Desktop Picture Holder

Hello everyone! I am sorry that I haven't been around lately. The longer that I stayed away from my blog, the easier it was to stay away from my blog, if you know what I mean. At this point, I am not sure how often I will be posting as I haven't been working on any new projects. I would like to thank you all for your comments and emails over the past several months. I literally have thousands of emails of all kinds to sort through and it is going to take me a while. I haven't been spending much time at all on the computer and I'm afraid it is going to be that way for a long while to come.

I am in the midst of cleaning and sorting through all of my craft stuff. A large portion of it has already been donated. The one thing that I cannot wrap my mind around is how much fabric I have accumulated over the years. Finding storage for it has become a real problem. I hope to live long enough to use it all and I certainly will give it my best try. For now and possibly forever, I am on a self imposed fabric buying diet.

All kinds of foolishness has been going on in my life but I won't bore you with the details. My family is intact and functioning well just in case you were wondering. In between it all, I have been working hard on getting my entire house in order, digging through decades of stuff, brutally tossing, organizing, and just trying to create a well functioning home once again.

The following is the original project that I put together for the I Am Roses contest back in May of this year. After much thought, I decided not to enter the desktop picture holder because of it's simplicity and entered my ring box instead. These pictures have been sitting in my computer since that time. Because I haven't been crafting at all over the last four months, I thought that I'd share them with you today.


For this project, you will need several mulberry paper leaves and roses, A Versamark Watermark Inkpad, glittered embossing powder and heat gun, gold 28 gauge wire, assorted small beads, a 1/4-inch paper punch, acrylic paint and paint brush, gold foiling paint or gold acrylic paint, a small flower pot, a small weight to weigh down the flower pot, small piece of styrofoam, cardboard, and cardstock, and a hot glue gun.

To begin, dip random parts of the mulberry leaves into a Versamark Watermark Inkpad.


Dip the leaves into the embossing powder.


Dip the tips of the rose petals into the ink pad.


Dip the roses into embossing powder. Use your heat gun to heat emboss.


I used a gold foiling pen to color the flower stems as they were originally green in color.


Using a length of wire anywhere between 2-1/2 to 4 inches, poke one end into the base of the flower alongside the existing stem.


Twist both wires together. The additional wire will lend more support to the rose stem.


To make the picture hanger, take a piece of wire about 5-1/2-inches and bend the upper third into a 90 degree angle.


Curl the short end of the wire into a swirl.


The wires used in this project measured anywhere from 5 to 8 inches. Add a bead to the center of a piece of wire.


Twist the wire tightly to secure the bead.


Create a flower and leaf cluster by twisting a couple of leaves around each of the roses.


Cut a piece of styrofoam that will fit snugly inside the pot. Cut a round piece of cardboard that will fit on top of the styrofoam (to hide the ugly styrofoam). Choose a weight of some kind to give some heaviness to the pot to keep it from tipping over(small rocks are good). You can use whatever small, weighty item you have laying around the house.


Paint the outside and a small portion of the inside of the pot with acrylic paint.
Glue the weight to the bottom of the pot using a hot glue gun.


Decorate the outside of the flower pot. I've chosen to keep it simple with just woven ribbon glued to the outside rim.


Cut a circle from cardstock using the cardboard circle as a template. Glue the cardstock to one side of the cardboard circle. Punch a hole in the center using a paper punch. Glue the cardboard side of the circle onto the styrofoam.


Gather all of the stems together, taking care to stagger the height of the flowers and beads while at the same time, arranging it in a pleasing manner. Glue the stems into the hole.


Here is a closeup of the flowers. They remind me of porcelain flowers. Well, sort of.


Here is the completed project.


The ring box and the desk top picture holder complement each other nicely.


I hope that you enjoyed this project. Until we meet again, take care, my friends!

Aloha,