Got Milk?

When I first saw the Bird's SVGs 'coming soon' message regarding the Nature's Bounty kit, I was truly excited to see a milk can in the collection. Over the past year or so, I've been trying to combine my love of both paper crafting and genealogy into some of my projects.  

My great-grandparents lived on a farm in Pennsylvania, and my great-grandfather Harry was a dairy manager. Unfortunately, my great-grandmother passed away at a very young age when my grandmother was barely four years old. One of the few pictures I have of my great-grandmother is this one with my grandmother as an infant, and a few milk cans in the background. 

  

Add in Harry's career as a dairy man (pictured on the right in the photo below) and you can see why I thought this project would be so much fun to incorporate into my family history projects/home decor.  Because this milk churn is also a box, I'm thinking it might be fun to put together a mini album with some of these photos which I can store inside the can.  That'll be a project for another day though.

Okay, family history lesson over!  I did an online search to get a feel for what vintage milk cans looked like and notice that many of them had raised/embossed lettering on the sides with the name of the dairy they came from.  I love that Harry's name rhymes with 'dairy,' so I decided to make that the name for the side of the can...Harry's Dairy!  The next trick was figuring out how to get the look of raised metal letters.  

I decided that I could cut the letters out of the same metallic paper I was using for the can and then just glue them on. I used Tim Holtz Alphanumeric Thinlets to cut the letters.

There are also a lot of photos of very rusted and distressed old milk cans, so before I added the letters, I scratched up and sanded the metallic cardstock panel pieces and then inked them all with some Distress ink in Walnut Stain.  

Once I was done making an inky mess of myself, I adhered the panels to the can and fell in love with the final results. I may have gotten a little bit carried away with the distressing in a few spots, but overall, I just love how this turned out.  

Thanks to Bird's wonderful design, I was able to put it all together in just an hour or two which included everything from the time I fired up my Cricut until I was taking pictures of the finished project.   

There are a few days left for you to get the Nature's Bounty kit from Bird's SVGs while it is still on special - a great deal with so many fun projects. 

You can find it here:  Nature's Bounty SVG Collection

And here's one more look at my finished project:

Thanks for stopping by!  I'd love to hear what you think of my vintage milk can in a comment below.  

Exciting news!

I'm so excited to announce that I have been selected to be a design team member for Bird's SVGs! You can read more about it here.

I have been following Bird's Cards for years and have always loved her designs. In addition, I have appreciated her generosity in designing hundreds of free svg files for her friends and followers. When Bird opened her SVG shop last Fall, I got straight to shopping!

If you've never visited Bird's store, you really should check it out. Look at the lovely Nature's Bounty kit which Bird released last night (shown below). As if paper crafting isn't enough, one of my other hobbies is genealogy, and my great-grandfather was a dairy man. I'm really looking forward to making the milk can very soon and personalizing it to include this family information.  

Nature's Bounty

The very first kit Bird released in her new store was the free Birdhouse Collection which includes several cards, a tag and a 3D birdhouse! I think it's so cute and plan to make the 3D birdhouse with a Christmas theme this year. 

Birdhouse Collection

Thanks for stopping by to share my happy news and please follow my blog or stop by often to see what new projects I'll be posting.  And special thanks to Bird for inviting me to join her design team - this made my whole month!

Oh say can you SEA...

I just fell in love with the Waving Flag Bag in the new Happy 4th SVG kit from SVG Cuts!  I considered making it in the traditional red, white and blue colors, but for me the 4th of July was often celebrated on the New England seaside and I've always had a love of the beach and could just picture this flag with a bit of an ocean theme.  

When flipping through my paper stash, I came across an older K&Company stack by Tim Coffey called Travel which is loaded with wonderful designs, so I picked a few to represent the red, white and blue and went from there. I inked the panels using Distress inks in Antique Linen, Iced Spruce and Fired Brick.  

I also dug into my Tim Holtz die inventory to create the starfish 'stars' for my beachy flag. These are from the Sand & Sea dies, Bigz and Movers & Shapers.  I tried to keep the color light so it would show up against the relatively light blue background. I rubbed the stars with a little Distress Stickles in Scattered Straw.  It looks a lot like sand in person.

As usual I spent more time on paper selection than actually building the project. This is a super easy project to do and makes such a nice seasonal decor piece.  

Happy 4th of July!