Oh! It looks even cooler that way!

Yay! Fox hat!

When Mom bought the canvases for the paintings in WHO is in the painting, she had an extra canvas. She wanted to paint a picture for my room on that extra canvas However, since I was home for spring break, she figured it would be easier to just make me paint it instead of painting it herself. :)

She helped me with the background. We started by picking the colors - purple and pink and light blue (I'm such a girl. :) ). We poured the paint onto the canvas and spread it around just having fun.

Then came the boring part: letting it dry. Of course, we wanted to use the kitchen table for other things while it was drying. What's the best place for a painting to dry? On Christmas coffee mugs on the stove, naturally! Where else would it dry?

After the paint dried we covered it in glitter varnish. (Ooo shiny!)

The glitter varnish is kinda hard to see.

Then I started to design the line drawing for the center of the canvas.

My sketch on lovely scrap paper

After I had a design that I liked, I drew it onto the canvas with Sharpie. Don't you just LOVE Sharpies? :)

The Sharpie worked really well and was much easier than painting the dress form.

We liked the result, but it still needed something a bit more. So we decided to put paper flowers in the corners.

Just plain purple flowers were boring. What's our solution? Pink and lilac paint!

We made an assembly line; Mom painted the lilac and then passed it to me so that I could paint the pink. At first, she was way too slow so I had to take care of my impatience.

But then we got into a rhythm and it worked like clock work. .... If clock work painted flowers. (There were many choruses of "painting the roses red").

After the flowers were finished it was time to break out our trusty friend, the hot glue gun.

I glued the flowers to the canvas.

Danced a bit.

Then glued some more.

And viola! A finished dress form painting! :)

I added the head to the dress form. :)

So I had the painting laying on the table when my aunt came to visit the day that I left to go back to school. Unfortunately, it was upside down to her. So she says, "Oh, it's kinda cool." Mom and I look at her and say, "Um, it's upside down." She turns it right side up and exclaims, "Oh! It's even cooler that way!"

Normal pens are too boring.

I hate having boring pens. I can't write with them!

Instead I have awesome pens:

My lovely fountain pen from Germany

My sonic screwdriver pen for you Doctor Who fans out there

My Elder Wand pen

And, of course, the actual reason for my posting: Our feather pens.

We got the idea for these pens when we were on our weekly inspiration walk...through the Hobby Lobby's store

We saw this display at the end of an aisle filled with just feathers in many different colors. We then proceeded to spend a good 15 minutes trying to pick out the perfect feathers. We tried to find some colored floral tape to attach the feathers to the pens, but we had no luck.

So we got creative. We went down to our fabric shop in our basement, fought through the stacks and stacks of junk until we found the collection of satin ribbons. And, of course, we brought out our good friend the hot glue gun.

Using the same standard Bic pen pictured at the beginning of this post, we hot glued the feather along the pen and then began to wrap the pen and feather in the satin ribbon.

We made sure to stop wrapping at a place that would allow us to replace the inside of the pen when it ran out of ink.

And ta-da! Awesome feather quill pens!

We made these while I was home over Thanksgiving break. You know what I was using to do homework on the plane flight back to school. ;) And during finals time you could totally find me writing/editing essays and studying with purple feather pen in hand.