Last minute St.Valentine's day craft

Until a day before yesterday I have never been aware that St.Valentine's day is reaching that close! Nina needs to bring cards to school for all of her classmates (and her teacher). We always take something handmade every year. We do not have to, but you know, I always say "Hey, let's make something by hands! Just for fun!" I didn't have much time so quickly searched fun stuff on You Tube and I found this whimsical Origami Heart with Wings. They are much harder to make than the last ones, but it is not impossibly hard. (Nina made one. So you absolutely can make one!) I made one, then I sorta got addicted to it! Try it! They look awesome. \(^o^)/

Happy Valentine's Day Everyone!

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!

Featured on PRUDENT BABY!

My "Easy Origami Valentine Heart Card Tutorial" is featured on PRUDENT BABY blog! Their site is filled with a lot of useful tutorials, videos and information. I hope many of PRUDENT BABY readers like my post and enjoy making origami hearts! Thank you for having me on your site PRUDENT BABY!

I posted new pictures of more colorful hearts for the PRUDENT BABY post. Please check it out over there. Happy origami making!

Origami Wall Decor Tutorial

Sorry that I let you wait, but I eventually wrote a tutorial for the Origami Wall Decor I introduced a couple weeks ago. It could be very long post and I have a lot of pictures for the tutorial. So I wrote it on my Flickr in Origami Wall Decor tutorial Set. This is a very fun project and also so easy. Please check it out and I hope all of you will enjoy it!

Happy Origami Thursday!

Modern Origami Wall Decor

It has been two weeks since I wrote the last post. I had been pretty busy for about a month to prepare the event and make staff for fund raiser and so on. After those busy days, somehow, my motivation went down very low and I didn't have much energy to face to my PC. I kept working on some custom orders but it is going slow. I think I mentally have been tensed since the Earthquake hit Japan. It was unconscious though, after a month of electric period, I think my nerve got tiered out and needed some quiet time. Then I wanted to do something different. Something very simple that I can really concentrate on it.

Knitting and crocheting help calming myself down sometimes. But this time that was Origami. I made some cool wall decoration with simple origami technique and I want to introduce it to you all. Oh, and I have to tell you that it worked pretty well to recover myself from the minor depression.

These cool geometrical shapes are made of 16 units of origami. Each unit is very easy to make (actually, the red and brown one is made by my 5 year-old daughter!). It only takes half an hour to make one. Do you want to make? OK, I will write a tutorial soon on this blog.

There is another Origami wall decor. Doesn't it look like a piece of contemporary art? I just loved it. The making process was very fun and also easy. It is made of 25 units of origami. I put it up on the wall of Nina's room. I am planning to make some more of this in different colors and sizes for my living room. It seems hard to write how to make this. I might need to take video for the tutorial. I will think of that.

I hope you all have a wonderful Easter weekend. Happy Origami making!