 One, two, three. Buddy, good morning. Welcome back to my channel. Today I have a very exciting DIYing Your DMs episode, which is a little series I do here on my channel inspired by The Sorry Girls. Now they did the series a long time ago and I absolutely loved it. And it's essentially where I take your guys's DMs or emails or requests for projects and I try to interpret them and create them here on the channel. So I have four really cute projects that you guys have sent me over on Instagram and you can always totally Instagram DM me. Make sure to follow me as well if you're not already. It is Lone Fox home on Instagram. And you guys, I burnt my finger making one of the projects but it was totally worth it. It wasn't really my fault. I mean, it was my fault, but it wasn't really because I didn't drip the hot glue on my finger. I actually set my hand on top of the tip of the hot glue gun, which was my bad. However, I would do it again for the project honestly. It turned out really, really good. But let's go ahead and jump on into our first project and I'll tell you guys who sent this one over. Now the first project was sent in by Lone Fox family member Alejandro. And he says, hi Drew, I absolutely love your channel. Thank you so much by the way. I'll be moving to a new place soon and I definitely love your style. I wanna decorate my walls and give them some more depth. And I would love to know if you can create these clay knots which I've seen these a couple of times before on Pinterest. I'm not sure if a specific company makes them or if it's just like people that create them but I figured it seems pretty simple to just roll out some, you know, long pieces of clay and tie them into a knot like this and create a cute little piece of decor which is great for like a coffee table or a paperweight or just something to style on top of a set of books or anywhere you just need a little bit of texture. So let's go ahead and see if we can create this little clay knot decor. For our first project, I'm going to be starting off with a large block of clay and I actually just cut that right in half and started smooshing it up just to make sure it was nice and ready to be rolled out into a long log. Now whenever I'm rolling out any form of clay I suggest using your fingertips kind of as I'm doing here. So what I'll do is I'll kind of start rolling it with my fingertips and I'll actually spread them as rolling it which I feel like widens it but it evenly widens the roll at the same time. So you don't have skinnier sections and then wider sections in some areas. That's kind of like my tip for rolling out clay when you want to have a consistent roll but you don't have something like an extruder to make it perfect. So I'm going down and I'm just eyeballing how much I think I need to create a knot and I'm going to fold that in half as shown here and then what I'm going to do is start actually creating the knot. So it's very simple. I'm just going to take my two ending pieces, wrap them over the loop and then make a large enough hole for you to stick it back through and of course clay is a little bit sticky but it kind of has like a matte texture to it. So it's pretty simple to work with without having it stick together. So I maneuvered my knot into the kind of location I wanted it to be in and the shape that I liked and then I cut off the tails just to make sure that it was nice and clean and I brought this into the oven and baked it for about 30 minutes or so just because it was on the thicker side and once it came out of the oven you can totally leave it as is if you want like a more natural look or you can spray it like a stone texture but I ended up opting for my favorite terracotta spray paint. So I went ahead and I gave it two full coats of this on the front and backside, let it fully dry and that finished off this little knot to core piece. Now our next project is the one I actually burnt my hand on. This was sent over by Courtney Jackson. So Courtney, I'm blaming you for the burn on my hand. I'm just kidding. I'm totally kidding by the way. She said, hey Drew, I bought this planter second hand and I haven't been able to find another one similar. I would love your take on it mainly because I want more than one in my home and it's a really cute planter. I love the kind of slotted detail of the wood and I also love how the legs are just a continuous piece of wood that kind of coordinates with the sliding but not too much. Now I'm actually going to be using a court size paint can to create mine. So I'm doing a little bit of a smaller version but if you want a large one like what Courtney has in her home, I suggest just using a gallon size paint can. So if you have an old can of paint anywhere or anything that kind of is that cylindrical shape but I'm gonna go ahead and use a court of pink paint that I ended up going through quite a while back. So I just had a little bit left. I cleaned it out and this is what I did with it. You know it's moving about. Before this next project, I ended up repurposing a court of paint. So I'm just using the can and then I got these wooden dowels at Joann's and I'm actually gonna chop them up into the sizes that are shown here. So I have a majority of my pieces at five inches and then I have nine pieces at six and a quarter inch. Now I'm also gonna go ahead and spray the can black just to kind of camouflage it a little bit. We're gonna be covering the full can. However, I just wanted to make sure that none of the silver popped through anywhere. So starting off with my five inch dowels all you have to do for this process is use a strong bond hot glue like the one I'm using here. This is the Gorilla hot glue sticks, which I love. And I'm gonna go ahead and glue the five inch strips. These are the exact height of our can. So I'm gonna glue these around the exterior just making sure that they're perfectly straight and in alignment. And when you feel like you wanna go in and add a leg, all you have to do is grab one of your longer dowels and then just place one of the shorter ones next to it so you know how much glue to add to the dowel itself and then place three of them next to each other which will create the leg and just make sure that the top is super flush with the five inch sections and then continue adding your five inch sections until you wanna add another leg section. Now I will tell you guys I got lucky with this and if you do use a quart can of paint as well, I used eight of the five inch sections and then I did three legs and then eight five inch sections, three legs and it ended up working out perfectly in the end. Everything was nice and snug and this is what the planter ended up looking like once all of the wood was glued on and now you have a choice to make. You can either go in and stain this, you can leave it as is, you can give it a top coat, you can use acrylic paint on it, but whatever you wanna do, I went in with my favorite early American wood stain just because I thought it was a warm touch and very reminiscent of the one that was sent over so I added a coat of this and that finished off my mini planter. Now our next project was sent in by Lone Fox family member Mia and she actually wanted me to create a large cabinet and for this video I was like, oh my gosh, a large cabinet, I don't even know how to create this. It was a $2,000 cabinet. She's like, I think you'll be able to conquer this but she also sent along a pillow which said or this project and it was literally a link. I went ahead, I copied and pasted the link in and I was able to find that it was this really cute kind of tufted pillow and I wanted to go ahead and do a little bit of needle punch anyway so I figured this would be the perfect project to go ahead and share with you guys how to create a really interesting pillow like this and this one actually retailed for I believe like $130 so we're gonna be making that for a fraction of the price and let's get started on this project. Now I have done punch needling a couple times in the past on the channel and what I always suggest doing to create the frame for your punch needle is just to go out and get an artist canvas at your local craft store, Joanne's or Michael's wherever you are, use a coupon on it and then remove the canvas and use the wooden frame as the base for your project. So next what I'm doing here is I'm cutting out a piece of monk's cloth which you can also find this at Joanne's as well. That's where I got this one and this is the proper fabric for punch needling. It's just more of a almost like loosely tightly woven material that allows you to really nicely punch needle on top of it. So I'm going in with the ruler here and just marking out the square shape that I wanna make sure that fits for my pillow. I believe I was able to get a 16 by 16 inch pillow on this particular frame here and then I'm going in based off the reference photo and kind of just free handing in the design there. This particular pattern is super organic so I just went ahead and kind of traced out my pattern there and I'm using my punch needle tool. I got this one on Amazon. I'll link it below for you guys, super affordable and punch needling is very, very simple. All you have to do is load your tool with your yarn of choice and you're just gonna basically poke it through your fabric and on the other side you're gonna use your hand to kind of grasp that yarn and you're going to hold it while you pull up. So basically on the other side of the fabric which you can't currently see, we are creating loops and on this front side here we're just creating these little tiny little stitches of yarn. Now this is going to be the proper side here so the white that I'm currently doing this is going to be the front side of the pillow. The back side is going to have a ton of loops on it but you're gonna see what I'm kind of doing with this pillow. I'm gonna mix and match the textures which I think looks really nice when it comes to punch needling. So this white section here probably took me about an hour and a half to complete and then I'm going in with the softer green color and I'm going to be doing the same exact technique. So I'm doing all of our kind of flat patches first which are the ones that kind of just have the stitching on them. And when you have a color I do suggest just trying to go as close as you can to the stitch next to it just to eliminate as much white as possible but at the same time I don't really mind having that white pop through because it does almost add a handmade element to this piece which I do really like as well. So I wasn't too concerned about that. So going in here, finishing off our green section you just have to snip it and then we're going in with this kind of like brownish umber color which I'm going to be doing the circular shapes in. So all of our flat punch needling as I'm calling it is done. So as you can see the other side we have a ton of loops, a lot of texture on this side which is really fun but we want to add texture to the front side of our pillow as well. However, I really wanted to mix it up. So as you can see I actually flipped my frame over and I'm punching through the opposite side. That way on the front side of our pillow we have a loopy section of this dark green color which I'm going to add to two different sections of the pillow just to add a little bit of visual interest. So I'm going to go ahead and punch through here that I'm also doing this bottom left corner as well with that dark green color creating a ton of really fun loops. And last but not least I'm also using just a solid gray tone to go in and fill in this larger patch here which is going to add a ton of texture. And after about four hours my punch needling is complete. Now this is a great project to do in front of like a movie or something like that. It is not hard at all. It's just a little bit time consuming but it's totally worth it. So next step is going to be removing our little punch needle section from the frame itself. So I cut that out making sure to leave some seam allowance on all of the edges and on the backside of our punch needling I'm actually going to iron down some fusible interfacing. And if you've never used fusible interfacing before it is essentially a lightweight fabric where one side has glue on it and when you place it against the fabric and iron it the glue gets hot and of course adheres to the fabric. So that's going to hold all of the yarn in place on the backside there. Now I'm going in with just a little bit of lightweight muslin. I'm going to use this as the backer fabric for the pillow, cutting it out to the same exact size and using some pins to pin together the right sides of our pillow. So essentially the sides that you wanna be on the outside or the sides that are shown you're gonna wanna pin those together. And then I'm using a straight stitch on my sewing machine to sew all the way around the edge making sure that you're sewing right up to the edge of that yarn that you went ahead and tufted. So of course you're gonna wanna leave probably a four inch to five inch gap that you can flip your pillowcase inside out so that the right sides are showing and then you're going to stuff it with some polyfill. I just had some excess from an old throw pillow that I'm going to repurpose. So I stuffed it as much as I wanted to and then I hand sewed off the open edge and that finishes off the pillow. And our last project you guys this was sent in by Noel. I'm hoping that I'm pronouncing her name right. She says, hi Drew, I would love you to recreate this decor these sculptural spheres and maybe even do them in a different color. Now I believe these are actually from West Elm because when I used to work at West Elm we would sell these like hotcakes. And I've really never even thought about recreating or DIYing my own. However, when I saw this photo I instantly thought of how I can easily do this because I think these are pretty pricey. They're like 50, $60 a piece and we're gonna be creating them for a fraction of the price and they actually turned out almost identical. Let me show you how I did it. And I think this last project was my favorite one. I just love how they ended up turning out. So I got these metal rings at the craft store. I believe these ones are 10 inches and then the smaller ones are five inches. So I'm grabbing two of my 10 inch rings and I'm going to interlock them kind of in a cross shape as shown here so that they're kind of going over the top of each other and then using a little bit of wire this is going to be totally hidden in the next step. So it doesn't matter what color you have but we're gonna wanna bind that joint together to make sure it's nice and sturdy. So as long as you're wrapping it in literally every single direction going diagonally, across, however many times you want you're going to wrap this so that the joint is nice and fastened and attached and these pieces are not coming apart. I also slipped my third ring over the middle sections of those other two. It was a little bit challenging and it's very, very snug. However, I like that because it makes it feel like it's sturdy. So I did go back through of course with some wire as well and I wirewrapped every single joint. So wherever any of the rings cross over another ring you're just gonna wanna wrap those so that this doesn't come apart in any way in the future. So once those are all fully nicely wrapped we're gonna go in with some of our clay. Now we're gonna be covering the entire sphere with clay. Now you can totally leave it as is. I think it's actually a really fun kind of metal object or maybe even could be some kind of light fixture or light pendant but I wanted to go in and make it as similar to the reference photo as possible. So just using some polymer clay I am going in and applying a thin layer onto every single section over the top of our wired joints and also over the top of all of the ring sections. Once all of your clay has been applied I just went back through with my finger and smoothed out any creases or cracks or just anything that didn't look perfect. So that way once we do go and bake it and we could paint it afterwards it looks pretty perfect. So I'm actually gonna be doing this smaller one as well but I'm not gonna go through every single step. It is the same exact process of wirewrapping all of the joints together and then just kind of adding all the rings and a figuration that you personally like. And then you're gonna go through and cover all of it with the clay as well. Once your little clay sculptures have reached your desired final result you're gonna pop them on top of a baking sheet with some parchment paper and I'm just gonna go ahead and put this into a preheated oven and I'm going to bake this for about 25 minutes or so. The clay really isn't that thick on the ring itself and I know that the ring is gonna heat up too. So once that was fully baked I just went ahead and let it cool down and then I'm going in with some gold leaf Rub-n-Buff. I have been loving using Rub-n-Buff as a paint lately. I just feel like it's the prettiest gold that you get a lot better than any spray paint or any other paint that I've used that's kind of a metallic paint. I just love the way that this one looks and I'll link the particular one I used below. So I went through and I painted both of our spheres and once they're fully done that finishes off this project. And that guys finishes off today's DIYing at your DMs episode. Now I have multiple more of these videos on my channel so if you are curious I'll link a couple more below if you like this concept and do not forget to also follow me over on Instagram it is lonefoxhome I'll put it on the screen right there for you guys. That's a great way to just stay in contact with me see new posts and also of course you could send in your DIY requests. Now I had so much fun DIYing these projects and I hope that you guys did as well. Do not forget to give this video a thumbs up if you did enjoy and I'm so excited for the next one. I actually don't even know what I'm filming next but I'm just always excited to film for you guys. So in case you didn't know I'm excited but I'll catch you all on my next one have an amazing amazing rest of your day and enjoy the weather outside if it's hot where you are it's finally getting a little bit more warm in LA which I'm very excited about and I will catch you all in my next one. Bye you guys.