Adorable Birdies! :)

I cannot believe that it is already December! It's crazy how fast time has flown since I came to college....geez I'm so old it's ridiculous. I'm basically a grandma now, that's how old I feel. Now I'm definitely not saying that all grandma's are old, you guys are so young and hip, I love it! Ok moving on...

I've been feeling super old lately, and I feel all dilapidated and junk, so I decided to do something to make me feel young again, and I found the perfect pin! My roommate and I found a pin showing us how to draw cute little birdies. It was fantastic. :) It took me back to the days when I was all young and spry, when I used to draw things all the time. And color lots of coloring books. Back when I didn't have to worry about paying for rent, and food, and tuition, and clothes, and food, and ice cream, and gas, and treats, and did I already say food? Yeah, I just have to pay for lots of things on my own now. It's not so good. But, drawing this birdy made me feel happy!

This 6-step program takes almost no effort. That was the greatest thing about it. I picked up a sharpie, drew a few lines, and the next thing I knew a beautiful bird appeared. If only the rest of the things in my life were that simple right now! Finals week is crazy. This week is crazy. I can’t wait for life to not be crazy! But I guess crazy is a fun way to live, it keeps you super hyper! Until you crash and it’s 10:49pm and you’re trying to blog about drawing a bird, and you attempt to take a cat nap on the dining room table chairs but that hurts your back, so you try to get up but you can’t so your roommate has to help you, and then you feel all sorts of embarrassed, and then you realize you still have to finish making your post, and then you get depressed, and then you ramble on. Yep. This is my life right now.

Anyway, back to the pin. It’s fantastic. Seriously, if I were a little kid and I wanted to draw a birdy all by myself, I would love these instructions. It is so easy and it made me feel like a straight up artist. That’s a good feeling. So if any of you have children that want to be able to draw a bird all on their own (you know when they’re in the stage where they don’t want any help doing things but they kind of do need help) this is perfect! Give them the instructions, and let them create to their hearts content!

I give this pin a 7.78… it’s pretty fantastic and I really think that little kids would love this. College students loved it. My roommate Natalie, says, “It’s a pretty bird”. There you have it folks. Words of wisdom from a college student. That was quite a profound statement there Natalie! Thanks for that.

Haha, ok well I’m going to call it a day. I think that my brain is fried from how much school, homework, and studying I’ve been doing. Not to mention the time I spent on Pinterest and Facebook…maybe one day I won’t waste so much time on those websites. I’ll let you know how that goes. Oh ps…I may or may not have broken one of our chairs today when I sat down. It was a sad day. But also ridiculously funny and made my whole day. I guess all that ice cream is not so good for me. Ok, I’m really done. I promise.

One more thing, my family has what is called goodbye disorder…we can’t say goodbye very well at all. It takes us like a half hour just to say goodbye and finally come to terms with the fact that we are going to be separated for who knows how long! So yeah, it makes family parties super great. I mean, we have to start saying goodbye to each other right after the party starts practically. Haha ok that might have been an exaggeration, bye everyone! 

Natalie's Birdy!

My Birdy! 

First Fiasco...

The original pin. 

I wanted to start out with something simple, so of course I chose to make adorable paintings. My first step was to find a pin off of Pinterest that I liked, and then buy the materials. They added up to a total of        12 dollars, which I thought was a fairly reasonable price.

 I came back to my apartment very anxious and excited, I was ready to get going and do some work making a seriously cute craft! I just forgot one major thing...the leaves. Without the leaves I was just going to have pink and blue painted boards, how cute would have that been? Not so cute. So I set out on an adventure with my roommate to find the perfect leaves. This was a fairly simple task, we live in a beautiful place that has tons of trees so I just chose the best looking leaves and took them. I hope that wasn't a bad thing to do...whoops! (For all you tree lovers out there, I'm very sorry I robbed a few trees of their leaves).

 While the leaves were being squished in a book, I started painting the white canvas squares with the blue and pink paint that I got at the store. That was a very easy job, the paint went on smoothly and dried remarkably quickly. I was quite impressed, so far things were seeming to be going great! Unfortunately things were about to go South...way South. Like almost to Mexico south. 

When my boards were sufficiently dry I got the leaves out of the books and put them on the boards. Now this is where big mistake number one comes in: I didn't allow the leaves to "squish" long enough, so they did not lay flat on the board. I decided in my naive mind that this wasn't going to be a big problem at all. Boy was I wrong! Big mistake number two: I didn't secure the leaf on the canvas before I started spray painting. DO NOT DO THAT! It did not turn out at all because the moment I started spraying the canvas with the spray paint, the leaf moved around and made it impossible to get a good outline of it. It ended up looking like a blob, a big fat ugly blob. It was awful! So when I went to do the second one, I got a little bit smarter. 

I decided to tape the leaf down so that when I sprayed it, it would stay! I'd call that stroke of genius divine intervention because the next one turned out great! After taping it all down, which took about 10 minutes to really get it down good, I sprayed it and SHABAM! It looks great! Overall, this craft was simple and turned out pretty amazing. 

My advice for someone else who is thinking about doing this is: Yes! Go for it, but be patient. I was too anxious to get started so I didn't let the leaves flatten enough and it made it much more difficult to tape it down. So be patient and in the end you'll have a totally adorable craft that was worth the 3 hours or so that I put into it! Rate for this pin on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being a dirty diaper and 10 being the Mona Lisa): 6.5- somewhere between Zac Efron and corn on the cob. 

The supplies. 

I was super excited that it was so easy to paint them!

Taping the leaves. That was quite the task.

The finished product! I think that the top two turned out the best.