DIY
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DIY: How To Make Elastic Apple Watch Bands
Many people are not happy with the limited variety of Apple Watch bands and straps. Those who started in the Apple Watch ecosystem, but grew tired of the same old leather and steel options available, are eager to find a new way to personalize their devices. One solution is elastic band syncing, which is much more affordable than it would appear at first glance.
If you are tired of your new Apple Watch being limited to the watch bands and straps that Apple has to offer, you can take matters into your own hands. There is a relatively cheap and simple way of adding elastic band syncing to your device. The process will allow you to have a range of custom-designed Apple Watch bands 2022 that you previously could not get anywhere.
Everything You Need To Make Elastic Apple Watch Bands
You will need an elastic watch band, which is available in a variety of colors and designs. You will also need a 4 mm Allen key, which you can pick up for a few dollars at any hardware store. Finally, you will need a small pin-punch tool.
- You will start by fastening the watch band to your Apple Watch with the 4 mm Allen key on one side, then place the watch band over the other side of your device and create a loop with the excess strap.
- This is where the pin-punch will come in handy. You will need to punch a series of holes into the band so that it can be pulled through the loop. The first hole should be as close as possible to your device while still being able to pass over it. The second should be as far away from your device as possible without causing a problem, and so forth.
- When you have finished, the watch band should be able to be pulled through the loop, leaving a series of holes behind. Since you are using elastic bands, there will be some tension in this loop. Make sure that it is not too tight on your Apple Watch. The pin-punch tool is useful for stretching the band over so that it can fit through your Apple Watch.
- Once it has been stretched over your device, you need to stretch the strap so that it attaches itself to your watch. This will require a little more effort in most cases, but the watchband should now slide onto your device.
Additional Tip:
The elastic band will require some effort when trying to stretch it over the Apple Watch. One trick that can help is to extend the loop on a pair of scissors, and then stretch the band over your device using this method.
You now have a custom, elastic Apple Watch band! When you have finished and are excited to wear your new fancy watch band, you should test it out. If the loop is too tight on your Apple Watch, you can bend the loop slightly with a pair of pliers. Be careful not to over-bend the loop, or it may break.
Fortunately, today there are an increasing number of third-party band manufacturers in the market that provide Apple Watch bands filled with personalized, one-of-a-kind designs. A notable example is cxsbands.com, a website offering a variety of customized Apple Watch bands that will make you stand out from the crowd.
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Bathroom Inspiration Ideas
Many bathrooms trends come and go but there are other designs that are built to stand the test of time. Bathrooms are our small sanctuary meaning they should be inspiring, satisfying, and above all cozy. Today’s bathrooms combine the elements of luxury, simplicity, and organic designs to create a trendy bathroom to match the home architectural design.
The article explores some of the bathroom inspiration ideas to give you a taste of the modern and trendy bathrooms you may consider during your next renovation.
Stunning Bathroom Tiles
Bathroom floor tiles are coming in many colors, shapes, sizes, and textures to give a rustic allure to your bathroom. Today one can pick ceramic, vinyl, stone, or cork tiles to give your bathroom floor an amazing look that rhymes with the house interior.
Linoleum floor tiles, for example, give your bathroom a retro look because of the limestone, cork powder, and linseed oil used to make them. They are available in different colors, shape, and size to ensure you never run out of options.
Amazing Lighting
They are many lighting styles you can use to remodel your bathrooms today. You can choose the modern style, eclectic lighting, or the traditional vanity to make your bathroom lively.
Some modern bathrooms are combining the natural lighting concepts to give you a little view of your backyard. LED strip lighting, color-changing, warm or white variety allows you to highlight the unique features of your bathroom and give a relaxing and vibrant feel to your space.
Stylish Wooden Touches
Wooden touch adds some warmth to the bathroom. You can incorporate wooden vanity and wooden framed mirrors into your bathroom design to modernize your bathroom with beautiful and practical pieces of the contemporary bathrooms. Adding a generously proportioned showerhead such as the homelody shower faucets offers you a gentle high-pressure downpour to give you a spa experience.
Decorative Mirrors
There are a plethora of beautiful mirror designs you can select to enhance the look of your bathroom. From oval, rectangle, frameless, to decorative vanity mirrors.
To make the mirrors bring an aesthetic wonder to your space position them strategically to reflect the natural light and open up or elongate the space. If you have a small space to work with, a mirror will make the room appear bigger. Have crisp white walls and dark or wooden vanity to contrast the area.
Earthy Natural Textures
Earthy colors and textures make your bathroom space feel welcoming. Add earthy accessories such as woven storage baskets and earth-tone towels. Integrating flowers or plants energize the room and purifies the air making your bathroom a natural sanctuary. You can include open shelves for your vanity to create a unique space.
Accent Wall
If you have a small bathroom, add an accent wall such as pastel blue to make your bathroom unique, thoughtful, and attractive appeal. The accent wall will make the space look more prominent, and the touch of color makes the bathroom vibrant.
There are many inspirational bathroom ideas but those are some of our best picks but you can always look for more to create your dream bathroom because the list is endless.
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DIY Burlap Roman Shade over Mini Blinds
I love the look of burlap, I hate the look of mini blinds. Finally, I figured out how to solve both problems at once.
My mom helped me with a little DIY project that I had been procrastinating on when she visited in July. A burlap roman shade to cover the mini blinds in our dining room. I LOVE how it turned out, and since it was SO simple, I thought I’d share how to do it.
If you rent your home, rather than own it; more than likely you are stuck with the standard mini blinds hung from every window in the house. Now you could take them down and try to store them somewhere and rehang them when you leave, or you could try to talk to the landlord about installing something better, but you might want to try this option instead. It keeps the mini blinds in tact, providing shade, privacy and a happy landlord…but it also makes the room feel much more homey and you can customize it to your decorating style.
I cut a piece of burlap to the size of my window, actually to the exact width and about 2″ longer, and ironed it flat. See how to cut burlap in a straight line here. Then I folded the top down approximately 2″ to give me a finished edge and used Wonder Under to hold the folded strip down. I attached a strip of mounting tape to the back of that fold and then fastened the top of my curtain directly onto the mini blinds front facing panel. This gave me a nice, straight, finished top.
Then we used a needle and thread to tie the burlap to the actual strings of the mini blind. Once on each side and then again in the middle, making sure to carefully count how many slats were between each fold. For my curtain, we tied it at the bottom and four additional times at equally spaced intervals. We didn’t have to take the blinds down to do this, although I’m sure it looked a bit awkward as we tried to fit between the window and the shade looking for the needle in the burlap sack.
Doing it this way allows you to still use the mini blind just like before. When it is down, it looks likes a curtain, but when the blind is pulled up, the burlap poofs out and folds like a Roman shade. I especially like the look of the contrast between the curtain and the lace doily table runner. (More on the jar of popsicle sticks later)
This, {read with Rob Lowe’s voice} literally, could not be an easier curtain. Tape, needle, thread, fabric – that’s it!
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New & Improved Sandbox
When we first moved up to NorCal and I was looking for a place for us to rent, Kyle and I made a wish list of things that we wanted in our new home. We wanted to rent a house with no shared walls, we wanted a place to entertain, we wanted 2 (but hopefully 3) bedrooms, a dishwasher, a nice neighborhood…it was a long list that we didn’t think would actually be met. And then Kyle added one more thing, the impossible…a sandbox for Kade to play in. When he mentioned it, I just stared at him…and then laughed. Talk about specific! Not to mention unrealistic. Kade and I drove up and down the Peninsula looking at places for 2 months. Then, the night before we turned in an application on a house that met most of our list, an ad for this house was posted. So I decided to take a look, even though I figured we wouldn’t get it. I liked it, a lot. But I didn’t know if it was worth the money, until the agent took me outside to see the backyard. And what to my wondering eyes should appear??? A SANDBOX! It was meant to be! God provided us with a wonderful home that met each and every item on our list and so much more. The miracles He’s worked to allow us to stay here don’t stop here, but that’s for another post.
Now the original sandbox was technically a sandbox but it wasn’t usable. It had been a neighborhood litter box for who knows how long and it was basically four 2 x 12′s nailed together. The wood was warped and coming apart at the seems, literally. Here’s a picture of our yard last summer and you can see the sandbox in the lower right. Clearly, with a fire pit stored in the middle, it wasn’t getting a lot of use!
So Kyle set to work tearing it apart, cleaning up the old wood and putting it back together. Then we purchased a couple 2 x 10′s and cut them to fit like a seat around the top. Kyle made sure it was good and secure and then routed the edges to make a nice comfy seat.
We found some left over primer and then painted it to match the trim on the house. The final step was sand. I’m trying to keep this as an uplifting and happy post so I won’t rant over the cost of play sand, but lets just say Kade will NOT be throwing it out of that sandbox! To top it off, we even found a tarp with a drawstring to protect it from the neighborhood animals.
There was only one thing left to do after it was all put together…get it approved by Kade. He loved it! It was so cute to see him bury his little fingers and toes in the sand. He was a little worried at first that it was sticking to his skin, but then we showed him how to slap his hands together to brush it off. If you thought he had intense dance moves, brushing sand off fingertips is even more so!
Look at that face! God is so good! He even answers the small prayers and gives us joy in the everyday things.
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DIY Burlap Placemats & Chalkboard Coasters
This DIY gift I loved so much, I kept one for myself…Stenciled Burlap Placemats and Chalkboard Coasters. It’s super easy and contributed to my secret goal to incorporate burlap into every room in the house!
I bought some burlap at JoAnn’s and cut it down to 13″ x 17″, an inch wider and longer than I wanted my finished placemat to be. I followed this great tutorial for how to cut burlap in a straight line, and it saved me so much frustration! Then I hand washed the rectangles to get rid of that weird burlap smell and soften their texture just a bit. After ironing them flat again, I did a straight stitch around the edges, 1/2″ from the border, to keep them from fraying. Then I purposely frayed the edges up to the stitching, just to give them a more unified look.
At this point, they were ready to be stenciled. I used my Silhouette to cut the stencils for my words. By cutting out the word, rather than the letters, I didn’t have to worry about messing up the kerning when I stenciled. For once, having very old craft paint was a huge win. My black paint had been left over from my mom’s stash and I’m pretty sure it was purchased somewhere around 1987. It was thick and clumpy, but it worked perfectly to give me very crisp letters. The paint didn’t bleed out from under the stencil edge at all.
I love chalkboard paint! If we didn’t rent our house, I’d probably cover the entire kitchen in chalkboard paint. For this project though, I limited myself to just the coasters. I purchased the cheap tiles at Home Depot (16 cents each) and glued a piece of black felt to the bottom of each with a hot glue gun. Then I gave each coaster two coats of chalkboard paint.
I wanted each coaster to have a toasting phrase and originally planned to stencil that too. But the font was too small and thin for that to work well, so I ended up tracing my stencil in pencil and then painting it free-hand. Despite my shaky hand, I liked how they turned out.
I’m so glad I kept one set for myself. They’re my favorite way to set the table!
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Living Room Inspiration Ideas
For those of you who follow me on Pinterest, you may have noticed my recent obsession with living rooms. Specifically, living rooms with a Rustic Industrial touch.
Side note: Can I just tell you how excited I was when I finally realized that was an actual style! My dad’s been calling my taste “Industrial Trash Bin” for years, and come to find out, he wasn’t that far off the mark. 😉
Back to the living rooms…I really want to revamp ours. We’ve lived here 5 years, and although I love the things I’ve managed to do (reupholstering the garage sale chair and the Craigslist chair, the slip-cover for the couch, the frame wall), it’s the stuff I haven’t done that’s driving me crazy. So, I’m looking for inspiration… Requirements so far:
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Cowhide rug – the rancher’s daughter in me NEEDS it
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Industrial / Unique lighting
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Lots of crazy drawers – my all time favorite furniture from Germany is probably out of reach, but a girl can dream…
My hope is that with a little paint, creativity and a trip to IKEA, I could do my own version.
IKEA PS 2012 Chest with 5 drawers/1 door IKEA Made of solid wood, which is a durable and warm natural material.
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Finally, antlers. Kyle has a couple pair from his grandfather, and I am just ACHING to paint them!
Thoughts?! Send me your ideas…
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DIY Collapsible Dollhouse Reveal
As promised in the BEFORE Post, this is the reveal of Jessie’s newly renovated collapsible dollhouse! After many hours of sanding, cutting, glueing, wall papering, painting, sewing, mod podging (and more mod podging)…it’s finished!
When she woke up that morning, we had it on the coffee table for her to come and discover. Watching her excitement was so much fun…I’d do anything for that dimpled smile!
She immediately identified everyone and dove into a make-believe story.
Nothing like breathing life into a 30 year old toy…so worth it!
And now for the Grand Tour…
The front yard and entryway, complete with lawn and welcome mat.
You enter into a black, red and white living room…I love so many things about this room. The fun art, the text on the wall, the leather couch and the shiny black floor…all the things I could never swing in my own house, but are perfect for the dollhouse.
I added our own family portrait and a frame wall similar to the one in our real house to the dining room. Kyle did a great job with the table and chairs.
The final room on the 1st floor is the kitchen. Initially, I started to do this room super trendy and sophisticated. Then I remembered it was for a 3yo, who doesn’t care about Houzz trends, and so settled on bright and fun instead.
Upstairs is the bedroom for the kids. They share, just like in real life. I wanted it to be playful and bright, and not totally girly.
The “master” is across from the kids’ room and houses the 2nd fireplace. Woody wanted to know why I put a fireplace in that room if our bedroom didn’t have one…I told Kyle in a not-so-subtle way that maybe for the sake of the dollhouse realism, we should get one. 🙂
I had so much fun picking out the Rubber Ducky art for the bathroom!
And, of course, we needed a Playroom/Schoolroom. Happy Birthday, Jessie. I know you’re enjoying it, and I hope that when you’re grown, you have as many fond memories with the dollhouse as I do.
