Easy DIY Picture Frame Out Of Paper!

I travel a lot. I move a lot. My transient nature makes it really hard to take stuff with me.

One of the easiest ways of making a new place feel like home is to get some art on the walls. It's hard to want to invest a lot of money into decorating when you know you are just going to be leaving again in a year.

Fortunately, I found an amazing tutorial years ago on how to make my own frames out of paper. I now make them all the time, whenever I need something to hold a piece of art I've either found or made so that it doesn't look like I've just taped a loose piece of paper on the wall like a poor college student.

No, these frames are classy. Most people don't even realize they are paper till they hold or touch them. And if you use poster board (which I highly suggest), you can make nearly any size or color that your heart desires.

It's hard to claim only a single "best part" here: at only a dollar or so for a sheet of poster board, and less than 30 minutes of your time, you can create a custom frame for pennies and feel absolutely zero guilt about leaving it behind if/when the time comes because you can just do it again at your next place.

I've modified the original directions to fit my style. The tutorial video I've posted here will make a 6-inch square frame to perfectly hold your favorite Instagram photos or, as in the video example, a beautiful sample of art that you might happen to find hiding in your life. (Think fancy gift wrap, a special card, fabric scrap, or printed bag.) Your whole home could be filled with these easy-to-make and incredibly affordable photo frames within a day. Think of what these frames could do for your gallery wall! Add a border, make them in a funky color to make them pop! The choice is yours!

Plastic Bag Basket Tutorial Follow-up

I made a follow-up video for the plastic bag basket tutorial I made over a year ago. Enjoy.



Here is the original video:

Adventures in Resin

I've seen resin things all over the place: butterfly wings, charms, bracelets, you name it... I probably first heard about it when those scrabble tile pendants were all the rage. I've been looking into it again as a super shiny, durable, and strength-adding finish to my polymer clay items. I finally bought a small kit designed for jewelry and tried it out about a week ago. It was surprisingly easy to use. I was expecting a bit of a learning curve, but really the only thing I wish I had done differently is  made sure the rhinestones I used in a few of my pieces were real crystal. They dissolved into the resin, leaving behind the silver foil backing where they used to be.

The house was just a touch on the cool side for the resin, which recommends temperatures be between 70 and 80 degrees for the best cure, so I brought over a space heater to bump it up just a little bit by the table where I was working. I did my best to leave them alone for the full 24 hours while they cured, and resist my urge to hover, as my butter-finger self would probably find a way to accidentally knock them over.

The pieces remained ever so slightly tacky for a few days afterwards. It wasn't like a genuine sticky, but more like a grippy kind of finish. I was slightly disappointed, as I was hoping for more of a smooth hard glass kind of feeling. It looks like it: like liquid smooth glass. Here are some of the things that didn't turn out so great with my first run with resin:

I just finished a few more steam punk pieces with resin a few days ago. I was a little wary of how they would turn out, and made doubly sure that the measurements were exact. (I measured the first time too, but this time I was extra careful to get it perfect.) I also used a different technique to stir it this time. Happily, it turned out perfectly this time, even if it was substantially more messy this time around as well.

 

I've also created a Facebook page that I'm thinking I will be able to keep updated on more of a daily basis. I will probably continue to post longer things such as tutorials on this blog, but for a more mundane look into my artistic thought processes, Facebook is the way to go. You can find that here. (https://www.facebook.com/LadyGraceCrafts)

Table Clock DIY

So, in my last post I described how my new clock face came to exist. I started to think about what I would need to do to turn it into a finished thing: a backing, a clock mechanism, and some sort of stand or hanger. So here is a little tutorial for how I made my own desk clock from polymer clay.

Step1: Get a clock

Find an old clock that you have laying around that you don't care about, or go buy a mechanism from the hobby/craft store. They are usually in/near the woodworking section, and run from $5-$8. I'm using an old clock that I got as an award back in college. You can probably also find a suitable clock in a thrift store, or maybe if even the dollar store. Make sure that if you are using an old clock to check it with a battery to make sure it still runs correctly.

Step 2: Remove the screws. I used the tiny screwdrivers from an eyeglasses repair kit. (If you bought a mechanism you can probably skip to step 5.)

Unscrewing my clock took two stages: the back outer case (3 screws), and then removing the guts from the front outer case (3 screws).

Step 3: Remove the hands. (I actually forgot to do this and got a small surprise when they came flying off when I pulled off the face in the next step...) You can try pulling them straight off, or use a small screw driver to pry them off. Be careful not to break anything.

Step 4: Remove the mechanism.

My mechanism was being held to the face of the clock by three little clips. You can see two of them on the right hand side of this picture.

Step 5: If you haven't done so already, make a hole in the face of the clock where the hands will come out and bake at the recommended temps/time.

Make sure it's big enough: mine was not. It was easy to fix with a round file, but slightly annoying.

Step 6: Decide on what you will use for a backing, and make a hole in it for the hands as well. I originally wanted to use a 4x4 bathroom tile, but realized it was going to be too thick, and that I would need special tools to drill a hole in it any way. I eventually decided to cut out a square of plastic from the lid of one of those plastic shoe box storage containers.

Step 7: Make sure everything will fit! Dry assemble your clock. Check that the hands will freely spin in the holes you created and that your face + backing is not too thick for the shaft length of the mechanism. Now is the time to change anything that is not right.

Step 8: Center the face of your clock onto the backing piece, and attach it with your preferred method. I used hot glue, which I do not recommend. Super glue or double stick tape would have been a better option, as I found the hot glue cooled too fast and left the face raised up in an unpleasant way from the backing, which later resulted in one of the points of the face to breaking off when I put too much pressure on it. (I later bought some E-6000 glue to try if I ever decide to do this again.)

Step 8: Attach the clock mechanism to the clock backing. (I used double stick tape this time, after the hot glue failure.) Put the hands back on. (they generally go on in this order: hour, minute, second.)

Step 9: Make a stand (or attach a wall mounting). I made mine out of cereal box cardboard and double stick tape.

Step 10: Place a battery in your clock. Sit back and admire your handiwork! =)

I'm back for 2013!

I"m back! After over a year off from crafting, I've been bitten by the bug again. A lot has happened since my last post: I moved back in with my parents. I broke my collarbone in a nasty spill on my bike (the doctors fixed me back up all nice with a titanium plate and screws). I dipped my toe back into the dating pool (before deciding I wasn't really ready to go swimming again quite yet). Oh, yea, and I actually took that tour on my bicycle I was fantasizing about before, from my home in Fayetteville NC to Gainesville FL (about 1,000 miles in a little over 7 weeks), meeting a ton of incredible people along the way. It was almost nothing like I expected it would be, but it is definitely a life achievement I'm glad I got the chance to experience. (You can read about my trip here.)

So, let me share a few of the fun things I've been working on. As per usual, I've been bouncing around a ton between mediums that would appear on the surface to be completely unrelated.

Yarn painting:

Complicated-looking beadwork:

Some watercolor painting that doesn't need to be shown here...

And lot and lots of crafting-vicariously-through-others. Google image search, and now Pinterest, have been both a blessing an a curse to me, in that they offer me limitless inspiration while also threatening (and often succeeding) to make me losing track of time, thinking up millions upon millions of ideas and projects in my head, only to never have them take form in the physical.

Most recently, polymer clay and wire wrapping seem to be what I have finally settled on at this point of time. I've had a bout of polymer clay obsession once before in high school, and working with it reminds me of how much fun it is to make different color swirls and patterns appear and change. Trying new techniques and then bunching up what you don't like only to have it be transformed, like magic, into something new: maybe something really cool. Swirl lentil beads (something I had tried to master in high school but couldn't seem to get the hang of) are now one of my favorite ways to use up little bits of scrap clay, and perfectly demonstrate what I mean. (You can see some in the picture below.)

I was attempting to make a filigree ornament (like this) using a clay extruder I bought, only to realize that out of the 7 ropes I got from the die I was using, only the one in the center was actually usable for that project. It seemed too wasteful for me to continue with as I intended.What to do with all of the extra ropes that didn't make the cut? I took two of them and twisted them together. The result reminded me of very expensive handspun multi-stranded yarns I used to yearn for. I loved it. Then I coiled my new rope around itself in a spiral. I flattened it out, and admired the new sheet I had created. From trash to treasure, for sure! Then I was faced with a new challenge. What to do with it? I wanted to use it in a way that really showcased the colors. It had to be something that would make them pop, and not be hidden. At the same time, my little experimental sheet was only about 2 inches in diameter. There wasn't that much to work with.

I took my inspiration from a necklace I had seen here, and used my wavy cutter to cut thin strips. This doubled the size of the sheet I had to work with. I still had to decide what to make with it. I had finally gotten my hands on a heart shaped cookie cutter, so I made some hearts, intending for them to be eventually become pendants. I really liked what I had done, and it was something that I thought would be fairly easy to replicate. I made another set of ropes and eagerly coiled them up the way I had before, only to be slightly disappointed. It wasn't that it was ugly, but it did not have the many subtle variations in color that my first experiment did. This version was much more bold and took on almost a checker pattern.

I was inspired by something that I had seen in one of my Google image search inspiration-junkie sessions. I remembered it as being a cartoony-whimsical vibed clock, made with wedges of vibrant colors and patterns all swirling in toward the middle. I couldn't find the image I was seeing in my head, but I did find something similar (which I can't seem to find this time around either. Go figure.) Not having a strong reference picture scared me a little bit (I suppose I'm afraid I'm always about to do something "wrong," which is absolutely silly when dealing with art. Gotta let it flow!) but I sucked it up and ended up with something reminiscent of the could-be-a-clock picture in my head I swear I saw at one point. Here's a taste of some of the pretty things I've been cooking up:

Wire wrapping, though, is something that I have not played with all too much. The seed was planted in my time in Montana, perhaps, when I was doing my best to make decent looking jewelry out of origami. I need a lot more practice, and almost definitely a better set of pliers, but the swirling and looping and the fact that you can be as freeform or as precise as you want is very attractive to me (this is also probably why I like polymer clay so much as well). The fact that I made an awesome necklace in about half an hour of just messing around after giving up on some of the other techniques I was trying to figure out doesn't hurt in the positive re-enforcement/encouragement/instant gratification department. The (false) appearance of a never ending spool of wire also definitely helps with the creative process. No need to worry about "messing up," when there's lots more where that came from.

A New Chapter

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life. As I sit here in the airport waiting for my flight, it seems like any other trip. I've been on so many. But tomorrow I will be in a new state, as a single woman, re-inventing myself and forging a new path that is radically different from any I've followed thus far. This last week I have congratulated myself on every major symbolic step forward that I've noticed myself making, and reflected that I am that much closer to freedom. The freedom is of many levels and is hard to put into words.

I've learned a lot about the man I was married to over the last month. This divorce has been long overdue and it is a relief to put it behind me, although I still feel the anger and frustration when I think about all he's done that is still seemingly of little or no consequence to him, granted it's starting to become more of an annoyance and topic of complaint than source of rage. Everyone assures me that he will get his due sooner or later. I can't help but feel like I need to write a letter to his commander to give it a final kick in the butt.

But enough of that. I'm ready to start out fresh! Clean slate! Gonna go visit with some long lost friends in beautiful Sacramento, CA. Maybe do a little sight seeing down in San Fran. Gonna look into whether I have a claim for unemployment compensation because my summer job was a government position (happy surprise because it was a seasonal part time position). Gonna apply for some new jobs and look at some new apartments, and gonna get a new haircut and maybe dye it a new color. Lots of new things! Lots of new chances to get things right and do things my way for a change, instead of rooting out every possible loophole to my situation and figuring out the best possible compromises all the time.

However, I have found myself a nice comfortable leather couch in a secluded part of this completely empty airport, and as my next flight leaves in about 5 hours, I'm going to take a little nap now. See you in Sacramento!

Homemade Camping Stove

Sorry for not posting for a while. It's been an emotional few weeks. I'm finally starting to look forward to the future and see that I can do with it what I please. I'm no longer bound by anything. No rules. I've only begun to realize the limits I had put on myself before, and I've finally realized that I can throw them in the trash.

So, I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but I do not own a car right now. I've been car free since the middle of April, and I've started to really enjoy it in the last month or two. I bought a cheap Walmart bike because that was all I could afford. Because I was using it as my transportation, I rode it into the ground in just a month or two. So I turned it back in and got another Walmart bike, this time with included rack and fenders and 21 speeds instead of just 7. It could go twice as fast and I could stop wearing my backpack which made me so sweaty and tired. Alas, it is still a Walmart bike. I got my first clues today that I might have started to ride this one to the ground already as well. Oh well. My next bike will hopefully be a good one from a real bike shop meant to and able to handle the abuse, and have quality parts actually capable of being properly adjusted and maintained. But that's a whole different rant. They are serving their purpose just fine, and if I wasn't riding them about 20 miles every day, then they probably would last at least a year with minimal protest.

I've liked using my bike to get me around so much, and I'm so cheap, that I've started fantasizing about long term traveling by bike (bike touring). Not having to pay rent, car payments or gas, airfare, water or electricity bills, etc sounds good to me. Why can't I live off my bike and go where ever I feel like it whenever I feel like it? It started out as a crazy idea, but it became more serious the more I researched it and read the blogs of people who were doing it. I made a list of everything I would need. I searched for the cheapest smallest tents, sleeping bags, etc. Anyway, somewhere along the way I found a tutorial for making a super small, super light camp stove using two soda cans. I don't drink soda, but there are tons of soda and beer cans littering the roadsides here. So I picked some up on one of my rides, and made a stove.

My first attempt is with an interior wall and a big hole in the center:
Being the first one I made, it understandably is not as nice as I would have liked. It was a learning process. A hammer was involved to make the two halves fit together. It took me about an hour.

My second one though, is much better in my opinion, and it took about half the time. I decided to try the "penny stove" design, which does not have an interior sidewall and only a little hole in the middle as opposed to cutting off the whole bottom. It's a pressure stove: you put a penny over the hole and if the pressure gets to be too great the penny will flap around, ideally preventing explosive pressures from building up.
I have not had the chance to test either of these stoves out yet, and probably will not in the near future either. They are indeed very tiny and lightweight and, assuming they work, would be ideal for inclusion in my pack for touring, if I ever get up the guts to do it.

Here are some links to tutorials. There seems to be at least a dozen or so variations.
http://www.thesodacanstove.com/stove/
http://ygingras.net/b/2007/6/a-better-soda-can-stove