I was so excited when, around Valentine's Day, I got a surprise in the mail! It was a box of craft supplies with a charge to use the included basket and five other items to create something cool. We could also use any items from our stash and up to $5 in additional purchased supplies. Challenge accepted.
I picked out my favorite pieces from the box. I wasn't really sure what I was going to do or how I was going to use them, but fortunately my wonderful friend & roomie Brianna was there to inspire and co-craft. We brainstormed a bit, then decided to try a challenging project: let's make a bird house!
We started by cutting the basket down to bird house size. This meant carefully cutting and un-weaving one of the short sides to move it closer to the other short size, changing the orientation of the rectangle essentially from the "portrait" seen above to a smaller "landscape."
The basket wasn't weaving back together very easily, so I broke out the hot glue gun. Worked like a charm.
After trimming off the excess, we had a tiny basket maybe 1/3 the size of the original. It was so cute! But it had a destiny to fulfill as a bird house, not as a tiny basket.
We didn't want to waste any part of the original basket, so we sectioned it off to be used in other parts of the bird house. The sections that were once the sides were joined together to make the roof, and the section that was once the bottom became the front.
We attached the front using hot glue (my one true love). To make a perfect opening for a bird, we searched for a perfectly proportioned round object to trace and found it in the basket tag. So I guess you say we really did use the entire basket!
Again I united with my darling hot glue gun to attach the roof.
We used the same tag to trace a circle out of the red glitter felt to complete the front and add a flash of color.
At this point we looked at the bird house and thought that it looked familiar... sort of like a Poke Ball, which houses Pokemon -- only in bird house form.
We thought it would be a pretty cool home for a Pidgey, which is a birdlike Pokemon; hence the name Pidgey's Perch. We decided to use the bias tape as an accent to the hole to make the theme more consistent.
The house was still looking too void of color, so we painted the underside of the roof bright red, added more sparkle felt to peek through the roof hole, and outlined the edges in red glitter glue.
We tore up the red tissue paper to act as bedding inside the bird house.
Then we attached a string of party beads to the roof to act as a rope from which the bird house can hang from the patio.
We think it looks pretty handsome hanging from our patio! Maybe it will attract some visitors.
We're looking forward to seeing how Mom, Jeanne, and Julie used their Mystery Box supplies!
