MOSS GARDENS - CHEAP AND EASY DIY

Looking up fairy gardens, I came across this in my search.  It's a great tutorial for making these wonderful moss gardens.  The maker of the video, Twig Terrariums, very generously showed how they make their intricate and beautiful wares.  Of course, I had to figure out how to do it the cheap and easy way!

First I had to get some good glassware.  The Dollar Tree is a source, but you're going to pay $1 each for some not-very-good quality glass there.  Thrift stores like Value Village (Savers) or St. Vincent's can actually be quite pricey for vases and goblets and such.  The best place to go for good cheap glassware is definitely "the bins," Goodwill Outlet stores where you pay per pound for most stuff.  We have quite a few good ones in our area, and the nearest one sells glass for $0.33 a pound.  My daughters and I went hunting and got 8 good glass pieces, a very nice cane, an ugly doll, and a couple of pieces of clothing for just under $6.00.  The bins can be frightening, icky, and a little dangerous (don't get in the way of either the employees bringing new stuff in or the people wearing gloves waiting for that new stuff), but go give them a try!  It's kind of like treasure hunting at the dump (anybody remember that experience?).

Lowe's was where I went for the pebbles and dried moss.  I did some hunting online, and dried moss can cost you an arm and a leg if you're not careful.  I got a really packed bag at Lowe's for around $7.00.  It's going to be good for at least 30 of these things, though, so it does qualify as cheap.  It wasn't the right season to get good bags of pebbles, but we did get a nice bag of "Western Sunset" rocks for under $5.00, also going to be good for at least 30 moss gardens.

Live moss is prohibitively expensive online, so I looked up harvesting tips and had a good laugh.  The people who wrote the articles obviously do not live in the Pacific Northwest!  There was a lot of talk about protecting the ecosystem and making sure not to damage the surrounding flora.  I went outside my back door and used a metal spatula to take some off the concrete wall along our walkway.

After washing my first container and a handful of pebbles (I put them in a tupperware and swished them around and drained, repeating until they were mostly clean), I gathered all the ingredients in my sun room, including a good size bowl for soaking the dry moss. After I finished this project, I realized that I put in far too many rocks.  The tutorial says to use about an inch, but I think I doubled that!  It still worked out, but I will be more careful in the future.

Using gloves, I ripped off and soaked a small handful of the dried moss in my bowl and it took no time at all to get squishy.  A spoon turned out to be the best way to drain it and put it into the container.  I did make sure to cover the rocks well, as it says in the tutorial.  You do not want the layer of dirt to get in there.  The moss left lots of little pieces behind on the glass, but that was easily cleaned up with a paper towel.

Luckily I have some very nice soil in my garden and just used that for the dirt layer, saving even more money.  I put too much dirt in, I think, as well as rocks, but it came out alright in the end.  Next time, I will definitely err on the side of caution.

The fresh moss was very easy to work with.  Using a wooden skewer, I poked it down and fit it over the dirt nicely.  I attempted to "make a hill for interest" like the tutorial said, using the dry moss and dirt layers, but it came out pretty level anyway probably due to my overexuberant poking.   It also said to use different types of moss, so I had gathered two kinds from the wall and used them side by side.  I used a somewhat flat moss next to a bushy one, and that worked well, but I'm looking forward to using the velvety kind next time.  A couple of leftover washed rocks added some contrast and also shaped the moss some.

In the tutorial, it says to add miniatures, to look for them in thrift shops and such, and I think that's a good idea.  We hadn't come across any good ones in our bin excursion, though, so I used a broken keychain of "Nayanko-Sensei" from "Natsume's Book of Friends" that one of my daughters had lying around, but I'm looking forward to creating our own little people and creatures.  Our oldest son and his family came for a visit last week, and they spent some time creating figures for future moss projects with a Sculpey-type clay.  Now I have some wonderful little subjects to create worlds around!

Unfortunately due to the shape of the glass, it was pretty hard to get a clear picture of the finished project, but here are two that give you the feel of it.  This was just after I finished it.

One of the very best things about these little gardens is that they need very little care.  They need a misting with a spray bottle every 1 or 2 weeks and NO DIRECT SUNLIGHT.  Other than that, they are completely self-sufficient.  It's important to monitor them in the first weeks to make sure they are not drying out in your particular environment.  These are going to make great gifts!  Here is little Nyanko-Sensei three weeks after he was originally finished and had been misted twice in that time (once today).  I'm very much looking forward to making more of these and will post them as they are created.  I hope I inspired you to make your own; post pictures in the comments!

Paula's Shawl

Value Village is my favorite thrift store, and every once in a while they have a massive 50% off sale of all clothing and bed and bath items.  Guess what category yarn is in!  I have gotten so many good deals on yarn there.  The best finds are bags with enough skeins for an entire project.  Without this wonderful store, I would not be able to afford my yarn addiction.  One lucky day, I got a bag of barely opened skeins of Caron Simply Soft yarn in these colors:

Simply Soft is a lovely yarn and actually lives up to its name, being very soft.  It's also great because it is fully washable and can be blocked by just throwing it in the washer and dryer (following the laundering directions on the package, of course).  I wanted to make something with it, but had no ideas.  These are beautiful colors, but don't really fit the palette of  my wardrobe (mostly black) or any of my kids (mostly darker colors).  Then it hit me that my cousin Paula likes this sort of colors.  I was a bit worried that they might be too pastel for her, and then one day during a visit she presented in an outfit with this exact range of colors, and I knew it was fate.  Lionbrand.com had recently featured a free pattern I thought she would like, the Mother of the Bride shawl.  It was my first intermediate difficulty pattern, but I felt up to it, especially with the diagram they provided.  I find it's so much easier to complete a pattern if I have the words AND the picture of what you're supposed to do!

Using a size I crochet hook, I had just about enough yarn to finish, though had to go buy some more Orchid (readily available at Joann's) and got some Violet to use for the border as a darker color to give it shape.  It took me almost a year, working on and off, but it was a great project to cart around and work on.  People were drawn to the sheen on the Simply Soft and wanted to touch it everywhere I brought it out.  It hung in my WIP (work in progress) spot on the yarn wall, and I finished just in time for Paula's next visit.

She loved it, and it does look spectacular on her, doesn't it?

Flames of Love in the World

This quote touches my heart and makes me wish that I could bring light into the lives of all those who are aching and despairing in the world.

It's a little late for Valentine words of wisdom, but here they are anyway.  Look around and find the love that is everywhere.  Are you feeling that there is none in your life?  The best way to find love is to bring it to someone else.  Show a random person a bit of kindness and watch the light dawn in their eyes... or maybe it won't, but there will be a little flame growing in your own.

Are you having trouble with the people whom you love in your life?  Do your best to keep loving them anyway, find the spark of light that lives in them and try to blow it into a flame!  See the love that they have for you and try to see what is shadowing that light, what it is that they need help with to find the way out of the dark.

When my kids get depressed, sometimes for no reason at all as that particular chemical imbalance runs in the family, I can only offer what sometimes works for me:  doing something, anything for someone else.  Sometimes nothing works and you just have to hang on until the black box opens up and lets you out, but trying to step outside of self and helping to bring the light to others can help to lighten your own darkness.

I have so much love in my life, such a loving family, so many friends, and still I struggle some days to find the light in the darkness of this vale of tears.  My heart cries for those who are fighting these battles on their own, and I hope I can be at least a little flicker to someone who needs it.

May you all be as flames of love in the world!

I'm Hung Up On Yarn

So here I had this wonderful yarn storage going, but it needed more.  I wanted something to fill the empty space above it and also add to the overall style of my office/craft space.  I thought about what I wanted to say (with help from my family) and decided on "I'm hung up on yarn."  This was the first time I had ever worked with letters with the removable vinyl.  Using Microsoft Word, I chose font Maiandra G and dialed the font size all the way up to 500, printing two letters per page.

"500??" you say, "Mine only goes up to 72."  A great tip for font sizes:  Select the number in the font size box and enter your own with a letter highlighted, and you can see how it will look.  Some fonts only go up to certain sizes.  (This works backwards, too, if you need a tiny font somewhere.)  I decided on my font size by printing different sizes on draft and holding them up on the wall.  When I was sure of the size, I printed one of each letter and just reused them to trace.

The back of the vinyl has lines on it for easy measuring.  I only printed one of each letter I needed and just reused them.  After choosing my font size, I measured the letters against the vinyl and cut strips from the big roll the right height for the letters.  I flattened my removable black vinyl (see this blog for more about where it came from) by cutting out the strips I wanted and leaving it under books overnight.  My roll is 2 feet wide, and my letters were 5-1/2 inches tall, so I cut 3 strips, 6 inches tall.   I traced the letters onto the back of the vinyl and found that, especially with the larger ones, it was much easier to use masking tape to hold them down.  It comes off easily from the vinyl backing, but best to not try to remove it from the paper.  Trace to the tape, skip, then trace after it.  When you're done, remove and join the lines!

I was going along very well, tracing away, and suddenly I realized I was in trouble.  Take a look at this picture, can you see where I went wrong?




Since I was tracing on the backside of the vinyl, the part that sticks to the wall, it's like drawing a sign on a window.  It has to be backwards!  So back I went with a red pen and made my corrections.  This is not the first (and I'm sure not the last) time that I got myself turned around with the vinyl.


I ran a string where I wanted my letters to be, leveling them with the edge of the wall and ceiling.  I am not a perfectionist and don't need everything to be perfectly aligned, so this was sufficient for me.  When you are applying large things with the vinyl, though, it's best to actually tape the entire thing up with masking tape and make light marks where you want it to go, measuring against ceilings and floors if you want it perfectly squared.



There are different ways to cut vinyl:  Many people like to use Exacto blades when working with vinyl, but my only one is old and didn't work out when I was making the tree, so I cut out all my letters with some good sharp scissors, bending it a bit to nip out holes to cut shapes inside shapes.  There are some wonderful machines out there called "Silhouettes" that will cut any shape into your vinyl straight from your computer, but while they look like they are Easy, they don't fall into the category of Cheap.  Rolled masking tape stuck to the back of the letters put them up under the string where I wanted them to go.  Even though this stuff is so easy to move, it's always better to make sure you know where you want it before you peel the backing off and start applying, especially things like letters with long skinny pieces that are easy to tangle.  The rolled masked tape worked pretty well, but they did tend to fall off if left up too long.  Next time, I'm going to just use the masking tape across the front of the vinyl as I think that will hold it better.

 
It looked great, but I was really glad I had taped it up first because as I started to get to the end of the sentence, it became very clear that it was going to be too long for one line over the bags.  Luckily, it looked pretty awesome when broken into two lines.  My mother's voice came to me from the past, "Measure twice, cut once."  I should have taken the time to work out the WIDTH of my sentence as well as the HEIGHT of my letters!  Moving the string up the height of one the letters made a good level for both lines. 

After I had taped them all up, I was ready to apply.  This project was somewhat different from what I had done with the tree before because I was working with letters.  I had similar problems with leaves and small branches though.  It is not a thick material, so when you are working with long skinny pieces, they will twist and stick to each other.  It can be very difficult to get vinyl unstuck from itself, and I've had my share of just having to throw a shape or letter away and start over.  What I do to avoid this is to peel the edges at the top of the shape and stick them to the surface first, leaving the rest of the backing on, as with this "H."  This way you are in control of the shape and can peel the backing away slowly while sticking it down.  Get started with peeling the backing off can be tricky, but I just an the edge down a bit and pop it off that way.  The vinyl may get a little bent, but if you are gentle, it won't crease and will lie flat when placed on the surface.  You can buy "applicators" in many places for vinyl, but I made one with my old AAA card, a piece of vinyl covering the old number and making sure I didn't get it confused with the new one, and that works very well.  When you have your shape or letter where you want it on your surface and you've pressed it down with your fingers, run the edge of the applicator flat down the front of this.  If you have bumpy paint on your plaster (as you can see with the H), the vinyl will make some crackling and popping sounds while you're doing this.  The goal is to make sure there is as little air under the vinyl as possible.

So here it is, the finished project:

As far as the "cheap" part of this DIY, how much did it cost? The roll I bought was 10 yards by 2 feet, making it 720 sq ft.  The pieces I cut were 36 sq ft.  Total cost of roll with shipping $32, $0.4 per sq ft, so total cost of my letters:  $1.44.  The coolest thing about this, and I learned this with making the tree, you can save every little scrap of the vinyl from those letters and use them for other projects.  So that $1.44 is going to go into a lot more projects than just this one!

My Yarn Hangup

Yarn is beautiful and soft and makes me want to form it into things that are beautiful and soft.  As many of us do, I have too much of it, and I can't seem to stop buying it!  Luckily for my budget, I'm a thrift shop hound, a garage sale fanatic, a half-price hunter, so I don't end up bankrupting myself with my habit.  Unfortunately I do find my office/craft space full of the stuff.

When you are in the habit of buying "used" yarn, it usually comes in less than whole skeins.  Of course, the best find is a bunch of full skeins in the same color and dye lot, but that's the jackpot!  Most of the time, I have bits and pieces from these kinds of purchases.  I have learned to hand roll them into balls (have yet to try a winder) and put a rubber band around them to keep them from unrolling.  It works very well for storing them in bags.

My original yarn "organization."

We could have a long discussion on the advisability and environmental and social impacts of shopping at the The Dollar Tree, but really there are some things you can only find at these stores for a halfway decent price.  One of those things is giant Ziploc bags from "The Home Store" which is a Dollar Tree brand and made in, you guessed it, China.  Let's put the social discussion aside for now and concentrate on how I was getting my yarn organized with these wonderfully cheap things. 

It worked fine for a while... until I got tired of moving them around on the floor of my office/craft space and having to dig through them to find that yarn I KNEW I had somewhere.  I wanted a system where I could see my yarn, it would add something to the style of the room, and it wouldn't look a mess.


I looked at a lot of storage systems, cruised Pinterest, and was very inspired.  The ones that display yarn in beautiful artwork-like wall systems blew me away, but I kept coming back to these issues:  "How do they keep it dust-free??  And what happens when you take one of those skeins out?"

Also, I wanted a solution for storing balls and WIPs (works in progress). Those just do not fit in nice framed storage systems. Of course, it had to be CHEAP AND EASY 'cause that's how I roll.



So I looked around and noticed I had this wall where I had just been sticking up artwork that was given to me, stuff created by my Children's Class or by me, and gifts from the past.  I had another wall I could move all that stuff to, and it gave me a chance to make it much more organized and pretty.  I also moved some of my many plastic storage drawers to under my worktable.  Now I had a blank wall with lots of space.  I also had a value pack of 3M Command Damage-Free Hanging hooks that could hold 5 pounds each.   I had purchased them for a project in the bathroom that didn't work out.  These are amazing things and wonderful for renters.  You stick them on, and they have a tag so you can remove them without scarring the wall or door or whatever you put them on.  It is important to follow the directions, especially about getting the wall clean before applying them.  I hung them in 2 lines of 3.

 To make sure that none of my yarn bags were over 5 pounds, I stepped on the scale with the bag and without the bag, and I was surprised to find none of them were over 3 pounds!  Then I hung them up.  This was much better than the bags on the floor, and all that yarn made me want to jump into new projects, but the bottom right is my current work in progress, and I need to whip myself into finishing it as it's a present for someone who is coming to visit soon!!

I loved the new system, but something just felt off.  Then I realized all that empty space above the yarn was too blank.  It needed something.  Another removable vinyl project is now in the works.  Check back to see where it's going!

Seasons

I grew up in a land of perpetual summer,

not close enough to the equator for monsoons,

not far enough away for there ever to be 

the slightest chance of snow 

except on the highest mountains...

no matter how hard we wished.

Of course, I had seen on screens 
the brilliant colors of the leaves,

the slow, sweet, sad 
dying of the world into winter,

but what a revelation was autumn

in Europe, the Northeast, the Midwest,

but best in the Pacific Northwest.

The sensory experience of “crisp” air,

the textural knowledge that 
rain can be as cold as ice

and then actually be ice!

 

I remember rushing in one morning and saying 

“Everything is covered in ice!”

and being told gently,

like a child a bit behind in vocabulary,

“We call that frost.”

 

The coldness of winter was not a surprise,

but snow, oh snow,
after so many art projects with cotton balls,
white chalk on black paper,
was indeed a wonder.

So quiet the world and clean,
covered in that blanket of stillness,
so brilliant and blinding when the sun shines.
Wet, dry, drifting down, 
furiously swirling, packed and thrown, 
dirty and sullen on the side of the road, melting,
then dangerously pretending to be soft
when already frozen hard again.

The joy of being inside, warm socks, 
fireplaces and snuggling.
Never knowing what will come next out of the sky,
soft, hard, round, long and sleek....
water takes on so many forms.

 

Even summer is a new thing.

Though familiar at first,

it turns on us and becomes 

a raging beast, a dragon with fiery breath,

and then we hide in the shadows,

look for cool water in the shade,

and we remember the blessings 

of trade winds and sweet rain,

but they will not come....

no matter how hard we wish.

 


But the best is spring.
Brave crocuses poking above the snow, peeping out of the mud,
and suddenly daffodils, as bright as the sun, and everywhere!

Then that color that you have seen on crayon wrappers,
touted on paint boxes, described in Easter stories
is draped on barren trees,
and you know in your heart that 
the words “spring green”
can never truly encompass its glory.

I have become addicted to this ever-changing way of life

and cannot go back even though sometimes,

especially in the gray of the very dead of winter,

I dream of the warm and fragrant islands of my youth

and know that they will always be in my heart,

no matter what the weather is like outside.

*I took these photos in these places:  

Autumn is at Hoyt Arboretum in Portland, Oregon.

Winter is at Camp Angelos in Corbett, Oregon

Summer is at Salt Water State Park in Des Moines, Washington

Spring is at Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge in DuPont, Washington

The Tree on My Wall

Detail of the Tree on the Wall

My neighbor invited me to a home decor party that her daughter was giving at her house.  "Kind of like Tupperware," she told me.  "You know, Pampered Chef-ish.  Games, prizes, she sells you stuff to decorate your house."  I was broke and certainly not very interested in buying stuff that other people might use to decorate their houses, but hey, games and prizes?!  I'm there.  Besides, it's the neighbor code thing.  You go to her daughter's decoration party, she buys your kids' cookies or candy or whatever Scouts or school or choir is selling. 

The party was not that wonderful, but it was such an inspiration to me design-wise.  Removable decals, oh my, the things I could do to my walls, even as a renter!  I went through the catalog and realized that not only could I not afford most of it, I wasn't very impressed with the designs they had to offer... except this one tree, a beautiful tree with its leaves blowing off down the wall.  It called out to my heart, and I wanted it really, really badly.  It was $119.00.  There was no way, absolutely and finally, no way I could have that.

I bought some little bugs, a couple of flowers, spent 20 bucks that I explained to my husband in our budget talks as "neighborhood goodwill money," and tried to forget that tree, its leaves floating down the living room wall.

Leaves blowing off down the wall

I saw other cheaper alternatives over the years at Dollar Tree and Michaels and Wal-Mart and tried them, but we found they dried up and fell off eventually, and besides, there was nothing like that tree.  Two moves and five years afterwards, the tree was still there, rooted in my heart.  A little less broke and with a lot more energy, I started researching how I could get what I wanted the way I wanted it:  Cheap and easy.

After spending some time on Pinterest and Etsy, it occurred to me that the crafters selling those beautiful removable decals had to be getting the materials from somewhere, and using the magic Google, I discovered H & H Sign Supply at http://www.hhsignsupply.com, the go-to guys for removable decal wall/craft vinyl in bulk!

I cannot say enough good things about this company.  You can buy their removable vinyl in small amounts to try it out, which I did at first.  They have it in all colors, though I am partial to the shadow stencil type black.  You can buy it in big rolls, which I most recently did.  One of the coolest features of this wonderful E-store is "$5 Dollar Fridays."  It doesn't happen every Friday or even on a schedule, but sometimes they have a sale where all UPS shipping is $5, no matter how much you are buying.  This is a huge honking savings when you are purchasing a 2-foot wide, 30-foot long roll of vinyl.  It's not a light thing to ship.

This is the type I chose after much researching into which ones work best for painted plaster walls:  Oracal 631 Removable Wall Vinyl.  I got a sample pack.  

The Tree on the Wall

The removable wall vinyl is a wonderful craft item.  My whole family enjoyed playing with it. I had to learn to think about the sticky side, to make sure my shapes would be going the right way.  I found it was best to cut it out and then tape it to the wall with masking tape to see if I liked it before actually sticking it on. 

I went ahead and ordered a 5-yard roll of 1-foot wide black, and I got to make my tree.  It took me most of a day to cut it out and put it together, but I had been planning it for a while in my head, where it was going to go, how it was going to look.  I made it happen, cheap and easy, and my heart was full of warm contentment.

Then, of course, we moved again a few months later and off it came.  I can testify to the fact that it comes off very easily and leaves no damage behind.  I do suggest, if you're a renter or unsure at all, that you try a little sample and leave it on for a week or so just to make sure that it comes off easily and neatly from your particular wall.  I found it was actually possible to take it back off and move it even after applying, especially with the leaves and other small things, but the big trunk and branch pieces were difficult to keep in one piece and flat when removed.  I believe it would be possible to take small shapes off and put them on the backing for storage, for holiday stuff and the like, but I have not tried it.  The only irritating part was taking apart a dandelion that I had made in many pieces.  In the future, I plan to not use little tiny pieces ever again.

The Pain to Remove Dandelion at lower right

The tree has come and gone, but now we are in a new place (where we are hopefully going to stay for a while), and I have 60 square feet of black vinyl ready to be made into new wonderful removable wall decals and a house full of mostly blank walls.  I got it on sale at 2.70 a yard for the 24-inch wide roll AND shipped on a $5 Friday, so I made out like a bandit.  Here I have only scratched the surface of the amazing materials they have to offer.  Go check out their site and prepare to be inspired!  Having the tree was awesome, but the potential for making something new is the best feeling ever as I am sure you know.

Look for more removable vinyl projects here in the future.  I hope you enjoyed my first blog and that there will be many more to come!