easy DIY macrame pot holders

his is actually a DIY I did last summer, but never ended up posting!  I wanted to liven up my front porch, so I made these super easy hanging pot holders and planted some little marigolds.  All you need is some rope and pots!

During Christmas I put faux Poinsettias in the pots, but I noticed that the red dye in the faux flowers bled all over the pots and rope.  Luckily the dye washed away in the rain after a couple months, but if you live in a place that's rainy and want to put faux flowers in your pots outside, take note.  Real Poinsettias are too large for these pots so I'll have to figure something else out next winter.

This is a really quick project, depending on how many you're making.  I have six hanging from my front porch and it took me a couple afternoons, mostly because I ran out of rope and had to go buy more.  I'd say each one only took 10-15 minutes.

You'll need six lengths of rope (or yarn, I made some hanging candles in mason jars using this same tutorial using yarn.).  I'd recommend cutting the rope longer than you think you might need it, it's better to have extra than not enough.   I used white rope and a simple terra cotta pot which I panted white with exterior paint (since my pots would be outside in the rainy northwest weather).  The amount of rope you need will depend on how long you want your macrame holders to be.  Mine hang about 3 feet down and I believe I made the ropes about 5 feet each.

Tie the ropes in a knot leaving a bit of extra (you can always cut it off later).  Separate the three pairs of rope so they're easy to see.  Tie the adjacent pairs together with a square knot.  This will be the base of your pot holder, so where you tie them will depend on how big the base of your pot is.  Try to aim for tying this first knot at the length of the radius of the base, or a bit longer.  Go around and tie all three pairs.

Now that all three are tied together, separate the free ends.  Tie these new adjacent strings together for your "level 2" knots.  Make sure all your knots are the same distances, so each level is at the same point, otherwise it'll get lopsided. If you're not sure if your knots are in the right place to create the right size space for your pot, have your pot on hand and you can slip it in there while you're making it to see if your knots are going to fit the pot.  Knot each adjacent pair.

You can keep knotting as high as you like, but I found that three levels of knots works good for a small pot.  Slip your pot in there to see how it fits and if it looks good, you're done!  Knot the top of the strings so the pot hangs where you want and then screw a hook to the ceiling, or wherever you're hanging your pot from and hang it!

I was lazy with my pot holder and just let the ends fray, but if you wanted to make the ends cute you could leave them super long and put a wood bead on the end and knot it for a bit of embellishment.  Or you could singe the ends of the rope/string so that they didn't fray.

DIY Summer Camp 2023: Make all the things!

Are you ready to sign up for two months of DIY fun? How does DIY Summer Camp work, anyway? Here are the deets!

DIY Summer Camp is on from July 16th - September 9th, 9 weeks of flexing your creativity. During those two months, as a “camper," you'll post a DIY project to your social media using the hashtag #campDIYallthethings once a week. Literally any DIY project. Just make something!

Unlike other DIY challenges, you do not need to be working on remodeling a single space, or complete an entire room during Summer Camp. You certainly can! If you want to use Summer Camp as an excuse to bang out a whole room transformation, AWESOME. But that's not the goal here. DIY Summer Camp is all about just being creative and making things consistently! That could mean you flip a piece of furniture one week, paint a mural the next week, craft some air dry clay earrings, or make some new raised garden beds on a different week… it's all DIY and it's all fair game during Summer Camp!

The real key here is that you nurture your inner artist and allow your curiosity to lead you. The internet and social media can make us feel like we need to "niche down" or focus on one thing and get really good at it. For me, my main audience is DIY Home Renovation, but I know that my creativity wants to spread it's wings a bit, so by letting myself do things that don't fit into the little box of "Home Reno," I'm actually fueling the fire of my  

creativity and allowing my brain to explore ideas that I wouldn't have if I stayed in that single niche. 

So this summer, DIY Summer Camp is all about loosening up the reins, honoring the tides of your creativity and letting yourself play!

DIY Hog Panel Trellis

Over the past three years, I’ve slowly built and added on to our garden, and now that the essential layout and garden beds are done, I’m moving on to fleshing it out with elements that help define the space and give it a cozier feel. When we bought this house, it really just felt like the house was dropped onto a totally empty lot with no landscaping to speak of, so adding in things that help the house feel integrated with the land and neighborhood has been part of our long-term exterior goals.

I’ve spent a couple years building raised beds for our vegetable/pollinator garden, but last year when I built the patio and pergola area in the back of our house, I realized that you could see all the way to that area from the front, so I wanted to create a little more privacy, with something for climbing plants to vine on. While I was walking the aisles of Home Depot, I saw a garden bed trellis made with Wild Hog fence panels and I knew that would be the perfect solution, since we already had garden beds right where I wanted trellis to go.

I’d built the pergola last year using LINX brackets and Wild Hog fence panels, so I was familiar with and loved those products already, so using them to create this trellis situation seemed like the perfect fit.

What you’ll need:

Materials (per 3.5 x 6.5 ft trellis):
2-  10ft 4x4 treated lumber
1-  8 ft 4x4 treated lumber
1-  36x72in Wild Hog Panel
1-  6ft Wild Hog Tracks kit
2-  4x4 LINX L-Fit Brackets
4-  3in Exterior Wood Screws
Gravel or Concrete for setting posts

Tools:

Circular Saw
Impact Driver/Drill
Angle Grinder
Tape Measure
Speed Square

1. Start by inserting one of the 10ft 4x4s into the first LINX L-Fit brackets. Make sure the 4x4 goes all the way in, so that when you look inside from the other side, you see it fully inserted. Then slide in the 8ft (for the 36in wide panel, or 6ft for the 60in wide panel) 4x4, so that its inserted fully and touches the 10ft 4x4 you’ve already inserted.

2. Lay your Wild Hog panel in the middle where it will eventually go, with about a 1/4 - 1/2 in gap on all sides. Mark the width of that top 4x4 using your speed square, remove from the bracket, and cut on your mark.

3. Insert the other 10ft 4x4 to the second LINX bracket, then reinsert the top 4x4 you just cut, then secure the brackets using the screws provided with the LINX brackets.

4. Open your Hog Track kit, you’ll have two 3ft tracks and two 6ft tracks. If you’re building a trellis using 36in wide Wild Hog Panel, you’ll need to cut the 3ft track to fit between the LINX Brackets (you won’t need to do this for the wider trellis using the 60in panel). You’ll also need to cut the excess off the bottom of the 6ft tracks to fit between the bottom of the LINX bracket and the bottom of the panel.

5. Cut the tracks using your angle grinder, then spray the cut end with black spray paint.

6. Mark the center of all of your 4x4s at 1 3/4in, this is where you’ll install the hog tracks. I used my speed square, holding my pencil at 1 3/4 and sliding the base of the square along the edge of the 4x4.

7. Using the provided screws, attach the Hog Tracks along this line.

Repeat this process for each side.

8. With the three sides installed, slide your panel in all the way. Once the panel is in, you can build and install the bottom piece.

9. Measure the inner width between the upright 4x4s and cut your final section of 4x4 to fit. If you’re making a trellis using the 36in panel, you’ll need to cut about 1in off your final 3ft Hog Track, so it will fit between the vertical Hog Tracks on either side. Again, mark the center of the 4x4, and install that Hog Track. You can then slide this up so the panel slips inside that bottom track.

10. Secure this bottom piece by toenailing in using 3in exterior screws.

11. At the location where you’re going to install your trellis, measure and mark where the posts will go. Using a post hole digger, dig a hole about 38-42in deep.

12. Place about an inch or so of gravel in the base of the hole, then (with a friend— these trellises are heavy!) slide the trellis posts into the holes.

13. You can secure this trellis either using quick-setting concrete, or I simply filled in around the posts using gravel. Since my garden plan is constantly in flux, I wanted to make sure I had the option to move these in the future if my plans change, and gravel keeps them secure without making them 100% permanent.

If you’re also wanting to build some of these corrugated metal raised beds, they’re one of my favorite budget-friendly and (IMHO) cool-looking garden beds. You can find my tutorial for those here!

Our existing arbor that you can see is a Home Depot find, I’m not finding the exact model but you can see a very similar one here.

How to use photoshop to create interior design mockups and mood boards

Learning how to create beautiful mood boards and project mockups is a great way to not only gain clarity on your own personal projects, but offer visual proof of concept of projects for clients, if you’re a designer, or potential sponsors, if you’re a content creator. While I love to create mockups for my own projects in order to feel out colors and design ideas, they also are a perfect thing to send alongside a pitch to a brand when I’m seeking a sponsorship. I find they are a great way to test out different paint colors or wallpapers, and get a feel for how something will look IRL. I generally like using image based mockups using actual photos of the space better than doing 3D computer renderings because they feel more real to me, especially if you’re keeping the existing structure of a space and aren’t moving walls or anything that would be more difficult to adjust from a photo. Mood boards are a great starting place for putting together a general design vibe, to see how different colors and textures will look together.

There are other programs besides Adobe Photoshop you can use to create mood boards and mockups, like Canva, but I’ve been using photoshop since 2004 and have never used Canva, so this tutorial will use Photoshop, however the same principals would apply to any program you use, the tools just may be different within different photo editing applications.

I find that, if you have access to them, the real estate photos of your space can be really nice to work with because they’re generally taken when the space is empty or very clean, so you don’t have to edit around a bunch of furniture or the clutter of daily life. But if you don’t have access to those images, you can start with images you take yourself.

The tools I use the most to create mockups are the background removal tool and the distort transform tools. The background removal tool is nice because you don’t have to remove the background of what your adding to the space. I grab a lot of product images from online to use in my mockups, and those generally have white backgrounds, which is easy to remove.

The distort transform tool is how you’ll fit that product image to your background so it matches the perspective of the space. It sometimes takes a little playing around to get things to feel cohesive, perspective-wise.

The other tools I use a lot are the clone tool, and the polygonal lasso tool. For the above image, I used the polygonal lasso tool to select that wall around the doorway and then used my paint bucket tool to fill it in with green to “paint” that wall green. When I added the tile to the backsplash, I added the tile to the whole plane of that wall, then used my polygonal lasso tool to select where the cabinets were and deleted so that the tile only showed where the tile should be.

The clone tool is nice because you can fix spots, like in the deck mockup, I fixed the dead spots in the grass, removed junk like the wheelbarrow and hose, etc.

The below image is the same image as the empty one you see here. The ceiling, bookshelves, furniture, fireplace, etc are all added in photoshop!

Mood boards are much quicker to put together, you’re really just taking images and putting them together on one “page” kind of like how you would if you cut things out from magazines and glued them all onto a pieces of paper. The main tools I use for this are the background remover tool, or the magic wand tool (if the background remover tool doesn’t do what you’re wanting you can use the magic wand tool or polygonal lasso tool to remove the background by selecting and deleting). Then you just arrange and layer things how you want. I like to include some inspiration images of spaces as well, which helps tie everything together.

If you want to start making mockups and moodboards, start simple by changing the paint color of a wall! Something like the deck mockup has a ton of layers and is more involved, but starting simple by changing a wall color or adding a tile backsplash is a great place to practice using the different tools photoshop has!

DIY Vintage Winnebago Kids Bunk Bed

Jack’s little Winnie bunk bed is hands down one of my favorite (and one of my easiest) DIY projects. You could obviously use this method to create any number of cool shapes— I made a version of this as a submarine for a local preschool— but I thought it would be so fun to give Jack a kiddo version of my grown-up-real-life Winnebago Brave.

Here’s what I used for this project:

Materials:
1/8 in 4x8ft Utility Panel
3/4 in screws
Finish Washers
White and Yellow Paint
Ikea Kura Bed
Ikea Trofast Shelf

Tools:
Impact Driver/Drill
Circular Saw
Jigsaw

Here’s the diagram for all the measurements I used to cut and paint mine. These measurements will fit the Kura bed, but you may need to modify if you’re using a different base bed (though it shouldn’t be too much different since it’s a standard twin size bed length).

1. Cut out your plywood panel using the measurements. I used a circular saw for the larger straight cuts and then a jigsaw for the interior window cuts.

2. Paint two coats of white on the whole thing (you could do both sides, but I left the inside raw wood).

3. Use masking tape to mask off the RV stripes and paint two coats of yellow (or whatever color you prefer)

4. Attach the RV panel to the Kura bed using screws and finish washers. You can touch up paint over the screws to help them look less obvious. I did a few along the top, and a few along the bottom.

That’s it! On mine, I covered up the area on the bed where the ladder goes with the RV panel, so I used the Trofast shelf as a set of stairs so Jack could climb up to the bed. I initially had a play kitchen inside so it felt like a real mini RV, but now that Jack is a little older and the play kitchen isn’t his speed, we turned it into a little gaming den where he can play Minecraft with Dan. Super cute!