Hello everyone! Today I am here with a cute DIY using some wine/liquor bottle corks that I acquired from my mother. I liked these in particular as they had distinct shapes:

I started off by drilling a small hole in the tops of all of my corks. I did not go all the way through, but just wanted to make a small indent that I could later use for some kind of hanging hardware as the intention was for these to be ornaments.

I then used some acrylic craft paint directly onto the cork. For the more bulbous corks, I had the vision of them being little mushrooms, so I painted the round top red and the base white. The less round ones I decided to make into little snowman heads with hats, so I painted the tops black and the bottoms white as well. 

Once the mushroom corks were dry, I used the end of a paintbrush to dab on some white dots of paint to give them the classic red mushroom look.

For the snowmen, I did a dot of black and then a smaller dot of white on the faces to give them some eyes.

For the snowmen, I also painted the pointy tips of some wooden sticks that I had cut orange to be their three-dimensional noses. When it was time to glue on the noses, I scratched away the paint in the area I was going to glue to ensure maximum adhesion and then attached the noses using some strong multipurpose glue.

I also gave all of the ornaments a coat of clear sealer once the paint had dried. Using the same glue I had used to attach the snowman noses, I filled the holes that I had drilled earlier so they were completely full of glue. I then took some thin twine and cut lengths of it, folded it in half and stuck the folded ended into the hole as far as I could. The glue then dried around the twine and left me with some long strings that I could tie off.

Once I tie these off, they will be ready to go! These were so easy to make, and I think they are a great use of corks. I have acquired some additional corks since I finished these out and can't wait to come up with some new ornament ideas!

What do you guys think about these ornaments? Let me know in the comments below!

 - Rebecca

P.S. Today's photo on the homepage is from Pexels user Isabella Mendes:
www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-brown-cork-wood-lot-928250/

Hello everyone! We are taking a break from the crochet crafts this week so that I can share a cute magnet project with you all. I'm not exactly sure where the inspiration for these came from, but I had it in my head recently that I wanted to make something with tiny little frames. I found these cute resin dollhouse-sized frames on Amazon:

Once I had the frames in hand, the idea morphed into making tiny little frames with famous paintings in them. I printed out 2 well-known paintings each from 5 painters, once I had shrunk them down to the proper scale. The 5 artists were Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, Edvard Munch and Pablo Picasso. I am going to be honest with you that I'm not really sure this is "legal" per say. Some of the paintings are public domain and are available for download via museum websites. Others, however, I could not find this way, so I did just copy the image from a good old Google search. That is why I will only be selling these at craft fairs, not on Etsy juuuuuuust in case :)

I cut out the paintings and then glued them down to the cardboard of a seltzer box to make them a little sturdier. I did leave a small border of white around the paintings so that I could have an edge around for gluing into the frames later.

Once the paintings were on the cardboard, I used a Ziploc bag to give a shiny "glass" look and to protect the paintings a bit. I glued this down to the front, being sure to only use glue around the edges so that it wouldn't get in the way of the picture.

I then covered the back of the cardboard with some fun shiny gold paper to finish it off.

I then used a bead of clear Gorilla Glue on the back of the frames and glued the paintings on, with the shiny side down so you could see the paintings through the front of the frames.

At this point, I was thinking that maybe these might work well as ornaments, but I felt like there wasn't a good way to attach a hook for hanging that wouldn't damage the frames. I had the perfect number of tiny magnets leftover from other projects to allow 3 on each frame so I decided they would be very cute as "fridge frames." I will be honest that attaching these magnets was kind of a pain. Since the frames were so small, I couldn't attach all of the magnets at once without them all snapping together so I had to glue each magnet down separately and use a pair of scissors to weigh each down while it was drying.

Once that was all done, these were ready to go! Here are all 5 pairs:

I think these are adorable! I am going to get them packaged up as pairs for craft fairs and here's hoping other people think they are cute too. Let me know what you think in the comments below!

 - Rebecca 

P.S. Today's photo on the homepage is from Pexels user Alex Qian:
www.pexels.com/photo/stainless-steel-refrigerator-beside-white-kitchen-cabinet-2343467/