Nevermore

October 7, 2016tinybows 2 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve made a wreath.

My last square one was a hit so I thought I would try it for my Halloween wreath.

Bits and bobs and bullet casings? Why not, it’s Halloween right

I got the form wrapped with some “spooky” (read black and white) ribbon and lace

Now on with the, fiddley bits, detritus, found objects and other accoutrements.

Need a hand?

Topped off with a motion activated crow from the dollar store that’s annoying as hell.

I had to learn how to tie a noose this week, something I thought I would never do.

But it was worth it for my spooky wreath.

TinyBows visits the Tiny Ocean

August 1, 2016tinybows 1 Comment

Mr. Smith got to see the Big Clean Lake or alternatively the Little Clean Ocean as he described Lake Michigan this week. Despite all his family living there, spending all his summers there, and being born there he managed to never see it. So we went to Little Sable Point Light House to see the lake, play in the surf and the sand, and later take a dune ride at Silver Lake.

Believe it or not this is one of the narrowest points between Michigan and Wisconsin just under 60 miles. Yeah big is an understatement. Guess that’s why they call them Great.

I built a little sand village Mr. Smith decided to be an evil giant.

After the lake it was down the road a ways to Mac Woods dune rides.

We had an excellent guide who told us all about the history and ecosystem of the dunes, he was also an excellent driver, it’s quite a roller coaster ride.

Grass was planted by the boy scouts to stabilize some of the dunes. Those parts only drift 2-10 inches a year.

Oh no there goes our ride

It’s ok we made a friend

There is a tiny forest in the middle of the dunes quickly being swallowed up. These trees used to cover all of this land before it was clear cut to rebuilt Chicago after Mrs. O’learys cow decided to be a jackass. It uncovered sandy glacial deposits and voila… Tourism

The live dunes (as opposed to the grassy stabilized dunes) move up to 10 feet a year. You can see on the edge of Silver Lake homes which are being swallowed up by sand. Silver lake itself is also rapidly being filled in by sand.

I’ll have to do another post on “stuff” from Michigan and our journey home just because our time there was jam packed and we came home with quite a few nifty things. I also have a big TBD list that I’m working on that just grew thanks to some hand me down items. So I’ll throw that list and what to look out for in my next post as well.

Adventure Time

July 24, 2016tinybows Leave a comment

We’ve been doing some more running around the great state of Michigan so I though I would share those adventures before my phone gets too full of pictures. Click over to this weeks earlier post if you missed it to check out our previous adventures.

First off we headed to the little town of Battle Creek to visit some family and of, course hunt down some Pokemon (it’s a healthy addiction right?)

They have a beautiful little river side park called friendship park, and of course another brewery. This one called Arcadia, they make an excellent cherry cider.

We also hit up a few shops in southern Michigan including this wonderful little art gallery and shop in Marshall called EastEnd Studio

And our all time favorite coffee shop

On Friday we had the privilege of attending a beautiful wedding at the Fredrick Meijer gardens in Grand Rapids.

If you ever have a chance to visit here you must do so.

We headed to the venu early so we could have the chance to look around the gardens.

Not only is it an amazing botanical collection they also have one of the most amazing and extensive modern sculptural collections in the United States.

Primarily we wanted to check out the Japanese gardens.

It’s the newest and biggest section and it is absolutely stunning.

I think I may finally have inspiration on how to landscape our back yard this fall.

Though I don’t think I’m skilled enough for bonsai on this level… Or any level… The plastic level maybe.

Today is a very welcomed rainy lazy day then tomorrow we head for the dunes at Lake Michigan. I’m looking forward to sharing that with you next week.

(Parentheticals)

July 19, 2016tinybows 1 Comment

I’m writing this in hopes that I’ll find an Internet connection somewhere out here soon. But for now here are a few updates. We made it to Michigan. Mostly we made it through Ohio because that state always seems never ending.

(Just waiting for the children of the corn or possibly an old timey baseball team, you just never know in Ohio)

We’re currently in southern Michigan visiting Mr. Smith’s family. We checked out the Dark Horse Brewery (apparently they’re a big deal) in Marshall Michigan as well as the aforementioned (here) Realm of Creativity.

(The Dark Horse’s mug club)

We wandered around their quaint (that sounds sardonic, it’s not, it really is quaint and wonderful) downtown area and Boardwalk. We caught a lot (I mean a lot) of Pokemon.

See, quaint…

I (as predicted) got sunburnt but my accutane treatment is progressing wonderfully.

Texture, swelling, redness, swelling, scaring, swelling, pain caused by the swelling and inflammation…really just the swelling is disappearing and it’s so nice.

Today we’re headed to the little town of Battle Creek to check out their down town and yet another brewery (apparently Michigan has over 300) then maybe Kalamazoo and Bell’s or maybe the Binder park zoo… We’re going to see how the grass grows, it’s vacation we do what we want.

Later this week we’re headed to the Fred Meijer gardens in Grand Rapids to wander around and attend a wedding then it’s farther north to see my family and hit the lake shore. In this case The Lake is Lake Michigan and the dunes at silver lake. Our summer of traveling is winding down but this trip has just begun.

First World Whining

July 8, 2016tinybows 3 Comments

Well half of the house is (semi-) cleaned, though that’s primarily because most of the mess just moved to the other half of the house.

This whole “let’s just travel all summer” thing is a strange cycle of cleaning house so we can “come home to a clean house” when in reality we just come home and throw all our things wherever they may fall just to have to pack them up again.

Between Florida, North Carolina (which we just got back from earlier this week) and Michigan (which we are headed to next week) we will have been home about 3weeks in the moths of June and July.

Next year we are definitely stretching out our traveling over more than just two months.

Enough of my first world whining.

I didn’t take many pictures while in Raleigh. We go there as often as we can since our best friends and godsons live there. However I did take somepictues of my amazing new hair

My best friend has different color hair every time I see her. Purple, blue, teal or some amalgamation of all of them and I’ve always wanted to have funky colored hair but haven’t had the guts to do it myself and won’t pay the price to go to a salon. Since she does her own, and does it beautifully I convinced her to give me some subtle colorfulness.

Instead of doing an all over bleaching (because it terrifies me, and my hair despite being very fine does not lift very well) or attempting to do a balayage we decided to go old school and use a highlighter cap

Stylin right?

We used a 30 volume developer so it didn’t take nearly as long as it usually does for my hair to lift. And since I had some previous balayage highlights it just added some extra dimension and lightness for the pigment to grab on to

We used several different colors to do my hair. All pravana brand, we used a vivid purple, a locked in red, locked in blue and various mixes of the three.

Because the colors were developed at different times and placed over different color highlights I got all different colors.

Some orange, green, yellow, red, purple, blue, we inadvertently oil slicked my hair and it’s amazing. Pictures don’t do it justice, I’ve gotten so many compliments on it already.

Though it doesn’t show up in the pictures as well the vivid purple came out as the brightest of the bunch so I think I’ll stick with those as opposed to the locked-ins for the next round. But, now I have yet another excuse to go to Raleigh regularly, gotta keep my hair looking good 😀

Secret Santa-ed

December 21, 2015tinybows 5 Comments

‘What did you get for Christmas?’ ‘A house’ ‘Well merry Christmas to you indeed’ am I right?

It’s a little scattered here

How did we get so many chairs, all the furniture we own consists of chairs

luckily I planned ahead a little bit so I’ve got a few posts I can share with you

So lots of people are likely doing their secret this coming week and I thought I would show you what I did for my secret Santa.

My secret Santa wanted gift cards (boring) or ear rings (I can work with that)
Most secret Santa gifts are limited to around $10 to $20. You can’t get much for that anymore. And to me small presents are all about the presentation so along with some $8 earnings from H&M I got $2 worth of craft supplies to make a little ear ring holder/ornament.

You’ll need two laser cut frames like I used in one of my very first posts found here.

Some paint, lace and some ribbon or twine for hanging.

First I painted my frames using a stippling technique to give them some texture.

Then I just used hot glue to glue lace to the back side of one of the frames. I also layered some tulle in there simply because my lace had very large holes and the tulle would secure ear rings better.

Then I spot glued a small length of ribbon onto the back of the frame to serve as a hangar.

Finally I coated the back of both frames with wood glue and sandwiched the lace and ribbon in between the two by gluing the frames back to back and carefully lining them up.

I clamped the layers together with clothes pins while it dried

After about one hour I had a lovely way to gift ear rings and money left over in my Santa budget for other goodies.

Broken Glass

December 14, 2015tinybows 6 Comments

I got an early Christmas present. It’s called a kinkajou, and no I’m not referring to the furry forest dwelling creature. It’s a handy little mechanism for cutting glass bottles.

It’s a pretty simple thing when you get down to it. It’s just two sets of rollers that clamp together around the bottle with a small scoring blade attached to one.

The rollers then allow you to turn the bottle scoring it all the way around. The tricky part is getting the start and end points to line up.

You then attach the included bands around the bottle and alternate hot and cold water along the score line to expand and crack the bottle along the score.

It took my first bottle a long time to finally break all the way through. That’s partly because my score lines ended about 1/4 inch away from one another. Partly because it turns out the glass was incredibly thick.

Luckily even if your score lines are a little off (like mine were) they include a tool to snap off any jagged pieces. Unfortunately my glass was so thick this little tool wouldn’t even fit over it so I had to improvise a bit.

They also include sand paper to get rid of any sharp areas.

It was surprisingly easy even having picked the seemingly thickest bottle ever, I have a feeling Mr. Smith has created a monster with this one.

Mother of Dragons

December 6, 2015tinybows 6 Comments

I made dragon eggs!!! Ok technically they are supposed to be pine cones but they definitely look like what I imagine dragon eggs look like.

Start with some squares of paper

Or alternately short lengths of ribbon (I used sticky back ribbon for extra ease)

Fold your ribbon or paper so you have a peak and pin them onto your styrofoam ball

Start with four “scales” all pointing towards one another, overlapping them in the center

Then cover your outside corners with four more

After that you can just start spiraling around with your “scales” being sure to overlap and cover your pins

It can be tedious

But so worth it

The if you want them as orniments simply find a means to hang them

For my first one (the ribbon dragon) I found one of the old drawer pulls from my infamous desk

I (ok my dad cause I was a scardey cat) drilled all the way through, I used some guilding wax on it and strung some twine through.

Then I just hot glued the repurposed handle to the top of the ball to create a hangar

Clothes Pin-terest

December 1, 2015tinybows Leave a comment

As you saw in my last blog I’ve been scouring Pinterest for DIY Christmas ornament ideas so Mr. Smith and I can have some memories for our first Christmas as husband and wife (maybe even in our first house if everything goes to plan)

I came across a few involving clothes pins the other day that looked pretty easy so I thought I would give them a go.

Start by taking apart some (by some I mean 8) wooden clothes pins.

Then glue the flat sides together like so

I followed that up by staining them along with a lot of other Christmas ornament supplies by using diluted paint. That’s completely optional though

This is also completely optional. I wrapped the edges of the pins with washi tape.

Next lay out your pins in a star/snowflake pattern. It’s easiest to first do four at 90* angles from each other and four in between those

Then find a bauble to glue to the middle on each side.

I chose to use a small fabric flower topped by a wooden snowflake

Just string some twine or ribbon through one of the small holes in the pins or glue one on and you’re all set

Like Tiny Snowflakes

November 22, 2015tinybows 2 Comments

Mr. Smith and I are getting ready to buy a house and we get to move our hodge podge of stuff into it. Unfortunately that hodge podge does not include any Christmas decorations.

So we are going to make some of our own this year. Here is a quick one I did over the weekend.