Spring DIY

Spring officially started March 20th of this year, but it does not feel like it.  The weather is still cold and occasionally Ann Arbor gets some snow. Until it starts to feel like spring, here are some DIY crafts to do to at least make it feel like spring in your house.

Succulents have been a big trend over the past couple years.  Even though you only have to water them once a week or so, that can be easy to forget.  To solve this problem, and to always have a succulent in your house to remind you of spring you can make one yourself.  All you need is a flower

 pot, pebbles, five or six normal size rocks, and some green and white paint. First decorate the flower pot however you want.  Then you paint the big rocks in the green paint, you can also buy several different shades of green to have a variety of succulents in your pot. Once the paint dries, draw small diagonal lines on the rock to make it look like the prickles on a cactus.  On other cactus’ you can draw polka dots and stars to have a variety. Then you place the pebbles in the flower pot as a base and arrange the cactus rocks in the pebbles to make them look like succulents. Then the only thing left to do is to find a spot in your house to display this wonderful spring reminding diy.

Another diy to make your house more springy, is to make a wall fixture of a mason jar string art flower vase.  This sounds much more complicated than it is. The supplies you need are: a small piece of wood, white string, nails, and fake flowers.  This first thing to do is to hammer the nails into the wood in theshape that you want your flower holder. You can make it any shape, like a wicker or wire basket, or the easiest being a mason jar.  If you need to, you can look up a stencil of a mason jar and nail into the spots that it tells you. After the nails are in place, you wrap the string around each nail once or twice like your playing connect the dots.  Once you reach the end, you can tie a knot with the string so that the entire picture won’t fall apart. The last thing to do it to staple your fake flowers so that the stem is inside the jar and the top flower part is sitting just on top of the jar.  Then you just move the stem to be under the string that you just wrapped around the nails, and your done! You can hang this on your wall and pretend like the real flowers outside have also bloomed.

Springing Forward: My Spring Bucket List

Happy first day of Spring! March 20 marks the Spring Equinox and if the warmth of the sun rays today showed us anything, it was that the calendar and the earth have finally connected via speed dial and coordinated their outfits.

Image via wallcoo.net

Spring is, of course, a time associated with fresh starts, rebirth, blossoms, and joy. But this so often is spring “in theory,” “in the ideal greeting card world,” “in warm-weather latitudes.” When the rains come, all too often with exams and papers in accompaniment, it is easy to get a little down. In order to motivate myself (GRADUATION IS ALMOST HERE!), I’ve made a list of tasks and skills I want to accomplish or at least take a stab at to remind me that spring has sprung and that there’s no better time to discover, learn, and live.

(Feel free to steal some of these bullet points for your own Spring 2016 bucket list! Or add to my list in the comments below!)

  • Visit the UMich Botanical Gardens
  • Sneak into an East Quad music practice room and learn how to play this on the piano.
  • Write a few of my favorite quotes on paper with a purple calligraphy pen, and have them framed.
  • Attend a Swing Ann Arbor event.
  • Participate in National Poetry Month (30 days of April, 30 poems!)
  • Contribute something to the chalk wall at Mash 
  • Explore Detroit (if you have any recommendations, let me know!)
  • Buy flowers at the Saturday morning Farmers Market 
  • Start sending more snail-mail letters to friends.
  • Ummm…find a job for next year!!!
  • Enjoy every day as it comes and make the most of it.

What will you do this spring?