Dapper Bunny Family Thrift Flip Road Trip/Watch Me Update These 90s Country Bumpkin Easter Decor!

Hello my crafty tribe this is Artsy Maddie and to all my subscribers I have been missing you guys so much. I have been picking away at this project for over a month if you can believe it or not. This is going to be part of the thrift flip road trip challenge that's hosted by Teresa from Our Green Acres and also the crafting cousins Kay and Trish. So if you don't know already I am in Calgary Alberta Canada so that's where you're finding me on the thrift flip road trip and I picked up these adorable 90s Costco Easter decorations off of a Facebook marketplace. I just thought these were so cute and had so much potential just on their little bicycles I just thought it was so so sweet. So anyway this lady had them kept pretty pristine although they were dusty so they had a real dusty smell to them and then just like a little bit of dust on the actual decoration. So I got the teddy bear portions the little bunnies pulled off they were just hot glued on to the wood and to the bike itself so I just took my time got them peeled away from the hot glue and then just went through and cut off any of the extra sort of things that weren't integral to the the build of them per se like the actual structure of the little bunny teddy bears. So it was kind of a like I had to do it a little bit carefully just going in and trimming what I had to of the fur to get them all detached and just kind of down to their basic form and then I got them all washed and smelling nice and just like new. So we're just going to be trying to take these from their kind of 90s country bumpkin look to more of a cute little dapper bunny family with their little farmer's market cart. This is a bit of a long video just as a heads up but hopefully you guys will stay tuned. I think they turn out super adorable and they've been worth all the work and little heartaches and little trials and tribulations I went through with them but definitely worth it. I think they turn out cute so stick with me to the end and you'll get to see the final result. So for the actual bicycles they're put together with these teeny tiny little screws and watch closely as I lose them never to be seen again. It's crazy that was just the beginning of the trials with this project so I carefully put them on some electrical tape to keep track of them and then you see them for a few more screens and then I don't know what happened to them. So just getting these all cleaned up and ready for some paint. For the metal though I'm going to be using some nail polish instead of paint so you'll see that here coming up but I just used my heat gun to get rid of those blobs of hot glue and the stickers that were on them so just a little bit of patience and the heat really helped to get the majority of that glue off. They're not perfect but I was able to get them down to a point where I could stain them and get them all matching and looking good. So for the little handles they were quite blocky just really simple so I thought I would try and shape them a little bit more so I just kind of whittled down the ends of them just using my utility knife and an emery board to sand them smooth and a little bit of sandpaper as well. So you can see there I just angled the edges in just to kind of taper them. So for colors I started off with this kind of a darker silver almost like a pewter color nail polish and I just went over the spokes of the wheels and then the inner part of the frame and the very edge of the frame and then just a little bit onto the outer part but we're going to be covering that with something as well. So just a couple of good coats of that nail polish and then for the frame of the bike I am using this turquoise color. I did plan on it being a little bit more bluish but we'll get into that down the road here too. I just this was all I could find at the moment even though I could have sworn that I purchased some more of a bluey on the side more blue than turquoise but anyway the next time I went to Dollar Tree I picked up some more of a blue color and I thought maybe I could paint over it and get kind of a neat effect with the blue over top of the green but the quality of this nail polish was just so poor and I swear it had acetone in it because it started peeling off the layer of nail polish underneath. So that was a no-go I just I'm gonna stick with this turquoise color and then for the wooden parts I just started taking those apart as well so just removing these little flower pots that were kind of cute we're gonna reuse those but just getting rid of the little birdhouse and stuff that was inside of them and the little kind of ribbon flowers and stuff that was a part of it as well. So we'll just try and update it a little bit try and make it look a little bit less dated if we can. So I came up with this turquoise paint to just kind of coordinate well with the turquoise of the frame of the bikes. So just giving everything a couple coats and this is actually some house paint like a latex mist tint paint so you always want to keep an eye out for those mist tints because they sure are handy to have especially in neutral colors but also some of these bright colors are fun to have on hand as well. So then I'm just going to decoupage with some mod podge onto this little egg that holds the little ones. This was just a an echo park I think it is scrapbook paper from a couple years ago and I just got that mod podged on and then put it aside to dry. Now for the wheels to actually make the wheels look like they have some rubber on them I'm going to be using this weather stripping so it's weather stripping for doors and windows. I was able to find it at dollarama for just a couple dollars but I think you would find like something similar to this at any hardware store or maybe even your dollar stores as well if you just have a look for it. So it's really quite sticky it has quite a serious adhesive glue on it that works quite well but I had just used a little bit of hot glue to glue the ends together as well. Now in hindsight I wish that I had have stuck a little piece of wire in the bottom of this because by the time I'm done with this project it actually ends up being quite heavy and it makes the tires look a little bit flat. So I had to go in afterwards and add a little bit of wire in the hollow part so if you can see there there's like a little hollow inside to it and I just stuck a piece of wire in there down the road you'll see that at the end of the video but just as a heads up if you do find these and you're trying to do a project similar to this or the same you'll want to keep that in mind. So then for these wooden pieces I'm just using the furniture scratch markers from Dollar Tree. Actually these are great they kind of have a stain and a finish all in one so I went through the three different colors decided on oak that the kind of reddish look of this stain looked good with the turquoise color so I just went with oak and I'm just staining all of the pieces. So you can see there were the hot glue I didn't quite get all of it sanded off but that's okay because the little bunny bums will be sitting on them again anyway pretty quick here Now for this super tricky part I decided to try and make little tiny baskets thinking it would be super easy and boy it was not super easy. So to get this basket from Dollar Tree apart because I wanted to use the same material from this basket to make a little tiny version of the baskets I thought this would work so well man it was so so tricky so I soaked it for a few hours in hot water to soften the materials and just get them more pliable to work with again but you know even after a few hours soaking in the water it's really still quite stiff and hard to work with but I would recommend that everyone at some point try and make a basket in your life because you will then appreciate every basket that you ever see and the work that goes into them. I don't know how they can machine make them but it's it's kind of a miracle that there are so many baskets in the world. This was just so tricky the clip wouldn't hold them because they were wet and slippery and you couldn't really pull on them at all or they would just slip right out of the clip so I just had to hold everything by hand and try and get it all woven together and it was just super super tricky frustrating this took me a couple days to make two very teeny tiny little baskets so it's almost embarrassing but yeah I have a whole new appreciation for any basket that I ever come across. So I'm just trying to while everything's still wet and pliable just kind of fold them over but they still ended up breaking on me it was just very very tricky to work with. So I'm wanting to make a basket this one this rectangle one here is going to be for the back of the daddy bunny's bike and then I also ended up making a smaller one for the front of the mummy or the mama bunny on her bicycle too. I think they work they end up looking pretty cute but yeah just super super tricky so if you ever come across little teeny tiny baskets at the probably want to make your own. I don't know if this would work better I was thinking maybe with some green materials like like the cattails I had worked with for the pumpkin projects I don't know if you guys have seen that video I can maybe link that in the description box as well but I worked with those while they were green and still very flexible and bendable and so I was thinking maybe that's how they go about this like that maybe the material is still green and fresh when they work with it and then they let it dry afterwards not really sure but definitely not not like this I do not have the secret to basket making. So I just went over like I folded all the edges at the top there I used wood glue and those clips to get it all to bond together and dry because the material was wet like it was hard to work with hot glue I actually had to wait until the next day until this was dry and then I just ended up as carefully as I could trying not to break the material just kind of hot gluing it around the edge just to reinforce the top of it. So there's the little tiny basket as well so here's two of them and then I just went in with that same oak furniture scratch marker and then just stained them to match the seats and pedals that we'll be making as well. So like I said this video is part of the Thrift Flip Road Trip hosted by Teresa of Our Green Acres and Trish and Kay of Crafting Cousins. I love both of these channels they both have so many great ideas they're both like fountains or all three of them are fountains of creativity. I will have a link to them in the description box to their channels as well as a playlist. So last month there was almost 50 participants so be sure to check out that playlist there'll be tons and tons of inspiration. So once this paper had dried once the Mod Podge had all dried I'm just going in and sanding this down so just in a downward direction and you get that nice clean finished decoupaged edge. So I thought the thing that was kind of dating this as well was this rounded top so I decided to make just kind of a regular rectangle sign instead and just kind of make it look like more of a farmer's market display type thing instead of that rounded dated top that it had. So just going in with some wood glue and then these are actually some stake markers just from Dollarama but they're quite similar to just a paint stir stick almost the exact same dimension and then I just trimmed them down to fit. So just using wood glue and a little clamp while the wood glue sets up and then once that was all dried and hardened I just decoupaged some more of the scrapbook paper. So this is just another paper that coordinates with that other one and it was just an Echo Park spring pad from a couple years ago but you can just just use whatever coordinating papers you have to whatever colors you decide and this video is just for inspiration. I don't know if you guys will ever come across these but I have noticed a lot of 90s and early 2000s Easter decorations in the thrift stores lately so you might even come across these exact ones. So then this is going to be a little frame for the carrot sign that we're going to be making for this little farmer's market bicycle here. So I can share this with you in my google drive. I just printed out a bunch of different little carrots in different fonts and stuff and found one I liked. So just doing the little trick where I'm tracing this on with some graphite from my pencil and then once I had that all done I just outlined it with a fine point sharpie and then filled it in with a little bit of a wider sharpie. So then I'm just putting it all back together just using hot glue for that and for the little framing on the sign here. So I actually cut the pieces just a hair too short. I should have dry fitted them before I stained them because my marker that just about did this marker in with these projects here so that was about all I could do with that little oak marker there. So I figured I would just kind of do some little decorative stuff around the edges anyway just to hide that seam. So going in with that turquoise paint again and I just watered it down to be more like a stain and these are just some little wooden hearts from Dollarama. Hopefully you guys have something similar or I'm sure you guys run into this all the time just having to do little decorative things on little corners and edges and just little fancy trims. So I just kind of wiped it off like a stain and then once they were dry I just went in with some little rubber stamps and I thought the dark green would show up well enough on the turquoise color but it doesn't quite show up as well as I hoped so then I just went in with some black ink instead and I didn't have a little C to do the little spent sign so just having to freehand that with a fine point sharpie. So because I had to do that I ended up just going in over the whole 25 cents as well. So because the wood had that stain on it then the sharpie didn't run too badly into the wood so it worked out fine and then this is the new green Spanish moss at Dollar Tree which I was really excited to see. It's kind of nice to have a variation in the color from that gray just the natural Spanish moss. I think this one is actually dyed the green color so then just going in with some little flowers and just some printed out butterflies. I just printed them out on some cardstock and made them double-sided like glued them together with a glue stick and then just adding those onto the little corners just to make them more decorative and kind hide those rough edges that I had on my sign and then just gluing the petals down. So I know with metal and wood it's always a little tricky. Luckily the nail polish made it a little bit easier to get those stuck down too and then I ended up just sticking a little bit of tacky glue inside the handles as well but they were a pretty tight fit so it all went together well. So now I'm just working with some air dry clay so this is just you know like your regular kind of earthen clay and I'm just going to make a whole bunch of carrots. So I'm trying to scale them to be about the right size for these bunnies and then if you just roll kind of a tube type thing or a snake in your hands it kind of naturally goes to points at the corners and then if you saw there I just cut it in half and then you get your two kind of carrot shapes and then this is just a little tool that they sell it's kind of like a fake cricket tool at Dollar Tree and that worked great for just making the little kind of root lines all through the carrot and then I just wanted kind of a muted orange for these carrots as the base color. So I started off with some beige latex paint and then went in with just some orange acrylic paint and a little bit of yellow to brighten it up as well and then just painting the one side getting a good base coat on these and then you just flip them over same thing on the other side just one nice coat because it had that good quality latex paint in there it was just one coat worked great and then I was helping my son with a craft project for a couple days here that's why you see glitter and stuff everywhere but anyway I'm just going to go in here now with some glaze so glaze is just a little bit transparent and then it takes a little bit longer to dry so you have time to really wipe it into the crevices into all those little root marks on the carrot and then I just made it a little bit darker and deeper of an orange it's a little bit hard to tell here because it looks like the same color as the base color when it's wet but then it will dry a little bit darker here so I have an image to show you the difference so just a little bit of a deeper orange and then it just kind of sits in those little crevices and kind of deepens them and then for the tops here I'm going to give you a couple different options that I thought of so I found this really great little plasticky greenery bouquet thing at dollarama I know most of you don't have access to dollarama though so I'll show you another option after as well but even if you just look for any little greenery like this I just trim them down to make them smaller cutting them kind of on a little sprout line sort of thing just to make it make sense with the the lines that are in the little bush pieces here and then I had used that little tool that little Cricut tool to put the holes in the top of the carrots and then everything just fits great down into that little hole there with just some hot glue so what this is is that basket material but you could use raffia or any kind of natural straws or grasses that you have and then just dye them with a little bit of hot water and green paints so I just mixed a little bit of like a Christmas green and then a little bit of a lighter leaf green color together just to kind of get a nice you know carrot top color just kind of a leafy green color and then I just stuck a few of them down into that hole just whatever would fit down into the little Cricut hole that we made there so now moving on to the clothes instead of these little country bumpkin clothes we're gonna try and make them a little bit more dapper and fancy and so I just drafted a little pattern to make him a little suit so this is just a really soft nice material it doesn't fray I would suggest if you can find something that frays very little or that has like quite a bit of strength to it just because it's such little pieces and if you're trying to sew something together that's little and then it frays that can be quite awful so if you're not familiar with sewing pants are always four pieces so you're just going to be sewing the back seam like the little bum seam and then the crotch seam first so you just sew the back sides together at the bum seam and then the front sides together at the crotch seam and then I'll just show you what that looks like here in a second so if any of you do find these and you're wanting to do this project by all means just message me I have my email address in my description box and then I can send you these patterns that I drafted too I'll take some photographs of them so then I'm just going to be sewing the inseam so if you're familiar with that term that just means like from the inside of your leg all the way up and then down the other inside of your leg so you do that all as one stitch there so now essentially you have the front sewn to the back of the pants and then just going up the sides so just each side seam the other thing as well is I'm using the stretch stitch on my machine and that just makes a much stronger stitch and then you don't have to worry about doing the back stitching when you start and back stitching when you stop if you use the stretch seam it's always going back and forth back and forth back and forth and it's a little bit slower but you definitely get a much much stronger seam and then there on those rounded edges you just have to clip the any rounded seam that you do you want to clip the seam allowance just so that it will lay flatter and allow the material to open to its full extent so for this little elastic piece here this is just a piece of underwear elastic and I turned it to a zigzag stitch and then just um widened my stitch width here so that the zigzag will be fitting to this little piece of elastic here and then I just pulled it as tight as I could so that hopefully these pants will pull up and fit tight around the little rabbit's waist here so he actually came apart when he was in the washing machine the bottom from the top there it was just kind of a loose fit with the pants that were on them previously and then I just tucked the little leg parts underneath because they're just too small to fit into your sewing machine so then moving on to the jacket I am stitching the shoulders first so the front two pieces to the back at the shoulder seams that's what's stitched together now and then that little piece on top is the shoulder piece so what I'm going to do is gather the top of the shoulder piece so that it will fit and have a little bit of gathering to it you'll see here in a moment just the visual of it so when I gather things I like to do two stitches and you just make your stitch length nice and long and loose and then you don't back up to start and you don't back up to finish you're just doing a very loose stitch that's easy to pull and gather so you can see there that that top part of the sleeve is gathered now and then I can stitch it into the little um armhole of the front and the back so the front and the back together make the armhole to stitch the sleeve to you just take your time and get it all to fit in well into that armhole and then you want to clip that seam allowance as well so anything curved you just want to clip the seam allowance to allow it to be flexible and for the arm to fit through and then moving on to the collar here so it's kind of different because it's a little jacket style collar so you're just I showed you there which three seams I'm going to be doing so hopefully that'll make sense there just that little angle on the top of the collar and then I'm going to clip the corner so that when I push it inside out they'll make a nice crisp corner and then I stitched it to the collar hole on the jacket so the neck hole of the jacket and just the one side of the collar and then I flip that around and I put a facing on the front pieces of the jacket so I'm sorry this is like super fast to be showing you how to sew a little suit hopefully I mean if any of you are doing this I wouldn't really call this a beginner project it was a little bit complicated for sure but if you're familiar with sewing then hopefully you could handle this project I lost a little bit of footage that pink dress that you see on the mama bunny that actually came off a super creepy really old vintage doll that I found at the thrift store really super dirty but I was able to get the dress clean and reuse that for the mama bunny and then for the little boys I just did some really really simple jackets so no collar just super super simple and then for the shirt I was gonna try and sew an actual shirt with a tie but once I got the jacket on the bunny I realized you wouldn't really be able to see much of it he doesn't really have a neck so I just opted for just a piece of felt and then I'm just gonna glue everything shut there so you can see you would have hardly seen the tie it was a lot of work to do and it wouldn't have really been visible so opted not to do that so then I thought I wanted some flowers and I just thought they kind of had to be tulips because I'm really like in spring mode and tulips just scream spring to me so I found this great tutorial from Alita Arts or Alita Art and she had this awesome awesome tutorial for making these little foam tulips so I just cut some squares that were about an inch and a half they don't have to be exact every flower can be a little bit different and then I'm just using these little fussy cut scissors from Dollar Tree and then if you saw there so just taking a nip out of each corner just like a little teeny cut on each corner and then you kind of make the little petal shapes so hopefully that was clear there with the video and then I'm using my good iron so I held a piece of parchment paper on it just to keep it nice and clean and make sure that the foam didn't leave any residue on my iron and then it's so neat like this is just really thin cheap EVA foam I believe it's called you'll see it at Dollar Tree a lot and any dollar store any craft store and any foam would work if it's in shapes or whatever you can just cut out the shapes you need out of it so then once you touch it to the iron the iron was on quite a high heat I would say about three quarters heat and no steam you don't need any steam and then you just hold the flower to the iron and it automatically curls up like a little flower so then once I had those all done I actually made 75 tulips I counted them after I was done it felt like so many so I poked skewers these are just shish kebab skewers up through the foam of the flower and then hot glued the end to keep them in place and then I don't have a little fine point glue gun that would have been super helpful here but I was able to make this work so I just put as tiny amount of hot glue as I could on the edge of each petal and then just stuck them all up together making a little tulip shape with each flower so hopefully that's clear here I showed it a couple times just to be sure you guys could know how to do this I will have a link to Alita Arts tutorial as well in my description box and she also can show you how to do this it's pretty simple kind of fun yeah it was really fun actually making all these little tulips so then I just poking them into some foam I knew I was going to be painting them so I thought I would just start getting them ready for paint I also wanted to do some leaves on each tulip so I am just using some very thin wire just kind of that little paddle floral wire that usually comes on a little piece of cardboard and I just put it onto some green painters tape some green masking tape and then just folded it over and so it's sandwiching the wire in the middle of the two pieces of tape and then just use your wire cutters or or some scissors you don't care too much about cutting through wire with and then I'm going to cut the leaf shape so at first for some reason I thought tulips had round leaves but then I ended up googling them and they don't they have pointy leaves so I had to go back through and just make all the leaves pointy at the end instead of rounded so always good to have an image first before you start trying to recreate something and then just hot gluing one leaf to each little skewer each little tulip stem and that was easy enough to do they just kind of wrap naturally around the skewer and then I'm just going in I found some green paint kind of leafy green paint in a lighter kind of tone that I thought looked kind of springy and then just got all the stems and then I painted over the tape leaf as well just so that it all kind of blends together smoothly and then I trimmed off the excess that was still on the ends of those these are just the pruning shears from Dollar Tree they work great for skewers and little mini dowels or anything like that and then I'm just bundling them in groups of five so five tulips and then I used my kids little uh what were those called those loom the elastic loom they're like super tiny elastics almost like um elastics for your braces and those work great to just bundle them up into little groups of five and then for the two pots that I had I just went in with a piece of foam there to hold all the tulips in and just did groups of five in each of those pots as well rainbow loom that's what those are called I could not think of that word all those little tiny elastics I swear we had thousands of them around here at one point so I did some with the mixed like orange and yellow together pink and white and then most of them were just a bundle of pink a bundle of white and then I just put my coffee grounds from our morning coffee into the microwave to dry them out it took about five minutes I believe I just put them in a couple times for a couple minutes at a time got them nice and dry and then I'm just adding them into some to represent the dirt in the little tulip pots here and then I just went in with the pointy end of a skewer just to kind of make sure that they were really down into that white PVA glue and now comes the fun part we start to get to put him all together here so I just glued the little bunny bum down to the seat again and then just the feet to the little wooden pedals and gluing the basket on I was just using hot glue for most of this stuff here to put everything back together and then for the carrots I just used those little rainbow loom elastics as well and just bundled them in little groups of three I thought that was cute I was thinking twine would look really cute too but just like a little bit trickier to do I don't know maybe I'll go through and put some twine on a couple of them as well and then I wanted to make a little tulip sign as well so I'm just using those thinner larger popsicle sticks craft sticks from Dollar Tree and then just some little normal size popsicle sticks to help secure everything together so just going to be working with some wood glue to hold it all together so just sanding the edges clean and then I just put some weight onto the wood glue pieces to help them dry and seal together really well and then I'm just attaching that front basket I wanted it to be really secure because with the flowers and the carrots it kind of has a little bit of weight to it so I just went in with some wire and got them all attached to the front of the bike here so just twisting up the wire and then I ended up just pointing it down into the basket because the basket will be so full you won't see it so I left all the carrots and the flowers loose for now um just I think once I'm totally happy with them then I'll secure them down probably with some hot glue but for now everything is just sitting in the the baskets and the little cart so I'm just gonna decoupage that same butterfly paper down onto this little tulip sign here and I just did the exact same thing so just um I wanted a similar font but the letters wouldn't do the same thing as the R and carrots so I just had to design my own little font here I'll show you in a moment so then I just got the little bunnies secured down the mama bunny secured down all of that's just done with hot glue and the little tiny bunnies had a little bit of a framework in their arms to help because they were holding stuff originally as well so I just used the little framework in the arm to hold a little tulip pot and stuck in some little tulips and carrots in amongst them as well so I just wanted it to look like you know kind of a crate sign it's the same thing just going in with the sandpaper sanding down the edges in a downward motion to get that nice and cleaned up and then I used the edge of the sandpaper to go down the middle of the two pieces of popsicle stick just to make kind of a shiplap line so here I was just kind of playing around trying to get the font to do the same thing as the carrot one I can share this with you guys as well if any of you are interested and then my youngest son Nathan came by and he said these should be two dollar tulips but two dollars seemed like a better a better buy and I thought that was cute because if this was our family he's a little one in our family too so pretty cute him holding the little tulip sign so these bicycles got a little bit heavy so like I said in the beginning there I had to kind of go back and insert a little piece of wire so this is just some rubber coated garden wire that I found at but just if you have anything you could even wrap wire yourself with some tape but just to make the very bottom of this hollow rubber insulation stuff here just to make it more solid so that it doesn't look like they all have flat tires and that is it I called this project complete so it was quite a quite a project it's taken me a while and a lot of trials and tribulations but I think they were totally worth it I love the finished product I think they are such a cute little dapper bunny family and hopefully you guys enjoy them too if you made it to the end of this video this is the longest video I've made yet I appreciate you so much you've just become one of my favorite subscribers and if you haven't subscribed be sure to subscribe and hopefully you guys like this video and found some inspiration of some sort and if you're looking for more inspiration I bet there is going to be a whole lot of inspiration on this playlist like I said last month there was over 40 participants I want to say it was like 46 so tons and tons of inspiration be sure to click on the playlist and be sure to check out Kay and Trish the crafting cousins I just love them and also Teresa at Our Green Acres she is just the sweetest she has wonderful shabby chic kind of French country ideas and I just love listening to her beautiful accent so be sure to check all that out in the description box and hopefully we will talk to you soon in the next video it won't be so long hopefully until the next one and I hope you guys have a wonderful week thank you so much for watching I appreciate your time so much