What! What! I'm baaaaack, again! HOLLA! Can you tell how excited I am to be back at the old blog? Even though I'm not "technically" blogging, I sort of am! HA! Today's Craft Monkey Destash Bash guest is Alicia from the Teal Magnolia. Alicia is going to get you all ready for the upcoming patriotic holidays! So, what are you waiting for, let's get our red, white & blue on!
Hi everyone! I’m Alicia from The Teal Magnolia, a blog and handmade shop – my little slice of the web. I live in North Carolina with my college sweetheart hubby and our two-year-old son (and another baby on the way! Yay!). I am so excited to be part of Heidi’s Destash Bash! This is such a cool idea. I just loved getting a box of goodies that I don’t normally work with and seeing what came out.
I have to admit, when I first opened the box, I drew a blank and had a little moment of panic. What if I couldn’t make anything for Heidi?! But I knew to let things simmer, and something would come to mind. I left the box on my kitchen table and played with the stuff for a couple of days and then inspiration hit.
Inspiration surprisingly led me in a patriotic path, and why not? We have all the fun patriotic holidays coming up (Memorial Day, 4th of July), it’s an election year this year, and we also have the Olympics this summer. Plus, my brother is in the military, as are a lot of my friends from high school (can you believe I was in JROTC? They told me I could plan the military ball if I joined, so I did. And so began my love for event planning.), so when I saw the pretty blue ribbon with silver trim and the shiny red ribbon, I just thought “USA! USA!” And this is what I came up with: a ruffle ribbon pin with interchangeable glass centers:
It was pretty easy to do. Some of the steps seem difficult, but it’s really not. It only took me a couple of hours. First, I took my aggression out by flattening out a bottle cap and then hot glued it to some blue felt.
Then I ruffled the blue and red ribbon that I got from Heidi. The blue one was wired so I just pulled one of the wires until it ruffled. Then I hot glued it onto the bottle cap on the side that wasn’t covered with felt) just around the edge. I ruffled the red non-wired ribbon by running it through my sewing machine on the longest stitch and pulling the bottom thread. I glued that ribbon just inside the edge of the blue ribbon, on the metal. I then glued a magnet in the middle of the whole thing. Once that was all dry, I glued a pin to the felt side and then glued a square of felt over the pin to make it a little neater.
Now, it’s time to get to work on the glass beads! I should probably stop here and fess up. Originally, I had planned to make a pom pom out of some white yarn from Heidi’s stash, but I guess I don’t remember my Girl Scout crafts as well as I thought I did, and ended up with something that looked more like a Barbie-sized mop than a pom.
So, plan B: Glass beads! I used beads from the floral department at the dollar store. They are about 1.24 inches round-ish. I looked online and got some free clip art and printed it out. Then I painted a layer of modge podge on the flat side of the bead and put them over the images. Make sure you test fit the beads over the images before modge podging. You want to make sure you printed the images the right size (I had to make them smaller and reprint), and you want to make sure the bead works with it. All the beads are a little different, so you might want to play around to see what fits better. Once the modge podge dried, I tore away the paper and trimmed it down right to the edge of the glass.
Now, here’s where I got stuck (again). For some reason, the whole time I was working on this my brain was under the impression that pennies were magnetic (I’m blaming pregnancy brain on this one) and had planned on gluing pennies to the back to make them stick to the magnet on the pin. So I had to scramble and find an alternative plan.
Flattening and cutting more bottle caps would work, but I couldn’t find my hubby’s stash, and then he has some that he’s keeping from certain breweries and I didn’t want to mess with the ‘collection’, so I scrambled some more and found some adjustable ring bases in my craft stash. I flattened them out and cut the excess off with some tin snips. I then used E-6000 to glue those to the backs of the glass beads so that the flat part (where you would glue the pretty part of the ring) is what makes contact with the magnet.
I love the “I Voted” version…those tiny stickers always get stuck in my hair, so it’ll be kind a cool to have my own pin. I think it would be cool to just have a big rhinestone for some bling, or a pretty pearl/pave button or something. That’s the cool thing about this…you can make different centers to fit your mood.
Come on over and see what else I’m up to at my blog, www.thetealmagnolia.com, on facebook http://twitter.com/#!/aliciamariel
Thanks so much Alicia! I LOVE it! How fun to have something other than a cheesy Old Navy flag tshirt {my usual 4th of July outfit of choice} to show your American pride!
No comments:
Post a Comment