I've received some emails inquiring about how I accomplished the retro effect for my Bob-ified photo. I found a tutorial by zh0823 at devianArt. The effect amounted to the following three steps:
{ Tutorial courtesy of zh0823 @ deviantArt }
I ventured into the city and visited Britex Fabrics for the very first time -- I'll have photos in Flickr eventually. After Britex, I stopped by The General Bead Store on Minna where I found some awesome button converters by the counter. There were actually two types: one to convert buttons into pins/brooches and the other to convert buttons into pendants. In retrospect, I should've gotten one of those, too. Button converters are about 3 bucks a pop and come in different sizes, so you can virtually convert a wide variety of buttons sizes into pins and pendants.
When I was at Satin Moon Fabrics on Clement a couple of weeks ago, I bought a couple of beautiful dragon fly glass buttons on a whim. Then today, I saw these button converters at General Bead -- something clicked. I can do something with those dragon flies!
With glue gun in hand, all I had to do was to stroke the periphery of the converter with hot glue and then to press it against the back of a button. Then, voila -- lovely glass brooches to go!
I nspired by Jessica Jones' thumbtack tutorial, I decided to make a bunch. I've been dying to make these thumbtacks since I first visited her blog several months ago, but a million nifty excuses trumped any of my attempts.
Well, Mother's Day is just around the corner and is the perfect excuse to set aside homework and laundry and other practical chores to get knee deep in crafts. You can check out the thumbtack tutorial HERE. Ms. Jones' illustrative instructions are very easy to follow. Emphasis: For the 1/2" button covers, you will need thumbtacks that measure 3/8" at the base. Any larger, then the thumbtacks won't fit inside the button cover.
For packaging, I decided to create origami gift boxes and thought that miniature boxes to house 6 thumbtacks would be endearing and so very cute. I found a simple origami gift box tutorial from Expert Village HERE. To create a cover, just use paper dimensions that are slightly larger than the base of the box.
The thumbtacks and the origami box were a great joy to create. Thanks, How About Orange and Expert Village for these rockin' tutorials.
Immensely *productive* today. During my lunch break, I found a YouTube tutorial demonstrating the Origami Mini Star fold. Great video and with a narrow strip of scratch paper, it was a total cinch to follow. I couldn't wait to get home and get started -- I had the best paper in mind for my stars.
I received a promotional poster from Veer several months ago. If you like illustration, photography and typefaces, I urge you to subscribe to their snail mail newsletters -- they're inspiring and often times, hard to throw away. I warn you, though... you may become a Veer promo pack rat. I'm relieved I kept the promo poster (I was close to clearing out my junk drawer last month but chickened out last minute), and in light of this project, I'm happy to be quite the junk mail aficionado.
So I cut the 22 x 36 inch poster into 11 x .5 inch strips. As you can imagine, I'll be able to make a ton of kewl stars!
{ Tutorial courtesy of Vinagurl. }
