Pin It and Do It #11: Nail house number

It has rained for almost a week here at our summer cottage so I haven't been feeling very crafty. All garden projects are on hold but I decided to continue with the Pin It and Do It -challenge on my own. The official challenge was in May and now I'm making these just for fun because Pinterest is such a great source of inspiration!

My dad built our summer cottage 20 years ago. The house has been without a proper house number all that time, so it was time to make one. I found this great idea for house number via Pinterest, originally from blog Lotta Agaton.

All you need is some nails and a hammer. This is great anger management too. Just saying.

Use a bigger nail to mark the places for smaller nails. This makes hammering easier and you will have somewhat straight rows of nails.

Start hammering from the middle of each number and then move to make the outlines. Make sure all your nails are in place. It's difficult to hammer some missing nail into the center of the number afterwards.

Here's my finished house number plate. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to paint those nails darker later. Maybe some contrast would look better? It would be fun to make some texts with nails too.

Pin It and Do It #6: Rock garden markers

As soon as I saw these rock garden markers on Pinterest (originally from this blog), I knew I would be making some myself. Such a clever idea, easy to clean and doesn't get ruined even if it rains. I happen to have many jars of stones that I collected as a child when I spent my holidays in Crete.

At one point I almost threw those stones away, because I was on a cleaning spree and I thought there's no sense in storing stones in jars. There's even less sense dragging those stones across the world with a heavy suitcase. I mean, a stone is a stone. Of course it's shaped by the sea and it's a memory of the place you've visited, but no more stones for me. I have plenty.

So, this Pin It and Do It -challenge gave me a good reason to make something useful with my stones. I used acrylic paint like the blog suggested. It's water-soluble when you paint but then dries quickly and becomes water-resistant. My tip is to use a small but hard brush, otherwise the color will smear. I wrote all texts and details with a permanent marker.

I wish it was June already and I could go to our summer cottage and plant all the seeds I have and then put these to good use. It makes me happy to know that I'll have a little piece of Crete in my garden this summer.

Weekly wrap-up: Tapas and rainy days

I decided I'm going to make a short wrap-up at the end of each week. If I have nothing to tell you, I'm going to at least draw some visual dream journal because I have the craziest dreams. A few nights ago I had a dream where I was hiding from a black bear and we don't even have those in Finland! Luckily we don't have polar bears either, even though some people think so. But enough of my dreams because this week I actually did something.

• I met with my friends in Helsinki and we shared a lovely selection of tapas at Tapasta Bar. Their tomato soup is to die for. This is me wishing I could eat that soup for the rest of my life:

• I was at our summer cottage for a few days, but the weather was really bad. I spent some rainy days indoors planning on what I'll be doing during the summer when it hopefully doesn't look like this:

• We made some amazing smoked salmon that we ate with roasted potatos and tzatziki sauce:

• Now I'm back home again and in a couple of minutes I'm going to write another post about my latest #PinItDoIt crafts project. Oh, and in case you were wondering, no birds had used my nesting material cage at our summer cottage. Boohoo.

I hope you had a lovely week too!

Pin It and Do It #1: Nesting material cage for birds

I am participating in the May 2012 Pin It and Do It -challenge. I have only recently started to use Pinterest but I'm already so addicted I could browse those pictures for hours and hours every day! This challenge forces us to actually make something instead of just pinning like crazy and then forgetting all the good ideas.

I visited our summer cottage in the beginning of May and birds here in Finland are just beginning to build their nests and choose the best ones of all the bird houses we have hanged. I thought it would be a good timing to offer them some nesting material.

My inspiration was this post that explains the use of suet cage nester. Only I didn't have a suet cage, so I decided to make one myself from twigs. Sooo... first I used cord that wasn't soft enough and all the knots I made opened later. Then I used jute rope to make this really environmentally friendly. Here's the finished cage.

The birds didn't show any interest towards this during those two days we were there, but I'll go back in a couple of weeks and I hope some of those yarn scraps will be gone by then!