Scraps

Bare walls drive me nuts. However, I am not really great with home decor. I tend to find all of our furniture from craigslist, family members, or the side of the road (seriously, drives my husband nuts). Everything hanging on our walls is either art from my kids, my very talented friends, or family photos. My house will never be in Better Homes and Gardens.

So we have a dining room. I love having a dining room, we found an guy through friends that makes tables and benches out of scrap wood leftover from building homes, a china cabinet for almost nothing, and chairs from Goodwill. It is big enough for our whole family even when extended family visits. It is also where my amazing Girl Scout troop meets, the kids do art projects and general mayhem happens. The walls in the dining room are still bare. Like totally neekid.

At first I thought I would put a dry erase board in there, or cork squares to change things up, but I didn't want it to be too classroom like. So a few months ago my friend Dorothy gave me a bunch of really cool vintage embroidery hoops. All sizes. I knew they had to be in my house somewhere.

So today the kids and I went through my fabric scraps and started loading up the hoops. To keep the edges down, we used Elmer's school glue, just in case we wanted to take the fabric out and use it in another project. If you want yours to be permanent, you can use a glue gun or staples.

This project took us about an hour from hooping to hanging!

I think it fits our dining room really well, and the fabrics remind us of past sewing projects! Bonus, it was FREE.

I know a lot of us don't have the hoops hanging around, but they can often be found in thrift stores or grandma's attic!

great balls o'fabric!

So this morning Rena and I were playing with my scraps. We just moved to Mississippi, and are working on getting our house in order, and that means decorating too. On our dining room table I have a big white bowl as a center piece. Before kids I would fill it with candy or candles, depending on my mood. After having the girls it went away for a while, but now that they are older it is back. But I have been agonizing on what to fill it with. Rocks? na. fake lemons? na. would look good, but they are fake, and would cost about $15. Real fruit? eh. would need replaced, and Rena would probably take a bite out of every piece then put it back. Yesterday at Target I was looking at those ball things they have, but a set of 3 was $20, and well, I just am not ready to commit to $20 worth of ball things. Then I remembered the pattern I had printed out from Grand Revival Designs Blog (She is wonderful, her fabric is wonderful) for a fabric ball.  So with Rena's help, I fished out a few scraps and got to work. There are 3 different sizes to the pattern, and I used the small two, because the largest is huge.These took about an hour or so to do all, and they used scraps. I stuffed them with leftover quilt batting, so they are a little lumpy. But, to make them smelly, I dabbed a little piece of the batting into liquid potpouri (apple cinnamon) before I stuffed them. So they smell wonderful, and are a bit of my personality instead of just "decorate balls".

So here they are. I didn't put potpouri in the penn state or the green one. I am happy with it, I like that they are something I made, so they are definately "me", and also that I didn't spend any money, which appeals to my frugal nature (yeah, I'm a cheapskate, plus that $20 could better be spent on more fabric.

and here is my helper posing with the balls. Silliness.

this is what the fabric was left over from, a diaper bag I just finished last week for a friend.

Ah, now off for some playdough time with Rena. She wants to make "cookies"....