#useless crafts

[madwormm]

hey girlbosses

[theahole]

Bright Light Ornaments

[This project is from Instacraft by Alison Caporimo & Meera Lee Patel.]

What you need to make this thing:

light bulb of some sort

tacky glue

paintbrush

glitter

kitchen parchment

20-gauge wire

To do this craft, spread a sheet of parchment paper on your work surface.  Pour a little puddle of glue onto a spot on the parchment.  Use the glue to paint about half the light bulb with glue.  Sprinkle on glitter.

I found that it works better if you sprinkle on some glitter and then roll the gluey bulb around in the glitter that landed on the parchment.

Do this to the other side of the bulb as well.  Let the glue dry for about 2 hours.

Next you need to make the hanging loop.  Here's what the book said:

"Wrap wire around neck of bulb five times and tie, leaving 1 inch of wire remaining."

Okaaay..

"Knot the ends of the wire to create a loop."

What ends?  I only have one inch of wire!  What the fuck are you trying to SAY?

Anyway, I tried several times to wrap the wire around the bulb tightly enough to tie it even once, and the bulb kept slipping out.  So forget hanging the damn thing.  All I have is

a wasted light bulb.

time: about 2 hours, 10 minutes cost: about $6.03 US injuries: headache

Happy Holidays!

[verdigreendream]

When you want to take an entire afternoon to make a pretty mess for one jar of berry juice.

[impastablestuff]

I have so much to do but what if I sit on my couch for like 6 hours and refresh AO3 on the off chance one of my fics updates? Alternatively, I could go to Michaels and buy a whole bunch of beads to make fun bracelets I’ll never wear. Unrelated, but I am the proud owner of these new crocs and I never want to take them off (but also I cannot wear them outside). Just so much going on here. So so busy.

[theahole]

Digestives

[This project came from Book Play by Margaret Couch Cogswell.]

The book lists this under "Unconventional Books," but I am having trouble figuring how exactly it IS a book.

What you need to make this thing:

Reader's Digest condensed book (I had a "deluxe" edition, which has lots of color illustrations)

glue or paste

paintbrushes (not mentioned in book)

waxed paper or kitchen parchment (NMIB)

lots of newspaper (NMIB)

weights

box of some sort

paint

palette of some sort (NMIB)

ruler

craft or utility knife

decorative scissors or pinking shears

neutral shoe polish (?) or antiquing medium and spray varnish

awl

shellac (I used varnish)

The first step is to glue pages from the book together.  The book suggests twenty pages per stack, but I knew my dollar-store scissors were not cutting that much. So I made very thin book-page crackers, ten pages thick. I started out using "Paper Mod Podge" for the glue, and that did not work out very well. Unless I poured the stuff from the bottle directly on the page it dried out before I stuck it to the next one. And there were a ton of wrinkles. This is not optimal. So I broke out the good stuff.

Here is my favorite bookbinding paste. It lasts a few months in your fridge, there's no wheat in it, and it smells kinda nice. It also doesn't wrinkle paper up very much.

All the book says is, "Put your glued pages under a weight for 24 hours." It was my idea to use waxed paper to make sure they didn't stick to the weights.

And twenty-four hours later--everything was still wet.

A better plan to dry out a stack of glued paper is make a sandwich with waxed paper and newspaper:

And then you should switch out the newspaper after about 12 hours. This way the moisture has somewhere to go!

Wow, it's almost like the author of this book doesn't really want you to know how to do the project..

While I was waiting for the paper stacks, I decorated the box. There are hardly any instructions for this part, just paint it and rub it with shoe polish "to give it a finished look."  I don't have any "neutral shoe polish."

Also the author's box was papier mache and I used a wooden box I got from the dollar store. I painted it with two colors and glued on a couple illustrations from the book:

By the way, the book all the pages came from is Hot Money by Dick Francis and there's someone in it named Coochie:

I have a hold request in for the unabridged version at the library, of course.

Then I followed the instructions on the antiquing medium to finish it, except I found it was once again more effective to pour the medium directly on the box and THEN spread it around with the brush.

It took a very long time for my ten-layer stacks of pasted paper to dry. I wond up gluing up two more stacks so they'd almost fill the box, and that made it take longer too. So it was about five days before I could start cutting the stacks into "crackers."

It doesn't work if you start while the paper is still wet:

Measure the interior box and use your ruler and knife to cut the sheets into pieces that will fit in your box. I wound up one short because I somehow got an illustration on the back of one stack:

Next, trim the pieces with your decorative scissors. The book says to use pinking shears but the only ones in the house are reserved for sewing, so I had to use a pair I got from the dollar store instead.

The advantage to the dollar store scissors was that the scalloped edge looks somewhat more like crackers. The disadvantage was that they really didn't want to cut more than an inch at a time, which made for some really uneven edges..

Plus I hurt my fingers pretty bad trying to cut through that much paper at once with those flimsy-assed things.

Then you poke holes in the pieces to make them more cracker-like, and varnish them. The book said to use brush-on shellac, but I HAVE varnish, so that's what I used, goddammit.

Anyway, now they're done and so's the box, and what do you do now?

"Add the 'crackers' and enjoy!"

Enjoy what?

I guess you could be like Eeyore with his balloon and Useful Pot and put them in and take them out again.

"So it does!" said Pooh. "It goes in!" "So it does!" said Piglet. "And it comes out!" "Doesn't it?" said Eeyore. "It goes in and out like anything."

time: about 8 days cost: $10.82 US, more if your paint wasn't a gift or you bought the paste specifically for this project.. injuries: pain and possible finger bruising for cutting hand

You can buy this useless stack of garbage and its cute little box here.