Of all the deeply philosophical questions I could be asking myself at this time of year the one question that I find cycling through my brain is… what the hell was going on 9 months prior to February and March?
It seems as though half of my extended family has birthdays that fall within these two months and for someone who is on a very restricted budget and trying to use recycled materials (not to mention I’m on a self imposed craft supply spending cut) this time of year almost rivals the stresses of Christmas.
Not only do I have many different people to consider for gifts I continually run into the issue of wondering really how much people will appreciate my hard work. Not everyone is thrilled with the idea of a hand made gift- although I would like to think my family and friends have come to the conclusion that their only option is to put up or shut up on this issue.
But I digress… I wanted to share my crafty concoctions for the upcoming spate of birthdays.
I’ll start out with my niece and nephew who are turning 3 and 2 respectively. Not wanting to spend an inordinate amount of time creating gifts that they probably won’t play with for more than 30 seconds at a time I decided that easier was a good call this year. Knowing what these munchkins are like I didn’t waste my time drawing out tons of images, but instead visited all the free online coloring pages I could find and printed out a multitude of pages for each tyke. Then I tried my hand at binding the pages together with some leftover yarn. Not too shabby!
To go with their new coloring pages I thought I’d make some toddler-friendly crayons perfect for stubby fingers. Using a bunch of my old crayons I filled a mini muffin tin with analogous colors and baked in a 300 degree oven until the crayons were melted. A quick cooling period later those suckers popped right out of the tin and were ready to be packaged up for a gift!
The second gift I’ve been working on is for my sister-in-law who is currently in Cosmetology school. I’ve been wanting to try book-binding recently and I thought any self respecting “school girl” needs a journal for notes and doodles. Of course it had to have some relevance to beauty school so I scoured the web for 1940’s and 50’s beauty product ads. In Photoshop I puzzled the ads together to make the cover image for the journal. After I printed the cover images out I laminated them with contact paper, using some scavenged cardboard for stiffness. As for the binding I found several helpful tutorials online that used the Japanese method which I thought was far easier than other methods I’ve seen.
Just for the record the inside pages are cut from used printer paper. Most of the sheets had one or two lines printed at the top or bottom and was unneeded for whatever reason. Cutting the printing off gave me tons of usable paper. This is paper that would normally go to waste, but not anymore!I’m still unsure as to what I should make for my lovely mother-in-law, so I’m making jewelry here and there until something looks just right for her. The first project I tried was making bracelets out of old thrift store records. I actually bought the records because of the kitschy art on the front, but now I can use the vinyl as well! This wasn’t the easiest project because cutting records when they’re at room temperature is almost impossible. Boiling them in water certainly makes them pliable, but only for seconds after they’re removed from the water. To punch the design into the bracelet I actually had to boil my craft punch along with the vinyl strip, pull them both out together and punch out the design using all my weight to get it to cut through the cooling plastic.
I also found a ring floating around in my jewelry box that had lost its stone. Originally it housed an onyx stone. I suspect it probably wasn’t really onyx, but it certainly looked like one. I thought a fabricated “stone” from polymer clay would work wonderfully. I mixed black clay and some iridescent white glitter together and pressed it into the ring and then baked the whole thing. I thought I’d pop that “stone” right out of the ring to sand it and then glue it back in but no luck. That stone was stuck in there solidly. I sanded the “stone” with a wet/dry sandpaper and polished it as well as I could while it was still set in the ring.
Hopefully one of these will work for my mother-in-law and the rest of my family will enjoy their respective gifts in due time.
-Lyzard
