Day 69

Today I revisited the craft storage box I painted blue a few days ago.  I have a book full of Celtic designs (Key Patterns and Animals by Courtney Davis) and decided one of them would look really nice on the cover of the storage box.  Of course being it's a Celtic design it's a bit elaborate so it took a bit of time to trace the design on the cover.  My eyes were pretty buggy after I finished and my hand was shaky from pressing hard on the pencil to trace onto the wood, so I made an executive decision not to paint the design tonight.  It's going to take some time and a steady hand, not to mention I need to go slow to make sure I correct the tracing issues I had...I really didn't trace well as you will see in the pictures below. (Oopsy)  I really love the design though and I can't wait to get back to it to paint it.  Consider this part 2 of a several part craft project! 

 Here is a close up of the design I chose:

Here is the box cover before I put the drawing and tracing paper down, and notice Cody's shadow, always having to investigate what craft I'm working on!  He is the epitome of the saying "Curiosity killed the cat":

Here is the design and tracing paper taped down, ready to trace:

All traced and ready to paint:

Another view of the traced design, click on the pictures to make them bigger:

Day 37

I was at Michael's craft store the other day and I saw a blast from my past - Shrinky Dinks!!!  There was no way I could pass up this kind of nostalgia!  I decided on the kind that you can print on using an inkjet printer.  After some online research for projects, I found a cute sunflower bookmark and used that as my inspiration for today's craft!

I went online and found a picture that I liked, in this case it's a Celtic Tree of Life design (one of my favorites, a top contender if I ever get another tattoo) and printed it on the Shrinky Dink paper.  After it printed, I cut it out, used a hole punch at the bottom for the bookmark and baked.  In three minutes I had a mini version of my original design!!  So fun!!!!  I messed up though, but in my defense, I haven't used Shrinky Dinks since I was like um, SEVEN!  The hole I punched shrunk too (duh!) so it was too small for my thread!  I had to sit there with some small scissors and gouge out the hole to fit the thread, but it worked!  You live, you learn...Once I got the hole big enough, I threaded green embroidery thread threw, knotted it, braided it, had Stan thread a light green bead on (see below, got super annoyed and needed help!) and VOILA,  a super cool Shrinky Dink bookmark!!

I have to give a shout out to me peeps, Stan  (LOL...peeps, whenever I say that I imagine a large marshmallow person) because without him I would have either 1. tossed the computer out the window because I could not find the proper printing settings or 2. thrown the almost finished bookmark out the window because I was having issues with tying the knots!  So as always, he's a life saver...or in this case a computer/bookmark saver!

Here is the big version of the picture I used:

 

And here is what I did with it:

Top view:

 

Bottom view:

 

Full view (you can see that I should have made it longer, but it's still usable!):

 

One more full view: