Disney DIY – Minnie Spring Wreath

Posted on March 27, 2018 by greenlisa9989@yahoo.com

As so often happens, creativity struck when I noticed a 50%-off sale at my favorite hobby store. This time for artificial flowers. There was a huge selection and I wanted to be frugal, but have a nice finished project. I’m positive I invested more time shopping for flowers than I did putting the wreath together. I seriously spent very little money and hardly any time on the entire endeavor. You know I’m lazy when it comes to stuff like this. I strive for maximum results from minimum effort (a challenge I can’t resist). So, if you decide to take on this project, your results could be much better than mine. As it is, I’m pretty pleased with the payoff my modest time/money investment produced.

Disney DIY – Minnie Spring Wreath

What You’ll Need

Three grapevine wreaths (one large, two small)
Wire
Flowers (put together a bouquet of colors you love)
Greenery

I know there’s an official ears-to-head ratio for Mickey and Minnie (ears are 3/5th the size of the head). The two smaller wreaths I bought were too small to be officially correct to that ratio and I knew this going in. Two factors were at play: the wreath selection was limited and the end product needed to actually fit on my front door. To compensate for this problem, I plumped up the ears with the addition of some greenery and was happy with how it turned out. Do the best with what you’ve got!

So Easy, Anyone Can Do It!

I started by pre-cutting several lengths of wire. Then I added greenery to the ears and head. On the ears, I was careful to keep the greenery to the outside, top edges in order to add volume and make them look larger. I did this before wiring the ears onto the head, which was super easy. This part took about 10 minutes. Next, I started wiring flowers onto Minnie’s head. I started with the biggest clusters of flowers, added the one giant pink flower, then finally filled in with accent sprays and smaller flowers. That’s it. Took maybe 30 minutes, max. You could easily make this fancier with the addition of some ribbon, flowers in hidden Mickey shapes, or maybe even a small bird’s next with eggs in it. What do you think? Is this something you’d try? I did a Christmas version here and a Halloween wreath here.

Have you completed a spring Disney project? I’d love to see it!

DIY Disney Christmas Ornaments From Pins

Posted on December 21, 2017 by greenlisa9989@yahoo.com

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to be crafty, but an idea popped into my head a while back and it wouldn’t go away. Creative thoughts flowing, I formulated a plan that was, of course, both easy and cheap. ‘Cause you know, with DIY stuff, that’s how I roll.

DIY Disney Christmas Ornaments From Pins

It started a few weeks ago when I found, tucked away, yet another bag of Disney pins purchased on a trip to Disney World some time ago. As I was ~~stuffing~~ lovingly adding these rediscovered treasures into our “Disney pin drawer”, I thought it was a terrible shame that we keep our pin collection tucked away. Couldn’t I find a way to display at least a few favorites somehow? What better place than on our Disney Christmas tree!

I’ve got mad skills with a hot glue gun and I’m a ribbon hoarder. I’m also cheap. Starting there, I purchased two additional items and I was ready to go! You artistic types that like to measure stuff will love this project. I didn’t measure anything and I’m not all that artistic and I made some pretty cute ornaments. Joseph took one look at them and called them banners, so we’ll go with that. Let’s make some Disney pin banners!

Here’s what you’ll need:

Disney pins and/or buttons
Ribbon in different colors and widths
Wooden sticks either plain or painted
Wire (I found colored wire at my local discount store)
Extras like buttons or flowers for embellishments

Here’s what you do:

Choose pins and ribbon that will compliment each other. I selected pins based on the ribbon colors I already had. You could pick out your favorite pins and buy ribbon to match, but then you wouldn’t have the fun of using leftover ribbon in an awesome way. I bought a pack of sticks and spray-painted them silver because…yep, you guessed it, that’s the color paint I found in my laundry room cabinet. You don’t have to paint the sticks at all if you don’t want to. I punched holes in an empty k-cup box, stood the sticks up in the holes, sprayed them, waited for the paint to dry, turned them over and painted them again.

Combine ribbons anyway you want to or not at all. For some pins, I hot-glued ribbons together side-by-side to make them wider. For others I glued layers of ribbons together to make a more interesting background. (If it looks like there’s hot glue everywhere in these pictures it’s only because there was!) Fold the ribbon over, hot-glue it to the stick and pin on the pin – the beauty of this project is that the pin comes right back off if you want to do something else with it in the future. I added some buttons to Mickey’s banner and a rose to Mulan’s for fun, but that’s only because I already had that stuff.

Finally, add something to hang the banner up with. I used inexpensive colored wire and I just wrapped the wire around the ends of the stick and added a little twist at the top to hold the ornament hook. Tah-Dah!!! Easy-peasy! If you have kids, this might be a fun project while they’re out of school for the holidays.

Thanks for stopping by! If you decide to make this project or a variation thereof, please share pictures here or over on Facebook. I’d love to see what you make!

More Disney Cruise Stateroom Door Décor

Posted on April 27, 2015 by greenlisa9989@yahoo.com

A long time ago I wrote this post about making stateroom door magnets for your first Disney cruise. There’s not much to it, but that post has been one of the most viewed I’ve ever written. Time for a do-over with more pictures this time. Earlier today, I was once again putting together some door magnets for our upcoming Disney cruise so I thought I’d share more tips for making door décor. If you’d rather watch than read or if you require a few more details than I’m including in this post, watch the video version of this tutorial here.

More Disney Cruise Stateroom Door Décor

If you’ve never taken a Disney cruise before, you should know that it’s a pretty common thing to decorate your stateroom door. You’ll feel left out if you don’t. You’ll also feel lost. Long, LONG hallways of nothing but identical stateroom doors – your family members had better be great at memorizing your room number, because all the staterooms look exactly alike from the outside. Unless you make yours unique by decorating it with your own personal touch. Decorations must be family-friendly and affixed to the door by magnets only (no adhesive allowed).

You’ll need:

Magnetic printer paper
Magnetic tape (or peel-and-stick flat magnets)
Foam Sheets
Scrapbooking (or other) themed stickers of your choice
Stick-on Letters
Stateroom Mickey Ears template (see below)
Printed photos of your choice

For small door magnets: I start by cutting some shapes out of the foam sheets to use as backgrounds and embellish those with the scrapbooking stickers. Then I cut pieces of self-stick magnet and put those on the reverse side. That’s IT! Add letters if you want and you’ll have some personalized magnets you can put up once or change out every day if you like.

For Mickey Ears (around the room number medallion on the door) – Follow the link at the bottom of this post to browse the fantastic selection of ear templates. Save and print your favorite set(s) of ears on magnetic printer paper then carefully (I’m scissor-challenged!) cut out the shapes and you’ll have another adorable addition to your door!

For large magnets – print big pictures on photo paper or magnetic printer paper. If you print on the magnetic paper, you’re finished. If you print as pictures, glue them on a foam sheet background (or a piece of cardboard) for stability, add some stick-on magnets to the back. You are now ready to set sail with a very attractive (and easy to spot) stateroom door.

Have you made magnets for your Disney Cruise Line stateroom? Please share your pictures over at Living a Disney Life on Facebook! I would love to see some new ideas!!!

The template For Stateroom Mickey Ears is available here for a small investment.

Disney Photos – 5 Great Editing Apps

Posted on December 24, 2014 by greenlisa9989@yahoo.com

Seems like no matter how many cameras I take on vacation, I end up using the camera on my phone the most. I think it’s the immediate gratification I get from viewing and sharing pictures right away. Not to mention how fun a great selfie is now and again. Sometimes I need to edit a good picture to make it a great one. Sometimes I just want to add a caption or a frame or make a collage of some related images…luckily, there are apps for that! I want to share a few of my favorites with you today. Some are super simple and easy to use, some take a bit of practice, but each app puts great picture-editing tools right at your fingertips. Best of all, they’re all free for at least the basic versions.

Disney Photos – 5 Great Editing Apps

Instagram – It’s not just a social media/picture-and-video sharing place. It also has wicked-cool editing tools that are easy and incredibly fun to use. Instagram also lets you quickly share with your other social media sites, so I can create a masterpiece and tweet about it or post it straight to Facebook! Here are some examples of my favorite Instagram-edited pictures (see all of them and follow me here):

Snapseed – This one’s relatively new to me and I’m still practicing. I do see tremendous potential and love the results I’m getting so far. What I like about this app is the richness is adds to certain pictures in a way I can’t quite achieve with other apps. Read the review that convinced me to give Snapseed a try here. Some of my best efforts with Snapseed so far:

Typic – If I could use this app to its fullest, I could do some amazing things! As it is, I fumble with it just enough to produce acceptably cute results. As with several of these apps, I tend to use photos I’ve already enhanced with Instagram first, then add frames and words in Typic. I bet some of you with more creativity and better vision could really go crazy with this app. (See more in this review.) Clearly, I’m barely scratching the surface, but I very quickly and simply used Typic on these shots:

PhotoGrid – Fun and easy to use, this is my go-to collage making app, but you can also do some creative things with single pictures. It’s fun and easy to pull a few photos together, plus there are some pretty neat filters available to enhance the finished product. (Detailed app review here.) RM-Singing-Busts-Collage Rhonna Designs – The free, basic package included in this app is packed with thousands of ways to enhance your pictures. While some features are easy to figure out, others are a bit more challenging. I love the video tutorials available for help! This one app could keep me busy for hours. Scrapbook fanatics must think they’ve gone to heaven. I’ve had this app for a long time and I haven’t used it as much or as well as I should – New Year’s Resolution time! Which of these apps are you using? Have any others to share? What about your favorite features, tips, and tricks? I’d love to hear them.