This morning I re-watched two of Amy Krause Rosenthal’s videos called “The Beckoning of Lovely”.
The first one:
and the third one
I knew when I added “Make 41 beautiful things” to this year’s list that I’d been inspired by AKR, but it had been awhile, maybe years since I’d seen the videos. I think now that her ideas inspired the creation of my life lists as well. However far off my radar they’d become a seed had been planted when I first watched them.
I have started to collect ideas for beautiful things to make and over the last couple weeks I began making them.
#1.
I started with a trip to one of those paint & drink establishments popping up all over. Have you been to one? My friend Anna came down from Michigan for a girls weekend, just her and me and we spent a snowy afternoon at Bottle & Bottega drinking Dark & Stormy’s and learning how to paint.
They do a fine job of breaking down the process to small enough steps that even the least creatively inclined among us end up with something that looks pretty dang close to what it’s supposed to. We picked a particularly difficult painting to tackle. I think the Dark & Stormys helped!
:: Ours side-by-side.
::hanging in my office/pantry/mudroom/cat feeding station!
#2
I have a medium sized collection of mostly burned-up candles. I can sometimes dig up enough of a wick to light the dang thing, but not for long. So I gathered up all of those useless candle remnants and made myself something lovely.
It’s a teacup candle! Pretty obvious, but super cute, no? All you need is a sweet little teacup, a wick and some candle wax. Also a couple of chopsticks help with the steadying of the wick.
I used an old glass jar to hold the wax and placed the jar into a small pan of boiling water (don’t put the wax in the pan directly – unless you’re into wax soup, then fine, do what you want). The wax melts, you pour it into your teacup, wait a few hours til it hardens and voila! Now you make candles, dude.
xoxo, erin
