Crafting Daze

Well hello again, long time no see.

I didn't realize how difficult it would be to find things to blog about. It's been a week or two since my last post. I figured that because it was summer time and I had all these things to do that putting up blogs would be a breeze! Not the case.

Ever since I had gotten back from the beach my life started up again as normal - working, babysitting, taking a few trips here and there to visit my boyfriend and my friends in Wilmington. Other than that, it has been a lot of sitting around at home doing a lot of nothing.

However, one thing that has kept me busy is crafting!

As you may or may not know, I am in Pi Beta Phi sorority at my university. I rushed last year in the fall and have loved every second of it. For those of you who are familiar with sorority life, you understand the whole Big/Little process. For those of you aren't, I will explain...

When you rush a sorority and begin the new member process there is a point down the road where you are assigned a 'Big'. This person is supposed to be your mentor, someone who is normally a year older than you and was just in your shoes as a new member last year.

At my school the way we find out who our Big is going to be is by Big/Little week. This was probably the best week of my life, not joking. It is 4 days of getting spoiled to death. The first day is normally a card or letter from your Big (this is still anonymous by the way). The second day you receive some sort of sweet treats. Third day is tee-shirt day, my favorite; you get a bunch of hand-me-down tee shirts from your big and family. And the last day is reveal day! This is the day when you find out who your big is and you get completely spoiled with a basket full of things Pi Phi related. For example my big gave me a couple of items from the Pi Phi Lilly Pulitzer collection, wine glasses, more tee shirts, cork board, Pi Phi related canvases, etc.

This can get to be pretty expensive if you decide to go all out, however at the end of the day it is all worth it. So with all of that being said, and having one year of greek life under my belt, I get to be a Big next year! I have already started crafting for my little and I am loving every second of it. I have only started working on two canvases for her and neither are completely finished yet, however I figured I would update you on my progress as I go along as well as maybe do a tutorial as to how to do some of these.

I got inspiration for my first canvas off of a group on Facebook called The Big/Little Connection where a lot of people post different crafts they did for their littles. I thought it this one was precious, so the crafting began...

Now some of you may be asking how I got the hands for the design. Well I tried finding cartoon hands of our symbol online but I had no luck. But if you have a Mac then you are in luck. There is an effect on the Photo booth application that is called "Pop art". All I did was pose my hands in a certain way and took loads of pictures until I found one that I liked the best, here was the winner:

Then what I did was printed the picture out (I actually had to use two pieces of paper to get it the size I wanted) and on the back I shaded over the lines that were the most important for my picture (obviously the TV in the background didn't make the cut). After that I flipped it over, positioned it how i wanted and proceeded to trace the lines of my hands and it turned out like the picture shown below. This method also works very well if you were painting a cooler.

I then colored it in with neon paint, I decided to go with these colors instead of the muted colors that were from my inspiration. (sorry for it being side ways, i couldn't figure out how to get it horizontal)

After a few more coats I added the black around the edges. This is good because you don't have to completely worry about staying within the lines when originally coloring above because the black will hide any mistakes.

After that I drew the black lines in between the boxes.

And traced the lines around the hands. You also want to keep your original photo that you traced in case you have to go over any lines that may have been covered up by the paint - that blue covered up everything.

And here is the finished product! I'm obviously not completely done, I still have to add the "Throw what you know, Pi Beta Phi". But I will probably just use either silver sharpie or paint for that, it shouldn't be too difficult.

So that is my first project of the summer! I am very proud of the way that it turned out. If you have any questions about paint or brushes that I used feel free to leave a comment with any questions that you may have! I have also started on a chevron canvas so be on the look out for that, I am done with the chevron but I want to wait until it is all finished to make a post about it because it is going to be one of my favorite pieces :)

I will definitely have a post at the end of the summer with all of my finished products so also be on the look out for that. Other than that, happy crafting!

Until next time,

Casey Rose