Where did the last 2 hours of my life go. *shakes fist at Pinterest*
If half the time I spend pinning things on Pinterest were spent actually making/doing the things I’m pinning, my craft room would be STUNNING.
Oh, Pinterest. You know I can’t stay mad at you…
Now, someone, go find me a door knocker that looks like Sherlock’s and I’ll be all set.
In honor of St. Paddy’s Day, here’s an early craft post.
For this swap, each person posted the name of a favorite Care Bear and we had to make ATCs accordingly. Here’s the one I made of Good Luck Bear.
I made the background, carefully cut out the bear, and wrote the little rhyme myself:
For the other two Care Bear ATCs I made, stay tuned on next Thursday for my regularly-scheduled craft post.
This was my first matchbox book. My partner really liked Disney, so that’s the theme I went with when making it. The drawers open up to reveal Disney stickers. I recolored the photo slightly to work with the background paper color scheme.
How do you make a double matchbox book? It’s pretty simple. Cut out paper that’s a little more than twice as long as two matchbooks, lay the matchboxes out and paste the paper so it looks like a book. Then decorate. I followed this tutorial when making mine.
Every other Thursday, I’ve been posting crafts. I’m going to try to make one of those posts each month an ATC.
So here’s my Super Mario Brothers ATC. It was the only one I did out of a series of classic video games. Super Mario Brothers was my first real video game love as a kid (I saved my babysitting money and allowance all summer to buy a Nintendo system).
I found some images of the baddies and reduced them in size as well as cutting out the backgrounds. After printing them on cardstock, I carefully trimmed around the edges (some shapes were easier than others… I think I clipped one of the koopa troopa’s wings–oops!). I drew in the background and then glued the characters on in a fun arrangement. Sadly, it’s going to be pretty impossible for Mario to get out of this situation I put him in, but I’d like to see him try!
I picked up a Mario Brothers trading card pack at the store for $1 and used one of them as the base of the card. I like doing that with ATCs and leaving some of the original card showing on the back.
Last year, the swap-bot Doctor Who group had a swap to send a Doctor Who-themed card and a package of sweet treats. This is what I came up with…
Adipose card envelope for the card. And a box shaped like a book that I painted to look like River’s diary, only with blue hearts instead of blue squares on the front.
The card, however, was completely “Partners in Crime” episode-themed. The little baby adipose is another stamp I bought from dragonflycurls.
This is one of only a few matchbox crafts I’ve done. This one is based off The Secret World of Arrietty, a Studio Ghibli movie based off The Borrowers. I obviously used an orange-red theme and a mix of sewing and nature imagery. The yellow pin is like the one Arrietty uses in the movie. As it’s a matchbox to hold Arrietty’s Treasures, I included a lot of little items she might find useful.
Every time I join a new artist trading card series on swap-bot, I try to come up with a new look or style for the cards. Here are the ones I made for the most recent Supernatural character ATC series.
I started with a white background and my Supernatural tattoo rubber stamp, one of my best investments ever, created by dragonflycurls on Etsy.
I decided to keep the black & white look by going grayscale for all of them. I picked one photo of each character and then 2-4 smaller images that represent the character in some way. I cut them as best I could, so there was no whitespace around the edges of each image. The result looked pretty good, especially together as a group:
On the backs, I put another image of the character, in color this time. This was especially fun for characters like Meg and Ruby who then got to be represented one way on the front of the card and with a different “meat suit” on the back of the card.
more »
melydia pointed me to this great push to finish unfinished projects. I have a bad habit of starting things and not finishing them, especially when those things don’t have deadlines attached to them. Give me a deadline and I’ll kill myself to meet it. No deadline and it never, ever gets done. So, inspired by ReveDreams, I am going to make this the quarter where I finish my dang projects!
Some, with fandom connects, I will blog about. Others will just be for personal satisfaction. I’m thinking that, if I average one a week, that would blow my expectations out of the water. So I’ll just see what I can get done. Even finishing up ONE of the projects would be a relief.
Anyone else with me for the ride?
I created a few monthly calendars to help me out in my organizing this year. I came across this idea on Pinterest and modified it to fit my needs.
I used colored file folders for a sturdy backing. I was going to use actual calendar pages from a Dollar Store calendar, but they turned out to be too large. So I ended up using an internet program to generate the calendar pages so they and the photos would have a standard look and size from month to month. After printing, I cut the image and calendar apart and trimmed off the white space. I’ll be able to make notes of important dates, meetup events, and organize my fandom blog posts on the calendars.
Each calendar page isn’t just made out of a file folder, it is a folder. There’s a pouch so I can store important things like receipts, movie tickets, notes, and other things for the month that I don’t want to lose. This should beat my system of printing movie/event tickets months in advance and leaving them in the printer tray so I don’t lose them. I may need to reinforce the sides of the folders that were taped up, but they should hold up for months unless I stuff them too full.
I used a hole punch and brads to put the calendar pages on the folder so that I can easily switch them out from month to month. However, another option would be to keep them intact and keep the items from the month in the pockets so that I can easily store them by month to go straight into my artifact journal. I taped the images on, but I could switch those out too if I get tired of them or if I want to make them match the specific month. Ponderosa’s image of Gambit spinning a card with heart-shaped energy might work well for February but not so much in other months. I look forward to seeing how best to use these this year.
If you make some of your own, let me know and send photos!
Far more people RSVPed for the annual DADA (Harry Potter Meetup) Yule Party this year, which means I am scrambling to fill Christmas crackers (which, I hope, I’ll feel up to assembling tomorrow after my trip to the hospital for another test). Which meant that I once again attempted to make pins. There was more desperation in this attempt, so I kept working until I got some right. I found a fantastic tutorial. However, I ruined a whole lot of supplies in the process, which was painful but a good lesson for me to learn. I’m used to trying something, getting it right, and moving on. I’m not used to having such a high learning curve and wasting money and time in the process.
Fail! Luckily, I found a few from last year, so I will definitely have enough for all the crackers now. What a relief!
