of the other and slot together!
From the top it should look like a cross like this:
Glue in some chain or matching ribbon in the middle for the whole thing to hang from.
This is how it looks hanging so far:
Now add in the center piece on a thread from the middle with a big jewel from the bottom.
Add drapes of chain to the first hanging points…
And drapes of yarn knotted at each loop around the outside…
Snip off any loose ends of the threads…
Hang that sucker up because you are done!
Now it’s probably not fit to hang in my imaginary multimillion dollar Swiss chalet but it sure cheers up my current bedroom ^_^
Once I can get some more supplies I’m planning to add more jewels and more dangly chains so it looks absolutely awesome. This is still a pretty good start though I think ^_^
Hard to photograph clear jewels and get in the epic sparkle of the silver but so pretty in person!
And so there you have it!
I hope you all enjoyed this tutorial as much as I enjoy watching the jewels spin around at night ^_^
by VioletLeBeaux | Apr 7, 2011 | Craft
Another mini craft, not even a tutorial but a way to save money ^_^ Sometimes outlet stores have sections up the back for damaged stock, the Forever New in the DFO at Southwarf has one of these full of broken jewellery and accessories. I LOVE them because it’s a huge gold mine for awesome stuff at tiny prices.
Last time I was there I picked up these little gloves for $1.95, originally priced at $14.95. Perfect condition but the seam at the thumb had unraveled a little.
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Big hole but a tiny problem ^_^
Needle and thread to the rescue, 5 minutes of running stitch later and they are all finished!
Taadaa…
And here is the other pair of similar gloves I did the same thing with:
All ready for a day at the flower show 😀
Quick craft that saved a bunch of money ^_^
Tomorrow it’s make up tutorial time, hope you’re all looking forward to that! |
by VioletLeBeaux | Apr 6, 2011 | Notices
So you’ve probably noticed the changes I’ve been slowly rolling out everywhere! Again the things I’ve been doing have been to either expand the site so it’s more interesting or make it faster and easier to navigate and load.
Moving servers recently has probably been the best thing I’ve done for this blog since getting my own domain name. Now that the site is hosted with Hostgator I have space and allowances to expand things the way I’ve wanted to for almost a year now! In case any of you are interested there is a discount/affiliate coupon for Hostgator in the side bar.
Here’s a list of what’s been done so far starting with the most exciting one…
Gallery Section!
This is the biggest change (or at least the one that’s required the most work!) I have moved off Flickr and am now hosting all of my images myself. What does this mean for you? Easier browsing!
Basically the Snapshots section has been replaced with the Gallery section which is massive and much easier to navigate. The drop down link allows you to either go to the gallery home page or head straight to a subcategory like “outfits“.
I’m still filling in things like descriptions and tags etc but with 6500+ photos that’s going to take me a while! You can also comment on and rate the photos and galleries if you like. I haven’t decided if I’ll keep that feature or not but we’ll see how it goes. In the future I’m hoping to make the Reader’s Gallery automatic so you can create your own accounts and upload photos etc that way you can write in your own descriptions and don’t have to wait around for me to find time to upload them haha! If you have any suggestions for this section please let me know ^_^
Menus!
Following on from the above I have completely revamped the menu system up the top. To keep things more organised (and make room for things to come) I have moved the FAQ section under the “About” tab. You will also notice that the Tutorials tab now has a new organisational system too, more on that later. Pretty much all of the pages up there have been updated a bit too.
You will see there are two new links in the menu, “Browse Posts” and “Downloads“. After listening to a lot of feedback I agreed that it can be hard to find older posts on the site which seemed a shame. Under the Browse Posts link you can now look at old posts by category, sort through my archives or view lists of every post in certain categories alphabetically. Yay that!
Downloads!
For around a year I’ve been thinking how to include more interactive and downloadable content for you guys. Tutorials are all well and good but there are some times when having a pattern you can print and cut out is just the easiest way to do things. Downloads section to the rescue! Now on the new host I have space to do that finally 😀 It’s going to take me a while to go back and make patterns for the tutorials I’ve already done but as I do they will be added here. After that’s all finished I will add some other fun things like wallpaper and icons that I’ve made too.
It’s a big work in progress but a fun one! If there is a specific tutorial that you would like to request a pattern from let me know and I will put it at the top of the list 🙂
Art Portfolio!
Found under the “About” link in the menu, this one is fairly self explanatory 😉
Tutorials!
The Tutorials is now going to be a billion times easier to navigate and maintain. At the moment every time I write a new tutorial I have to manually update that section… which sucks for you guys because I don’t have time to update it often so it is usually a month or two behind. I have changed the system so now it updates automatically, is sorted alphabetically and into category. It’s not as pretty as before because it’s just a link list but soon I will add thumbnails as well to make it easier to find something at a glance. Less work for me and easier to navigate/less clicking for you = win!
You will notice that in this tab there is also a “View by category” link which allows you to just browse through those kinds of posts if you don’t want to deal with reading through a list.
Sidebars!
Continuing the whole easy-navigation theme of these updates you’ll notice that there have been some changes in the side bars. Mostly it’s just been moving things around and bringing more important things higher up. I’ve added one of those cute little grab badges on the left side as well in case anyone feels like using it.
Featured Tutorials Slider!
Along with the good there have been some casualties including the Recent Tutorials Slider. Too difficult to troubleshoot things for people with different browsers and internet speeds so it’s gone. That said with all of the other changes I’ve made hopefully there are no problems finding recent posts now 😉
Now what?
Well at this point (other than the basic maintenance I’ve mentioned above) I’ve finally gotten the site to a place where I’m happy with it. Now I’m trying to sort out plans for the next year and get a firm direction of where I want to go with the direction and stuff like that. From all of your feedback so far I understand that you would like more beauty related things and more videos. I’ve filmed and am currently editing 3 make up tutorials which is something I enjoy and would love to do more of. If you have suggestions of what you want to see more/less of or where you want the blog to go in the long run just let me know if the comments!
Phew!
I think that’s everything! If you managed to read this far you probably deserve some kind of reward XD I don’t have anything though because I didn’t really think this far ahead… so why not go explore the new Gallery section instead 😛
Thank you all for continuing to read my blog, I really appreciate you coming here and supporting me! As always, feedback, ideas and suggestions are welcome and encouraged, I hope you all like everything!
<3 Violet
