Butterfly and Dragonfly Clothespin Craft
I’m longing to dazzle you with a blog post that has homemade jewelry or reinvent something with scrap wood or a wonderful garment made from a curtain and an old pair of jeans…sigh. But alas, between work and volunteering at the kids school there is no time for more than making a pipe cleaner butterfly and dragonfly. Oh well, its good to take a few minutes out of this busy, busy week for some crafting.
For this super cute project you will need:
- 2 pipe cleaners
- a clothes pin
- 2 small googly eyes
- paint, sparkly glue, gems to decorate it
- hot glue gun or white craft glue
To get started take a pipe cleaner and shape it into a circle. Bend and twist the ends to close the circle. Repeat this step with a second pipe cleaner.
Pinch the circles in the middle and twist the pipe cleaners. Twist again to form the middle of the butterflies wings. As you can see I arranged the pipe cleaners so the yellow made the upper wings and the blue made the bottom wings.
This middle of the wings will be pinched by the clothes pin when opened. You can do that now or wait until after you finish gluing everything on.
Add a dab of hot glue to the small googly eyes and secure them on the clothes peg. I added some gems from a sheet of stickers. This is a pretty easy project even for youngsters. They should use regular white glue and not hot glue guns.
One option to change the wings, is pinch it in so its heart shaped. This way it’s a bit more butterfly-like. Narrow wings look more like dragonflies. Add what you like to decorate the critters. We could easily turn this into a fridge magnet by gluing on a magnet to the back.
Have fun with this easy project and have a super day!
…
Sewing Diy- Extend the Length of a Short Top with Lace
Have you got a great shirt that has gotten too small and you aren’t ready to say good-bye to it? Adding a bit of lace to the bottom is so easy and will make all the difference on how much longer it will work for you. Great for growing girls….also helpful for adults…I have a 100% cotton tank top that is going to have a similar extension as it now is a crop top…just from regular laundering it shrunk inches!
For this project you will need:
An awesome shirt you want to save
A piece of stretchy lace that will be as wide as the top
Sewing machine, thread, tape measure etc etc
Iron the t-shirt and the lace before you start. This lovely, shimmery, sequin butterfly top is 14 inches wide (36 cms) along the bottom seam when laying flat. So the lace would need to be 28 inches (73 cms) wide plus one extra inch (2.5 cms) for a seam allowance. Check to make sure this will be a good match in width.
Fold the lace in half and sew the edges together. Turn it inside out.
Lay the lace on the bottom of the t-shirt and decide if you would like to sew it on top of the bottom edge or underneath. My lace has a nice look to the top so it didn’t need to be hidden. Lay the lace down flat and put a pin on each end…this will help you to line up the pin to the side seams.
I pinned the lace on top of it all around the top. After I took this photo I decided that the t-shirt would be on the left of the sewing machine so all the pins needed to be turned around. Since the t-shirt and the lace have some stretch you can pull and stretch it a bit if things aren’t lining up well. After you sewed all the way around you are done. Try it on. Can you believe that only took you 10 minutes!?!? Well done!
We love this sequin butterfly top enough that we would probably cut the butterfly off and sew it onto another shirt when its just too small.
