Whipped Cream Heart Earring Hanger Tutorial!

by VioletLeBeaux | May 10, 2010 | Craft, Decoden-Tutorials, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

Morning everyone today I have an odd one, an earring hanger tutorial!

A lot of you have written saying you have lots of earrings but no way to store them all. I like to display my earrings because they’re pretty so this is what I’ve come up with ^_^

Continuing my theme of sweets related storage solutions it’s a gigantic hanging heart made of whipped cream 😀 It can hold as many earrings as you want and it doesn’t matter what type of backs the earring have because they can all just poke through the tulle.

So let’s get crafting!

What you need for this whipped cream earring hanger tutorial:

An old wire coat hanger
Pliers
Tulle in whatever colour you want
Artists Modelling Paste
Piping bag and tip
Ribbon
Glue gun
Needle and thread
Tray to do it all in so you don’t make a mess

Firstly you should take your coat and use the pliers to undo the top twisty bit.

Use the pliers to shape it into a heart. Use the twisty ends to secure it together. You can make the heart as big or as small as you need, it just depends on how many earrings you want to hang at the end ^_^

Cut out a piece of tulle which is big enough to cover your heart with a few inches either side for hems.

Thread your needle with the same colour as your tulle. Fold the tulle over the sides of the wire and sew in place. You might want to pin it all before you start sewing. You should make sure to sew it quite tightly, if it doesn’t have tension it won’t be able to hold up earrings.

You should stitch like this:

Keep going around to the other side:

Make sure to pay extra attention to the pointy bit at the top of the heart. You might need to cut the tulle a bit to make it fit.

Cut off all the extra tulle around the edges.

Now time for some whipped cream 😀 Put your heart onto the tray. At this point you should make sure the heart sits flat on the floor, if it’s not flat it won’t sit against the wall. You might want to put some cling wrap down on the tray to make it easy to remove later.

Get your modelling paste and icing bag ready. You can buy modelling paste from most art stores.

I got the idea to use modelling paste rather than silicone etc from Hikaria who is the master of making sweets! Modeling paste will be more durable for a wall hanging, keep it’s shape well and doesn’t have the safety issues that silicone does.

Use a spoon to fill your piping bag with the paste.

Eventually we are going to make 3 rows of little icing swirls but we want the top ones to be much higher than the sides so we need to make an icing platform for it to sit on! Use your piping bag to make a line around the edge of the heart, you should put it directly on top of the wire.

It doesn’t matter if it looks terrible or is broken up because we’re going to cover the whole thing up with more icing later 😀

Put a bit of extra icing at both of the points of the heart.

Put it outside to dry for a while. Depending on how hot it is in your part of the world, drying might take some time.

After it’s dry to the touch bring it back in. Use your piping bag to make a bunch of icing swirls on either side of the first line you made.

You should now pipe the top line of icing swirls on top of the first line you made. It should form a nice little dome ^_^ I forgot to take a photo of that step sorry! Make sure the icing covers all of the wires.

Now let the whole thing dry! It was quite cold when I did mine so I left it for a day then I turned it over and let the back dry for another day.

This is the back:

Once you are completely sure it’s dry gather the rest of your materials.

Cut a length of ribbon for it to hang on.

And hot glue it to the back of the heart. Make sure you do it in a way that’s not visible from the front.

And there you have it! It’s a gigantic whipped cream heart ^_^

To attach earrings just hook/pin them through the holes in the tulle. I made the ribbon hanger longer to make it easy to access the back of studs.

Here’s a close up of all the cream. Because it’s made from modelling paste it should be very hard, be careful because the tips of the cream are pointy!

And so the cycle of sweets themed storage continues XD My next sweets storage is going to be candy cane themed, any guesses to what it is? 😛

Hope you enjoyed the earring hanger tutorial, let me know if you try it!

How to store hair accessories, pins and scarves ^_^

by VioletLeBeaux | Apr 16, 2010 | Craft, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

Blah storage problems, how to store hair accessories?

I get a whole lot of reader request for cute storage tips so today I’m going to share with you how I store my scarves and accessories. These are only going to be very rough tutorials because I made the items many many months ago ^_^

I have to apologize for the quality of these photos, James is wiping his computer today so I can’t use his fancy camera, these were all taken with my phone >_<

First question is about how to store scarves. I love scarves, they are completely awesome and super versatile. I always have one on my handbag for emergencies! But when you have this many it can be quite hard to store them. I previously had them in a drawer but it’s so hard to find the one you want without searching through all 7 million of them…

So I decided to make something and this is what came out of it:

This is super easy to make with junk you have around the house.

You need:

Toilet rolls
Old yarn/wool
Bows/decoration
Sticky tape

-First gather your materials!

-Cut the toilet rolls into sections that are around 5cm long. Cut as many sections as you have scarves (or maybe a few more so you can add to your collection later!)

-Sticky tape them together into a grid pattern.

-Get your yarn ready. I used some old scratchy pink and white acrylic yarn.

-Start wrapping around the rolls you stuck together. Keep wrapping until it’s all completely covered. Pay special attention to the places where the rolls join together so they are strong.

-After it’s completely covered add a strap out of plaited yarn to the top.

-And then hot glue/sew bows on if you want more decoration ^_^

Now you can add your scarves in. Loop the scarves through the holes so the ends stick out the back. Choose your favorite scarves for the bottom holes so their ends hang down. You can hang it in your bathroom or where ever you like!

Now on to the hair accessories ^_^

I have a lot of hair accessories. A lot. If they don’t have somewhere to live, they end up getting very messy and broken!

So I made myself a cute place to store them, I like it because it looks like a gigantic shopping bag 😀

So to make one you need the following:

Fabric in whatever size you want
Knitting needle or something to make the top rigid
Plastic handle
Lace
Glue gun
Needle and thread
Bows/decoration

-Gather your materials

-Cut out the fabric to the size you want.

-Hem the two sides and the bottom either with hot glue or sew it. You can see in the above photo how uneven my hems are because the fabric is slightly see through XD

-Hem the top in the same way but put the knitting needle in the fold of the fabric. This is going to make it nice and strong and give it structure rather than just being a floppy piece of fabric.

-Sew or glue on lace to the bottom and top of the fabric.

-Sew the plastic handle to the top, you should stitch it so it’s actually attached to the knitting needle. This way it won’t put stress on the fabric.

-Glue some bows to cover the stitches.

-Add accessories and hang it up!

I like to put all my accessories that are on bobby pins along the sides and the ones with pins/brooch backs in the middle 😀

So there you have it, I hope that all makes sense! It’s harder to write tutorials without pictures so if you have any questions just let me know!

If I ever make more of these I’ll make sure to take photos along the way ^_^

*Edit* Shmuberry made her own version of the scarf holder in the shape of a heart!! Go have a look at her post here, it’s so cute!!*/Edit*

So how do you all store hair accessories?

Tray Table Socks Tutorial

by VioletLeBeaux | Mar 31, 2010 | Craft, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

Ages ago I showed you very quickly how I decorated my tray table. I love this thing to death because it means that I can work out in the lounge room without having a gigantic burning laptop scalding my legs! Because it’s adjustable I can make it flat and do crafts and nail art on it too 😀

The problem with it is that on tiles every time you move it scrapes and make horrible noise. This is what the bottom of the feet look like, the tiles have actually worn through the paint! So my solution is to make it some socks to keep it’s feet warm 😀

You need:

Felt
Needle and possibly pins
Similar coloured yarn
Scissors
Lace for decoration

First detach the legs so it’s easier to work with. Lay your felt underneath it so you can measure how long you need it. You are aiming to have a long tube which will fit around the legs all the way up to the first hole in the side. My felt wasn’t long enough to do that so I had to use two pieces to make it long enough.

The cut out pieces, one for each leg.

To join the two pieces together I used a shoelace style stitch. This is to make sure it lays as flat as possible, you don’t want a wobbly table!

All sewn together into one piece:

After you’ve sewn them together, just make sure it’s still the correct length…

Now sew the other one 😀

Now thread your needle with the yarn. Wrap the felt around the end of the leg and stitch (or pin) it in place to hold it.

Using a blanket stitch start sewing the felt into a tube around the leg.

It should look something like this:

Keep going all the way up!

When you reach the top where the hole is poke the needle through it then wrap the thread around a few times. This will secure the sock at the top of the leg so it doesn’t wiggle down while you’re using it.

Now at end you started at use the yarn to close up the hole.

Looks like this:

So this is what it looks like with the socks fully on..

Now it’s time to decorate 😀 I sewed a ring of lace around the top of the sock.

Finished! Heehee they remind me of cute little Lolita style socks 😀

Much safer for the tile and a lot less of that irritating scraping noise!

Finished!

On another note, with all the questions I’ve been getting lately about nail art I’m going to do a FAQ like the Hime Style one I did a few weeks ago. If you have any questions you would like included just comment or contact me.

How to Store False Eyelashes in a Cake… yes a cake.

by VioletLeBeaux | Mar 3, 2010 | Beauty, Beauty-Tutorials, Craft, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

How to store false eyelashes? Challenge accepted.

It’s no secret, I love cake. No I don’t think you guys get it… I looooooove cake. So much so that the first thing I thought when I was trying to think of a way to store my false eyelashes was cake… and you’ll see why in a minute 😀

If you’re anything like me you have a lot of lashes. Here in Aus they don’t come in the nice little trays, they come in stupid plastic packets which mean it’s really difficult to store and reuse them. My counter tends to look like this after a few days…

Very ugly, very messy and very unhygienic. So what to do? When I found this cheap craft storage box at a $2 store I had a great idea 😀

I decided to turn it into this:

Yep. It’s an eyelash cake.

The storage container looks like this when it’s filled up. Each compartment has it’s own lid so when you need one set they won’t all fall out and it’s transparent so you can see them all at once. It’s exactly the right size so your lashes don’t get crushed or out of shape.

So let’s get started! This is what you need for cakey lash storage:

-Paper clay. I picked up a kit from Singapore but I’ve seen this same kit available on Etsy as well. -Container -Cute ribbon -Icing bag with nozzles -Optional if your paper clay kit doesn’t come with white icing you can use acrylic modeling paste (read more here) -Small false flowers

So this is what came in my kit. It has lots of molds and a couple of colours of clay and a ready to go icing kit.

I wanted a strawberry for my cake so I made one with the mold like this:

Put clay in both sides of the mold.

Squish it together..

You get this:

Remove the extra and you’ve got a strawberry.

You can make pretty much anything you want by hand as well as it’s really easy to work with. I made some macarons, hearts, icecream tops and some of those swirly chocolate wafer stick things.

Also squish some of the yellow clay flat and cut out 8 fairly equal triangles like this. These are going to be the slices of cake on top so make the roughly the same size as the container sections.

I make a bunch of clay bits and pieces at a time because they need to be left to dry over night.

The next day!

Now that everything is nice and dry let’s get going! Turn your container upside down so the lid parts are on the bottom and coat the top sections with epoxy glue.

Glue the triangles you made on 😀

Now decide on the design you want on the top. I like to lay mine out first so I know that it will all fit!

Before I go ahead and glue it all, here is a mini tutorial inside a tutorial on making the wafer swirl things. After they’ve dried you can add the chocolate. I paint mine with brown nail polish 😀

Paint the swirl… fairly self explanatory! Let them dry really well before you add them to the cake!

Now back to the cake!!

Time to cover the edges, get your pretty ribbon and glue it around the edge. You should align it as close to the bottom lids as you can without obstructing the opening/closing. Don’t worry about having a large gap towards the top, we’re going to fill that with icing 😀

I decided to put flowers on the top of mine, glue whatever you decided to put there ^_^

Time for icing!

Fill your icing bag with whatever you’re using for the icing (please use the paper clay or acrylic modeling paste rather than silicon as silicon attracts a lot of dirt in the bathroom) and get any decorations you have for the top close at hand.

Start icing around the top gap of your cake 😀

You can use whatever icing method you like, I just did this: http://www.wilton.com/technique/Shell

I did two lines of icing to fill the gap up to the ribbon.

Next pipe a gigantic swirl in the middle of the flowers 😀

Then while the icing is still wet you should add in any decorations you want. I added the strawberry, two wafers and some diamantes 😀

Make sure to leave it to dry at least a day or so then it’s ready to use 😀

And there you have it! A delicious way to add to your bathroom collection of sweets! And oraganise your collection of lashes!

Also if your collection is bigger than 8 pairs (like mine is) you can just add more layers to your cake underneath ^_^ YUM!

So it would appear that my bathroom now has an unintentional sweets theme now XD

Do you have tips or tricks? Can you tell me a better way to store false eyelashes?

DIY Jewellery Storage Idea – Icecream

by VioletLeBeaux | Mar 1, 2010 | Craft, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

Morning everyone, odd post today, it’s a DIY jewellery holder shaped like an icecream 😀

Apologies if this tutorial is a little vague, I’ve been sick all night/morning so if something doesn’t make sense feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll update it ^_^

Today’s post is a reader request! Many readers have written in and asked me to show them how to store certain items in a cute way. For example how to store earrings/jewelery/belts/other junk in a creative way that still displays how pretty the items are. There have been so many requests that I’m going to have to turn it into a series of posts… so this is the first.

This is for girls with a small number of earrings/rings/whatever that they want to store.

Firstly, as always you should gather your materials. I’m making mine out of felt but you could use pretty much anything.

-White Felt -Pink Felt -Brown Felt -Dark brown felt -Needle and matching thread -A small amount of stuffing, I cannibalized mine from an old pillow. -A ribbon bow -Scissors -Glue gun

Firstly grab your brown felt. and cut a circle the size you want the base of your ice cream to be. Mine was around 6cm across. Then measure out the circumference of your circle and cut two uneven rectangles (trapezium), the smaller sides should be a few mm bigger than 1/2 of the circumference of your circle, while the longer sides should be maybe 1-2cm more. This is how we’re going to make the cone part of the ice cream.

Put the two trapeziums together and use a blanket stitch down both short sides:

This bit is a little tricky but you should blanket stitch the base to the part you just made. My tip is to put an anchor stitch on each side then sew around, this way your circle doesn’t move while you’re sewing.

Now flip it inside out… and you have a cone! Go you!

Now let’s make the ice cream part 😀 Ok get your ice cream coloured felt together. You are going to need enough for 3 swirls. I am using standard sheets of felt (I think they are around A4 size). Cut one of the white pieces in half length-ways, this will form our two white swirls. Pick a contrasting colour (I’m using pink) and cut one piece the same size as the white you just did. You now have 3 pieces the same size to be used in the swirl… does that make sense?

Fold a white piece in half and loosely stitch down near the open ends so it forms a tube like this:

Fill the tube with a little stuffing, don’t use too much otherwise your ice cream will be too fat and wrinkly to roll up.

Now repeat with the other two pieces. Stack them together in order and stitch them loosely together at the bottom. You can see in this picture that I didn’t have a wide enough piece of pink felt so I had to use 2 piece stitched together >_<

Now it’s time to roll it up 😀 With the good side (the one with all 3 colours) facing you, roll the corner backwards and stitch it in place.

Keep rolling in a downwards motion so it forms the shape of an ice cream…

Stitch the bottoms in place as you go so nothing unravels.

It will probably take you a couple of goes to get it the right width for your cone as well as the right swirly effect but if you don’t like it unroll and start again until it looks like this:

Securely sew the ice cream so it’s not going to unravel and put it to the side. Get your cone part and fill it with some stuffing…

Now place your icecream in the cone and arrange the stuffing so it fits. Turn the tops of the cone over and stitch it to the icecream part.

When you’re done it should look something like this!

Now get your ribbon bow and the dark brown felt. Cut out a bunch of match sticks from the felt that are around 2/3rd the height of your cone.

If you want a really nice finish you should stitch these on but I didn’t have much time when I was doing this so I just used the hot glue gun 😉

Anyway add your ribbon bow to the front and then glue the match sticks around the cone like this:

If you have left over felt you can make a chocolate stick to go on top by rolling a piece up and gluing it in place ^_^

And that’s finished! Now you just need to add your jewelery:

You can hang earrings in any of the swirls as well as rings and small necklaces.

The chocolate swirl is also really good for wrapping longer items around.

So there you have it, a pretty way to store smaller collections of jewelery ^_^

Next in this series of reader requests is going to be “How can I store a really large collection of earrings in a cute way?”

Thank you for everyone who has been submitting reader requests, I’m a bit behind on posting at the moment but I promise they are all on my “List of things to Post” so I will get to them eventually!

In the mean time if you have any other requests please don’t hesitate to send them to me via my Contact page.

Also let me know if you make your own DIY jewellery holder!

Part 3 of Setting Up Your Blogging Space- Putting it all together…

by VioletLeBeaux | Dec 30, 2009 | Inspiration, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Tutorial

I have a couple of little announcements before the main post on setting up your blogging space!

Firstly I’ve done an interview with the lovely Hollie from Mermaid’s Closet click here if you’d like to have a look 🙂

Secondly, I’ve been planning on doing an FAQ about Hime Gyaru styles for a while now and I’ve actually gotten around to starting to write it ^_^ So if there are any questions you have about my style or Hime Gyaru in general I’d love to hear them. You can put them in the comments or go to my contact page if you’d like to do it more privately 🙂

Lastly I’m going away for a few days to the beach for New Years (I hope my new swim suit arrives today or else that’s going to suck!)… anyway that means I’ll probably be missing Art Friday this week but I’m taking a sketch book so I might post something on Sat. I’ve just gotten WordPress on my phone so I might test it out and try to post some snap shots 😀

But back to the important bits…

I’ve had a lot of questions about the mechanics of blogging lately so I’ve decided to make a series of posts with tips on setting up a productive blogging space ^_^

Part 1- Tutorial on making an inspiration board Part 2- Tutorial on decorating a mirror and lamp Part 3- Putting it all together and what else do you need?So today is

Part 3- Putting it all together and what else do you need?

Well isn’t that the just longest title in the universe? Very important though. One quick disclaimer, this isn’t actually my blogging space at the moment. Because we’re living in a room at James’ parent’s place for a few months to save for our mortgage deposit, my current blogging place is in bed with a tray table holding my lap top… and it sucks. James has a big computer so he gets the desk in our room, nuts to him I want the desk! In our new house when I’ve stolen my desk back this is how I’ll be setting it up 😀 Oooow it’s like you’re seeing into the future! *cool sci fi music*

So this is *my* blogging space:

I’ll go through it bit by bit but the most important part of the whole thing is the laptop! You can’t blog without a computer ^_^ My laptop of choice is a big Mac Book Pro with lots of useful programs. You can see my pink twitter page on the screen heehee! If at all possible you should have a desk and a really comfy chair with lots of back and neck support. When you spend a large amount of time in front of a computer screen you really need to have a supportive chair which doesn’t hurt your back! Trust me, blogging in bed is not as comfy as it sounds.

From the picture below you can see that I’ve set up my inspiration board up right in front of the window. This way I can see outside (natural light is really important fr your eyes too) but I have lots of things to inspire me.

Here is a close up of the right side of my desk. Here is a list of what’s there:

-Decorated mirror (to check I look cute before photos)
-Wacom graphics tablet (for work and to draw all the cute graphics for my blog)
-Nail up magazine (INSPIRATION! God I love this mag so much but on any given day it could be replaced with some other book or mag. Inspiration is so important!)
-Cake eyelash holder, ok see the little thing that looks like a cake on my graphics tablet? It’s actually a false eyelash holder I made. I’m going to do a tutorial soon, but the point it that I keep recent or current projects close by so I can remember what I’m talking about when I write up the tutorials. That an false eyelashes are awesome 😀
-Water bottle/soft drink (Always keep yourself well hydrated, when you’re using a computer time can run away from you and all of a sudden you haven’t had a drink in 7 hours >_< Very important!)

And for the right side:
-My lamp (For when it’s night time or I’m decorating something small and need extra light)
-Cute headphones (For when you want to watch videos and it’s like 2am and you don’t want to wake up your boyfriend who is asleep right next to you.)
-Video Camera, case and mini tripod (Very important for video blogging obviously…)
-Phone (Important for taking calls from clients and also for quick photos etc)
-Kinder Chocolate or Bueno (Snacks! Chocolaty delicious snacks! Very, very important to remember to eat. Snacks are fantastic, especially Bueno shaped snacks. Damn would Bueno hurry up and sponsor me? I give them enough advertising!)

Not pictured here but also important:
-Reliable camera. I use my phone and my video camera when James doesn’t have his awesome DSLR handy.
-Boyfriend who’s good with his fancy DSLR camera to take photos for you

Having lots of power points around your area is handy too so you can plug everything in.

I think colour and decoration are very important to putting me in a good mood for blogging. I find pink and other pastel colours make me happy so I’ve decorated accordingly. You really don’t need to spend much money on decorating, the table cloth is just a scrap of fabric ^_^

So there you go! That’s the series, I hope you guys found that a bit helpful. If you have any questions I’d be happy to answer them, if there are lots I might even do a reader Q&A post on setting up your blogging space in general. 🙂