Embroidered Mother's Day Messages

I finished two Mother's day embroidery items last week. Embroidered messages in hoops for hanging on walls. Using hoops like frames for hanging on the wall is very popular in the crafty world now. I am sure that's because they certainly look cute!

The technique I used is Dye & Stitch. I drew and colored the design with fabric markers on the fabric first then added stitches along the outlines. I also sanded and painted the embroidery hoops. I hope that makes the finish a bit more professional.

These hoops can be purchased at my favorite vintage shop Junk Evolution in South Bend. (They also have some more of my items like these and those!) We finally have beautiful Spring days here in South Bend! This is my most favorite time of the year! I hope you are enjoying your day too! Thank you for reading.

Language issue / Sakura (Japanese cherry) Blossom

I always appreciate that I live in this amazing internet age. There are more than two hundreds people all around the world following my blog, almost three hundreds people liking my facebook page. That is truly amazing and that definitely inspires my creation, my life and myself a lot! Those good crafty folks from everywhere on the globe encourage me so much and spreading my world so much wider! I would like to yell to all of you THANK YOU! today and also want to apologize for an issue. It is the language issue. The languages I speak and write are only Japanese and English. And my readers are from all over the world. I love love love you to leave comments in my blog, my facebook, or Flickr. I am always looking forward to hearing from you. But unfortunately, I cannot read French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Finnish........whatever except the two I mentioned above :ﾍ:
The point is that I am not able to approve the comments which are wrote in those languages I cannot read since I cannot recognize what is written in the comments. I know that those readers wrote something very nice and maybe very useful information. So I feel so very sorry about that. If possible, please write your comment in simple English. So we all are able to share your valuable information together. And again, I am so sorry if you posted your comment in your language in the past and I didn't publish that because of the language issue. I hope you understand my circumstance.

Changing the subject, my Sakura (Japanese Cherry) trees are in full bloom! This Spring they got more flowers and its beautiful. I love Sakura soooooooo much. I hope you like them too.

Have a great weekend!

Dye and stitch

Embroidered message surrounded by sweet flowers. 

Almost finished.

I doodled flowers on the fabric using fabric markers. Then added simple stitches on it.

Doily mini clutches for Mother's day!

I finished six mini clutches for Mother's day sale today! They are all different, one of a kind!

Pretty Spring colors and feathery hand crocheted lace doilies.

These mini clutches will be sold at Junk Evolution from next week. You will find so many cool gift items in Junk Evolution. (That is one of my most favorite shops in the town!) If you live close to South Bend, you should check it out! I am going to make some more things for Mother's day. It will be embroidery projects. I am going to share the process of the project. (I don't have any specific pictures of the design in my mind yet, though.)

We had a pretty heavy thunder storm last night. This morning when Nina and I were waiting for the school bus outside, we felt that the storm brought warmth of Spring. I wish it would stay like that from now on. We will have some more cold days this weekend. But my Sakura (Japanese cherry blossom) trees have lots of buds getting colors in it :-)

Thank you for reading. And please have a happy crafty weekend!

Mother's Day Gift Making Sneak Peek

I am preparing items for Mother's day gift sales. Right now I am working on small clutches which have crocheted little doilies on them. I crocheted the doilies in different patterns and with different fibers. I am having fun playing with colors of fabrics and zippers. I am sharing  some sneak peek photos today. Hope you enjoy them.

Have a happy week!

My thrifty home decor #2

Hello everyone! We came back home from Washington DC Thursday morning. It was very very short trip to walk through DC but we surely had a great time. Unfortunately the weather was way too cold for cherry trees to start blooming. There were few trees had flowers on them but mostly the buds were just getting pink on tips.
I will write about our adventure on the trip some other time. Today I need to finish sharing some more photos of my thrifty home decor.

These are more Origami unit wall hangings in our dining room. If you want to try making these, there is my tutorial here. It will take some time to make numbers of the units, but the process is pretty simple. I hope you'll enjoy making them.

More wall decors. I save Nina's good drawings and paintings in the folder. I have a bunch, or boxes of her art. It is nice that you always have a variety of art works when you want something fresh on your wall. It is like you have your own artist in your house who works only for you! So I can refresh my wall with different art works occasionally.

Home made wall quilts and a bunting from Nina's lemonade stand at our yard sale last spring (we might be going to use this bunting again this spring?).

I like to use fabrics of big scale prints as a wall decor. These were my favorite textiles a couple years ago from IKEA. Since my husband runs house related business I put up this house print on his office wall.

In the bath room.

In our master bed room I have this re-purposed shelf. I glued some Japanese Kimono fabric in the back of the shelf. It is hard to tell from this picture, but I use old harvest basket as my jewelry storage. (Hanging necklaces from the basket handle. Rings, pins and earrings in tiny bawls on the basket tray.)

 

From here these pictures are all taken in Nina's room.

Cut out colorful tissue papers make a pretty pattern on a plain lamp shade.

There is another tissue paper craft. Children's books are very nice items for decorating in fun colors. You see many children's books in my house.

A glittery wire garland from a party store is good to embellish a girl's room. Nina learned to make Origami cranes and she hung them from her ceiling. (We just use colorful masking tapes to hang things from ceilings.)

And some more junks and treasures on the shelf and the wall.

What home decor idea do you have? I would love to hear about it from you! Thank you for reading. Happy Spring!

My thrifty home decor #1

I think I shop at thrift shops once or twice a week when I want to change or improve my house interior. Especially this time of the year, Spring is right around the corner, I start cleaning house and thinking to add some fresh colors and interesting elements to the house. I walked through all the rooms in my house, then I found my home decor is pretty much crafty and also very THRIFTY. I wish I could spend hundreds dollars to decorate my big white living room wall. But, you know, I can't. Our budget for home improvement is usually (always! Honey!!) very low. But it is not the end of the world! If you had no money, you just use your crafty brain and imagination. I thought it would be fun to share my  thrifty home decor ideas here with you.

Collecting paint chips is a kind of my hobby. And also a part of my job. We run a small business of property investment. We renovate houses and rent or sell them out. When I am not making things and taking care of my family (that occupies 99% of my time ^o^ ) , I work as an "interior designer". I do picking paint colors, buying light fixtures, finding furniture, and some more things like those. I took out a bunch of pretty color chips from my collection box and made some easy art frames.

I got these black frames from Goodwill. I inserted three paint chips in each frame. Black paint was coming off and there were scratches as well. So I painted the frames with bright yellow acrylic paint.

I love the paint chip color combinations and my choice of the color (yellow) for the frames.

One day I found a set of five modern art frames at St.Vincent de paul. I couldn't believe my eyes one moment when I saw the prices on these. They were only 98c per each!

 

Now my boring stairway changed to a little gallery!

This is the breakfast table area in my kitchen.

I have a lot of Origami decor in my home. They are perfect for adding interesting elements to the spaces in you home.

I used recycling papers from my recycle bin for this beautiful mobile. You don't need to buy nice origami papers from stores. You can use pages from old books or magazines. 

I am going to post "My thrifty home decor #2" soon. I already prepared more pictures of my "sustainable" crafty home decor for the next post. 

By the way, tomorrow is  Good Friday and the Spring break is starting. We are planning to go to Washington DC from this weekend to see the cherry blossoms! We take the Amtrak Capitol Limited!! This is going to be an exciting trip for us. I miss seeing cherry blossoms in Japan every Spring. And I have been wishing to go to DC in the Spring to see the Cherry trees came over seas from Japan 101 years ago.

None of us has ridden a sleeping car. So that is going to be exciting for all of us! The train trip is going to take sixteen hours to DC from South Bend. I will take a book and some lace crocheting projects with me. Nina and I are making a list of things we should pack in our suits case. Fun, fun, fun! If you have any suggestions for us about places we should visit or good restaurants in DC, please let me know! I am hoping we won't miss the peak of the cherry blossoms (Actually I love to see the wind blows flower petals like snow falling, too!).

Thank you for reading! I hope you all have a Happy Easter!