Saturday, December 25, 2010

Stocking Tree in action

Saturday, December 4, 2010

How I Made the Ornaments

I got two sizes of wooden discs from Michaels.  The discs aren't very thick.  The first batch I used a 1/16" regular drill bit, which was almost too thick for the wood.  I got a 3/64" bit in my Dremel which worked well later on.  This would have worked better if I had a bench press.

I got some gold elastic jewelry string and gold metal jewelry wire.  I had some jingle bells in my crafts box.

For the photos, I got the logo from the school, but use Paint.net to erase the New Orleans part so it would fit better on the rounded shape.  I used the smudge tool to make the graphic edges fade out a bit better.  I then made 8 copies on a 4 x 6" canvas and printed to the photo printer.  I had to cut them out with scissors - Fiskars (and others) make some punches for scrapbookers which would have made cutting those out a whole lot easier.

I used some red stained glass effect spray paint on the backs of the discs.  That takes a while to dry.  Then I glued the photo paper to the fronts of the discs with spray adhesive.

The small discs just have the year written on them with metallic marker.

The discs are coated both sides with high gloss polyurethane.

I used the gold wire to wire things up and the most difficult part was hot gluing the wires in the little holes - also the elastic cord I decided to use for the top loop was very difficult to get in the hole.  I used a paper clip to push it in and then secured with hot glue.  I needed something more rigid though - like a 1mm punch.

In hindsight, it might have been just as nice to drill the holes in the face of the disc and simply string the wire or elastic through the disc.  Less hot gloue, and hopefully just as nice looking.

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Everything is so much easier when you have the right tools.

Now I need some kind of precision hot glue gun...

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