How To

More Floating Shelves!

May 23, 2018 2 Comments

Guys, I am officially obsessed with floating shelves in our home! You might remember when we made smaller floating shelves last year, and we made this the exact same way. I was over the photos we had hanging up in the living room for the past few years. I wanted to switch it up and decided some longer shelves would look great, so we tried it out. We love how they turned out and wanted to share. Charlie’s dad cut the wood for us – the pieces are 5 feet long, 6 inches wide, with an inch wide and 2 inch tall lip to block anything from sliding off the shelves. I’ll show some photos below of what I mean.

Here’s what the shelves look like:

DIY Wooden Floating Shelves

And here’s what we had before. The change makes the room look so much more inviting some how! It’s crazy what small changes can do to a room.

All you need to hang them up are your brackets, screw gun, screws, a level (super important to make sure everything is even!), and a pencil to mark where your screws will go. Charlie and I got these hung up within an hour.

DIY Wooden Floating Shelves

So this is what the wood looks like before it was stained…you can see the lip I talked about before here.

DIY Wooden Floating Shelves

I use the same stain color for all of our shelves so they match…

Here’s what I’ve been using and love:

To see what we use to hang the shelves and how we hang them, check out our first floating shelves DIY post here.

DIY Wooden Floating Shelves

I LOVE lights, so Charlie had the idea to add a couple puck lights to the top shelf to shine to the below shelf, and they look so cute at night all lit up! I added some twinkle lights too, because why not lol.

DIY Wooden Floating Shelves

Like this post and want to save it for later? Awesome! Pin the photo below…

Reverse Canvas DIY

March 10, 2018 5 Comments

If you have a Cricut, you’ll probably know that “reverse canvas” projects have become super popular. I’m not sure who started this trend or else I’d give them credit, but props to whoever first made one of these because they turn out beautiful! I’ve made a few and stained the wood, but last week decided to paint this one’s canvas as well as the wood frame. I painted the frame white and the canvas a color to match my living room since I’ll be putting this on a new shelf. I’ve seen the quote “Together is my favorite place to be” on Pinterest and I LOVE it, so I decided to put that on this one. If you’d like to see how I made this keep reading!

STEP ONE:

Cut the canvas off of the frame from the back. I ended up using a bigger Exacto knife because this knife didn’t work that great. Just cut the canvas off the frame, it doesn’t need to be perfect or neat. You’re going to end up cutting the excess anyway.

See how I did mine? All that’s visible now are the staples. You can leave those, they’ll end up on the back of the new picture.

STEP TWO:

Put the canvas aside. Now paint or stain your frame any color you’d like! I just used a white acrylic paint.

STEP THREE:

I used my Cricut to cut this quote I made. If you don’t have a Cricut, just get some stickers or stencil! Both will work great.

STEP FOUR:

Before applying your letters to the canvas, paint clear mod podge all over the canvas and let dry. It will help the vinyl or stickers to stick better. Once you’re done with the mod podge and it’s dried, add on your vinyl or stickers. If you’re stenciling, paint the canvas your solid color, and then stencil. If you’re stenciling you’ll do these steps opposite of how I am.

I’m not gonna lie – applying vinyl to canvas even after the mod podge might be a little tricky. Just be patient with your transfer tape and it will work. I painted a slate blue/grey color all over the canvas, covering the letters. Once the paint is applied (2 coats), I took the letters off. The paint was still wet when I did this, didn’t make a difference.

STEP FIVE:

Once your canvas is completely dry, turn your wooden frame over to the side with all the staples. This is the back. Cut the canvas to a size where it’s not overlapping the edges, but leave enough room to glue down the sides to the wooden frame. Look at my picture below, that’s exactly what you’re going to do. Hot glue down the edges of the canvas to the wooden frame. Make sure to pull tightly once the glue is dry to each side so there’s no creases.

And that’s it! Look how mine turned out! I love it so much and Charlie was so impressed by how this came out! Charlie’s Dad is making us some new shelves for our living room, and this will go on one of those. I’ll be blogging about those next week once they’re hung! Can’t wait to decorate them and show you what else I make to display on them.

Like this project and want to save it? Thank you! Use the photo below to Pin It for later.

How To: Download and Install a Font in Two Minutes

January 6, 2017 Leave a Comment

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I’m back with another “How To” guide for you guys! I love that my “How to start a WordPress blog” guide has helped a lot of you out already, so I thought I’d do another one that I think should be really helpful too. So here’s my newest simple step by step guide…

How to: Download and Install a Font in Two Minutes.

Go to a free or paid font website, look for a font that you love and want to download or purchase

There are a lot of free font websites you can go to, to find free fonts that you can use for (usually) personal use only. If you’re really in love with a font and end up wanting to use it commercially, you can typically find that same font available to purchase commercial rights. A lot of the time, if you purchase a font it can be used commercially, but double check before committing to the purchase so you’re not disappointed to find out you cannot use it commercially! If you’re looking strictly for personal use though, I suggest DaFont.com, Font Squirrel, and 1001 Free Fonts.

If you’re looking for commercial use or just some awesome fonts, check out Creative Market, My Fonts, and The Hungry JPEG. I love all of these websites and have personally used them plenty of times.

My main suggestion would be to just be careful with anything you’re downloading onto your computer. I don’t trust all font websites of course, some are just plain sketchy, so keep an eye open. If something seems off, don’t download it.

Download the font, add it to your font book

For this step I’ll walk you through it with pictures. I’m on DaFont’s website, and found a cool font called “Trendsetter”. I click download, and now it’s saved to my desktop (Make sure you know where your downloads go to, it could be your desktop or downloads folder. Check your settings if you’re unsure).

Unzip the font file by double clicking it. It will either open a folder containing the font(s) or in my case, just the one file of the actual font .ttf

I use a Mac, so these are the steps for Mac users, Windows steps are in parenthesis under Mac steps…

Font Installation

On your desktop screen, go to the search button in the top right corner of the screen. When the search box pops up, type in ‘font book’, hit enter. Your font book will open.

(Windows users, from the ‘Start’ menu select ‘Control Panel’. Then select ‘Appearance and Personalization’. Then click on ‘Fonts’)

Once your font book is open, drag your font from your desktop into the font book. It will say “Validating Fonts”, and once that little pop up disappears, your font has been installed! Hooray! Now open Photoshop or whatever photo editing program you use and search for your font. It should appear for you – now start using it!

(Windows users, after opening ‘Fonts’, click ‘File’, and then click ‘Install New Font.’ Select font(s) you want installed, and click ok. You should be good to go!)

And that’s all there is to it! Once you’ve done this a couple of times you’ll know it like the back of your hand and it will take you seconds to download and install your fonts. I really hope this was helpful for you! Let me know if you have any suggestions for my next “How To” guides.

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