Floral Painted Coat Hanger Tutorial – Home Sweet Home

by VioletLeBeaux | Aug 22, 2014 | Craft, Home Sweet Home Tutorials, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

Another Home Sweet Home craft today! Today is how to jazz up plain boring wooden coat hangers. My dream is to one day have a complete matching set of coat hangers. Somehow we always end up with a heap of random unmatched ones. I don’t know how it happens but it always does!

So my end result:

For this tutorial you will need:

A wooden coat hanger
Acrylic paint in various colours
Paint brush
PVA glue/clear sealer to seal it all in
Nail file

To begin with, buff the coat hanger with a nail file to remove any shiny finishes.

Next, paint it completely white. You may need a few coats of paint.

Next, paint pink or lilac spots randomly all over the coat hanger.

Add little green triangle leaves.

Then a while spiral in each as well and a highlight on each leaf.

Allow it to dry completely and then paint the whole thing in a thick coat of PVA glue.

Once it dries it will be nice and shiny!

Now just imagine an entire wardrobe full of these… magical yes? If only I actually had that many of these to paint ;_;

One day, ONE DAY!!

I think maybe I need to dream a little bit bigger than just having matching coat hangers in my life >_>

James’ Office Chair Make Over – Home Sweet Home

by VioletLeBeaux | Jun 18, 2014 | Craft, Home Sweet Home Tutorials, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

After we moved around the lounge room to the new configuration there was one thing left which bothered me: James’ chair.

I have had a love hate relationship with James’ chairs over the years. He always picks the cheapest crappiest chairs which are terrible for back support and also super ugly, but he claims are super comfy. I mean if they were good for his back then I could understand… But honestly bleh.

So I made this…

From this…

So I sold him on a make over by promising to add a bunch more pillows and arm support so it was *actually* comfortable for him to sit there. Double win!

I tied some old pillows from daiso around the arms, added one to the seat area and one to the back support and held them all in place with old yarn.

I toyed with the idea of coating the arms completely in yarn but I didn’t have enough and the finish wasn’t so great so instead I covered it and the rest of the chair in white stretch fabric and hot glued it down.

I chose green knit fabric for the bulk of the chair so it matched the rest of the house.

I didn’t have enough for the whole chair so I ended up chopping up an old scarf and doing the rest in brown knit. I like it because it kind of looks like a tree.

I fixed the final fabric in place with hot glue as well making sure that all of the edges are covered up.

Bam! New area! I feel like it’s much more open and almost magazine-y! So clean and pretty and nice. And a clean work space means a better frame of mind and more productivity… or that’s what I’m going with anyway 😀

Now if I could only convince James to buy a really nice proper ergonomically chair which would actually be good for his back -_-‘

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Random Ikea Lamp Hack – Home Sweet Home

by VioletLeBeaux | Jun 11, 2014 | Craft, Home Sweet Home Tutorials, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

Random project… We had an Ikea lamp which was broken and an Ikea tea light lantern which was also a bit broken. So I combined them into one monster lantern…

Before:

The second lamp didn’t work and this one wasn’t getting power properly.

I removed the top of the lamp and glued the lantern in place. I also strengthened the inside so it could withstand the extra weight.

I also added some flowers into the stand because… I don’t know, its me. >_>

With no power supply any more I debated between tea lights or LED fairy lights. The LED won out because they required less cleaning of wax.

So there you go, waste nothing! It looks a little like it’s leading the way to Narnia XD

How To Make Your Own Decorative Pom Pom String

by VioletLeBeaux | Mar 19, 2014 | Craft, Home Sweet Home Tutorials, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial, Video-Tutorials, Violet Vision Videos

Last christmas I saw little felt pompom decorations everywhere but they were quite expensive. I think they were overpriced because of the hipster tax. Every time something uncool is picked up by the hipsters here it pretty much quadruples in value, case in point: dear heads. Apparently pompoms are cool who knew?

Anyway, if you have some spare time they are actually extremely easy to make with some needle felting supplies. Of course you could take the even easier route and just buy premade Pom Poms but I find that the repeated stabbing of needle felting is good for getting the stress out ;D

It’s really so simple that I don’t know if this counts as a tutorial.

Step 1. Needle felt some balls.

Step 2. String them together using needle and thread.

Step 3. Find a pretty place to hang them

Here’s a slightly more detailed video tutorial I did which covers all of the basics including how to actually shape the balls:

Yay! A seriously easy and stress relieving craft ;D

Now I’m thinking of possibly doing this on a bigger scale all over the house, what do you guys think?

Home Sweet Home- Garden Update

by VioletLeBeaux | Mar 12, 2014 | Home Sweet Home Tutorials, Life, Tutorial

It seemed a great time for a Home Sweet Home Garden update… mostly because everything in our garden is pretty much dead haha!

Everything was actually going really well during the initial phase and we were ready to begin harvesting things including the radishes which is what I was really looking forward to!

While a lot of the flowers weren’t growing over their entire boxes they were definitely alive and kicking.

The inside herbs and flowers were doing really well too, there was lots of natural light for them and other than a few little bugs they were surviving nicely.

Even my peppermint which I had assumed was never going to sprout made an appearance!

It almost looks as if there’s a garden there… almost!

Then in the space of a 4 day heat wave… everything died >_< I think most of you will have heard me complaining about the heat on social media. We had 4 consecutive days over 43 degrees Celsius and it got up to 45 on some of those days. It went from 20 degrees on Sunday to 43 on Tuesday *_*

Unfortunately… nothing in our garden survived that intense heat!

On the first day we watered like crazy and tried to shade them.

It didn’t really help! We have no air conditioning and because our apartment was built in the 1800’s it is basically just a big heat box so the inside plants didn’t do any better.

Wilted chives!

The birds took this as a hint to try and eat my radishes too >_<

By the third day this had happened and I had given up…

Poor sad radishes! You will never be part of a delicious salad R.I.P. ;_;

So very sad! It kind of looks like a plant horror movie.

Once it cooled down again we tried to revive them but there was no hope.

All of the neighbours plants died too so our apartment block just looks really depressing at the moment. The only thing that survived was William, our Billy Idol Day tree.

I’m going to try growing some new plants again in a month or so when I have time to take care of them again but this time I’m just going to go to a nursery and buy some ready gown plants which are a bit more hardy against Melbourne’s terrible weather!

New Crafting Desk- Home Sweet Home

by VioletLeBeaux | Dec 20, 2013 | Craft, Home Sweet Home Tutorials, Tutorial

I finally cleaned up and organised my crafting area so now I have a really pretty space!

I covered the table in contact that was left over from the kitchen.

I’m going to do something about those lights too because I don’t think I need them anymore.

I took the large mirror from the bathroom and painted it white too. I also got rid of the lampshades, instead I stapled paper into tubes to diffuse the light more.

I covered the craft shelves in decoupage using the same paper as my bedroom door and I bought some more storage boxes from Daiso. I think I want to get rid of some of the little shelves there but not sure the best way to do it. Maybe at least covering them with white paper would be better. Not sure!

So it’s starting to come along! There are still things that need to change like the mini shelves, the yarn box and the fact that I have far too many supplies for the space they’re in >_< But yay progress anyway!

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