She's Crafty | Bright and Fearless Decorating

Are you craving an immediate change to your interior decor? Do you feel as though a few spaces in your life need a mega dose of color and a touch of whimsy? Are you stumped as to how to pull a colorful room together? Well, my answer is yes to all three so I pulled two books off the shelf in hopes of getting some inspiration for home and office decor.

Feast your eyes on these book covers:

Bright Bazaar: Embracing Color for Make-You-Smile Style by Will Taylor.

Decorate Fearlessly! Using Whimsy, Confidence, and a Dash of Surprise to Create Deeply Personal Spaces by Susanna Salk.

Beautiful, right?!

Bold too. Both of these books have style ideas that reach way beyond the average or typical.

If you want to get some pattern mixing inspiration I suggest checking out Decorate Fearlessly. As you can plainly see on the cover, a space can exist that mixes over a dozen different patterns and it will still work. Also, your pug will most likely approve the combination. Although my brain can't handle that much pattern mixing, I did enjoy the creative texture and color combinations featured in the book. Almost every single one I would have never thought of before.

Kitchen decor from Decorate Fearlessly.

The next book, Bright Bazaar, is bold and whimsical. The focus of the book is on learning to use colors and textures effectively for a style that is one-of-a-kind. Will Taylor packs Bright Bazaar with inspirational case studies, tons of tips, and plenty of ideas.

Looking at bright colors and white walls in Bright Bazaar.

Many of the spaces Taylor features in his book contain decorative objects that are obviously DIY and not something you can find at the store. Taylor doesn't give step-by-step instructions for the pieces but if you're the crafty sort you can probably figure out how to replicate what you see. Like the wall string art below.

Be forewarned, walls, I realllly like this idea!

Geometric Gems from Sea Lemon DIY

Now for some DIY. Sea Lemon is one of my favorite craft gurus. She uploads video tutorials to YouTube and I discovered her while researching how to make bound books. She uploaded a video recently showing viewers how to construct 3D geometric gems to display on the wall or set on a table, which is perfect for me since I can't get enough geometric designs in my life and I have a thing for simple line representations of gems.


I see a great many of these gems in my future. if you're interested in finding out how to make these wall gems, click here for the youtube tutorial. All you need is some wooden dowels, hot glue, and some paint. I was able to find all the stuff I need to make all four designs at my local craft store.



Malia

She's Crafty | Book Bound

Over the Christmas season I made a few gifts. Handmade books to be exact. I've dabbled in bookbinding before but I kinda went overboard and made my projects more difficult than they really needed to be. Too many pages, too many little holes...if you have to grab a drill to bind a book and it's still too hard, your project may be a bit more ambitious than a newbie can handle. I abandoned my projects and set bookbinding aside, thinking it wasn't my thing.

Recently, I got the itch to try again while looking for a drawing book that would lay flat when opened and stumbled upon THE BEST bookbinding video tutorials EVER by YouTuber, Sea Lemon! Go on, check them out for yourself:

• Click here to make a sketch book that will lay flat when opened.

• Click here to make a book from a Junior Mints box!

• Click here to make a sushi book...or two...or six.

For Christmas gifts, I ended up making three different book projects. The first, a coptic stitch bound sketch book for a friend. I bought a large mixed media drawing pad, detached all the pages and folded them in half, cut the cardboard backing in half, poked a bunch of holes in everything, waxed some thread, followed the video instructions on how to coptic stitch and within an hour the book was finished!

I heart binder clips!

The second project was a few sushi books with a perfect binding. Perfect binding involves gluing the spine instead of stitching the pages together. A few layers of glue and it's surprising how well the pages stick together! It's also fun deciding how to press the books while gluing. I decided to make six, three a piece to two little girls who love to go to sushi with the adults in their lives. It seemed like an easy-peasy project, and it really is, but six is a LOT more work than I thought! They are incredibly cute little books and decorating the covers made the tedious bits completely worth the effort.

 
The third project was going to be a set of small, bright blue notebooks with a perfect binding and gold leafing on the cover. Late, the night before I would be handing over this project as a gift I: got the pages bound together; cut the cover to size and scored it in all the right places following the Junior Mint recycled book tutorial; got what I thought was the gold leaf out annnd failure commenced. Now that I think about it, I believe the gold stuff I used wasn't exactly gold leaf. In the end, I had to purchase a gift, BUT I'm determined to revisit the gold leaf book project and find success.

Gold leaf imposter AKA gold stuff

I'm glad I found the Sea Lemon videos. They helped me bring bookbinding down from some lofty perch I stuck it on long ago with the title of Maybe This Isn't For Me. Dwindling are the days that I can't move forward in my pursuit of learning a new craft because I can't find resources to help me puzzle the problems out. At this moment in time, I may not know how to use a decades old kit of gold stuff with successful results, but I did learn how to make a few books!

And, not surprisingly, the library has many books on handmade books:

Whip up a book in no time!

• Book Making and Paper Making

• The Penland Book of Handmade Books

• The Handmade Book

• Making and Keeping a Handmade Journal 

• Making Books by Hand: A Step-by-Step Guide

• The Book Book: A Journey into Bookmaking 

There is even a picturebook about bookmaking for the little ones!

• Magic in the Margins: A Medieval Tale of Bookmaking  

Until next time, enjoy your crafting endevours and keep at it. You never know, you might find a book or video that gets you going in the direction towards great success!

Kaye & Malia