No blog entries over the weekend. Didn't plan that but it is ok.
I have two great things to share today.
First, I was busy on Sunday with an earring project.
Saturday I was surfing Beads Baubles and Jewels videos and in typical YouTube fashion I ended up in random-land looking at all kings of jewellery making videos.
I actually love this feature. I find all kinds of things I would never have looked for like this: how to make French dictionary segmented earings.
I loved this idea but decided to take it a little further.
I had some little jingle bells and was planning on making some holiday earrings with them.
So I found some sheet music to Jingle Bells online and took screen grabs of some of the denser sections of words and notes. I got a good shot of a G-clef and treble clef and then using Libre-Office's presentation sw I made a collage:
I added a few holly leaves for color. I probably should have added more.
My text pieces got copied and rotated and overlapped. There are still a lot of places that aren't very interesting. I also might vary the size of the text elements next time.
Next I took a 1" round paper punch (I had to buy this. The person on the video cut the rounds by hand after tracing around coins. I knew this was beyond my scissor skills so I bought the punch. It cost $10. which seemed like a lot (especially since they had dozens of styles! Would cost a small fortune to get well equipped.) but Michael's had a 50% off coupon on one item so I got it for $5 which seems much more reasonable.
I cut as many rounds as I could out of one sheet of 8.5"x11" paper. I punched circles around the edges and then trimmed off the scraps and punched some more until all of the paper was used.
Next I followed the tutorial to assemble the spheres. Make sure you always glue the plain sides together. Letting the pieces dry between steps really helps.
I used ModgePodge for the gluing and the finishing. Seems to have worked fine.
Here are the little dears drying with the jingle bells ready to attach waiting on the table. I got creative with the bead containers to give them enough space to dry without touching each other or anything else. I did not follow the advice on the video to only finish a few segments at a time and fought to keep the pages from sticking to each other. Lesson learned.
I let them dry overnight and this morning
I added the bells. Here's a look at the finished product:
Pretty cute. I ended up with 3 pair from one sheet of paper. But I had a few casualties along the way so maybe 4 pair would be possible.
While I was playing with this, my husband was edging the counter he installed on Saturday in the bead room:
It is a little wonky in this photostitched image due to the angle at which I took the pictures. It is a simple u-shaped counter, made of sheets of plywood with double thickness along the edges and where the uni-strut attaches.
Today's plans are to sand the counter and apply sanding sealer.
Then I get to have some fun finding various pieces of information to glue down to the counter top..... a ruler, some basic shapes (concentric circles, triangles, squares) and maybe a wire gauge chart, knitting and crochet needle sizes, bead sizes... I know I'll think of more after the fact.
Anyway, should be fun. tune in tomorrow for the results.
Oh, and for the record, I did not go to the handbell concert. I ended up finding some good performances online to look at.. actually can look at them on the TV. Once we get the sound system connected I'll try it again... should sound awesome.
Instead I went shopping on Sat. and got some bins to start organizing the stuff that will go back into the bead room.
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