My name is Karol, and I am a collector.

My garage holds crates and crates of collections. Most are seasonal, some are old linens I can't seem to give up, some are books that are there for the same reason. But mostly it is seasonal "stuff".  Every year I swear to myself that I am not going to buy anything else, but I just laugh and keep adding to the pile. I won't embarrass myself and tell you how many crates are out there, but I will say that my car couldn't fit in there if it had to. I have mostly Christmas, then next would be Halloween. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and if I didn't think my husband would kill me, I'd keep the decorations up all year.

Here are some of my Easter collectibles.

These egg cups started out as a set of chalkware that you could paint. I can't even remember where I got them, but I've had them for over 10 years. I love their facial expressions and poses. There are four total.
















My maternal grandmother used to send us all cards for every occasion when I was a little thing.  The impressive part about that is she had 36 grandchildren and never forgot to send any of us a card. She was a sentimental woman and that trait has been passed down to me. I kept my cards and love to bring them out to make me smile. This one has a fuzzy feel to the bunny.

 

Here is another one next to a thrift store pink duck sitting on one of my chairs from another collection. The duck is half of a salt and pepper shaker set. The other piece was missing. Notice my white plate collection too. I love milk glass. I put some dollar tree gel stickers on the plate... how cute! That was a DUH moment. I usually put them on a mirror or window, but it struck me that the white glass was a perfect background for the pretty pastel gels.

This is a full view of one of my cabinets in my kitchen. I made the egg "banner" with plastic eggs that I simply opened and attached to a ribbon. Not my idea, I saw it on another blog and loved the effect. So easy, and sweet.

I'm also a big lover of bubble lights. This one came from TJ Maxx and although it has glitter in it instead of just bubbles, I love it anyway. We had bubble lights on our Christmas tree when I was a kid, and I can remember how fascinated I was with them. I love that they are back around. What do you collect?

Easter cake!

I made this cake last night as a thank-you for some people who went above and beyond to help us out at work. I saw it on a food website (can't remember which one) and thought it was so cute! It is simply a box chocolate cake mix and tub icing. I'm not a big baker, obviously. Anyway, the sunflower "seads" are tiny chocolate chips, and of course, the Peeps make the petals. I did have to use toothpicks to secure the Peeps. They wanted to slide off. It is so cute in person and made a very nice presentation. I believe I'll be making another one for our family Easter picnic. I'm one of the few who actually likes to eat Peeps, and chocolate cake is my favorite. mmmmmm :)

 

Hippity Hoppity SUG

I made these little thank-you gifts for our fellow coworkers and passed them out this morning. I started with 4 boxes of bunny Peeps, 2 bags of little malted milk balls, a large bag of shredded coconut, and a package of the bags sold in the Wilton aisle that are meant for lollipops. These are so simple to make. I dyed the coconut greenish-yellow then toasted it in the oven on a large cookie sheet at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. I stirred it, and put it back in for 12 more minutes. After cooling, I spooned coconut 2 heaping spoonfuls into the bags with 5 or 6 milk balls and a Peep. I printed out onto shipping labels: "To one of our favorite Peeps", stuck those on the back side of the bag, then zip tied them with the silver tie that comes with the bags. Too cute!!! and so easy. I made 48 of them to share. Peep Peep!

Accessorizing

After almost an entire week of not feeling well, I finally got over whatever "crud" had invaded my body. My spring break was intended to be more productive than it was but that, as they say, is life. I did manage to get around to some cleaning out of the spider webs in my craft room. Not literal webs, I'm not that bad. But I am bad at dangerously close levels of hoarding. So, I have my car filled to the brim with donations for my favorite thrift stores, and a second batch waiting to get loaded after that one gets dumped off. I feel cleansed. I had so much stuff in bags, I had forgotten that I had most of it. That's the bad side of crafting. How many times have we all said, "I will get around to doing something with this later." Of course, later never comes.


My first project was my bulletin board. Remember... I had left over material from my chair redo. Here is the board:

Right now I have some of my favorite family pictures on it, but I will be using it as a place to put inspiration pix that I find on-line or in magazines. I love this material! It is very bright and fun, and definitely sparked up my space. Got it at Walmart.

These are another couple of projects that I did to pull in the green/black theme. I found both of these at thrift stores. One is a cutlery tray and was light oak. The other is a little wall shelf and was a darker mahogany color. I'm am sooooo terrible at taking the "before pictures"... sorry.

On the cutlery tray, I simply primed it with white, painted the inside of each compartment with a spring green, then decoupaged the "walls" with black and green background papers. It is really cute! I attached a picture hanger to the back so I could hang it on the wall.

This little shelf got spray painted green and I filled it with some of my K collection and a few other little things that make me smile.

















The lamp started out as an ugly 80's brass thing with a pleated shade. I sprayed it with a brushed nickel paint and changed the shade. I took some more of the chair material, cut out some of the flowers and used Mod Podge to attach them to the shade. The little black pompom fringe adds so much whimsy! That was hot glued on. Believe it or not, I measured the shade before I bought the trim. Imagine that! I'm a slow learner, but I do learn eventually.

 

I found the bird cage at a thrift store for 50¢ and sprayed it green. I have my large acrylic paint bottles inside. The tissue box was one of those oval ones that Kleenex puts out at Christmas, and I covered it with green striped BG paper and added a black satin bow. Very pretty.

Another view of the lamp without the light on. You can see the color much better now. Enough for now. I'll post more another time. Meanwhile, I'm back to work tomorrow :(

Word Art

I love words and especially when made into word art. When I was younger, my choice of reading material was usually a dictionary. I still will pick one up when I have down time, or maybe books about quotations or word derivatives. I have compiled a mental list of my favorite words. If I'm ever asked by James Lipton what my favorite and least favorite words are, I will know the answers immediately. Onomatopoeia # 1 fave. Phlegm #1 least fave. Kind of ironic that my least favorite word is an onomatopoetic one! Anyhow... back to word art. I found this in a Ross store on clearance after St. Pat's Day. I bought it simply because I liked the size of the wooden block and it was $1. I also knew that I was going to redo it when I got it home into word art.

It had a little dowel with a broken shamrock sticking out of the top. I tossed those. I decoupaged some black background paper on the front then cut out magazine letters to spell out a message. I chose green letters to use because my of my recent chair redo. It has ispired me to use lime green and black accents in my craft room. Here is the first result:

Yuck! The background paper is waaaaaaay too busy to be able to read the letters. So scratch that one and start over. I covered the green letters with a piece of beige card stock then started over with more green letters:

Much better! It says: "she decided to start living the life she dreamed of". I do a lot of this kind of art. I cut out letters from magazines lay out a message ransom style. I call it Ransom Art.
I have this one hanging over the freshly made-over bulletin board which is above my work bench.
I took an old cork board which had an ugly brown metal frame, and (spray) painted the frame glossy black. I took some of the extra material from my chair project, and glued it (using ModPodge) to the cork and added a green ribbon around the edges .

I'll post more pictures of my craft room when I get it looking more photo worthy. I'm working hard at re-organizing and paring down some of my craft supplies. It was to be my spring break project, but that went awry since I got sick on day one of my break. I'm getting there.