Bowl - it's really a roll of tickets!

Here's another idea I wish I'd thought of.  It's a ticket bowl made from a roll of tickets and some mod podge.  The original was posted at Buggie and Jellybean, complete with a tutorial full of pictures.  I saw this and immediately thought of my dad, who received a coordinating set for Christmas.  Here's how his turned out:

It took six little cork disks to fill in each roll center but now they are solid.

My one goof-up was not finding the perfect little glass bowls until after the mod podging (is that a word?) was complete.  Once the bowls were finished, I found the perfect bowls at the dollar store and with the proper planning, I could have formed the tickets to the glass bowls for the perfect washable lining.  Ah well, better luck next time.

Alien Abduction Lamp

With little kiddos and Christmas and New Years to take care of, I got pretty lazy about posting.  But with the holidays over, I have some fun things to share!  This alien abduction lamp one of my favorite projects from our most recent round of homemade Christmas gifts. 

It was inspired by the lamp created at Dollar Store Crafts.  Heather at DSC had the brilliant idea to make a lamp out of two bowls and an acrylic glass.  My modifications were using a round wooden cutting board as a base and adding polymer clay creatures. 

I painted the cutting board brown, then sponged it with shades of green for a ore grassy look.  Then a coat of mod podge sealed it up and made it look a little more finished.  This pic is before the mod podge shined it up.

I did not find small animals or aliens that were quite cute enough, so I made a sheep and some aliens out of polymer clay.

The glass is a green acrylic glass from Target.  I only had a drill to work with so cutting the bottom of the bowl out was not going to work.  So instead, I drilled as many holes into the bottom of the lower bowl as I could before the drill battery died.  The way the light filters through the holes gives the lamp a little bit of a fun eery feel.

Check out the link above for more details on how to make one!

Polymer Clay Knitting Needle Pens

There's tons of Christmas crafting going on in these parts right now, but with projects needing to stay on the down-low, I haven't been able to share them here.  Luckily my knitting group's second annual potluck was a week ago, so one project is no longer secret. There were a lot of fantastic stocking stuffers at the potluck, some hand made and some pre-assembled.  These were my contribution:

They may look like Boye knitting needles, but they are actually pens. 
These would have been a quick and easy project for someone who was experienced with polymer clay, but I'm not so it was a long road.  Here's what it took:

• Polymer clay (I used Femo and Sculpey mixtures for the bodies, Sculpey III for the knobs, and Promat for the cap mold)
• Large knitting needles - US 15 looked large but turned out to be a good size
• Oven safe pens - Bic sticks worked great, but I also tested Paper Mate Eagle in the oven and they did not melt either
• Silver acrylic paint
• A little bit of blue painter's tape to keep the paint tidy

The first step was to make cap molds.  I found a large knitting needle and stuck it into a wad of clay to make a mold, and then baked that according to the package directions. 

I originally started with a US size 10 needle, since that seemed large enough in relation to the pen.  However, the end caps lost some size due to my wiggling and compressing the clay to get it out of the mold.  So I made a second mold from a size 15 needle, and that worked much better.  I then made replica end caps by putting small balls of clay into the mold and pulling them out to bake.

Luckily the clay can be rebaked, so I had nice solid pieces to attach to the pens after they were rolled in the clay.  The needle caps may have worked better if I had made them in Femo.  With the Sculpey III being softer, it was pretty difficult to wiggle the clay back out of the mold without distorting the image.


After setting the baked needle caps aside, it was time to remove the pen innards.   It's easy to do with a pair of small pliars; just rotate and pull the plastic portion of the tip (not the metal point), along with the ink chamber, out of the barrel.

The next step was to roll out the clay.  I used a mixture of Femo and Sculpey III.  The Sculpey was a lot softer the Femo, which flaked like crazy through the pasta machine. 

After conditioning the clay for what seemed like hours, I rolled it out in sheets and cut it in rectangles to fit around the pens, just short of overlapping at the seam.  Setting the pasta machine at 5 produced a nice thin layer of clay that seemed to have a neater appearance at first.  Unfortunately clay that thin was not very forgiving because there was just not a lot of clay on the pen.  So I went up to setting 4, and the clay was then thick enough that I could lay the pen on top of it, roll it a few times, and the seam would virtually disappear.  The next step was to pop a pre-baked end cap at the end and set it in a manilla folder folded accordian-style to bake.  This is how they turned out:

The white caps just weren't right, of course.  So I took a little bit of blue painter's tape and wrapped it around each pen to create a sharp line.

Then I brushed on some silver acrylic paint and pulled off the blue tape.  Voila!







Pillow buddies, even cuter than the original

So every time we walk through the mall, my son drags me over to the pillow pets display to ooh and aah over the animals.  They seem a little silly to buy.  But make one?  I'm totally down with  that.   There's a 2-part tutorial over at Twelve Crafts Till Christmas, just adjust the details for the animal of your choosing.  Here's a look-see, head on over to check out the details:

And, oh happy day, this means I finally have something to make with those yards and yards of flannel I bought at the JoAnn Black Friday sale!

Win a Silhouette machine!

I've been hand cutting all of my craft projects, but that will come to an end if I'm the lucky winner of a Silhouette machine.  Several craft bloggers are giving away machines, but the contests end this weekend so hurry up and enter.  Check out Infarrantly Creative - she is hosting one of the giveaways and her projects do a great job showing off some of the crafty possibilities.

Make a cornhole set

It can be pretty tricky to find a homemade gift that even the men will love.  But here's an idea: cornhole!  The pre-made sets can be pricey, but some craft store sells blank boards at a fraction of the price, just add paint and beanbags.  Even the board blanks look rather simple, and even they can be made from scratch.

Believe it or not, there's an American Cornhole Association.  The ACA has adopted equipment standards.  That means if you want to make a regulation cornhole set, plan on two boards made of 48"x24" plywood.  Each board will need a hole, six inches in diameter, placed 9" from the top and 12" from each side of the platform.  The back of the platform is to be placed at a 90 degree angle to the face of the board, and the back needs to be elevated 12".  The surface of the board should be sanded smooth and painted in a high gloss latex paint for that optimal slid-ability.  You will also need beanbags made from duck canvas and measuring 6"x6".  It should be filled with 2 cups of corn feed and weigh 14-16 oz.   

There is a page over at the Fun Times Guide with links to tutorials and videos to guide you through every step.  Looking to jazz up the bags a little?  Here's a tutorial over at Infarrantly Creative, with a way to make photo bean bags without photo transfer paper.

Custom Vintage Gift Tags

There's no better way to top off a homemade gift than by creating a personalized gift tag.  The Graphics Fairy is an amazing blog, posting new vintage images every day.  There is tons of gift tag potential in her labels posts, and in some cases Karen offers both the original image and also an edited version to allow you to insert your own text or graphics. 

To test it out, I added some text to the mermaid card.  I saved the image, opened it in Microsoft Paint, and then selected the text option with a transparent text box.  Pretty sweet!