Create a simple, vintage wooden ruler

I love glossy magazines, especially the home-beautiful, country-living, vintage craft style of magazines. After a busy week filled with constant activity and endless demands on my time, I love to curl up in a favourite chair in the sun, relax and read a beautiful magazine.

But I recently discovered a magazine I hadn't seen before, an European publication, and I've really enjoyed it. In fact, I returned almost immediately to the newsagent where I found it to buy one for a friend and all the copies had sold. Have you found it yourself? It's called 'Daphne's Diary and you will find the website here>>>

It's beautifully presented with a vintage flavour and includes articles on antique furniture, herbs, country cooking, home decorating and journals. There's a segment on travel, antique dolls and a frame-able poem that reflects on a new year.

There are some lovely pull-out pages of postcards to use and some folder tabs to detach and adhere to your organisational stationery and even an article that takes a look at Jane Austen with delightful illustrations and cameos of Jane's life and times.

Amongst the numerous craft ideas within the book, I came across this simple idea to create a wooden ruler. It's so easy that you could create it with your grandkids.

The idea is very simple.
You will need:
* wooden paint stirrers
* sandpaper
* glue stick
*scissors
* ribbon
* the magazine

I found, at our local hardware store, that paint stirrers are free so this makes the craft an especially inexpensive activity.


Directions:
1. Lightly sand the paint stirrer.
2. Included in the magazine is a detachable slip of paper with inch and centimetre divisions marked out as for a ruler. Remove the design and cut out the printed rulers.
3. Spread glue over the paint stirrer and adhere the cut out paper ruler to the wooden stirrer.
4. You will notice that the design, the decorative edge, extends beyond the width of the stirrer so this will fold around to the back of the stirrer.
5. To finish your creation, you may like to add some decorative media to the handle or tie some ribbon.

And that's it... simple but attractive.