DIY Cake Stand

Truth is, I finished this cake stand a while ago but have been putting off sharing it – I thought I would make some sweet, pretty cupcakes to adorn it & show it’s cute functionality… but…. who am I kidding…?!

How to make;

Collect yourself some bland plates: A dinner plate, a bread & butter plate & a saucer. Originally I was going to use some cute vintage plates & leave it at that, but when it came down to it I couldn’t sacrifice their lovely brown floral goodness to being glued forever more to some sherry glasses, so I decided to go with some ugly plates & paint the whole construction.

You’ll also need two of the afore mentioned sherry glasses, your local oppy shall, I guarantee, have a plethora, some heavy duty glue – make sure it says on the pack that it’s suitable for glass & ceramics – and some enamel paint. You’ll need the grey base coat & the colour of your finished piece… red, surely…?

You know the glue is the real deal when it is kept separated….!

Find the centre of both your dinner plate & the bread & butter plate. Mix the glue (use a match stick) & apply it to the rim of one of your sherry glasses (if you have a larger & a smaller one, like I did, use the larger for the dinner plate) & attach carefully to the centre of your dinner plate. You don’t want to be too far off centre or your cake stand will look lopsided and perhaps be unstable. Repeat with the bread & butter plate.

When the glue is set, you can stack everything together & see how it fits. I found this part super easy – the bases of the sherry glasses fit straight & centred into the rimmed bases of the plates above. When you can see how they fit together, apply your glue to the base of the glass on the dinner plate & place the bread & butter plate on top. Repeat with your last plate & leave to dry.

Paint stand with enamel base coat. You will need 2 coats – read the instructions on your paint tin – I had to leave 16 hours between coats with mine.

Now for the fun, yet time consuming part – painting the colour! Again you’ll need 2 coats, with perhaps 16 hours between each. I painted the underside of the plates first, let dry, then turned over & painted the other side.

And voila! A super cake stand you can admire, whether it is filled with cakes or not.

Buttons by Candlelight, aka "How to make a button bracelet"

You may recall my whinging recently about the price of buttons going up to the dizzying heights of $5 a jar at one of my local opshops...? Well when I was last in I was glad to see that the button jar pricer had come to their senses (...perhaps their sales were down due to my refusal to by buttons...? I buy enough of them so that certainly is possible...) & repriced the jars at $2. That's a dollar cheaper than they used to be before the crazy jump! So I bought 3 jars of buttony, buttony goodness, and spent an embarrassingly long period of time sorting them into colour families.

Things I learnt about opshop jars of buttons;

There are more white or clear than any other colour.

The least popular colour is yellow.

There are some hideously ugly buttons in there.

After sorting them I realised that I finally had enough red buttons of the appropriate size to make myself a button bracelet - Hurrah!

Button Bracelet Supplies;

1 candle

1 (or several... just to be safe) quite large, strong needle

A charm bracelet blank

Jump rings

Pliers

As many (plastic) buttons as you want on your bracelet

Ah! Crafting by candlelight....

Light your candle & hold the tip of your needle in the flame, I try to heat as much of the needle as I can as it makes going through the entire button a wee bit easier, but it depends on the size of your needle, you don't want to burn your fingers!

You might want to use gloves or use your pliers to hold the needle, but I found it fine to hold on it's own - just make sure you hold it as far back as possible.

Decide where you want the hole for your jump ring to go & pierce it with your needle - you have to be really fast with this step or your needle will be too cool & you'll either have to heat it up again or you'll bend the tip of your needle. Not that I know, because I wouldn't have done it any way other than perfectly... *whistles inconspicuously*

What worked for me; Holding the button up & piercing it from the side & then twisting the button down the length of the needle. Sometimes the button gets stuck at the bottom of the needle, just push the point onto a flat surface & press the button down & it will slide off.

Pierce many buttons. Attach with jump rings to bracelet using your trusty pliers. You can arrange your buttons in the order you want them before you attach them, but I just did it haphazardly, as I do.





Take artsy fartsy photos of your lovely new bracelet & admire your handy work. Perhaps even wear it. Wonder if making button bracelets counts as wardrobe refashioning.

Why is a raven like a writing desk? (Or, my latest furniture refurb...)

I am SO excited to be showing you this... I could pretty much only be prouder if I had built the thing myself.....

Before:

After:

What I did:

Scraped off the old varnish & sanded (by hand!!!!), painted interior shelves, stained & varnished outside with 3 separate coats, waiting 8 hours between coats, replaced handles, decoupaged desk top (whatever that green stuff is would not be painted...).

Filled with crafty goodness.

This was intended to be my 'little projects' craft spot in the lounge room, but I love it so much I think I may be spending a lot more time using it than previously anticipated.

You can probably tell I am pretty damn chuffed with my efforts - first time I have really got into the nitty gritty what with the sanding and everything - it was a test of my patience and my need for I.C.G (Instant Craft Gratification) but I got there in the end!

DIY Make-Over. Sort Of.

In the spirit of handmade/DIY, last night, I cut & coloured my own hair.

I think that there may be a lot of advocates of DIY out there that would absolutely draw the line at this (the cutting, not necessarily the dying), but it kind of happened by accident, and turned out okay, so I'm happy.

I meant to just give my fringe a bit of a trim, as I have been doing, with a technique that I saw on tellie years & years & years ago on that bastion of respectable and informative television... Ricki Lake. The idea is you gather up your fringe so that the base, or roots of your fringe, form a triangle, then twist it around & CHOP! This results in a kind of choppy, layered look.

Well, I did this, kind of half arsed, not even bothering with the whole triangle thing, & ended up with an incredibly short fringe that just looked... wrong. So, I gathered up the rest of my hair & did the same sort of thing... a chop here, a snip there, until I ended up in a happier place.

Here I should probably let it be known that I am not a hairdresser, and have no experience or aspirations in the field... which I think you may agree is glaringly obvious...!

So there I was, with a sink full of hair & a completely new hairstyle, and, luckily, I kinda liked it, but I was kind of shocked by the colour of the hair languishing in the basin. It was dark. Really dark. Like, dark brown dark.

For someone that considers themselves to be a natural blonde, this can be quite distressing! I decided that I'd dye my hair too, while I was on a roll.

I've only ever dyed my hair with temporary colours, you know, like blue fudge or something else that is gone in 8 washes, and none of that since I was even in high school, so it is fair to say that I was pretty nervous hiding out in the bathroom with my disturbingly close to cat-urine smelling pack of hair 'solution', but, good girl that I am, I followed the directions to the letter & ended up with hair the colour I always thought it had been, nice & light, bright, and ready, oh-so-ready, for spring.