Decorated Metal Lunch Box

I love recycling, re-purposing, buying second hand and getting things for free is always a bonus. So you could probably understand why a sign by the bread that advertised  *buy two loaves and get a free lunch box* would catch my interest :) Imagine my delight when the lunch box turns out to be metal and covered in advertising, the perfect excuse to re-purpose it:-

Add black paper (the only colour I had enough of to cover the entire surface) and various stickers, punched & cut out shapes, a torso tag made I had lying around from previous burst of creativity, ART letters, a button, a scotty dog and a M as my first name begins with M and here is the end result :)
 

 And finally a photo of the treasures my Art lunchbox now holds :)

Sunday Market Find - Tea, Coffee & Sugar

One of our favourite pastimes on a Sunday morning is to visit the local market and womble around all the second hand/garage sale type stalls, today we were lucky enough to find and purchase three containers for the kitchen that I just absolutely adore.

Decorated Dairy - 24th & 25th January 2012

24th January - subliminal message perhaps?

25th January - Blue paint chip mosaic on blue organza ribbon.

Had fun putting both of these pages together.

Napier's Sunken Gardens

Napier has an absolutely beautiful place called the Sunken Gardens where I've roamed with my camera, a few of the shots are above. I also found a very unusual and interesting flower (below) which I absolutely love the colour of so just had to share it with you.

Playing With Shadows

When roaming around town with my camera after my 6 monthly glaucoma check (it is amazing how facing losing your eyesight makes you look closer at seemingly everyday things) I spotted a pattern on the ground so I looked up and captured a shot of the patterned glass bus stop (above) that was creating the shadow (below).

Youngest Daughters Creations

My youngest daughter Z is incredibly talented when it comes to arts & crafts and she's been busy over the holidays putting together a jewellery holder (above) and rag rug (below).

Decorated Dairy - 22nd & 23rd January 2012

Decorated Dairy - 20th & 21st January 2012

Two more pages in my 2012 Dairy, this time I have crafted ice creams, with the idea of celebrating Summer which has arrived!

The orange, white and green cone is cut out from cardboard that I put aside from a tissue box, the green & black cone was packaging from magnetic bookmarks I brought earlier this month (the bookmarks also take pride of place in my dairy). The ice creams on top are cut outs from the inside of envelopes (orange and black are two of the hardest to source I've found).  I took the ingredients for these two pages (cut outs, glue and scissors) to work with me this morning and spent my lunch time happily gluing them in and journaling.

Murals in Napier (Pt 2)

 

Four more murals that have caught my interest when I've been out roaming with my camera (when will my family learn not to let me out unsupervised? lol).

Late Night Photography Visit to Napier (Pt 2)

Four shots of the Fountain in Napier at night as the colours changed.

Solar cooking progress

Unfortunately we've not had a great deal of sunshine since I last blogged about solar cooking, or if there has been sunshine it has disappeared fairly early in the day so I have been reluctant to experiment too much foodwise with my home-made solar cooker.

The news isn't all bad however, I have managed to buy a thermometer and do a few trials to find out what temperature the cooker is producing, so far the highest it has reached is 70 celsius (not quite hot enough for cooking I don't think), I am hoping that in February when summer really kicks in and our temperatures reach 30+ degree celsius the cooker will produce hotter temperatures meaning that I will manage to successfully cook and blog about it!

Solar Fountain

Late last year I posted a picture of a glass birdbath that I made just incase you missed it here it is again

I've since added to that birdbath a solar fountain which my lovely husband gave to me for Christmas in a glass bowl

Decorated Dairy - 14th & 15th January 2012

At the beginning of this year I decided that I want to 'Live A Life Full of Art' this year, so I have been  making the effort to do something artistic each day, below are the pages I decorated for the 14th & 15th of January 2012.

The hearts came from scrapbookscrapbook.com, I took the photo of the water lilly earlier this week and paint sample cards were cut out and the remnants glued around the outside of the page on the 15th. I have left a reasonable amount of room for journalling which I do try to do on a daily basis. I've also been playing with mosaic using paint sample cards on a black wine bottle shape to see how it would look.    

Jewellery Organiser for under $10

Frame sourced from St Vincent De Paul Op Shop $4.00

Fine wire mesh sourced from Mitre 10 Mega  $5.00 for .5m x .9m remnant

Using wire cutters I cut the mesh into a rectangle large enough to cover the inside of the frame and stapled the wire to the back of the frame with a staple gun - it's as simple as that.  My inspiration?

                                                                                   Source: google.com.au on Pinterest

Vibrant Murals in Napier (Pt 1)

As I have been wandering around Napier with camera in hand I have found some fantastic murals which beg to be photographed, above are a few from the "Uniting the Community" mural.

Mini Masks

The template for the butterfly mask on the left was again from firstpalette.com, 

the template for the mask on the right was from good-weeks.com.

This time I decreased the size of the template so that it would fit the smaller sized card that I had and popped glued the butterfly template to the back of the butterfly embossed card as it just seemed to work visually, the cardstock used was from Premium Tacks "The once upon a time" mat stack.

Late Night Photography Visit to Napier (Pt 1)

The night before last I mentioned to my husband that I would like to try taking photos of the fountain in Napier when it was lit up, he didn't seem adverse to the idea so we waited for the sun to make it's slow descent and paid a visit to the Sound Shell as well as the fountain, above are a few of them photos (will post more in another post).  The moon was full and with the ISO at 400 I was able to capture some lovely shots.