January 2013 – The Paisley Fish

18 Jan

Fabric Magnet Board Tutorial

Magnet Board with Button and Cork Magnets!

Great for the home, office, dorm, or where ever! My roommate’s mother made one of these for her, and after seeing hers, I had to make one! Her mom used an old shirt as her fabric! Yay for upcycling!

Supplies

Pizza Pan (mine was 16″… The bigger the better! Any sort of metal pan will do though. I liked the aesthetics of the circle shape.)
Hot Glue
Fabric
Twine/Yarn/Hemp/String
Permanent Adhesive (I used E-6000)
Cork/Buttons/Charms/Jewelery
Magnets

This project is fast, easy, and fun. It’s really one of those projects that you turn ‘nothing’ into ‘something’ really pretty. I’m going to make one for my room and for my office.

Remove any stickers on the pizza pan.

Cut your fabric to approximate size.

Round your fabric, but make sure you keep about 1.5 inches of extra fabric around the edge.

Notice that I am glueing on the concave side of the pizza pan!!

Start hot glueing the fabric on.

Do four opposite sides first, so that your fabric is tight and centered.

Pinch the fabric a bit when glueing, so that you don’t have any bunched up fabric on the good side.

I braided a few pieces of hemp as my hanger.

I attached it with the E-6000.

I tried hot glue first, and it’s not strong enough. My magnet board crashed down my wall in the middle of the night. Scared the heck outta me.

I also made Magnets to go with my board.

This is also super easy, just glue anything you want to a piece of magnet. You can get magnet sheets and cut them to size. Make sure they aren’t weak magnets. The fabric does weaken the strength of the magnet, so just keep that in mind. I used buttons, wine cork, googly eye, old jewelery, and pieces of wood (which aren’t finished yet, soon though).

And that’s it! Easy and beautiful.

14 Jan

Fabric 3D Letters Tutorial

3D Fabric Letters! How cute!?!

Supplies:

Cardboard
Hot Glue Gun/ Glue
Mod Podge
Fabric

Using cardboard, cut out your letter (I free handed my letters), and enough strips of cardboard to make the width of your 3D letters. My width strips were 2.25″ thick. When you cut out the letters, flip each letter over and cut out a reflection of the letter for the back side of the 3D piece.

Using hot glue, (careful, don’t burn yourself!), build up your 3D letter walls. Start from the center and work your way out. This seems to make is easiest for maneuvering the glue gun. Hold the piece in place for a minute for the glue to harden up a bit. Some of the pieces won’t fit exactly, so keep a scissors handy for trimming for an exact fit. Any letters with curves (D or R etc) make sure you prebend the cardboard before glueing it.

Put the other side on the top of the letter last. After the glue hardens, trim off any extra cardboard, making the edges of the letters match up as perfect as you can.

After you’ve completed your cardboard letters, the next step will be to pick out and cut out the fabric you will need to cover the letters. One of my pieces of fabric is actually an old t shirt! Yay for upcycling!

Cut out long strips of fabric to go around the sides of your letters. Take the width of your letters and add one inch for the width of your strips. You want 1/2 inch of extra fabric on all sides.

Cut out a fabric letter piece, and a fabric reflection piece!

Paint Mod Podge around the outter sides of the letter.

Secure the fabric strips around the glue covered sides.

Do the inside of your letters too. This part is difficult to do without making your fabric all wrinkled. I used a pencil and a tweezers to help smooth it out. Also, make sure your fabric is the exact size with maybe a tiny bit of overlap. The more extra fabric you have, the harder it is to secure is smoothly to the inner cardboard.

At each corner, cut the fabric overlap down to the cardboard. Then glue down the overlapping fabric to the front and reflection faces of the letter.

Glue down the front piece of fabric and the reflection piece of fabric.

Viola! Create any word, phrase, name, sentence you want! I love using fabric for stuff like this.

I love how this turned out!

14 Jan

Tissue Paper Pom Pom Balls Tutorial

These pom pom balls are so easy and cheap to make! You can hang them around a light, cover a ceiling, fill up a bowl, the options are endless!

Supplies:

Tissue Paper
Piece of Wire
Scissors

Stack 10- 12 sheets of square tissue paper. You can layer several colors if you’d like! The bigger your squares, the bigger the pom balls.

Accordion fold the stack of paper, like shown above. For bigger pom balls I used a 1.5″ width, and 1″ for smaller pom balls.

Secure the center of your folded tissue paper with a piece of craft wire.

Round the corners of your folded tissue paper with your scissors.

Start on one half. Separate each piece of tissue paper, one at a time. Pull them away from the center, alternating sides. You want to fill in half the pom pom ball when your finished.

Flip it over and fill in the other side. Shape it with your hands when your done to fill in any holes.

Wrap thread or fishing line around the center and hang from the ceiling.