Last week, John and Sherry introduced the Winter Edition of their Pinterest Challenge and I got super excited to sort through my seemingly endless pins of inspiration to find something to tackle right away.

I wanted to do something that would be fast and easy, and didn’t involve major household work (i.e. something I’d need Hubs to help lift and sand and move and stuff) so I went for something more crafty and light-weight fun: painting.

Well, to be more specific, I went for stamping.

Even though I had several contenders for fun, quick projects, the apple stamps were just so cute and spring-y that I couldn’t imagine a better project to distract me from the wintering that’s going on outside.

I grabbed a couple of apples, one that was getting a little soft as the lone leftover in my fruit bowl…

and one that was super shriveled and wrinkly since he’d been living in the potato bin (I read online that it helps prevent eyes…not sure if it worked or not…) for awhile.

(Strangely enough, it seemed to stop the apple from getting brown and rotten, just squishy.)

See how small and wrinkly it is compared to the other one? Weird.

Then, I sliced both apples in half, giving me four paintable faces to work with.

I think it helps to let the apple slices dry a bit before starting to stamp with them, so I used this time to gather a bunch of things to stamp on. I found some wood (from our wedding), some old fabric, some paper, and a brown paper bag or two.

I also gathered up some leftover paint and paint samples from when we were picking colors for the house.

Then, it was time to actually get started!

After squirting/pouring some paint on a paper plate, I first tried dipping the apple in the paint but found that made it be a bit too globbed on…

…resulting in some globby apple prints.

So after that, I just brushed the paint on the apple, using a brush, which took longer but worked much better.

Make sure you press the apple down firmly on the surface you’re printing, even holding for a few beats, before CAREFULLY and SLOWLY lifting it off as evening as possible. (Some times I even used both hands to make sure I got a nice, un-smudged print.)

After starting out on some easier surfaces (i.e. paper and an old ratty tshirt rag)…

I got to work on my project of choice: fabric.

I decided to use the back of an old pillow that I had cut into to reuse the stuffing for other various homemade pillow projects (like this and this). The front was ugly anyway, so why not?

I selected my colors (the green was a freebie sample from Wal-Mart I got specifically for a craft purpose like this one and the teal is from my office) and started carefully laying out the pattern, stamp by stamp.

Pretty soon, I had completed Round 1 of Project Pillowcase Stamp.

Note: You may have to touch-up your prints if you don’t get enough paint on the surface of the apple. No big deal. A cheapo foam brush worked wonders for this step.

Then, it was time to add details. I have small brushes somewhere, (still lost from the move?) but was too lazy to search for them, so I painstakingly used a toothpick to add stems and leaves.

(Note, if you’re using the side of the apple that has the stem on it, by all means, paint it and use it to stamp the stem. If you’re careful, it works just fine.)

I also used a cotton swab to add a few polka dots.

Here’s how it ended up looking (sorry these pictures aren’t great, it was nighttime when I was doing this, so no natural light in the photos…):

By this time, it was getting late and I needed to clean up and let the paint dry. It was kind of a messy project, but a totally fun, totally easy, and totally worth it way to use up some old apples!

I have some small plans for projects with a few of the stamped papers, but be sure check back tomorrow for the reveal of what I did with this empty stamped pillow case!

What Pinterest projects are you wanting to actually get accomplished? Do you suffer from too-much-pinning, not-enough-doing, like I do? Or have you actually tackled an awesome Pinterest project and had great success (or great failure?) Here’s to some progress at least, right?!