Roses Part 1: Rolled with Glue Gun

I've been working on several different types of fabric flower for a friend of mine, and she sent me this blog for a how-to on rolled roses. There are lots of different instructions on how to do rolled roses online, but so far her's have been the clearest I've found. Here is her rose:

And here are mine:

(I found the leaves idea somewhere else... still looking for that link)
I did the left one by cutting the piece and the right one by tearing the piece. You can't tell it in the picture but there is not really all that much difference, they both frayed a bit.
I'm fairly happy with them. I used the same length piece for both of them but you can see how the right one is tighter and smaller. It also caves upwards.

Discoveries:

1. What she says about the low-temp glue gun? Follow it please. Don't be me, I'm not always the smartest cookie in the box.
2. Apparently Jo-Ann's sells a glue stick that is clear but drys white. Another tally off the rapidly decreasing Jo-Ann scoreboard.
3. I think I'm going to try a sewn version of these next. Gluing was messy and the roses won't "bloom" as they might if they were sewn.

Hand Drawing Via Sharpie

We just moved and so I have been on the lookout for sunflower decor to put in our kitchen. Today I came across this blog that showed how to sharpie over a picture you printed out from your computer and then to re-trace it on the back. (Making the back the final picture) It really was easy and fairly fool proof! I have little to no drawing ability myself, but I think it turned out pretty ok.

So I did a search on google and the above picture is the one I settled on. I didn't even bother to download it, just ignored the iStockphoto stuff and printed it off. However, I forgot to do a print preview and when I printed it from the internet it was much smaller than I wanted. Nevertheless, I decided to make the small one my trial run and this is how it turned out:

Not too shabby for a 'free-hand' sharpie picture!

Since I was busy procrastinating from doing the dishes or any other sort of cleaning, I decided to save the picture on my computer and print it off in a 5x8 size. After tracing, re-tracing, cropping, and framing, my final result is:

He is looking great, but slightly lonely so I'll probably add a few more of these later.

Discoveries:

1. The bigger picture was harder to re-trace and cover all of the black lines that seeped through. Maybe this was because I was tired or maybe because it was bigger.
2. Be sure to put an extra scrap of paper behind the one you are working on, it is meant to bleed through, and will probably go through more than one sheet.
3. Pick a picture without a lot of tiny details. Sharpies tend to ink and then spread out (can't remember what that's called... any ideas?) so it's harder to do the fine details. You can see that I skipped the tiny white dots on the edges of the butterflies wings in a few places, and altogether on the smaller one.
4. You might also try this with a felt or super inky pen. However, I would think that it might be harder to re-trace fine lines. Sharpies can (and did!) cover a multiplicity of errors.  

And on a side note... I'm not sure why blogger decided that this last section needed a different color text background.... anyone know how to fix it? Maybe I'll figure it out tomorrow.

Horray! A Way Around the Facebook Issue.

So I've completed several projects that I found the instructions/helps for through pictures on Pininterest. However some of them are great, and some... not so much. I want to be able to pin my results/opinions back onto Pininterest, but the usual path (facebook) is one of the only exceptions to places you can't 'pin' from. So here is a review of the ones I've done, most with pictures of my version of the project.