Marbled River Rocks

Today I am showing you a Marbled River Rocks garden craft! It's a fun & easy DIY, and a great way to get more colour into your garden.

You can watch my youtube video below for this craft, or you can keep reading below.

Start with some smooth river rocks spray painted white and some Easy Marble paints. Easy Marble paints are waterproof and lightfast; which make them perfect to use for a project that will be outdoors in the elements.

*For my fellow Aussies you can buy Easy Marble paints through Art House Direct

You take a container large enough to fit your rocks in, fill with water and drop 2-3 of your chosen colours into it. The paints will sit on the surface of the water.

Take a stick and swirl the paint around. It dries pretty quickly so I tried to work fast.

Take one of your river rocks and submerge it into the water. Before you pull the rock back out, swish any extra paint still floating on the surface of the water away from the rock so you don't get a double-up of colour on its way out. Also, make sure you're wearing gloves: the safety recommendations for the paint states that you should avoid skin contact.

Ta da! Once you've marbled one rock, use a scrap piece of cardboard to lift any remaining paint out from the water surface ready to marble another rock. Make as many rocks as you want!

Someone had fun placing them in the garden!

Jules :)

DIY Craft: Rhubarb Concrete Stepping Stones

Hello!

I have a DIY concrete craft for you today: rhubarb concrete stepping stones.

I have by no means come up with this project. I've just seen it done so many times and wanted to make some for our backyard and I'm sharing our experience.

It's sumer here! I am so happy the weather is warming up which means we're heading outdoors much more as a family on our one acre block. There are always jobs to do (so many weeds- ugh!) and big projects to work on that Jimmy has started. We are currently working on some crazy paving using slate in a new fire pit area. We have an electric cement mixer here (which I dubbed Jimmy's thermomix) and I decided to steal some of the mix so the kids could be outside alongside us working making stepping stones.

We laid out some plastic sheeting on an outdoor table and the girls picked some large rhubarb leaves from the garden. (See Jimmy, rhubarb IS useful for more than just apple and rhubarb pie :D)

The leaves have lots of cool veiny texture which captures really well in the concrete.

We had some pretty tough wire that we used for reinforcing (which you can see in the bottom left hand corner above), which Jimmy cut with a grinder. You will need some sort of wire to reinforce the stepping stones, if you need to cut by hand just use the thickest wire you can manage to cut by hand.

The girls then took handfuls of the concrete mix and slapped them down onto the leaf. You keep adding them till you reach near the edges. I get them to wear kids gloves as you don't want skin to come into contact with concrete. 

(For a nice strong concrete mix I like to use 1 part grey cement, 2 parts fine sand, and 1 one part coarse sand and a cement additive (optional) to packet instructions. You can also find suggested mixes on the sides of a bag of portland cement.)

We kept in from the edge of the leaf an inch or so, and shaped our leaves into heart shapes. Once we had one layer of concrete on the leaf, we placed our wire reinforcing in, then added another layer of concrete. Our stepping stones were around 1 1/2- 2" thick. 

The girls tended to make their edges a little thin so I needed to remind them to build them up to make them the same thickness as the centre of the stepping stone.

Once shaped, we let set for 1/2- 1 hour then came back and covered with plastic. I kept them damp and covered for one week to let them cure for extra strength. (A minimum of 3 days would be sufficient.) 

24 hours after they've been made you can peel the leaf off and neaten up any rough edges with a chisel or rasp. 

The kids had fun peeling pieces of leaves back! :) They were really stuck in there, but they come out easily when they're all dry.

I love how they turned out and want to make lots for all around the garden! Jimmy thinks the rhubarb has earned it's keep (he thinks it pointless keeping something that requires a tonne of sugar to do anything with.)

I hope you enjoyed our DIY craft rhubarb concrete stepping stones experience, please drop a comment if there's anything you'd like me to craft out of concrete. It's such a versatile product, and it lasts a long time as art in the garden. Affordable, and no kiln needed! 

Enjoy,

Jules :)

Bunny Turns Ten! And Bonus DIY Party Favor craft Tutorial!

Hello Creatives!

Bunny turned 10! I can't believe it! So we had a special celebration, and I wanted to share a tutorial for the party favor craft we did at the party.

First up, here's the bunny cake that I spent a whole day on making! I found a beautiful cake on Pinterest and set out to recreate something similar. I've never piped icing flowers before, but I had a piping set, the will, and then a bit of searching how to pipe flowers on you-tube and I was ready to go.

The cake was marbled pink inside, and I also cut out a chunk out from the center and filled it with baby marshmallows. 

Grab 'em while you can!!

Here's an aerial view of the top of the cake...

The cake below was my inspiration, but the link on Pinterest didn't go anywhere. If this is your cake, or you know who's it is, please let me know so I can credit it.

The nibbles table...

In lieu of lolly bags (whose kids need extra sugar after a party!?) we completed a craft activity which I finished up whilst the kids were busy so they could take them home with them when they left.

We used stamps, beads & patterned buttons to stamp into flattened disks of polymer clay. I found I had to roll the clay out for the girls to keep a nice even shape.

We poked holes through the top with something sharp. A skewer would work well. 

After the girls finished stamping their pendants, I baked the clay in the oven. We used white Sculpey; it's easy and quick to get soft and usable.

After they baked and cooled I took orders for colours, and painted them all over. I then took a damp tissue and wiped away the excess colour, leaving the paint to sit in the recessed areas to make the texture stand out.

I added jump-rings to each pendant and a bit of coloured cord. They were a hit and I don't think the lolly bags were even missed!

I could've done the painting with the kids too, but we just ran out of time. We had some farm animals (including bunnies of course) at the party for a couple of hours so that was our main activity.

We've also recently had our other daughter's party, so I will share details of that soon. (It was Harry Potter themed.)

Now to rest and recover, and get back to normal life!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BUNNY!

Jules :)

Kids Craft Project: Painted Dream Catchers

Hello Creativity Lovers!

I'm sharing a craft project that we kept busy with one day over the school holidays.

We had some of our kids' friends over for a whole day, and they are art and craft lovers, so we thought we'd come up with a special project for them to complete while they were here. 

Painted dream catchers! 

I got the fabric circles and wire loops ready before our guests came over. I cut circles of calico, a little smaller than the wire circles I made, sewed around them leaving a gap, snipped around the edges then turned out to the right side. I pressed the circles with an iron, then topstitched close to the edges all around, sealing the opening.

I gave each circle a coat of gesso and let dry. Check out my desk, one of my kids has written "ART!" Haha.

I suggested each kid think of a theme for their dream catcher, and we printed off some pictures from the internet for inspiration. I also suggested we each thought about our colour theme, and whether we wanted lighter or darker colours. One of my girls thought a colour palette scheme printed from the internet would be a good idea, so we did that.

Once the kids were in the studio, they chose fabric to wrap around our wire circles, sealing the ends with tacky craft glue. 

Then the kids got to work painting their chosen themes. We used student grade acrylic paint, and one kid chose to add some pen to the top of their dry painting (we used a hair dryer to speed up the paint drying), and another chose to use some stamps to embellish her piece.

The stamping was done by painting acrylic paint onto the stamp then pressing onto the fabric. You need to quickly wash stamps after doing that, before the acrylic paint dries into grooves.

Contrast works well in paintings. I suggested a darker background here to make the cat stand out. Of course, I'm not strict about it all, if someone chooses to go against my suggestion, then I'm all for letting their own individual creativity and ideas shine!

Then came sewing our paintings into our wire loops. To make it easier, I used a hammer and a chunky nail to make holes around the edges so the kids could easily sew their chosen wool colour through the edges of the paintings. We used tapestry needles for the sewing.

We found it easier to loosely sew the calico circle in, then go around fixing the tension of the wool later.

Busy, crafty, fun work!

The kids then chose from ribbons, fabric strips, ric-rac, wool, and beaded strands to "flourish" their dream catchers. (Flourish was a word used by one of the kids- love it!)

They also discovered my supply of resin flowers, and so some of them got added to their paintings as well. I made wool loops to attach to the tops for hanging.

Then, the dream catchers were all finished, and our proud guest artists went home with a unique piece of art to hang in their rooms and catch all their wildest dreams!

I hope you enjoyed seeing the process of our latest kids craft project.

Jules :)