First feature!!

Today marks a special day in Color Me Domestic history. I've been featured on The Creative Paige!! *does the happy dance* My first feature! Not only was I among the top 3 links clicked, but I was THE most clicked link!! I am truly honored!

thecreativepaige.com

Ok so here's how I found out, if you're interested. It was about 5 minutes before I was set to leave school for the gym. I was trying to waste time and perusing my blogger feed, saw The Creative Genius was up, and decided to look if there were any awesome Valentine's project made this week. When I started scrolling and saw a glimpse of my Magnetic Pin Dish, I quickly scrolled more and saw that I was in the top 3!! Woot woot!! I really did not expect to continue scrolling and see that I was #1. But I was, and I was speechless. Really? Really?! That means I'm the Creative Genius of the week and my button is displayed in her sidebar!


There's me in the left hand side bar!

So like any award, there are people I need to thank. First, Sawdust and Paper Scraps for the idea for the magnetic pin holder, I'm really just a copy cat, without her idea I never would've made this. Second, my dad for helping me with the project and supplying his muscles to remove the cap off the Krylon spray paint (seriously, those things are HARD to open!!) and his garage. Third, my grand-ma, who gave me a reason to make the dish. And finally, all of YOU who came to visit me!!

I'm also getting a lot pins for this on Pinterest, and some Pinterest traffic, which makes everything that much sweeter :) I am officially on the map lol

I have a feeling this is gonna be a great year! I've got a lot of project ideas, I'm just short on materials and opportunity to grab them, time and space. A lot of them, or well the bigger ones, involve woodworking (my primary crafting medium because of my dad's influence), which I can only do when I go to my parents'. So we'll see how things go.

Now I'm off to make a new section in my sidebar: Featured! And also will be working on getting my Projects page up and running while I don't have a ton a projects to organize on there; I see some people clicking there but know there is nothing to see :( That will change soon :)


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Magnetic Pin Dish

Do you or someone you know love to sew? This would be a great, easy present to make!

I know that's what I thought when I first saw this awesome magnetic pin dish at Sawdust and Paper Scraps(be sure to check out hers, too!). Of course I waited until 3 days before Christmas to make it, but anyway... (I blame it on the fact that I have no Michaels in Montreal to get supplies, only when I go home to Ottawa, and that I would not have any space to spray paint inside at my apartment anyway)




Supplies, where I got them, and how much they cost:



~ glass rose decorated plate- dollar store, 1$ (pictured ^^)
~ glass candle holder- dollar store, 1$ (pictured^^)
~ strong magnets- Michaels, 4 for 5$ (I used 3)
~ Spray paint- Michaels, 5$ (with 50% off coupon!) I got Krylon Ocean Breeze, which I've seen a lot of people using lately.
~ Epoxy glue, or E6000 (which I do not have, but original maker used that), on hand

Total: 12$ (less if you have some materials on hand)
Look on grand-ma's face when she opened it: PRICELESS

That's the beauty of making something hand-made for the grand-parents, and you don't need to be a kid for it to be effective!

Alright, so here's how I did it, it varied from the original tutorial quite a lot.

First, since I had a plate with a nice flowery design on the bottom which I wanted to conserve, I turned it upside down and only spray painted the bottom. I only did this once (dried overnight) before moving on to the next step. Also, I did not use a glass primer. Krylon Indoor/Outdoor says it's good for glass (this was my first experience with Krylon!). And I figured that I'm not gonna be painting the inside of the plate where scratching by the pins could occur, it would be good. I dunno if I did the right thing... but I didn't want to buy glass primer on top of that. Does anyone have experience spray painting Krylon on glass without primer? Will my gift hold up?





I used a handy-dandy box to contain the spray painting, even though it didn't go too far and it was in my dad's super messy garage. Oh and don't mind the horrible picture please, it was to illustrate this point. My dad did not want to wait for me to take a ton of pictures in the hope that I would get at least 1 right, haha! (he was helping me, though I didn't really need help, but it was good father-daughter bonding time :) Yes, I get the crafty gene from my dad! )

For the magnets. They were the strongest I could find , but I felt like one did not have a good magnetic radius, so I put 3. Glued with epoxy. Make sure they will fit inside the candle holder!

EDIT: I saw someone comment about not putting it too close to the computer/electronics on one of the pins from this post. I don't think it's THAT strong of a magnet, but I understand that you would want to take precautions. I would think that unless you put it directly on top of the computer and monitor, then you should be ok. I mean, how close does the pin have to be to get pulled by the magnets in the dish anyway... I'd say a couple inches... For more info about computers and magnets, I'm referring you to this article.



Why is there masking tape holding them, you ask? Well, if you'll remember from elementary school (I think?!), magnets have 2 poles, north and south poles. North pole is attracted to south pole, but north poles repel each other. Well, they being so close to each other, if they were on the opposite side from one an other (like one's north pole facing glass, and the other's south pole facing glass), they would just stick together. So we put them all with their north pole facing the glass, but that meant they would repel each other! So there we were having glued them, but they would not stay in the center!! So we put a bit of masking tape until the glue was set. We were careful to not put the masking tape over the glue, and all was good, no peeling.

We let that be for maybe an hour before gluing the candle holder (which was not painted yet). Sorry, forgot to take more in progress pictures :S Let that be for a couple of hours and then spray painted once over the whole thing, with it upside down, before going to bed and letting it dry for the night. Then spray painted 2 more coats in the morning and late afternoon the next day (it was the 24th, I had to wrap it up!). That's it!

Finished product:









The only thing that irks me, that I can't fix, is that since I only put one coat on the plate before gluing everything, there is a spot in the middle that has less paint than the sides and it shows. At least I don't think my grand-ma really noticed, but it does bug me some.

If I were to make one again with the same technique, I would either spray paint just the plate a couple of times before gluing the magnets, or protect most of the plate while painting the candle holder once it's all glued together. I suppose you could paint both pieces separately also, but then the glue might show.





For more crafty projects to make, check out my project gallery, craft section.

Thanks for stopping by! Until next time!



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I party at these parties.If you would like to invite me to your linky party, please do so on my linkies page, thank you!


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Decorating Gingerbread cookies

I know that Christmas has been over for almost a month now, but I'm prolonging the festivities! I'm not ready to let it go, I barely had any time before Christmas to enjoy all my decorations. And since I took some time coming back to blogging after the holidays, I have a few Christmas themed posts left. Hope you don't mind. If you do, then you can skip :)

Last time I told you that I had my girlfriends come over to my parents' place while I was back home, and I showed you the little gifts I made for them.

I had a big day planned for them! But since we hadn't all been in the same room in a LONG time, we ended up crashing in the kitchen and talking mostly, catching up. The one thing we did end up doing in my planned activites was gingerbread cookies. Yup, never too old to enjoy this Christmas activity! And decorating them, of course!



This was actually my first time EVER making these, even as a kid we never did. I followed this recipe. One of my friends took over the rolling of the dough since she had experience with that ;) It was so much fun rolling and cutting out the shapes. I'm not sure exactly how many cookies we had, but we had lots!





For the decorating part, I had looked for icing tubes, but at 3$ for every color, I thought it would be WAY better to do it myself!

All it is is icing sugar and milk added until you get a good consistency (so not too runny but not too hard either). And we got to make our own colors. We made some very fun colors if I do say so myself. Just put them in a baggy, snip the end, and have fun decorating. I also had jujubes (dots) and M&Ms as buttons or what not.



We each had a color to start with and passed it around when we wanted change. For some reason, I ended up making about double as everyone else. Here's my stash:



One of my friends' stash:



And some of the favorites:







And this one might not be child friendly so click to see, if you want, I thought it was funny:

Little Boy Gingerbread

To be honest, I didn't like the cookies all that much, just not what I thought gingerbread cookies would taste like. But everyone else did, so that's ok. And the boyfriend didn't mind having all those cookies made just for him in the end :)

Next week, I'll show you the gifts I made for my grand-ma's. What's better than something handmade by their grand-daughter for someone who seems to have everything?!

Thanks for stopping by, until next time!



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I party at these parties.If you would like to invite me to your linky party, please do so on my linkies page, thank you!

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Party favors and decorative magnets

Is it too late to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year? No? Ok, good! Because this is my first real post of the year, and I forgot to tell you all in my last post. I guess I was too busy trying to ask for help (which I still need btw, blog design is a tricky thing).

It really wasn't in my plans to absent myself so long from my blog. But school comes first! So I took almost 3 weeks off (even work in the lab) to study for my finals. Then Christmas came, I went back home for most of the holidays, and the rest I just vegged on my couch, spent a whole day reading Hunger Games (I am now done the trilogy now, absolutely loved it!). I also took a lot of time to reorganize just about every storage place I had in our little apartment(closets, drawers, shelves), it's a lot more functional now!

I did manage, however, to snag a lot of pictures for future posts during the holidays! I made a few of gifts, mostly inspired by all of you in blogland! So today I am sharing the first of many. Even though Christmas has come and gone, there is always next year, and birthdays!

While I was back home, I invited my closest girlfriends for a little girl time. We hadn't been all in the same room since probably high school, 6 years ago. I had a lot planned out for that day, but in the end, we ended up mostly talking, which was totally fine! I wanted to make them a little something with my new crafty talents, and naturally I had pinned a few things, but in the end made these:



I'd seen these toilet paper roll favors all over in the last few months, and I couldn't help but make my own! They are really great for small gifts.

I ended up searching for a tutorial since it was my first time with Mod Podge and I wasn't exactly sure how to go about. I followed this tutorial from Crissy's Crafts.





The trickiest bit I found was folding the ends over, they just never seemed quite as nicely folded as everyone else's. Once I had the Christmas scrapbook paper Mod Podged on, it became somewhat easier, though.

The decorative magnets have also been ALL over blogland (I'm sorry if you're tired of seeing them) and it's not hard to understand why. These were so simple to make, cheap, and you could give to just about anyone. The original tutorial I followed was Potentially Beautiful's.



I bought a scrapbook paper page with a lot of different colors and designs on it to be able to make different sets. All but the blue one came from that one page, and I do find them quite different!



The magnets I used were from a small dollar store, and they seemed a lot more powerful than the brand they have at the big chain Dollarama. In fact, in these pictures I took, I had to separate the magnets a bit so they didn't repel each other or stick together, that's how strong they were! I really don't think they would've been very useful with just magnet tape (which I tried, but I really didn't feel much pull when I stuck it to the fridge).

Just a little tip if you're using hot glue like me, if I too little then the cold magnet cools it down too quickly and I couldn't squish it down properly and it bulged out more than I wanted it to. Took me a few stones to figure that one out. So I used a really good blob of glue and was able to get it right and push it down close to the stone ;)













I just used a bit of fake snow to cushion them inside so they wouldn't move all over, and voila! A little something for everyone!


Did you end up making something in bulk to give out during the holidays? I'd love to get ideas for next year!


Next time I'll show you what we did end up doing for the 6 hours we were together. Let's just say you're never too old to enjoy some simple Christmas traditions!

Until next time, thanks for stopping by!




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I party at these parties.If you would like to invite me to your linky party, please do so on my linkies page, thank you!


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Blog design, need some feedback/help!

Well, there it finally is! (go to my blog if you aren't reading it from there) My very own custom made blog design! I'm happy to have personalized my blog at least a little bit. I'm not completely done, but I was getting really tired of looking at the "out-of-the-box" design I had going on. And I've been working on it for over a month and really wanted to show it! I really didn't think it would take me so long to get it together, but, yeah... Well, I did most of the graphics the first week back in December, during my study breaks.

I LOVE my header, and I hope you do, too!! Please, please, please let me know what you like or don't like about my blog design! I also love my social media buttons, it's so cute! Is it too much? But at the same time, simple and elegant isn't my style, either. But if you hate it, I totally won't be offended, everyone has their own taste.

Ok onto the help part.

The part that took me so long, and in the end I still haven't figured out, is for a menu bar under my header. See, someone pointed me to The Blog Design Network and the first post I saw was how to use CSS image sprites, to have images change at hover. Sure it might be a little advanced, but I just loved the idea so much, and for me it really doesn't matter how complicated it is, if it does what I want it to, I will learn how to use it.

So that's how I designed my social media button image. For some reason, it looks a little wonky (the first button, Facebook, is a little higher than the other 2, and also there's a green dotted line above the other 2, have no idea why it's doing that). But at least it works, and I can like with a bit of wonkyness.

I also designed a menu bar with the same technique/code, but for some reason it just won't work in blogger. I mean, I test it out in a visual editor, and it looks just like I intend it to, but when I put it in a widget, which I position under my header, there is nothing. I really am at a loss of why it will not work. I've found an other way of doing it (still trying to figure out how to add the last image so it doesn't jump to the next line, that's why there's a gap), but if I could get the css sprite way to work, I'd rather have that. I tried asking for help on the Blogger forum, and on the post's comments, but no one is responding. I'm hoping that maybe someone will read this and know what is wrong. Please help me!

I'm probably still gonna tweak it, still want to make a post separator, signature button, put a picture of myself (IF I can get a decent one! I seriously do not have many), but you get the picture. Also, not liking my button, I feel completely uninspired for it (unlike the rest: background, header, social media buttons), or it's not coming out well when I do have an idea. Ok, nevermind, I just tweaked it and am now satisfied, maybe even like it now.

I realize I still have a lot of work to do, but I also desperatly need help for the menu bar, and so this is my cry for help! And a little update.

I actually have quite a few posts in the works, that I have the pictures for, but yet have to edit them and write it. I feel so overwhelmed with house work since I finished my exams (also spent the holidays away), and that is coming first, but I'm almost done, and so you should see more posts from me by next week (there I said it, must keep my word!).

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