Beautiful Home Tour and Easy DIY Craft

Let’s learn to decoupage with vintage and thrifted paper as we wrap up our home and studio tour with Michele from Rat Hill Co. This would be such a fun project for Mother’s Day or housewarming gifts! #gardening #gardendecor #gardendesign #cottagegarden #gardentour #cottagestyle #backyard #beforeandafter

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well Michelle we are going to impose ourselves on you once again because after showing us your gorgeous gorgeous home we missed a couple of rooms that I still want to share with our followers before we start on the reason we really came out here to begin with which was to do our craft our our matchbook covers so tell me about your wall of Curiosities of framed Curiosities I love this I loved the idea of having a collection of Taxidermy and feathers and um a lot of them have meaning so we do have bugs that I find already ready for pinning um around our property and I have a case for that and feathers that we find around our property and it just is a unique uh representation and expression of um of Nature and uh collect and all the things and just all the things you find fascinating about nature and I again it kind of repeats that initial impression I had of coming up it’s almost like you know when you go to the Nature Center in a state park or a national park I have so many of these same kinds of things but they were they were passed down from my older or my brother-in-law and and we cherish those things and before we move this way just talk work a little bit Stuart and just or twist a little bit and see if you can show that wonderful bathroom with your collection of you are a girl who loves her mushrooms yes yes I do and we do have some morels that will grow occasionally on the property depending on the season you know if it’s raining enough but oh that’s cool but yeah we I really love mushrooms and the scarf the Vintage scarf that’s hanging above the um above the toilet is a favorite so fun to frame that well and you even you told me that you had also framed one of your grandfather’s cchs yes I think that’s and you know again another wonderful way if you don’t have a lot of money that you can incorporate meaning and art into your home in a way that expresses your personality well this piece here actually is a um rabbit fur little piece throw piece that my grandparents had in their home and you know you can’t take everything but you can try and reimagine things in a new way and so I thought it would be really neat to put it in an inexpensive shadow box yes that’s very fun well we’ll do we won’t go into your your bedroom but I do love the paneling that you’ve got behind your bed that’s just really wonderful and I love the I just I just love the Simplicity of it and that’s obviously a na to your husband’s minimalism yes it is okay Stuart come into the office or aka’s uh Michelle’s omage to the F arms I’m G to say I’m going to say because there have you never met a plaid you didn’t like ah that is correct yes and I think I think that’s a good rule to live by so this is this is really wonderful is this your office your husband’s office both of your office this is my office and I actually so a lot of the aesthetic was was what I did before before we even traveled to Scotland and so whenever I think that’s one of the reasons why I just connected with the terrain and the entire aesthetic of the region um because I had already Incorporated some of those things into my own space but I really wanted something dark and Moody and just something that could be reflected in the the things we collect and the things that inherited you know that have inherited and yeah well there’s definitely uh a Harmony to all of your interior spaces and I just I love this I love that fabric that rabbit fabric which we also saw on a stool in the kitchen that’s just really wonderful and this guy right here of obviously you also have a thing for rabbits so this right here reminds me of the movie Harvey oh yeah with Jimmy Stewart I love that movie well we can’t linger in here too long steuart because Leah is waiting Leah is waiting in the craft room for us to work on our project so what do you say we had that way sounds [Music] good okay now to the reason at hand that you and I really became close because you gifted me some of these wonderful matchboxes and you you actually get to them to me twice the first time was just wonderful and the second time they were kind of like you custom made for me in in in blues Cottage BL yes and cottage blues and I absolutely love them but you also make these to sell that’s correct so where can people find you if they want to buy some of these to to gift um to try to I don’t know just to visit with you find out the magic of what it is you do yeah where can they find you I have an Etsy shop um so it’s rat Hill is my uh artist name and then I also am a Vibes artist with Edmund’s first um Thursday’s Vibes art community and it’s fun we line the streets of downtown Edmond and everybody sells their beautiful works and talks to everybody and it’s just a really fun Community event so how long have you been doing this been like selling your wees um for two years yeah oh that’s wonderful it’s just wonder you made all these pieces up here too right yes yeah I’ve made all um I started with matchboxes and then kind of branched out into objects and uh I’m always inspired by different pieces I’ll see um and uh so then I’ll try and recreate it in a you know kind of a artistic way using Marvel paper or Florentine paper or vintage paper um gorgeous and it started with my grandfather’s uh Southwest art magazines I inherited a bunch of those and started making matches with those so that was kind of the initial start and then yeah this reminds me a little bit of my Mosaic of the cottage I know I was just thinking of said that to me oh did I okay yes yeah okay well you are so inspiring to us but I am going to step away and I’m going to let you work your magic in creating some matches for Leah and here’s my question of the day so you put out an assortment of papers and these are just a few of your abundance what you have I would have gotten overwhelmed if there were too many yes but perhaps representative so we’ve got some and you said some of these are vintage papers these are these are vintage wrapping papers that wow yeah it’s always a good thing to look for any type of vintage station area papers and you just Source your stuff from just everywhere from just everywhere and you Source your matches from I’m sure we can probably find we can give you guys a link to these are the best matches aren’t they they are they really are um cuz I have gotten some before that were just like oh like for weddings and things and white boxes and they were duds so these are really the the best ones that you want to get and big box stores believe it or not have the best almost wholesale pricing oh really so I did try and get wholesale matches and it’s cheaper to go and buy them from a big box store box store so your big box store of choice is Lowe’s Home Depot I Walmart because it’s Walmart okay okay good good to know good to know okay so here’s our question of the day and that is if Michelle if you were as fortunate as I and Michelle give him a number like each give each one of the numbers there go two three four five okay so one two three four five now I it’s full disclosure I thought for sure I would know which one Leah pick and H wrong answer I was I was wrong but I look at these look at these she put she even puts little Toppers on the little heart oh my this is a vintage button vintage button yeah she got these line these little brass I mean just I guess your imagination could go wild and so probably you could put found objects on there too seashells and twigs and all sorts of things Pine all right so which one you think she had which one did you think I would pick I thought you would pick this one partly because when we went to Art and Bloom these were the colors of your very favorite that’s true your favorite and so I assumed because you Leah describes her aesthetic as grandma she and she so to me this kind of looked like Grandma’s sheet but tell me which one you picked out I picked this one this one called to me and I would name this Caspar because it reminds me of all the Caspar love the gold I think it’s the gold the reflective gold it reminds me of something very specific though I don’t know if it’s surprising or not but I get a doctor 65 oh well it’s yeah because the it reminds me of kaspari nap guns but it that’s the fun thing is it reminds us of different things so now I am going to step out of the way and we’re going to let you do your magic we’re going let you do your magic but first um and we’re going to speed through some of some of what we do but tell us what you need to have on hand if you want to try this project out yourselves so the best thing to have on hand would be your matches obviously and then you pick your paper um scissors and um some glue you can use Modge Podge you could use a just a thicker kind of decopage style glue okay and um and then it’s always good to have some type of smoothing device um which commonly are bone own folders so they’re used to fold cards and they have their heart you know the strength can straighten edges um so something um along those lines okay now Michelle if you’re going to try this project at home and do try this at home this isn’t to don’t try this at home because this is a relatively simple project but you do need to have some things on hand yes so show us what you have that makes the task easier so you need your matches large Matchbox um you need a bone folder which will help you straighten out edges it has some strength so it allows you to get a real crisp Edge mine is very dirty uh you need scissors um so the first step is to take your paper and you want to set your matchbox on top of it if you have a a pattern you want to make sure your pattern is straight on the box itself so I always just kind of flip it over to double check you got think about where you want it lined up now yeah give yourself a little room and you want to leave enough on each side that you can fold it up and it’s going to hopefully cover most of the side of the box like that so then you’re going to kind of leave yourself some room over here and you’re going to cut along here you want to make sure you give yourself enough room on this side and then we’re just going to cut along there so now we have one side and you can just take this as a template and put it on your paper and move to cutting the next piece doesn’t have to be perfect cuz you can straighten it up later you do this just with scissors you don’t have to have any of those razor blades or you don’t even necessarily have to have that cutting mat but it would certainly make it easier I guess so then so now we’ve got our paper so now we’re going to put our glue I always wet my brush a little bit first and we’re going to take our glue and put it on top of the matchbox and there’s different ways of doing this you can do it where you put it on the paper I just do it the way that I have found is easier for me what inspired you to do these to make these to begin with I’ve seen others do it and um uh and then it just I really liked the idea of taking something that you know might be slated for the bin um and to just reuse it in a different way and that’s where when I had my grandfather’s vintage um Southwest art magazines it really made it to where I thought I can use these on matches and it would just look so cool like pain yeah that’s really cool so you kind of put want to put a thicker layer and then I always go back over it once again to kind of remove you don’t want it to be too thick and drippy on your glue then you take it and you’re going to put it down like this again make sure you can cover your sides and then on this part also just once again make sure your pattern is straight for this type of paper it’s not too bad because your pattern is a little less uniform if you’re doing a scene or a specific picture it can make a bit of a difference yeah and while it’s still wet you have a little bit of flexibility don’t you to move it around slightly then you’re going to take your bone folder and you’re just going to smooth it out use a credit card this you could anything with the straight kind of edge that will help you get a smooth finish and some of the paper so paper likes to curl when it’s first wet so sometimes you can kind [Music] of wait just a second you want that paper to absorb well your match books were always I couldn’t tell if you painted it on they’re so smooth it seems like that’s how it was originally made yeah it’s really um you just want to get it as smooth as possible sometimes it doesn’t matter matter as much if you have a specific paper that has a pattern like this it’s not as big of a deal and in terms of the weight of the paper you have the best luck with kind of a medium weight paper like like that versus a very thick paper or a very thin paper I have found all papers can be problematic and all papers can be wonderful so it really good answer I wish that there was a a specific I mean sounds like one of your garden it’s kind of all over the board it’s kind of meditative watching you so you so you also want to clean up so after you’ve smooth it out and it’s not 100% perfect sometimes your matchbox is also going to determine yeah like kind of what you can do but this is where your tip of your bone folder can also come in handy because it can help get corners you want to be careful if it is a thinner paper like this so you don’t want to do it too much because it might rip the paper so sometimes you just kind of then you just let it be so then you flip it over and you want to clean up your edges very scientific you know you just use your finger now there you can do things differently um if you wanted to go ahead and fold your sides up and get that going I prefer to cut here cut along this margin on both sides you got a wonderful guide there then to be able to do that so I prefer to go ahead and get that done you look like you’ve done a few of these see so Michelle if someone wanted to buy these online can you give them an approximate price on what a large box is do you sell them in multiples how does that work um the large boxes usually range anywhere from um 18 to to $28 um depending on the paper a lot of my papers I source from Brazil or um the UK so you know these are really specialty papers created by Artisans themselves and Toppers as well like you’ve sourced a lot The Toppers vintage and the yeah and all the Toppers so some of it it is really like a lot of you know the craft of just actually finding the items to to make the object as well um I I it depends on I’ve have a lot of customers that will buy you know specialty custom uh mini matchboxes um so it’s kind of all over the board yeah but a lot of them are sold individually okay now you’re going to so now that that’s done then you’re just going to kind of view on the side this is always kind of a guessing game because at this point I don’t like to measure it’s it takes too long for such a small piece so I just kind of eyeball it and then I know that that’s going to go on this side and it’ll cover most of it it didn’t get all of the white but that’s okay put a little [Music] glue again not too much because you don’t want it to drip and even though this isn’t a complex process and it doesn’t take a ton of time this nevertheless when you purchase something like this there is an investment of the time it takes for you to Source the special materials for you to actually do the work perfect it and perfect it and and just the Artistry that’s involved in selecting if you want want a Topper to go along with it but these are really I love things that are both beautiful and utilitarian just make ni book bring you Joy well then you can sit it out and it’s yeah like does all over in the house they really are like little people and there’s something so tactile about using a match I age versus a clicker yes so do you ever do fireplace matches I you know I know other artists that do and I just never have it’s really those are a harder thing for me to source and um but you certainly could yeah you really could as uh cylinders are hard are harder to cover cylinders that’s true so it’s a harder cut and it’s a little bit harder application I’m trying to think of the fireplace matches I have I think they came in square boxes I got them onon oh okay I was thinking a circle yeah I’m sure it’s both but the circle ones so then we smooth that out and then you can kind of look at your corners and see if you need to make any additional little small cuts so smooth okay and then there’s one side well that is just wonderful and I think it’s the second side is just a replica of the first that is okay so I do it again and just do it again and then obviously when you select a topper and show us where you keep your Toppers I keep them in these neat little um vintage filing cabinet that was my great-grandfather’s it might have been his dad’s as well um wow but we have yes I use a lot of intaglios and a lot of my work um which is what is in this drawer and then a lot of brass ornaments love that drawer um lots of medieval and lots of vintage necklace pieces so pretty um it’s always neat to take a you can take like your grandmother’s necklace or if you have a even you know these aren’t real it’s just costume but anything like this that you could add you can just put on the top yeah that’s really sweet you find a put on your coffee table instead of in a drawer somewhere I love that and it just makes it so that would be a fun thing to look for when you’re thrifting if you’re at Michaels if you’re walking up and down the street uh you can you can always imagine something a Topper well I know for Mom I mean if anybody that has kids if you go to all the rock places when you’re on vacation yes there’s always rocks and all that I mean so it’s like you know taking yeah I was looking at taking a rock that you get you know and you can just put it on top has meaning yeah and how fun to do that for a child and use it you wouldn’t even have to have matches in there just have it as a really special treasure box that they could put fun little things I just I was watching to Kill a Mocking Bird and Scout you know had all of her little precious things that she kept in a box and to give someone a treasure box like that for their fairy finds or for their little things I think would just be just be Charming oh so perfect yes really really fun thank you my dear so much for showing us how to do this for sharing your absolutely gorgeous spaces but most importantly thank you for sharing your creativity and your artistic hi don’t KCK me Stuart yeah yeah yeah yes so thank you darling we so appreciate itk you and you are always welcome at the cottage and I feel certain that you would say I am always welcome here always and just you guys check out her Etsy page and just just rad Hill just it we’ll link it to we’ll link it but just in Cas and what’s the what’s the provence of that name that name so uh Rat was my grandfather’s initials cuz this was kind of started with him um and I started making the matches as uh he was passing away so it was kind of a therapeutic way of handling grief and so rat is his initials and then because we live up the hill from their home I just really liked theill rat Hill a lot oftion everything DET yeah I was thinking I got got a very Tasha tutor Vibe kind of when I saw it or or uh or you know Beatrix Potter or something like that yeah it’s very very very very wonderful well this is absolutely Charming I can’t thank you enough and Leah are you going to go home with a new box of matches thank you thank you thank you [Music] [Music]