Happy Friday! I'm really excited to share this DIY with you guys! I knew that when we were about to get hit with Blizzard Jonas, I wanted to make sure that we had plenty of indoor activities for Cora to do since we were going to get snowed in. I also knew that I wanted in on the fun too. Somehow I thought it would be really fun to create something with these & these plastic gemstones (I honestly don't know where the inspiration came from, it just kind of popped in my head!). So I figured why not make something that we can hang up on the walls. Cora's all about jewelry and pretty, sparkly things so making something with these plastic gemstones was a hit with her.

I won't lie, both of pieces pictured here were mostly my doing, but Cora helped me with the letter "C" since it's going up in her room. That was the very first piece we did and it was so much fun to work on it with her. Don't worry, she worked on another piece by herself that she is apparently "gifting" to me! The other piece is something that I worked on by myself while the girls were sleeping. And I may have gotten a little meticulous about it (yes, I sorted through all the different gems by size & color, yes I am cuckoo), but it made it SO much easier to find the right piece for the job. Since I was figuring it all out as I went, I didn't document it while I was working on it so my apologies for the lack of step-by-step pics.

I knew that I also wanted to try something with watercolor paints for this project, so I thought why not have a watercolor background instead of white paper. And with "jewelry" as the centerpiece, I'd say it worked out perfectly. With the letter "C" piece, I opted for black construction paper since it was our first piece and I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out. I didn't do anything fancy with painting the background (clearly), I literally just went back and forth on the watercolor paper with my brush and left a white border around it to allow room for a frame.

Then after letting the paper dry completely, I had to place it under some heavy books since it kind of curled. But then after that, I was able to work on creating the earrings. I laid everything out the way I wanted it to look before glueing anything down. That part took a big chunk of time since I was getting really picky about how I wanted it to look. Then after that, I glued it piece by piece, starting with the larger pieces and then filling it in with the smaller gems. That made it a lot easier since it's easier to move the smaller pieces around after you've put it down with glue versus the larger ones. And tweezers are a MUST. I cannot stress how much easier they will make your life with doing this. I didn't use one when we created the letter "C" because we were kind of free-forming it and I wasn't too concerned with how it looked since it was the very first one we were working on. But with the earrings, I was like I NEED tweezers.

What do you guys think? It's time-consuming and a bit painstaking, but I am so happy with how the earrings and "C" came out! Is this something you would try to do regardless of a blizzard or not? TGIF!





I'm still working on this piece, but I wanted to show you a few step-by-step pics of the process.