Shamrock Bouquet!

This is the first time in a long time that St. Patrick’s Day has fallen on a Saturday and I wanted to do something fun and have family and friends over for dinner and hanging out.  I am serving up a bounty of Irish food…shepard’s pie, corn beef, colcannon, and Irish soda bread.  To go with the food and good company, I wanted to make a cute little centerpiece that would put everyone in the Irish spirit and I thought a great way to start this would be a shamrock bouquet.  I am really happy with the result though it sort of took on a life of its own and took longer to finish up than I anticipated.  I kept re-doing and tweaking until it was just the way I wanted.

I sort of collected things over the past month that I found on sale or that weren’t too expensive to do mine, so if you can’t find exactly the same stuff, don’t worry…get creative.

What you need:

• Various green toned scrapbook paper
• Ribbon in greens, orange, and white
• St. Patrick’s Day scrapbook stickers
• 12 in. wooden dowel rods
• Green and/or black paint and paintbrushes
• Green, gold, and orange glitter
• glue pen
• Any other sort of Irish inspired small decoration you can glue on a stick
• Glass beads…white and/or green
• A glass vase
• Styrofoam plant ball

First of all, you should paint your dowel rods whatever color you want them to be.  I bought a package of pre-cut 12 inch rods at my Hobby Lobby, but if you can’t find this you can always buy long ones and cut them down to size.  I painted mine a couple different shades of green and a couple black ones too.

Next fold your scrapbook paper in half with the colored side on the inside.  Then you can trace any sort of shamrock shape you have on the paper.  I used a cookie cutter, a pre-cut foam shamrock, and a wooden clover shape to trace around, but you could always go on the internet and find shapes there to cut out and trace around.  After you are done tracing, cut out the shapes making sure that you keep the two that cut out at the same time together.

After you have all of your shamrocks cut out and the paint on your dowel rods is dry, you can start gluing the shamrocks together with the dowel rod in between them.  They aren’t going to fit together completely perfectly because of the rod, but if you use a little finesse they will look good.  And any white on the edges can be trimmed off later.

 

After the these are dry (now you are starting to see why this project took longer), I used a glue pen to draw an outline around the edges and then used glitter to make them pop.  Make sure you let the first side dry before you glitter the other side.  I tried to do some designs in the middle of some of the shamrocks, but the best looking ones were the ones where I just outlined the edges.

To add a little variety to the bouquet, I took some St. Patrick’s Day scrapbook stickers, put them on some brown card stock, cut them out and outlined them with glitter and stuck them on dowel rods too.  I also had some wooden pots of gold and leprechaun hats from a wreath I found in the dollar section of Target and so I took a couple of these and glued them to dowel rods as well.  I sparkled them up a bit too.  I may never get the glitter out of my house.

these used to be wreaths that I found in the dollar spot at target. 

glittered up and ready to go.

I tried a variety of glass vases I had around the house, but none seemed to give me what I was looking for.  Finally I decided something shallower and with a wide opening was what I needed.  I found a glass bowl at Hobby Lobby (thankfully half off.) and was finally feeling like this project was going in the right direction.  With a bowl I was able to spread the shamrocks out more. I used floral Styrofoam in the bottom of the bowl and stuck the dowel rods down into this.  These rods had started out at 12 inches but I am pretty sure they finished at about 6.  I then covered the Styrofoam and filled the bowl with a mixture of green and white glass beads.  Finally I added some fake little white flowers to help cover up the sticks a little because I didn’t like it when so much was showing.  I ended up not using any ribbon for embellishment because with a bowl it just didn’t seem to need it.  And this is the end product.  It may be a little hokey, but it puts me in the spirit of Ireland and that is what I was going for.

Happy Crafting

St. Patrick’s Day Table Decoration: Leprechaun Spirits

A while back I had seen a blog post where the person took min liquor bottles, relabeled them, and handed them out during a party.  I thought this was a cool idea, but decided to see if I could turn it into more of a decoration…and here is what I came up with.

Materials:

• small glass bottles with corks
• scrapbook paper
• food coloring
• glitter
• water

This is a pretty easy project that only took me about half an hour to do.  First, I found 3 small glass bottles from my local craft store.  Note: two of these had flat sides, while one was rounded and while I liked the look of the rounded one a lot, it was a pain trying to glue the label on it.  you may want to stay away from the rounded ones.

Next, I printed the names for the labels of my bottles.  I had three bottles and came up with Essence of Emerald Isle, Elixir O’ Luck, and Leprechaun Spirits.  I just used my word program and kept the writing pretty small.  It took me a couple tries to get it the right size.  I also picked out some little clip art pictures to add to my labels.  Once I had every thing the size I wanted, I took some scrapbook paper and just helped make the labels more decorative.  After this, I glued the labels on the bottles and added a little ribbon just to give them another dimension.

Finally I added food coloring to water until I got the shades that I wanted and then poured these into the bottles.  Note:  I would definitely mix the water in a separate container because if you try to do it in the bottle there is a good chance water could be sloshed around and then ruin the labels you just made.  After I poured the water in the bottles, I add a little bit of glitter to a couple of them just for something extra.

I was pretty happy with how they turned out and once I finish the shamrock bouquet I am working on, that and these bottles will make a cute centerpiece.  Will add another picture when the centerpiece is finished.

Happy Crafting!

Recycled Crayons with a St. Patrick’s Day Twist

I had seen the re-purposing of old crayons into new floating around on the internet for a while, but it hadn’t really ever made it to the top of my crafts-to-do list.  However, when I was in my local Hobby Lobby the other day, I came across a shamrock silicone mold ON SALE and decided it was time to give it a try.  Let me tell you this was super easy.  All you need is a silicone mold and all those broken or restaurant crayons you have lying around the house.

First off, find that bag of old broken up crayons that you can’t seem to throw away because it seems wasteful.  Next sort the crayons by color and start peeling off the wrappers.  I sorted them so all shades of one color were in one pile.  I.e., all shades of blue together, all shades of green together, etc.., but you could do whatever you want.  Note:  I made the mistake of peeling wrappers as I went and then throwing the broken crayons into the mold.  I wish I had just peeled them all first and then broken them and put them in the mold.  Peeling is a pain in the butt…the boy child put in a valiant effort trying to help but after about 4 crayons, he had had enough…sadly it has to happen.

So after all of the crayons are peeled, start breaking up the larger pieces and putting them in the molds.  If you are using shades or different colors, make sure you get them mixed up well when putting the pieces in.  I had a mold with 6 shamrocks and for the first go around, I made three St. Patrick’s Day inspired crayons (shades of green with a couple of orange and white added) and then three single color (various shades) crayons.  My molds were pretty tall so I just filled them up about halfway.  You can do as much or as little as you like.

Set the mold on a cookie sheet and then place in a 250 degree oven for 13-15 minutes.  From what I understand, crayon wax can burn and smells terrible so keep an eye on them.  Once the crayon pieces are completely melted, remove the tray from the oven and let them cool COMPLETELY before you remove them from the molds.

Note:  Keep the tray as flat as possible when removing it from the oven…you don’t want crayon wax sloshing everywhere, plus you want to keep the natural shade differences of the crayons rather than mixing them all up.  Also, you will be tempted to try to pull the crayons out of the mold before they are completely cool…DON’T!  Have patience and give them a good 30 minutes to cool and then they will just pop right out.  One last thing, after you use the molds for crayons, I don’t think that you are going to want to use them again for baking, so make sure you are ready to let them go crayon making realm for good before you use them.

The Boy Child and Little have both been having fun using the new/old crayons.  We saved the green/orange/white ones to give as a favor to their cousins when we have my extended family over for dinner on St. Patrick’s Day.  I think that they are going to be a hit!

Happy Crafting!!