A heart shaped shredded paper bowl...

Last night marked my first ever heart crafting disaster.  It all started at around 5pm, I had my project all planned out, it's actually one that I've been wanting to do for awhile, so I pulled out my book to get started.  There's the book, down there...

Supplies!

This is when I thought I was
actually going to make
two of these guys.
Ha!!!

The not wet enough paper strips

The project is actually those bowls on the cover. I wanted to make two heart shaped nesting bowls. I gathered my black card stock and cut it into strips using a paper cutter, PVA glue, Martha Stewart heart punches and heart shaped bowls. The directions said to cover the bowl in saran wrap.  Here is where I made my first mistake...I had some special kind of saran wrap that wasn't very saran wrappy...but I decided to go with it anyway. Then I took a PVA/water mixture and covered the bowls with it. The directions said the make the paper scraps damp, so I put them in a separate bowl and threw some water on them. In retrospect, I probably could have used a bit more water on them but for some reason I was being conservative yesterday. Weird. I know.

I then set to the task of covering the bowl with the glued up paper scraps.  First of all, this seemed to take a rather long time, then because the scraps weren't wet enough, it wasn't working out so well, they weren't pliable enough. Still, I motored on...

Here we are at the beginning... 

I kept adding more and more scraps, trying to cover most of the bowl.  I put the heart shaped cut outs on there as well to add some dimension.  Really by this point, I was over it, but I wanted to finish.

I have nothing witty to say about
this picture.

It was then that I read the end of the directions...it could take "days" to dry. DAYS????? I don't have days. I have to blog. Fine. So I put it in front of a fan and went to work.  When I returned at 2am, it was sort of dry, so I plied it off of the red bowl and went to bed, figuring that I would be able to remove the fake saran wrap in the morning. 

And this is how it shall stay.

I guess I could use it
as a wall hanging.

No sirree bob. That stuff is not budging.  So there you have it.  My very first heart shaped crafting disaster. 

Accordion Valentines

In the spirit of this Valentine season, I ended up co-teaching a class at Paper Source with my friend Olivia.  It was super fun and we all had a blast. I love those crafting classes where the table gets really messy and there's stuff everywhere. It's what I call progress.

I love all this mess!

In the interest of keeping with the hearts theme (not exactly hard to do around Valentine's Day), I used two different kinds of Martha Stewart craft punches, a heart hole punch from P.S, some heart cards from P.S. and V-Day themed 12x12 papers. It was lots of fun! The final product ended up being an accordion valentine that fits into an A7 box mailer.  I made it pretty generic so that I can customize it for whomever I deem worthy enough to receive it...

I love all of the different heart punches that we used, they are FABULOUS. Martha Stewart is the queen of crafting and I aim to be her co-queen!

The end result is very long...