Dried Wedding Flower Ornament

Posted in diy, Holiday by peppermintsandhoneybees

Happy Holidays everyone! I have a really easy but special DIY for this Season. And of course they don’t have to be from a wedding bouquet but these are from my wedding which was last June.

I wanted to preserve a bit of my flowers but I don’t want them in a shadow box because I had hydrangeas and things with tiny parts that would just fall apart anyway.

I don’t know how many years they will keep but they should last at least a few years.

All you need is some clear glass ornaments and dried petals and leaves. Be careful when placing everything in the ornaments because they are very thin glass and you don’t want it to break and cut you. It’s that easy! If you don’t celebrate Christmas and/or have a tree they would look great handing from ribbon in a window or from a shelf also.

I added some of my wedding pictures also, since I realized I never shared them on here last summer.

Have an amazing holiday season!

15Oct2015

Pumpkin Terrarium

Posted in craft, Holiday by peppermintsandhoneybees

When I was in elementary school I always secretly loved projects where I got to make dioramas. I’ve always loved miniatures and love making little scenes. So when I found some pictures on Pinterest here and here that combined my love of dioramas with my love for Halloween I knew what I had to do! I found the foam pumpkin at Goodwill. Someone had tried to carve what sort of looked like a castle and gave up so I buggy it and just cut a big hole out where they had started carving. Of course you can just by a new foam pumpkin from any craft store in the fall. Just make sure it’s the hallow carve-able kind!

I chose to spray paint the inside black as shown below but it’s totally up to you what you want the inside to look like.

I used rocks, sticks and different kinds of moss for the terrarium. The moon and stars are glow-in-the-dark stickers and the fox is a little figurine from Joann’s. Finding things to put in is half the fun! I’m still on the hunt for very tiny battery powered led string lights that I can attach the the top inside to shine light down on my scene. It’ll be fun to switch things around every year. Now get to crafting!

6Jul2015

My Fourth Of July Weekend

Posted in My Life by peppermintsandhoneybees

Hello, I hope you all had a great weekend. If you live in the U.S. then you probably celebrated the Fourth of July with fireworks or a barbecue, but whatever you did I hope it was great! Here are just a few photos of my weekend. Ben and I went to Madison, WI for a concert Friday night so we stayed the weekend and hung out in Madison which is a very cool artsy city. We watched fireworks on the lake, ate cheese curds and just walked around. This is the second time we have been to Madison and we love it! also they have a pretty nice contemporary art museum. Have a good week everyone, let me know what you did for the 4th.

One of the amazing horse sculptures by the artist Deborah Butterfield at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

The Capitol Building

Waiting for fireworks to begin

25Mar2015

Concrete Easter Eggs

Posted in diy, Holiday by peppermintsandhoneybees

Hey everyone, it’s Wednesday, woohoo! We’re half way to the weekend and even though we just got about 4″ of snow here on Monday, (not cool Mother Nature) I’m excited for Spring and Easter. My family never did a whole lot to celebrate Easter other than Easter egg hunts and and getting together to eat too much food, but its always been one of my favorite holidays to decorate for. I think its because I love rabbits and animals in general along with anything Spring/Summer related. I found this diy on Pinterest by Camille Styles for making concrete eggs with real egg shells. I’ve actually been working on this for a while because I needed to get enough egg shells to fill. When I would use an egg to cook with I would just break out the bottom with a knife of my finger. You want to take the bottom out so that you can fill it from there and then when the concrete is dry they can stand up. Below are the supplies I used; the cup and knife were for the concrete mix and make sure to have paper towels handy. You can usually find concrete mix at any craft or hardware store, it’s pretty fun to work with! If you’ve never mixed concrete, plaster, or anything similar, I use the mound method which is where you fill the cup up with about 1/3 water and slowly add the mix until there is a little mountain on top that doesn’t sink down immediately into the water. Stir it up until there are no clumps or bubbles. it should be about the consistency of pancake mix. I have to admit I got some of mine a little too thick and some didn’t quite turn out perfect but I like some imperfections in mine.

I got a little messy and broke one, whoops! 😉

After your eggs are filled let them dry outside for at least 24 hours. Use an exact-o knife to help peel the shell of and that’s all! If you’d like you can paint or stamp you eggs or anything else you can think of. I might do something with mine but I’m not sure what yet. If I do change them I’ll give an update.

My Easter Table

P.S. the adorable basket and grass cloth are from my good friends at Glory Days Mercantile, check them out they have tons of cute Easter decor!

19Jan2015

Valentine’s Day Garland

Posted in craft, diy, Holiday, home by peppermintsandhoneybees

Hola peeps! I took a bit of a hiatus from blogging, not really on purpose but more because I was too busy to start/work on new projects and before I knew it January was half over! I am totally scared by the way time works and wish things would slow down just a bit. Now its that time of year that I just want to bypass to warmer days but I’m trying to enjoy the here and now and find the good, even in this frozen wasteland, because one day I’ll look back and miss these times!

I’ve never really decorated too much for Valentines day but since I have a craft blog now I figured I’d see what I could come up with, and love the results. I’m really starting to get in that heart everything spirit now and even though I don’t do frilly decorations (unless they’re vintage of course!) I made some simple nature inspired pieces. The arrows are inspired by similar ones I found on Pinterest. I used sticks for mine though and used paint and marker for the feathers. the heart tips are cardstock. I also made some of the feathers into earrings for my Etsy shop Peppermint Emporium. The garland is straight from my noggin and is just sticks, coffee filters dyed with watered down craft paint and twine. grab your glue gun and there ya go! Ben buys the unbleached coffee filters so I was a little disappointed that they weren’t white, but afterward I decided I liked the brown color better, it lends itself to the natural rustic vibe I was going for.

27Dec2014

Holiday Gifts

Posted in craft, diy, Holiday by peppermintsandhoneybees

Hello, I hope you had a Merry Christmas and are resting up with family and friends! I know Christmas is over, but I couldn’t post any of the stuff I made as gifts until I gave them out, but you could still make them for yourself or birthdays, or just wait till next year. So here we have wood burned bamboo spoons, hand stamped cork coasters, and yes, those are the marble clay dishes from A Beautiful Mess!

20Dec2014

Bleaching and Dyeing Bottle Brush Trees

Posted in diy, Holiday by peppermintsandhoneybees

I’ve been seeing lots of bottle brush trees all over Pinterest this Christmas season and love all of the different colors. I love the vintage-looking scenes that can be set up with bottle brush trees and I’ve always preferred to decorate with pastels and bright colors instead of the usual red and green themes. I had some bottle brush trees left over from the snow globes I made last year and also bough a bag of small bleached trees from Michaels.

I bleached the trees I had that were green with the intention of dyeing them after I was done but was pleasantly surprised when the trees I had from last year turned light pink before bleaching completely and the one green tree I had bought this year turned a light mint bluish-green. Since this was the colors I wanted to dye them I left them this color and then fully bleached a few.

I used my hurricane glass vase to bleach because I wanted something that was tall and narrow to stick the trees is, normally I wouldn’t use my good glass but ya know, use what you have! I used 1/3 bleach to 2/3 water in the glass and used tongs to dip them in. It really didn’t take long for them to start bleaching and I swished them around in the bleach water to help with the tongs, just wear rubber gloves and be careful. After I bleached the trees I soaked them in soapy water to get the bleach off.

Most of the tutorials I read said to use Rit dye to dye, or food coloring or cool-aid would also probably work, but I used this spray on dye by SEI Tumble Dye that I already had. I love this because it is already made and you can just spray it on, it’s perfect for small dye jobs and comes it tons of colors. You can find it at craft stores or online at www.shopsei.com.

I also touched up the happy accident trees a bit with the spray dye and mixed a bit with water in a spray bottle to get different shades. On the biggest tree I sprayed a couple different colors for an airbrushed ombre effect. That was another reason I used the spray, for the ombre effect, but if you’re going for one solid color, I’d recommend the dip dye method.

I love how they turned out, and I also sprayed a bottle brush wreath I found at Joanne Fabric! Show me yours on Instagram with the hashtag #peppermintsandhoneybees.

Happy Holidays!

18Dec2014

Decorating My Tiny Apartment for Christmas

Posted in Holiday, home by peppermintsandhoneybees

Hello, I hope everyone is doing well and getting everything ready for Christmas! I thought I’d show a couple pictures of some of my Christmas decorating this year. We wanted to get a tree but I couldn’t find any for a price I wanted so I’ll wait and look after Christmas. My mom taught me to always shop for holidays after the actual holiday for the next year! SO anyway since we didn’t get a tree I strung all of my ornaments on a garland and I actually really like they way it looks. I also found these adorable peppermint and red, green and white globe bulbs at Target in the $3 section.

Happy decorating!

13Dec2014

DIY Snow Globes

Posted in diy, Holiday by peppermintsandhoneybees

Hello, I’ve been busy trying to get all of my Christmas shopping done and make the presents that I am hand-making. This was actually something I made last Christmas as presents for everyone and silly me I didn’t take any pictures of all of them before I gifted them, probably because I didn’t have a blog yet, but I do have one left. I kept this little guy for myself to put out.

I had looked at quite a few different blogs to see how they made theirs and after reading about how the ones containing water and glycerin had made the green of the bottle brush trees bleed after a year, I decided to go without liquid. I was worried it wouldn’t look as cool but I was pretty happy with how they turned out, as I was going for more of a terrarium scene than actual snow globe I guess. Plus I didn’t have to buy glycerine!

I used:

Old glass jars with lids
Bottle brush trees
Tiny winter animals, cars, people, houses, ect.
fake snow (mine is from Michaels where the miniature Christmas village houses and stuff is)
glass beads to glue on tree for ornaments (optional)
I used bakers string for the jar, you could also use ribbon or nothing at all
Spray-paint (again optional) I spray-painted all of my jar lids silver because they were from food jars
Glue, I used my trusty E-6000 but hot glue would also work

I glued the tree and animal to the inside of the lid and put the desired amount of snow in the jar. I then screwed the lid on after everything was dry and voila, It’s that easy! I’d love to see what yours look like so put them on Instagram and hashtag them #peppermintsandhoneybees.

7Dec2014

My Weekend

Posted in Holiday, Jewelry, Products by peppermintsandhoneybees

Hello, I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! I know it’s been a while since I posted but it was because I’ve been getting ready for a jewelry show I did yesterday and trying to get my Christmas shopping and making done. I was at the Holiday Market for an elementary school in my area and it was a great fist show to do. So hopefully now I can start doing more! I have some fun Christmas DIY’s planned for the next few weeks so for now here’s a picture of my table at the market. Have a great weekend!