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Personalized art book, perfect gift for a toddler!

I don’t know about you, but I always seem to struggle to find a nice present for a kids first birthday. I don’t particularly like the bright plastic toys for these little ones and most other types of toys aren’t suitable for babies. Since most babies don’t talk by the time they turn one they can’t tell us what they really want for their birthday. Honestly, that first birthday is more the parents’ birthday than the kids… I want to give something that will last to those parents and help them retain their memories. What better way than to give the baby a personalized art book?

How to make the personalized art book

Buy any sketchbook with blank pages and look in your drawers for fabric, ribbons and other nice stuff to sew on. Cut the fabric at the size of the cover of your book. Then write the child’s name on a piece of paper making sure the letters all connect. Cut the paper, turn the name around and transfer to some nice fabric. Cut the name and sew it on your cover fabric.

Add any other things you like on the fabric. I used some ironing pieces I had laying around and flowers cut from fabric, but you can use anything you like. Once you’re happy with the results it’s time to put the fabric cover on the book. I used double sided tape that I stuck on my book. You could also use glue but I found the double sided tape a little less messy and easier to use with the fabric.

Once the cover is on, your present is ready! You might also like to add a ribbon or a button on the side of the book, whatever you like. 

I also had a brand name on the back of the book and I wanted to hide that. I cut a smaller flower from fabric and glued that on the back, using double sided tape.

I wanted something extra for this gift so I took some felt and sewed a little envelope to hold some pencils I bought. Looks cute right? The little girl that got this present was very happy with the small envelope, taking the pencils out and putting them back in was her favorite activityJ.

Do you have a great (DIY) gift idea for a toddler? I would love to hear about it!

A little about me and this blog

Hi and welcome to my blog!


I’m Lisette, a 36 year old stay at home mom. The summer of 2014 was all about change, change, change. We moved from Holland to Canada and are currently settling in in st Albert in Alberta. We have a strong minded 5 year old girl we are very proud of. I have always been creative but the last few years I discovered that living without creating makes me feel very low. I need to create! Writing, crafting, sewing, illustrating; I need it all! This blog was set up to do all of this and share it with the world as well. You will find DIY projects for the house, recipes or tips I have about lunch and dinner and sometimes I just blog about life. My life is far from perfect, I know by reading a lot of blogs, it always seems that other people have perfect lives. Well, mine just isn't, so I write about those days too. I will write about being lazy and my DIY project tend to be easy or cheap and preferably both :) 

I hope you’ll enjoy reading my blogs, I definitely would love to hear your thoughts and ideas, so please feel free to comment or share!

Ps. Be sure to check out my Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest!

Contact me

If you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear them! Comment on my posts or we can connect through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest. You can always email me old school :)

If you are a company looking for a sponsored post, please feel free to email me. I'm always open to offers if your company and product seems appropriate to me.

lisettemaassen-at-gmail*com

How to make a feature wall for less than $15

As you might know, we currently live in a rental house. The house was built in the 1970’s and although it has been updated over the years, some spots still breathe those seventies… Especially in the basement this posed a slight problem for us. There is a wall in the main area that is somewhat outdated –yes, I am being very kind to that wall-. The main area is also the playroom for our daughter and that wall, it just seemed to suck all the fun out of that room. Okay, so maybe that’s a little much, but still it is one ugly wall. Painting was out of the question because of us renting and also because the panelling wasn’t real good quality. It wasn’t mounted very nice and was very loose at a lot of points. I was afraid wallpaper would never come off and putting new paneling in front of the wall would be a very big and expensive project. I was starting to believe we would be stuck with that ugly wall. Not anymore though! Because even though we can’t really change things permanently, I found a way to transform this ugly wall into a feature wall!

How to transform an ugly wall into a feature wall

Halfway through

When looking in despair at that ugly, faux wood wall, I thought about a previous project of mine. I started thinking that shelf lining would be a great solution! I tested a spot and stuck a piece of scrap lining I had left to see if it would stick and left it overnight. It stuck! And, more importantly; I was able to remove it afterwards without ruining the paneling behind it. So I went to Wallmart where they sell shelf lining at the best price. I had measured how much I would need and for this wall, I just needed two rolls. That means I made this feature wall for about $15! You can’t beat that price, right?

The project was relatively easy. Just measure how long the lining has to be, cut it and stick it on the wall. The tricky part was getting it on straight but luckily you can pull it back off and stick it back on again plenty of times.

I really love how this wall turned out! The pattern even brings out the best of those brown doors! My girl now has a pretty feature wall in her play room. Do you have any great tips on how to transform an ugly wall? Love to hear them!

Ps. A full blog on the whole playroom will follow. After redoing it, it is now jam-packed with cute play areas! I just need some more time to finish it.

DIY door make over that's cheap, easy and not permanent!

I’m very lucky because our new rental house has an extra room on the main floor. That means I get to have a craft room on the main floor! The house being a rental does mean I don’t have complete freedom to change the rooms as I please so I’m somewhat limited in what I can do to the spaces. I also don’t want to spend a ton of money on a place we’re not sure how long we’ll be living in, so sometimes we have to get creative.

In my craft room there were these, uhm…not so beautiful doors. They are kind of cheap looking doors and I really didn’t need any mirrors in a room I’m crafting in (or am I the only one with strange facial expressions while crafting?). I couldn’t remove the doors easily and I kind of liked the idea of a storage cupboard with doors (the more of my mess I can hide, the better). I decided to turn to my new best friend; shelf lining!

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It was a really easy DIY job and the result is really nice! First I measured my shelf lining (I bought mine at Walmart), making sure that the lining was a little wider than my mirrored doors. Trust me, you want to do that! Sticking the lining completely straight is impossible, leaving some overlap makes sure you have some margin to stick it not completely straight.

I then stuck the lining on the mirror. Just take a small portion of the backing of the lining and start sticking. Pull the backing as you gently push the lining on the mirror. Try to only push down the middle, take care of the edges later. It makes for less bubbles to push out afterwards.

After sticking the lining on and pushing the bubbles out I created a nice fold with my thumb on the sides of the mirror. Using a knife I cut the lining to size and I removed the excess lining.

And that’s it! The mirrors are now covered and if we move I can simply take the lining off. Everyone wins!

I’d love to hear how you solved an ugly door at your house!

Valentines school treat

Pretty soon we'll be celebrating Valentines. My girl obviously wanted to hand out a treat in class. And let’s be honest; I just love creating new stuff so figuring out a Valentines treat she can hand out in school is just fun for me. Luckily the shops started filling up their shelves with Valentines stuff right after new years’ so I had plenty of options to choose from. I didn’t want it to be expensive and I wanted to make it fun, so I started searching for stuff and inspiration.

How to make this cute Valentines school treat

I found really cute heart shaped boxes at Target (why oh why must they leave Canada???), they were just $1 for a bag of 6 boxes! There were bags with pink and red boxes and bags with multi colored boxes. I bought a combination of the two so the boys didn’t have to end up with pink boxes (because we know they really don’t want to). I bought heart shaped sweets at Dollarama and filled the boxes with a few sweets each.

     

I just love the idea of a bag with a personalized label, I can't help it, I just find it so darn cute. So I put the boxes in some bags I had laying around (I bought them a little while ago at Dollarama). I then made labels. Just measure how many labels will fit on one page and insert a table. You can then write whatever you want in the table. If you want double sided labels like I made them, be sure to use a text box for the upper line so you can easily rotate the text so that it’s upside down. Then just cut out the labels and attach those to the bags with the boxes.

Cute Valentines school treat, right?

My girl helped to fill the boxes and taste the sweets (which is a really important task obviously), she also made heart shaped name tags. She's really proud she can write so she wrote all the tags herself and decorated the tags.