A Tale of Two Feet: DIY Party Ideas

Last night we (The Well) finally had Drew's going away party, since the fall semester was his last on staff. I was put in charge of pictures and a basket for the cards, two things that are right up my alley! I knew I was going to put together a slide show of pictures, but I wanted to find a way to display some hard copies as well, and then it all just came together in my head.

I still have the shutters that I pleaded with Drew to let me buy and haul back to Johnson City when we were on a spring break missions trip in Florida two years ago. He let me do it, but gave me grief about it the whole time. They have since been cleaned up and repainted and I decided they needed to make an appearance at his party. My first thought was to glue small craft clothespins onto the slats and clip the pictures in there, but I didn't want to do something that would be permanent. So then I figured I could somehow attach twine to the shutters and still use clothespins to clip the pictures up. So I brought my shutters into my living room a few nights ago and started messing with it. I put a nail in the back of one panel to tie the twine to, and draped it across the front and then kind of zig-zagged the twine by wrapping it around the edge and then through the slats, and I just did that over and over again to cover the top half of the panel with twine. I put in another nail to tie the end of the twine to. And then I did the same thing to the other side. I don't know if that makes any sense, it's kind of hard to explain. But I love how it turned out!


This kind of shows how I wrapped it around the edges and through the slats.

And as soon as Samantha asked me if I would mind making a "crafty" basket to put cards in I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Making little pennants that spell out things are very "in" in the crafting world right now, and I've been wanting to make one, but never had a reason, until now! I went to Michael's to get the basket, paper, and letter stickers and then got to work. I started by using some old, thick crafting paper to make a pattern for the pennant flags. I ended up with a diamond that was 3" wide and 6" from top to bottom. I used the pattern to trace out flags on the paper I bought, and then I put on the stickers to spells out CARDS.

I got that purple pencil at the MoMA :)

I laid them down upside down, placed a piece of yarn across the fold, and used a glue stick to glue them together.

I wanted to attach the yarn at each corner edge of the basket, so I used a crochet needle/hook thing to pull the yarn through one of the slats a few times.