Month: November 2011

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Camping Birthday Party

Recently we celebrated my sons 2nd, 2nd birthday. Meaning his wonderful relatives in Durham had already had his and his cousin a joint 2nd birthday party. Of course I have next to no pictures of the first or second party since I get so caught up in the moment I forget to take pictures of the decorations. Suffice to say that both events were lovely! Since I had mentioned my idea to throw McClain a camping themed birthday party I thought I would share the very few pictures I had the presence of mind to take.

I made a simple “Happy Birthday” banner by enlarging the Pinewood font and cutting out the letters on my Silhouette craft machine. For a rustic camping look I clamped them to some hemp twine and strung them between branches I anchored in buckets on either side of the buffet table. While the color is washed out in the photo I used blue, red, and green embroidery floss to make friendship bracelet tassels.

We moved all the furniture to the edges of the room to open up play space for the kiddos and places a tepee in the corner near the fireplace. My mother let me borrow a number of plaid and striped wool camping blankets to use on the floor and as throws. Here she is enjoying one with McClain in the tepee.

Chocolate and vanilla cupcakes were topped with moss (green sugar in two shades) and woodland characters. I have to say I used my Silhouette again to find these cute little animals and cut them out. However, there are plenty of cartoon forest creatures available as free clipart you could use. Just print them out and mirror the other side. Then match the two sides and glue to a toothpick.

Here is a detail of the cupcake toppers. I also set (high above the children) candles, with various birds and moss. While not shown, I used mess-kits to serve many of the snacks and lanterns as decorations. The menu kept with the theme by serving campfire chili, cheese log, and smores icecream sandwiches.

McClain’s favorite part besides the obvious attention and presents was a toss up between the tepee and the cupcakes. Though for pure family use I’m going to have to go with the tepee. We kept it up for a week and everyone, including the felines, enjoyed their time sitting in it.

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Snowy Woodland Tablescape

I created the following place setting and tablescape for tomorrow’s Centsational Girl/Homegoods Holiday Tablescape Contest. Well I created it for that contest and for my own Christmas decorations.

The inspiration for this particular project was the snowy woodlands of Western North Carolina. But enough chit-chat let us take a look and we can discuss more after a few photos.

 

The idea was to design a tablescape that embodied the spirit of Homegoods based on style, affordability, and creativity. I hope I achieved all three. I actually went to Homegoods/TJMaxx to scope out what they were doing for the holidays. I wrote about their trends here and then went ahead and followed none of them.

While, it was NOT even implied you needed to purchase a product from Homegoods I happened to fall in love with the tiered display item I used as a centerpiece. I’m not even entirely sure what its intended use is, but I loved the fretwork and patina, which immediately put me in mind of the outdoors. Since the cold weather at Christmas leaves us stuck indoors, I thought it would be great to bring the outside in. Live moss, old branches, vines, and fluffy snow decorate mirrors that mimic the cool streams of the mountains. Glass cardinals give a nod to North Carolina (State Bird) and add some pops of color for Christmas. Here are some more details:

 

You’ll have to be the judge as to creativity and style. However, I can attest to the affordability! Most of the tablescape is constructed with items my son and I gathered while wandering the neighborhood. I already had plates, red glass balls, some mirrors (candle mirrors), and fake snow (from a previous Christmas). I really only purchased the tiered stand, some new napkins, and the glass cardinals. Altogether it was much less than $50 and I have plans to reuse the stand all year long.

If you would like to construct something similar here’s a quick guide to how I created the tablescape.

  1. I laid out the main objects. The white “runner” is a cut open trashbag. I wanted to use the bare wood of the table but protect it from the damp moss and branches. You can see my “helper” supervising in the background.
  2. I wanted an organic centerpiece so I cut the plastic to both wrap around and touch certain place settings. BTW, if you hadn’t noticed there is a two year old helping me create this. So I can attest the main layout doesn’t take long at all.
  3. I took various types of moss, lichens, and branches and laid them to follow the curves of the outline and act as stream banks for the mirrors. In case you worried we only gathered small sections of moss since it takes forever to grow. I wanted to make sure not to denude the neighborhood. Most of the moss will get replanted in a few weeks too.
  4. I filed in the open areas with snow. I tried to mimic the natural way snow lands and melts to let some of the landscape show through.
Not shown: Other steps involved adding my red accents, switching out various colors of dishes. Though I only own one set of fine china, and an everyday set of white and green. So there wasn’t much in the way of trading the plates out. I took the red napkins and twisted them into bow shapes to place in the bowls instead of using traditional napkin rings. While, offsetting the plates to give a modern edge to the tablescape. Finally, I want to note that I had some store bought vines and lichens (from previous crafting projects) that I used on the plates and chair decorations. I figure guests want to enjoy nature without tasting it.
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Color Schemes: Color Wheel Basics II

Tuesday we looked at the basics of a color wheel (Part I). Today we are going to jump right in and look at the theory used to select color schemes. Don’t despair if many of the colors we use today are a bit bright! We’ll touch on how to use the theories we learn and apply it to real life design next week.

A Full Color Wheel

To fully flesh out our color wheel we need to add tertiary colors. These colors are made from mixing the primaries and secondaries. For example:

red + orange = red-orange (such fancy names)

blue + purple= blue-purple

As a side note when naming tertiaries the convention is to use the primary first and hyphenate the secondary name, as in yellow-green not green-yellow.

Using the full wheel we can illustrate a number of different ways to pick color schemes.

The Triad is Not Just a Shadowy Agency

Triad color schemes rely on make an equalaterial triangle through the middle of the color wheel. For example red, blue, & yellow are a triad, and also used heavily in children’s color schemes.

In this particular triad I have picked a trio of colors that are reminescent of schemes based on the colors of India.

Simply turn the triangle and use the ends as pointers to get a triad color scheme.

Tetrad; Yeah I Didn’t Pay Good Attention in Geometry Either

Tetrad color schemes involve choosing four colors. Instead of a triangle we’ll use a square as the pointer in the color wheel.

In this case the four colors would be, well very bright. But as I described above we are working on theory here:

I promise it will come together to allow you real life design inspiration next week. Though the above color scheme reminds me of some of my outfits in the 1980’s if we want a real life example today.

Other Schemes of the Color Variety

There are a ton of other ways to use the color wheel. Each have a rather fancy name like analogous or split-complementary color scheme. This wikipedia article has good text descriptions of many different types of schemes.

Tune in next week when we wrap this series up by looking at how you can use these color theories to pick out a scheme to fit your next event.

 

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Color Schemes: Color Wheel Basics

Color makes a huge impact at any party or event. Why else would we deck the halls in red and green, go over the hill with black, and force our bridesmaids to coordinate their outfits. Obviously we intuitively know some colors just work for events. However there is a basis for picking out a good color scheme. That basis is the color wheel.

In this three part series I am going to show you the basic usage of a color wheel and how it works to pick out color schemes.

Primaries From Primary

Probably somewhere in elementary school you learned to mix your Play-doh®; blue and yellow make green, while, adding in red makes a greyish mess. But what does it all mean? (note if your into color theory or printing I’m not going into that type of depth here)

There are three primary colors you can use to mix and make every other color in the world! Red, Blue, & Yellow

For illustrations sake we are going to place these equally spaced on the color wheel.

 

‘Second’ary Isn’t a Bad Place to Be

Next we will fill in the secondary colors. Secondary colors are what we get when we mix two primary colors together. So back to our grade school Play-doh®:

red + blue = purple

blue + yellow = green

yellow + red = orange

 

Complementary Colors and Real Life

Now that we have our very basic color wheel filled in it is time to look at one of the most basic color schemes. Complementary colors are based on being exactly across from each other on the color wheel. In our very pared down version you can see we have three sets of complementary pairs; red & green, yellow & purple, and blue & orange.

While these are some of the most basic color schemes available, you may recognize two of them. Red & green are synonymous with Christmas while traditional yellow and purple remind us of Easter.

Tune in Thursday to take a more in depth look at picking three and four color schemes from the color wheel in Part II of this series.

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DIY Halloween Costume: Toddler Braveheart

Instead of DIY Wednesday we are doing it a day early. The reason? A simple costume for Halloween that I simply must show off! William Wallace aka Braveheart toddler style:

It got very cold, so, yes he does have pants under that kilt… and an extra shirt under his shirt. This costume also included a buckler and sword, but being almost two years old he quickly figured out throwing the sword and shield was super fun. This was our followup to last year’s viking costume.

How to Create A Toddler Friendly Version of Braveheart aka William Wallace

Materials: Plaid, Brown T-shirt, Brown Duct tape

Optional Materials: Faux Leather, Brass buttons, Sewing Skills

Steps 1

Create a kilt. If you have sewing skills then go ahead pleat and add elastic. Otherwise simply cut a strip, wrap it around the toddlers waist and secure with a safety pin. In either case don’t worry about hemming. I even unravelled a bit of the edge to give it a worn appearance.

Step 2

Before putting the t-shirt on the toddler take an extra piece of plaid and either sew or safety pin it to the shoulder and waist of the t-shirt so this it drapes across the front. Do this BEFORE putting the shirt on. (Are you sensing the ‘before’ theme?) This will keep the toddler from getting obsessed with the plaid on the shirt.

Step 3

Paint face blue. Use a little cream makeup and put it on lightly. If it isn’t thick they can’t smear it much and McClain got a hoot out of watching me put it on in the mirror. If your toddler refuses then no big deal, just have them go as a Highland Scot.

Step 4

If you can sew: I added brass buttons to look like fancy pins at the shoulders, braided a leather belt to hang over, also sewn to the shirt. You can use strips of brown duct tape to mimic leather as well. Everything was attached so he wouldn’t have to fiddle with the costume.

I like to keep it simple and comfortable for a toddler. Certainly, I could have added more armor etc, but this gives the idea and he was free to run around and Trick or Treat in comfort.

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