Giveaway City!

I am doing my first giveaway today and am so excited! Mary Jean over at The Dough Nut is hosting the giveaway. Head on over to her website and enter to win one of my signs for FREE! She will close the entries Wednesday night at midnight and announce the winner Thursday. Good Luck!!!!!!

A Custom Frame

The goal of Once Upon a Cottage has always been to make signs and other items that match your decor. I have always wanted my items to match YOUR home, no cookie cutter crafts. That is the beauty of custom made signs! Having said that, I wanted to share with you a recent custom order that turned out so cute!

I had someone order a frame instead of a sign and it turned out so nice that I am going to make one for my little girls' room. Take a look....

She wanted to frame a picture of her daughter and her husband surrounded by the quote "I already met prince charming, His name is Daddy" It is too sweet!

Edit: These frames will be for sale along with my signs. I will be listing them in my Etsy store. You can also order them directly from my website by emailing me. Please be sure to tell me your background and font color so I can customize it for your room! Thanks for the wonderful emails and comments about this frame!!!!

I love it!

The Nester is having a 10 minutes to a room you'll love finale! I wanted to enter but between my root canal  and my laptop being in the shop, I did not get around to it! There have been some wonderful 10 minute makeovers.

 I was thrilled to see that Mary Jean (AKA The Dough Nut) from One Nutty Girl  did enter and my sign was incorporated into her post! I LOVE seeing my signs in other homes and am always thrilled to see how people display them!  Head on over to One Nutty Girl and check it out!

                                                

Be sure to check back in at One Nutty Girl next week! She will be hosting a giveaway for one of my signs!

Two Dollar Window Tratments

If you think it is not possible to make two dollar window treatments let me show you how! First, I got the window treatments from my wonderful neighbor who had them in storage. She bought the fabric on clearence and made them herself. However, when I discovered them she was not using them and they just so happened to match my daughters' room perfectly! She was so kind to let me have them. Always remember the quote"One man's trash is another man's treasure."

I brought them home and played around with them and discovered they were much too long for my windows and I did not want to have to invest in any hardware such as rods and finials. So I decided to fold them and just use fabric tacks to hang them on the wall. Obviously I did not want you to see the tacks so I tied a few bows from ribbon collection and hot glued them to the tacks. This was the quickest and cheapest window treatment I have ever done and they are beautiful!

This is the underneath of the window treatments where I folded them. By folding the fabric I avoided having to purchase hardware and saved even more money!

                                                             The finished product!

Here is a close up of the bows I hot glued over the fabric tacks!

You might remember these bows from Part 1 of my fabric series: Fluff it Up. I used this ribbon again on her shams to tie the room together.

In other news:

Pink and Polka Dot is having a Vintage Valentine Giveaway. Head on over to her blog and enter! She has some very beautiful stuff int her giveaway. You can get there by clicking on her name and you will automatically be linked. Good Luck!

Taking it all in

I am home from Blissdom and there is so much information to absorb that I am still processing much of it. I learned more than I ever imagined I would and met more talented woman (and even a few men) than I thought was possible. There is no way that I could summarize everything that I learned but Edie at Life in Grace did a great job of putting some notes on her blog. I must admit that I went to Nashville not knowing Edie or her blog but left there with a great respect for both. She is cute and sweet as can be and I feel blessed to have met her.

I sat in the car for sixteen hours with two woman that I had never met before and by the time we got home yesterday I felt like we had been friends since childhood. I am thankful that they were patient and did not throw me out of the car half way to Nashville. I had no idea how we would find stuff to talk about for that long but I have already talked to both of them via email to day. I guess we could have driven another ten hours before we ran out of things to talk about. Thanks Do it Yourselfer and Koehmstedt for putting up with me. I had a blast!

      
           At the last minute Do it Yourselfer and I decided to room together and it worked out perfect!

          
                 Other major highlights of this trip included the following blogger "star" sightings:

                                The Nester and The Inspired Room speaking together on a panel

Balancing Beauty and Bedlam smiling with Chatting at the Sky

I had a great time and can not wait to do it again next year!