Guest Baskets… part 2? *Free Printable Banner*

So when I did my last post on the guest basket, I so thought I was done with my basket. I was just going to put some random bow on it. So I pulled out my ribbons, and played around with a bow, and NOTHING looked good. So then I was just going to leave it be, but then I thought if I did a pleated ribbon, it might work better. So I took some burlap trim from my Lost & Found Sunshine set, and just folded it as I ran it through the sewing machine. Then I played around with that and it was so cute draped in the front, but the draping called for a cute banner. So off I went to design and print a banner. And voila, the perfect cherry on top.

I also added the water bottles with their label, put the flossers in that I had forgotten, and made little tags for the toiletries:

Here is a sneak peak of the guest room, all ready for our guests:

I really am done now! If you want to download the graphics to make your own welcome banner, here is a free PDF download:

Click on the image above to download a PDF version of my printable welcome banner. The downloadable PDFs in this article (and across my entire site) are free for personal use only. If you would like to blog about this free download, please accompany and images from my site with a credit and link back to this article. As a courtesy please do not link directly to a downloadable file but rather to this page.

Be our guest! Fun ideas for Guest baskets

A few years ago, Martha (you know, my good friend Martha Stewart) introduced me to the idea of guest baskets. Now I love nothing more than being a great hostess, and so I tucked this fun idea away for a time when I actually had a guest room and an opportunity to welcome guests into my home. As my regular readers may know, my parents are coming to visit TODAY. I’ve been hustling to get a guest room ready for them… less than a week ago it was just an empty room with way too many storage containers in it! Magically it has all come together and the room looks great. I’m going to do a post about that, but am waiting for Mr. Project to come home and get the curtains up for me first! Okay back to guest baskets!! I wanted to make my parents feel as welcome as possible, so I bought a bunch of fun items to put in a big basket in their room.

Here is a list of what I got:

• Shampoo
• Conditioner
• Lotion
• Body wash
• Bar soaps
• Shower poof
• Flossers
• Toothbrushes (not in the basket, just extras on hand)
• Washcloths
• Trail mix
• Cashews
• Flavored almonds
• Dark Chocolate
• Fruit Bars
• Pistachios
• Dried Apricots
• Crackers
• Water Bottles
• Do not Disturb sign

I placed everything in this fun wire basket from Cost Plus World Market like so:

But of course it wasn’t cute enough for me (Martha would not approve). So I decided to take a little time and make some custom labels and give the whole basket some cohesive elements. Here are a few shots of the cute new packaging:

And the whole basket, just ready to welcome my folks for their visit, and hopefully make their stay as comfortable as possible.

I hope this inspired you to create some sort of welcome basket the next time you have special guests!

Creative Contributor Open Call

Are you a project girl too? If so, I’d love to have you showcase your projects, ideas, and inspiration on TheProjectGirl.com! I’m hosting an open call for blog contributors now through September 18th. I’d love to hear from you. Here is more information:

Decorated pen-holders – sharpie style!

I wanted to do something cute with my Sharpie project, and I thought of these boring clear platic buckets that I have hanging around. What better way than to spice them up with some sharpie action. So I had the fun idea of making a geometric pattern on one and a free-form floral on the other.

So since I was drawing on clear plastic I printed out a geometric pattern, cut it to size and taped it to the inside of my container. Then I just went to town with my sharpie! This is how they turned out:

Its  a bit hard to see on camera, so I put a white sheet of paper inside each of them so you can see how cute they are:

And here they are holding all my new fabulous sharpies!

From start to finish this took about an hour, and I love how modern and chic they turned out. You could do this on any pen holder or even an empty can of formula, or tin can that is painted or covered in paper first. If you have a chance run over to sharpie.com to see their Youtube Take Over this weekend, and if you have fun sharpie projects be sure to post them on the sharpie website.

Home Sweet Home – Lost & Found 2

So I finally got a hold of all my new My Mind’s Eye releases. I actually laid everything out and took a bunch of photos, but that’s a whole other post! Just looking and touching it made me really really want to play with it. So I rearranged some stuff and made some time to just get my hands dirty. First I had to unpack all my craft supplies. As I was doing that I found these three 5×6 pieces of foam core board and it got me thinking of what I could do with them.

I knew I wanted to play with all my pink goodies… if you could see how gorgeous they are, you would want to play with them too!

To make my Home Sweet Home wall hanging, I used pretty much all of the Lost & Found 2 Blush set not including the titles, and definitely including the 6×6 paper pack. I did cut some of the 6×6 papers on my cricut. For the Home Sweet Home lettering I used the Freak Show font (with SCAL) to cut it on my cricut. For the Bracket shape, I made a quick .SVG File that you can download for free.

The first thing I did was cut and mount this glittered dance paper on my foam core:

Then I used this Creamy Brown chalk ink to make the edges look a little edged.

So then I just played around with all the supplies and made these cute rectangles:

To get the striped ribbon to have those pleats, I just cut a strip of card stock a little more narrow than the ribbon, and ran the glue runner over it. Then I adhered the ribbon, and toward the end, I just made 3 loops. Then I ran the whole thing through my sewing machine – looped side first with a contrasting ribbon.

Then to put the brad on, I just took my crop-a-dile and punched a hole through the whole thing and dropped in the brad.

The other fun thing I did with this rectangle was use the coordinating stamps to stamp that cute but still subtle banner.

With this crocheted ribbon, I gathered it with my sewing machine with my very technical method of shoving it through the sewing machine quicker than it can feed itself.

One of the fun things I did with this rectangle was take the pearl swirls and cut them up to fit the bottom of the rectangle instead of using them as a full set. It worked so well and was a super easy way of customizing the pearls.

When all that was done, I glued the rectangles to a wide ribbon and looped it at the top, and hung it in my guest room (which so does not look like a guest room at all!). Yay for baby steps to decorate the house.