If you can't find it, make it.

It's Monday, and you know what that means, so once you've finished here, go and see what everyone else has been up to in the crafting world this week over on Handmade Harbour for Handmade Monday. You know you won't be disappointed!

This week we finally evicted Teaghan from our bedroom! She is almost one now (where has the time gone!) and we felt it was time she had a little bit of Independence from us. So she has moved into her big sister's room. Obviously before now the room was solely Caoimhe's. When she was born, we bought some ceramic letters from Hobbycraft to spell her name out on the wall (incidentally it worked really well, as she has been able to spell her name since she was 2, which is a lot more than her grandad can do!) We wanted to do the same for Teaghan, but have been unable to source any letters, at least none that we really liked. Same with her door plaque. We were lucky enough to have one given to us for Caoimhe but I didn't know where to start for Teaghan.

I thought it would be a lovely idea to get her door plaque made, so I looked around some of the lovely crafters whose blogs I follow. But I wasn't even sure what theme I wanted, or what style. Caoimhe's is a lovely, fairly plain plaque so I didn't want anything that stood out more than that does. (anyone with 2 or more children will know what I'm getting at here!)

So last week I had a good think about what I have at home, and what I thought I would be able to do myself.

First of all I loaded up my Craft Artist disc and chose some background papers, and letters that I liked. I  printed them off, and glued them onto Artist mount board before applying Mod Podge for a nice finish. When the letters were dry, I cut them out and stuck them onto the plaque, and tried out lots of embellishments, stars, buttons, flowers... but in the end I decided that Less is More and it looked fine as it was. I think it's bright and colourful and just right for a child's room.

I had some sticky foam strips, so I have used these to attach it to the door.



When it came to the lettering for the bedroom wall, I once again turned to the disc for a bit of inspiration (it's getting some serious hammering!) and saw that there was a template for party bunting. You just drag over your chosen background, add any embellishments etc and press print.. I wanted to add embellishments myself so I just chose two backgrounds in contrasting colours (I chose the same paper as I had used for the door plaque to continue the theme) and printed them out. I cut them out, stuck them to artist mounting board (and incidentally it's from the same bag of cut offs I bought months ago as regular readers might remember, so what a bargain quid that turned out to be!) and applied lots of Mod Podge again. . Then I chose the letters I wanted and printed those out, too. More mod podge and cutting out, left to dry for a few hours and I was ready to assemble it. I used buttons from my stash to embellish it, and strung it all up on a paper twine. I was quite pleased with the finished article!

I enjoyed making these, and they didn't take long to make really, drying time aside. I wish I had thought of making them sooner, rather than all that Internet browsing, although it did give me inspiration for other possible future projects.

Don't forget to have a wander over to Handmade Harbour, as I will be doing once the kids are in bed! Have a great week!

Til next time!