What Van Gogh would have done if he were a stamp collector ...

       

        

 

One day my roommate and I were looking around DI and we came upon a really great stamp collection. We bought it, no questions asked. What was the obvious step after that??? Make a Van Gogh. 

I have to give most of the credit to my roommate.  She was the master mind behind the whole thing.  We bought a large canvas and borrowed some Mod Podge from the neighbors.  We organized the stamps into: flags, fruits/flowers, pictorial, foreign, Christmas, and presidents.  We then just did a color by numbers.  

Flags with white background- sky

Flags with dark background-hill at the bottom

Foreign- swirl in the middle and the moon

Pictorial-peak in the middle

Fruits/Flowers- stars

Presidents-Streak through the middle

The Christmas ones didn't make the cut, but I did use them later.

While we were working on our project we watched Charade. It seemed like an appropriate film while working on stamps.  I have to admit about 3/4 of the way through this project (like 3 hours in) I never wanted to see another stamp again.  It took a few days before I could feel good about it hanging  in the apartment.  Now I love it!

 Attached to one of the stamps was part of a letter. We could only see a few words but we thought it was an appropriate signature for our work of art

Budget Ornaments

This year I wanted to make ornaments to decorate my tree with.  I don't have a ton of $$ lying around for decorations so I needed it to be basically free.

  I got a typewriter this summer and I have been crafting non-stop with it. So of course I wanted to use my typewriter in the making of these ornaments. Side Note: Getting a typewriter was probably one of the best things I've ever done.  It is so easy to use and makes any project, list, label, note, letter... x10 cuter!   

 I also had a large collection of old Christmas stamps laying around (more on that later) that I wanted to use.

To make the paper/stamp ornaments I typed tons of Christmas words onto brown paper bags (free), then cut them into segments and glued them, along with a few stamps, onto the ornaments ($1 at Big Lots).  

For the fabric ornaments I just hot glued small pieces of fabric left over from my quilt onto small plastic ornaments ($3 at Walmart). The ruffly one is the same small plastic ornament and the same small fabric squares but, using a technique I learned in 1st grade, I wrapped the square around the end of a pencil and just hot glued the eraser end to the ornament so the middle of the fabric is glued and the ends of the fabric are standing on end.

The glass ornaments (also purchased at Big Lots for $1) were made by typing the same 3 words in a column, then making a fold under each word and taping the ends together to form a pyramid.  I used a gold spray-paint pen to run around the edges to make it a little more festive.

By Christmas I only finished about 10 so I guess I'll work on them all year and they can be my decorations for next year.