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Tuesday 9 October 2012

Craft Wars

Today is launch day for Craft Wars: Part 1!


A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away

Craft Wars

It is a period of boring walls.
Rebel crafters, striking
from a hidden base, have won
their first victory against
the evil Bland Decorations


Yea I'm getting a little nerdy about this! It's Tuesday!

But seriously, today is the first day of preparations for our battle against boring! I've compiled a list of things we'll need for the first episode of our little saga:

1. Cheap (emphasis on the cheap) wooden frame
2. Paint brush
3. Paint of some sort of color (what color?!) 
4. Creative crafty thingy for the corner of the frame (getting off to a great start here)
5. Photo for the frame
6. Small hooks for keys (X3)
7. Blender
8. Margarita mix
9. Tequila
10. Limes

Numbers 7-10 are optional but they are recommended. 

I've been having a hard time coming up with an appropriate color for the frames and I recently came across this interesting little project: 



What a cool idea! It looks a little complicated with the staining and the sanding and the charcoal but we'll see if we can't take a couple shortcuts!

*Please note: This is where I always get myself in trouble. 'Ah this is taking too long, I'm going to take a shortcut' and 'Naw this looks too complicated I'm sure there's a simpler way to do it!' often lead me to disaster. Feel free to ignore this when doing your own crafts.

But seriously guys I think we can make this easier.

Step One: Stare suspiciously at the craft materials, optional margarita in hand. You know they'll do their best to mess this up somehow, you're just not sure how they'll do it yet.

Step One and a Half: Was just writing Step Eight and thought of something: maybe put some tape on the edges of the glass so that part of the frame doesn't get painted?

Step Two: After finishing said optional margarita begin your craft war by painting the frame a stone color. Leaving the edges a bit rough sounds lazy and awesome and looks fabulous in the picture so we're going to stick with that.
Make sure sides are big enough to write on!

Step Three: Now, I'm not too excited about using charcoal to rub off on the wood by tracing the letters, I'm not a wizard or a pilgrim or whatever so that sounds and looks difficult. I think I'll just use my best handwriting and a ruler (I also don't have a printer) and trace some letters and then fill them in with black paint. Right? There's no way I could mess that up : P And I don't feel bad about purchasing a little thing of black paint because I feel that will come in handy for future projects.
Copy of my handwriting (what could go wrong?!)
Step Four: Wait for paint to dry and work on optional margarita number two.

Step Five: So we've painted the frame and watched paint dry (literally) and I'm sure it will all look lovely and worn and super realistic. Now we're supposed to sand down the paint a little, I'm probably going to try and be gentle at first and then get frustrated and really go at it. You do what works best for you : P

Step Six: Now she says to stain the whole thing with a 'dark walnut stain' but I'm not going to do that because I've already used a paintbrush a couple times today and those margaritas will probably be starting to kick in. So that's step six, avoiding work.

Step Seven: Screw in or nail or somehow jimmy-rig the hooks into your picture frame. We have a slight issue in that the blog that was attached to the picture of the picture frame craft has been taken down so I'm going to wing it from here. If things haven't gotten interesting by now I'm sure they will soon.

Step Eight: Avoid using doily thing in corner. We have letters on the frame now so adding a corner thing would make it a little busy, right? Or maybe buy old cool-looking key and somehow glue to corner.
Keys!
Step Nine: Put picture in frame

Step Ten: Hang on wall and BAM! You've just crafted your way through several (optional) margaritas and into the world of stylish!

This is the optimistic plan for what is going to happen tonight. Hopefully I make it in to work with all my fingers and some exciting/hilarious pictures of my success!

-N-

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