Pintesting - German Glass Glitter Ornaments

So for this round of the Pintester Movement we've been instructed to make Christmas tree ornaments. Now I live alone. I have no kids. I rarely put up a Christmas tree (although I do have a lovely one I bought back in the early 90s from the Pick & Save in Fairbanks. I think it was $19.95.  I'll let you translate that into an appropriate level of "lovely." I think it is 4 feet tall.)  Anyway, I don't usually put up a tree because who will see it except me? So once I have made my lovely ornament (something about Christmas requires multiple uses of the word "lovely.") I'm going to try to send it to Jodee who blogs over at the Cheeseblarg for her first ever Christmas tree. Why? Because I love cheese. And honestly I don't need a lot of Christmas tree ornaments. Also, I wonder if I could compete with her cheese love. I think I could.

I opted for the German Glass Glitter ornaments for the combined reasons of glitter and theoretical ease of the project. Except I can't make projects easy. I must complicate them in some way. In this way I didn't re-read the instructions that would have let me just do scribble designs and I actually attempted to create designs of actual things. Also, I don't know what the hell German Glass Glitter is and so in the great tradition of the Pintester, I just used what I had which was normal glitter.

 

So here are the ingredients. The basic instructions do not mention mod podge and the big paint brush but since glitter is the herpes and I don't want it all over the place I theorize I will seal the glitter on the ornament with the mod podge.

 

I started out with making holly. Holly is so easy to draw with a pen. It should be easy to draw with glue. See the first dot. 

 

Look! Three little holly berries. They will begin to drool almost instantly. Don't use this much to make your holly berries.

 

 

Note the blob o' berries and the outline of the holly leaves. This is good, right?

 

Sprinkled the green and red glitter carefully onto the holly and berries. 

 Then I had to take a fine paint brush and dust off all the glitter because glitter sticks to the whole glass ornament whether or not there is glue on the ornament. 

 

I also tried a snowflake. It was easier by far.

 

 

I carefully sprinkled white/clear shiny glitter on the snowflake.

 

You can't really see the glitter, but it is there. I promise. I wouldn't lie about this. (Would I?) No, I probably wouldn't lie about that.  

So because I don't want glitter to eventually get everywhere I sealed the ornaments with mod podge. My theory is that it will seal in all the glitter.

 Luckily the mod podge dried clear. I was briefly worried about it. But it is shiny mod podge (modpodge mod podge modpodge mod podge say it a bunch and it loses all meaning) so it enhances the snowflake (in my opinion)

 

So I hung several to dry. I did stripes which was much easier. I also had a finer glitter I used on some ornaments. Also, if doing stripes or covering the whole thing with glitter, it is much easier to use the mod podge to coat everything than it is to use the regular glue. 

Pintester Movement - Pretty Wire Garden Art

As a Pinteste, I look forward to the crazy things the Pintester tries. I she cracks me up.  She is doing this thing where she is having her readers do their own Pintesting. Be a part of the Pintester Movement.  I came across several pins that I wanted to try and decided this Pretty Wire Garden Art project by Jen Goode would be fun. I am buying my first house this year and this way I could make my own yard art. Isn't that exciting for me?
 

 

So these are the supplies. I had to buy wire coat hangers because I didn't have any and because apparently I never go to the dry cleaners. The fine craft wire and the little glass things I bought at Michaels. I had the wire thingie but I didn't actually use it.

 

Step one was to straighten out the wire. The cat decided the wire was something fun so we had to take a break for a few minutes to play.

 

I did my first bend following the pictures on the website. I wanted to make a dragonfly because I love them. See, it is taking shape! A wing!

Look, it is working so far! I have two wings and a head! I also have the picture up on my Kindle Fire so I could follow along.

 

 

Well, it starts to fall apart around here. I couldn't bend the 2nd wings the way they needed to go. Seriously. Not in the least. I could not bend them with my thumbs. I tried and tried until they were numb. I could not bend them with a plier. To say I succeeded would make me a liar.  But, hey this looks kind of cool right? No. No it doesn't. So I straightened it out and started over again.

 

 So I went back to the drawing board and just did a simple spiral flower. This I could do. This worked well. I also had a needle nose pair of pliers to help me out with the little bend. (Completely related, as I type this my right thumb is numb with pain and discomfort since the wire bending is HARD)

 

 

Next step is to decorate with decorative wire. I also included some small beads.

 

 

So here's the completed flower with the red decorative wire and little beads wrapped in. Not hideous. 

 

I had an extra little part that I wrapped with green decorative wire and then glued to the stem.  Gluing wasn't part of the project but it was necessary to make the leaf hold. 

 

And then I stuck it outside in my flower pot. I think it looks pretty. It was difficult to do and seriously my thumb hurts. A lot. I have enough hangers to do a lot more if I wanted to. I think I'll use them to hang up some clothes or something. Maybe jackets in the closet.

Putting the pieces together

While at my parents' house I picked up a few things I had owned since childhood. One of those things was a telescope I thought I had lost years ago in all my moving around. Once I buy a tripod, I'm going to bust that out and use it. The stars here in Texas are amazing.

Something else I found was a pair of Okinawan Shisa dogs. They are similar to the Fu dogs of China. I bought them in Okinawa when I was there many many years ago. When I shipped them to Texas, I did not pack them well enough and one broke much more than the other. The other broke into 3 pieces and was fairly easy to put back together. The other... not so much. It will probably not stand solidly once I'm done gorilla gluing it together. It also will have some chips missing. I do feel badly that I have broken them. I could try to be all profound and say that broken things can't be put back together the same way, but we all know I'm not profound. :) Luckily it is the one who keeps his mouth open to ward off evil spirits as opposed to the one whose mouth was closed to keep in good spirits. Maybe the cracks will confuse the evil spirits.

Free Weekends

In January I started my internship wherein I worked 8 hours a weekend at a library and given that it takes me about 1/2 hour to get there and back 5 hours of each of my weekend days were spoken for. Five hours in the MIDDLE of the weekend days (1 - 5) were spoken for. Since the first weekend in January I have had Easter Sunday, one weekend in February when my sister and I went to DC and last weekend off from the library.  Until today. I'm done with my internship. I have no house guests. Just me and a glorious weekend of doing what I want. Apparently what I wanted was to do boring errands that I haven't run in months, like taking the recycling to the recycling place. I need my apartment to get recycling. I lugged 5 bags (which became 6 as the "forceflex tough" trashbag broke when I got to the bottom of my stairs that was fun) of newspapers, 3 bags of cans, 3 bags of plastic bags and a shitton of cardboard out to my car to take to the recycling place. I also took a bag of clothes out to the car so I could take them to charity. I discovered I have little to no endurance.  I seem to have decided to do this at the hottest time possible (really 10:00 - 12:00 what was I high?) and it wiped me out.

But I feel accomplished and that's what is important, right? :) I also picked up a shoe organizer for the closet where I keep the shoes. Sadly it was apparently designed for children's flip flops and so I cannot fit a pair of shoes into each little compartment, but that's okay. I think now that I have free time again I'm going to get back to work on my scrapbook project for my scouts scrapbook and Lyday's (gag) orange and blue and cat hair afghan. My niece now wants one too (but it doesn't have to be gator colors thank goodness) so that's another project for me to start and actually complete.

It will be a good summer. I'm looking forward to not having homework to do or anything else really that HAS to be done on the weekend. I think tomorrow I'm going to try to go someplace I can take photos of flowers. I want to create my own flower calendar at Snapfish. At this rate it'll be an 18 monther. :)

Yum Yum Pizza!

I'm participating in the TRAC study again. They did this once before where I wear a GPS and a step counter and then write down every place I go for a week. Apparently the last time I did this the GPS wasn't recording data so they had to have me redo it. I find the green notebook where I write my movements down to be fascinating. I can't access any of the info in the GPS or step counter so that doesn't matter, but the notebook tells me a lot. Today, for instance, I went to more bus stops than I did anything else. (Since there were several times I had to change buses.)

I went to Pacific Fabrics and picked up 'eyes.' :) Simple black buttons to use for my animals. I also went and got pizza. Yay. What a fun day! Now I'm back working on my lion. I have to rustle up my felt. I know I have some here in the apartment, I just have to figure out where I put it. I need it to make the lion's muzzle.

Big Project

Apparently I've taken a minimum of 266 photos of my scouts during all the years we've been meeting. Minimum because that's the number of photos I just ordered. Over the holidays I purchased this cute photo scrapbook and I'm going to scrapbook all my scout years. I really should find my table before I do this so that I can work in a big enough space. Scrapbooking is big work. :) I'm rather excited about working on this. It was so funny printing out these pictures. The girls were so young!

Rest & relaxation Sunday

I'm watching the latest season of The Amazing Race. I love this show. I'm so excited about this season and a teeny bit sad I'll miss an episode while I'm in Ireland. :) I like the teams that are interesting and different instead of the usual "we're blondes and we get our way" team or the bickersons who argue the whole race and are using the race to determine if they should be together or not. Like THAT's a good barometer.

I've spent part of the day working on amigurumi animals for Michelle. So far the turtle isn't that great yet. I had to pull some stitches out of his head because it was way too oblong and not as round as it should be. But I haven't finished it yet. I had a hard time buying a crochet hook since the place I went to had two that were different sizes but were labelled the same size. (Ie an F hook should be x size and a G hook should be y size and instead both were labelled 4 mm sizes) so I'm not sure if I'm using the right sized one for the turtle. I've started on a lion next because I had some nice yellow yarn for the body. I think they're bigger than I thought they were going to be. For some reason I thought they were going to be teeny tiny like keyring size and instead I think they are more toy sized. I have to get better eyes though. I used pony beads for the eyes for the turtle, but I don't like that look. The patterns are from this book: Amigurumi World, seriously cute crochet. Hopefully with practice they'll start looking less retarded. Currently they look like they kind of have pointy heads.