West Elm Knock-off Doormat

Hey there Readers!

I really can't believe that the holidays are already here. To be honest, I'm not really ready for it. Usually I already have my house decorated well before Thanksgiving but I think between carrying around a little muffin-lette (who is currently moving around like crazy) and making things to sell at local craft fairs it came way too fast. Did I mention that the weather has been more unusual than normal here in Texas? Driving home from work today, it was 70 degrees! What kind of holiday weather is that?!?

So for those looking for a few home decor projects to do for the holidays look no more!

West Elm knock-off Doormat

I subscribe to the CasaSugar blog and the other day there was a list of ideal gifts to give for the new homeowner. One of the items on this list were these cute but simple holiday doormats from West Elm.

I absolutely love their designs, however with the holidays coming up and a baby on the way there was no way I could justify a $30 price tag. So, then I thought...I can do that! It might not be perfect but I can still get a similar effect for about half the cost.


Items you'll need:

• Outdoor doormat - I found mine at Walmart for $7 - it wasnt exactly like the one in the picture above but it did have the jute material in the center of the mat
• Spray Paint of your desired color - For this project I tried going with fabric spray paint and wasnt completely thrilled with the lack of color vibrancy. Plus it set me back $5 whereas Rustoleum would cost a little less
• Thin cardboard or posterboard
• Scissors
• Some basic drawing skills

Isn't he cute?

So, anyone who has known me for any length of time knows I love bunnies. So I thought it was very fitting to make a bunny image on my doormat.  First, grab your poster board and sketch your bunny design. I did a quick Google image search and found some silhouette images of bunnies and chose one that would be easy to replicate.

Once you are satisfied with your design carefully cut out your image - the outline will be your template. The actual bunny cut out can be used for another project if you want.



Next, setup your workstation in a well-ventilated area that you can get messy. I have a small paint booth I made for myself out of a portable closet so I can paint anytime I want, but if you don't have something like that available, newspaper or a garbage bag will be more than sufficient. Arrange your template on top of your mat and start spraying.

Voila! You're done! I'd recommend leaving your mat there overnight so it dries completely. I love how simple this project was. It also gives you plenty of flexibility to customize it to your liking (I'm thinking monogramming and other embellishments).

The whole project probably took me about 30 minutes to do from start to finish which is great because Sleepy Muffins tend to get a bit impatient if a project takes too long. 

A few things I discovered with this project:

• Make sure you find something to weigh down your template. I noticed when I was spraying my mat that the paint caused the paper to curl up fairly quickly so I didnt get very sharp lines on my finished mat.
• As I mentioned before: try out regular spray paint instead of fabric spray paint. I thought it would be alright for this mat but it didn't give me a vibrant enough color.

Well until next time Readers, Happy Thanksgiving!

The Little Sleepy Muffin

An easy autumn DIY project in time for Thanksgiving

Hey there sleepy muffin readers!

I don't know about you, but I have got the serious after lunch sleepies today. Maybe because its a little humid and overcast. Definitely ideal weather for a nice nap :)

Anyways.....I have been going through a holiday home decor flurry this past week in an attempt to try to decorate for other holidays besides Christmas. I'd really like my son to enjoy every holiday as he grows up so all the decorating Ive been doing lately is my baby steps in that direction.

So as a way to celebrate autumn and help you decorate your home for thanksgiving here's a little project I finished recently:

Felt Autumn leaf garland:

 

This project was super, super easy and doesn't take much effort to make. In my opinion its easy enough that with supervision its fairly kid friendly as well. Its also a fairly inexpensive project as well. I think it probably cost me less than $5 to make. It may cost slightly more if you don't have some equipment such as a hot glue and I already had my own yarn but still the overall cost wasn't bad.

 Items you'll need:

• Colored felt sheets - I was able to find these at my local craft store for 29 cents a sheet and one sheet of each color was way more than enough.
• 3 even lengths of yarn - I had originally wanted to use a thin jute rope, but I had some interesting green yarn and decided to use that instead. Another option to use for this project would be ribbon.
• brown puff paint (fabric paint)
• hot glue gun and glue sticks
• scissors and pen

As you can see from my photo, my fireplace mantle was the ideal place to put my garland, so all I did was measure my lengths of yarn by hand. Once I got the length I wanted, I braided them together to make a thicker rope. 

Next, I googled some images of fall leaves and used these as a visual template to draw my leaves onto the felt with a pen (see images below for my results).


I wasn't intending for it to look absolutely perfect, so I got my pen and hand-drew them and cut them out. If you need an actual template to go by I would recommend doing a autumn leaf image search on Google and printing out a few different varieties as your templates.

Once all my leaves were cut out, I flipped them over in case they still had some pen marks (like the maple leaf to the left *blush*) and got my nifty puff paint pen and started drawing veins on the leafs and some detail on my acorn caps. After your pieces are nice and dry grab your glue gun and glue those guys to your yarn rope and its ready to display!

Since my mantle isn't very big, I ended up making only 2 of each type of leaf but what is so great about this project is that you can make as many or as little as you like.

A little side note: I had originally intended on putting a single acorn on the garland but I ran out of space. So instead of tossing out that cute little guy I decided to glue him onto the bottom of the other acorn and give the effect of falling acorns.

So, there's a simple little DIY project that is flexible enough for you to personalize it to your own tastes. I apologize for not getting this post out sooner. I had to throw all my time into preparing for a craft fair I was participating in last weekend so its been a bit hectic and my poor blog has suffered. I promise to be much more consistent from here on out.

I truly hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and that you spend some wonderful time with family and loved ones.

Love,

The Little Sleepy Muffin

DIY: Tote Pillow

Hey there Sleepy Muffin Readers!

I apologize for not posting a new entry any sooner. I was absolutely determined to make sure my next post was a DIY post, and then when I started getting things together for my project I encountered some technical difficulties (Thanks mom for rescuing me!).

So without any more delays here's my very first DIY  project!

Isn't this tote adorable??

Last weekend my husband and I went to Austin with my parents (more to come on that later). One of our stops there was the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. The museum had some pretty interesting exhibits, but my highlight of course was perusing the gift shop, in which I found the most ADORABLE retro styled cowgirl shopping tote. My only problem is I have tons of these types of totes in my closet already: so how could I justify getting this? Well, since I finally took a sewing class I figured I'd put those new found skills to work and make a small throw pillow out of it! The process was fairly simple and probably took me about an hour to do.

Items you'll need:

• One cloth tote bag
• Sewing tools (scissors, all purpose thread, pins, etc)
• poly-fil - I'm not a fan of the regular stuff you get at craft stores so I tried the bamboo kind this time and really liked the texture and result better

First, turn your tote inside out and clip off the handles of your tote as close to the connecting seam as possible.


I did run into a slight problem with my tote because it was originally sewn with a panel of fabric between the front and back of the tote which makes a nice roomy bag, but throws in a few more complications when you're making a pillow. I ended up deconstructing one of the discarded handles to turn it into the top panel of the pillow. In some ways this method turned out great cause I just matched up the seam with the edge of the tote and used that as a guide to pin my fabric together when I started planning on sealing up my tote.

That seam from the handle made a very nice guide to pin

After I started pinning, I started with one of the corners and carefully worked my way around the edge of the fabric. Since this was my first sewing project it definitely took me some time but it wasn't very difficult at all.

After I was done sewing, it was ready to fill! I turned my former tote right-side out and started filling my little pillow. After a while my husband was nice enough to test out the comfy-ness of the pillow and let me know if I needed to add more stuffing to it before I hand-stitched the opening shut.

And.....voila! All done! As you can see from my picture below it turned out pretty cute and huggable. Since this was my first actual sewing project I don't think it turned out perfect, but I was happy with the result.

After this little project, I'm definitely motivated to try this out with other totes that I love and don't use very often or even allow myself to buy a new cute tote here and there he he.