DIY Make Your Own Pac Man Paper Mobile

Pac man paper mobile - More DIY How To Projects

Make Your Own Mobile Kit

I have a new crafty kit available for the holidays!
A mobile making kit! Comes in a clear plastic tube complete with instructions and everything you'll need to make your own little mobile.

This is a great holiday gift for that crafty special someone...
I've been stocking up for holiday shows and I thought it'd be great to have a new packaging for a special little kit - I feel like a product like this is all about packaging. Something that looks fun to buy and complete in its own little box. So I looked around a bit and found these great little clear plastic tubes. They are just big enough to hold a few golf balls - OR - a bunch of goodies that you could use to make your own mobile! :)

As someone that enjoys mobiles, I think one of these kits would be the best holiday present ever!!!

Printing on Glass

After much patience and hard work - our printing on glass tutorial is now for sale on Etsy!!!

click here to purchase

Here's what you get with purchase:

• step by step info (its a PDF file)
  
• pictures of process and experiments
• video
• supply lists and suppliers
• information about what pigments make what colors after firing

Its 22 pages of goodness. Really - its worth it! As Jan likes to say "$300 in 2 months" and you can now purchase all this information for only $20.

Images on Glass Experiments Ready for Publishing!

Upcoming soon (maybe in the next couple days!?) the booklet Jan and I have been creating, a collection of our experiments and instructions for how to print images into glass... its soon to be available for purchase!
I will be announcing the actual availabilty here in my blog soon... today we finished it up (it was 106degrees out in the shade today, so I hid in Jan's airconditioned studio and we banged out the finishing touches on the booklet). We were so excited to actually finish it! Jan even bound a black/white printed copy and she bound it with orange thread! We even got started creating a listing for it online. Whoopee!

Winter Crafty Goodness: Making Cinnamon Ornaments

Mary blogged about her fun times making cinnamon ornaments and the idea was planted in my head to try and make some myself. Cinnamon Ornaments!

Here's my how to on making these wonderful smelling decorations:

What You'll Need:
- equal parts applesauce and cinnamon (I used 1 cup each)
- ground nutmeg and clove if you have them
- Elmers Glue
- oven or dehydrator
- plastic straw
- rolling pin
- wax paper
- cookie cutters
- cookie pan

The process is odd but easy. Mixing up all the cinnamon into the applesauce takes a bit of persuasion, and then the dough isn't very cookie-dough like... but its relatively easy to work with. Use the wax paper to roll out the dough pretty thin (1/4") so it won't take too many days to dehydrate. And the plastic straw is for cutting the holes so you can hang them. Then bake them at 250degrees for a while, flipping them once. If I had a dehydrator, that'd be the way to go... but I don't... so I just left mine out to sit for a couple of days before I decorate them.

Don't eat them - they won't taste good, they just smell good.

The whole house smelled so good as I made these! My brother said he's gonna sleep walk during the night and eat some. When I opened the oven the smell of cinnamon was so strong I could taste it!

Now I need some puffy paint so I can decorate them.

Fun Soggy Weekend

This weekend the weather here in Portland was rainy and gray, temperature in the 50s and sorta windy. And I was outside selling my artwork! Sheesh I am crazy :)

I actually had a fun weekend in spite of the forecast calling for constant rain and wind. After being depressed all week about the onslaught of this persistent crappy weather, I don't really know why I decided to vend this weekend. Saturday morning I showed up skeptical of my strange choice, dressed in my navy blue rain jacket, my rain boots , two layers of fleece sweaters and two pairs of long johns.

To make a long story a little bit shorter, I ended up switching booths with my neighbor Bob. That small change made my whole weekend so much more fun and exciting! I set up my booth in his spot (2 spots down the road from my reserved space) and he set up in mine. Bob makes incredible metal birds, lifesize and gorgeous, his business is Metal Art by Swan.

Residing in Bob's spot for the weekend was great! I think I really needed a little change of pace to brighten my weekend, and this was perfect. I absolutely love all my neighbors in my reserved space, they are awesome, don't get me wrong. It was just fun to be in a different location for a weekend... even though it was just two booths down :)

I got to hang with my friend Maggie, Papaver Jewelry, she is in the picture above, don't our booths look great even though the weather is sh*t and already getting dark! Oh I forgot to put my big red Leah Glass sign... when I remembered I just didn't bother cuz I figured it'd just get wet and I didn't feel like toweling it off.

And I got to meet many customers that were so friendly and kind. It was not the busiest of weekends, but in my new perspective I was basically right at the entrance to the market, and there weren't a whole lot of vendors, so I was very visible and colorful. People were walking down the road saying to their friends/family "Oh I like those mobiles, I have seen them online!" and man, that just makes me so darned proud - I can't even tell ya! And the fact that many mobiles and other creations of mine went home with new owners, that makes my day even sweeter!

Today I made a lot of rings (I thought that would be a good way of utilizing the rainy day and possibly rousing up a little business from people enjoying watching the process - it worked too!), so I thought I'd share a little video diddy of me demoing making rings.



If you are also curious about my ring making process, here is a tutorial I made years ago - it shows exactly how these are made. Just excuse the old website format... makes me think I should re-do this tutorial... that website it is on is an old template of mine that takes forever to load all the seperate pictures...

sheesh. :)

Super Simple Borosilicate Glass Ornament

Clearly I could/should have decorated this glass ball... the point is, its easy to simply blow out a borosilicate point and create a simple Christmas tree ornament. The little metal caps (with the wire) are available from glass supply distributors... if you are an artist that uses the Aquila studio, they have the metal caps available for sale there as well. If you take my Ornament class, you make at least a dozen of these little imperfect creations, and I put the little metal tops on them for you, after they have been annealed.

Come take a class - learn to do this - or try at your studio at home!

Basically... pull a point of tubing, decorate the bubble, blow it out and anneal it. This pic-tutorial shows how to crack off the blowpipe afterwards and create your simple ornament:

Beginning with your annealed point with the blown out ball, blowpipe still attached

Done.

Making Frit from Scrap

A glass artist is never lacking in scrap bits of glass, and I always tell my students that they can turn their scrap into frit using a coffee grinder! Well, I figured I should try it out and see if it really works!!

Here are the necessary tools: coffee grinder (retired, never use for coffee again!), mask and eye protection

First cut up your scrap (rod or flat glass) into manageable size little chunks that will fit into the coffee grinder politely. Then put it in there, pulse away, and voila!


IMPORTANT: after you grind it up, wait before opening the grinder, and if possible hold the grinder under an exhaust fan when you open it up. There will be a good deal of powdered glass dust created and its important not to breath it in.

Making Glass Rain Drops

Continued Video Fun

Ever wonder how I make my little mobiles? Heres a glimpse. Enjoy!

Making Glass Coils

Technique

Circle Cutting in Glass:

There are many different tools out there on the market... currently I use the Silberschmidtt Repetitive Circle Cutter. And I use my own custom technique, its a little unconventional - but its fast and simply awesome :)

if I say so myself - ha!

Okay - I 've made a little slideshow - basically the heart of this technique is using a big paint bucket, and smacking the glass after you've made the score - this "smacking" (aka breaking the glass) technique works great with this German scoring tool The Silberschmidtt scores at an angle that enables this - all you have to do after making the score, is shock the glass violently and the circles fall out. No running pliers, no grouzing, no grinding - and even better, if you use a bucket to induce the "violent shock" the mess is minimal, all the scraps end up in the bucket - all you have to do is pick up the circles and clean them off.

Important Safety Note:Of course if anyone is reading this and planning on trying out this technique for themselves, do so at your own risk. I take no responsibility for the foolish unconventional methods I utilize :)

Efficiency makes me happy - the less you handle each piece of glass and the less to clean up - the more I can get done with less cuts and splinters! I cut over 100 circles yesterday, cleaned them and got some of them into the kiln, took about 2 hours of my day. Then I had a class in the evening teaching an introduction to glassworking with Pyrex Glass. Yummy!

Making O-Rings

I use a LOT of o-rings in making my mobiles... so I make a lot of o-rings (yes I make them myself - although I should admit that I adore help! and Tim is a great o-ring maker)

The pictures above show how I do it. The wonderful father of a good friend of mine made me the simple sturdy jig - basically a wooden frame with a bent steel bar that has a small hole. You feed the wire thru the hole then just turn the handle. The coils make about 100 0-rings after its all cut up and said and done.

And I should also admit that I didn't figure this out myself - I used to thrash my wrists making coils for o-rings, then I saw some chain-link artists using a drill and a dowel that had a small hole. I thought - brilliant! - but the metal I use (14guage) is too heavy for a wooden dowel, its just breaks or tears, so this steel rig works best for me.

Just thought I'd share how I do it. And I wanted to try out the neat SLIDE website. Its fun.