Lace, starch, giggles, and snorts
redos, Tutorials
What gorgeous weather we are having! I took advantage of the sunshine to get outside and do some yard clean up. Last fall, I kind of slacked on the leaf clean up and realized what a big mistake that was this spring. Leaves left over the winter get soggy, heavy, half decomposed, and best of all, used as a cat litter box.
So, the leaf blower wouldn't do the trick, it took rakes and snow shovels to clean up what I could have just blown away into the woods if I'd done it last fall.
But, its done now and while the yard still has its grey winter gloom look, it isn't buried in leaves. Everything looks much tidier. I picked up sticks and branches, and raked over mole mounds to flatten them out.
Gee, that's interesting, huh? Well to get to the point of the story, I found a branch on the ground that I thought was a pretty shape, and I spray painted it white to bring into the house.
It was a good day to be outside spray painting, so I grabbed a few vintage cardinals and white washed them too. I thought maybe I'd foof them up and add crystal eyes, millinery flowers, and other pretties, but decided that I liked them just as they were, simple and white.
I brought in a peeling paint flower pot full of sedum and stuck the branch down into the dirt. The sedum was nice, but I wanted a bit more at the base, so I sat a house plant into a terra cotta pot, tied a pretty page from an old book to it, and added that next to my tree.
To make sure the tree stayed upright, its stuck in the dirt nice and solid, and I braced one side with a rock and the other with the pot of flowers.
The fun part was making leaves for my tree. I'd seen some similar ones at Anthropologie last year and wanted to try making some myself. I don't know how they did theirs but this worked for me.
I cut some random leaf shapes from lace and soaked them in full strength starch, then left them on a cookie sheet to dry over night.
When they dried, I wired them onto the branches.
I'd also wrapped Xmas lights around the tree, and did a slightly crappy job of it, they are just loosely draped. It would have looked better if I'd spent more time on it, and attached them more attractively. But the branches are pretty fragile and I didn't want to snap them all off by messing around with them too much.
One bird sits in a little nest that I found in my stash, the rest of the birds just clipped on.
Besides waiting for the leaves to dry over night, it was a very quick project. And easy to do. I didn't use a pattern for the leaves, and they are different sizes, just like a leaf would naturally be. I discovered that it was easier to trim them up into a better leaf shape after the starch had dried, than before I dipped them and the lace was floppy and wrinkled.
If you want to try this, it's probably a better idea to starch the lace, let it dry, then cut the leaves out.
You could also purchase white birds at a craft store if you don't have any old ones to paint.
Another variation you could do, is to just put branches into a large vase or urn, not a flower pot full of dirt.
My weekend wasn't all yard work and spray paint. The newest Fairy Grand Baby came by to visit for a while and we got in some good giggle time. That baby has the cutest belly laugh/snort thing that she does.
