Baked porcelain mugs

Sooooooooo I have had this idea for a while now and procrastinated for too long (seemingly a current trend of late - which I'm using my best efforts to diminish) to try it out and especially when I saw all the creative ways and ideas in which one can do this. You can paint quotes, designs, pics, words, anything really..... and not only on a mug, but on bowls, plates, .....again.... anything! So yeah, all I needed was a "sharpie" (or a porcelain pen rather) Sharpie is a universal brand but apparently not the best in the market or on the shelf so to speak. So I went with the craft store owner's recommendation and bought the pen... just needed a mug, and I was set....

Having got home I realised I had an old porcelain mug that I wanted to test it on first to see how well it works. I'm not entirely sure why a R16 brand new mug for testing wasn't test worthy enough, but I thought - the more chances I get - the merrier, that I'm strange... there's nothing up for debate there.

So while I still need to make the actual one.... my pre-test one is done. My cursive needs a little work, although real handwriting has a certain appeal when it comes to printing on something... ... and also I need to get a steady hand if I wanna get anywhere near good.......Here are the ridiculously easy steps I followed............

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.
2. Wipe down your porcelain mug and make sure it's dry before writing/drawing/stenciling
3. Get creative with the porcelain pen (leave to dry for an hour)
4. Pop mug/dish into the oven and "bake" for 30 minutes.
5. Remove
6. ADMIRE your creation :)

PS - don't use in dishwashers (rumour has it - but for sharpies - so perhaps a redundant warning for me)
     - don't wash same day you baked your dish of choice (sounds like food haha)

Salt Dough Ornaments

Been looking forward to making these for some time now. Obviously it made sense to only wait until it was closer to Christmas and of course....a rainy day. Being handed both on such a weekend I got the 3 very simple ingredients together and started to whip up a dough where I was soon going to shape ornaments for my tree as well as it being a trial run for keepsake gifts for the family for their own Christmas trees.

What's needed for the dough: 1 cup of salt
                             1 cup of plain flour
                             1 cup of lukewarm water

Additional tools to make them into something pretty: 

Glitter Glue pens
Letterpress kit
Cookie cutters
Gold twine
Straw for making holes for the twine
Baking tray

So it's quite simple really, you just preheat your oven to 90-100 degrees C. They have to dry out slowly, so lower heat - longer time is the trick. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl and gradually add the water until you reach a consistency that pulls away from the sides of the bowl and isn't sticky. Once your dough is ready, knead it on a flowered surface - I love doing this :) Then roll in out with your rolling pin. This should be more fun - however I always have too little flour on the pin and it wants to stick, so I keep having to flour it. Another trick is that the pin should be ready cool. I have a marble pin which I find much better than the wooden ones. So roll the dough out til a couple mms thickness and cut your shapes out with cookie cutters. Take your straw and poke a hole, swivel it around to pull the dough out and viola, you have your ornaments ready for the baking!!

I have a letterpress kit which I bought from Yuppiechef (thanks yuppiechef - you're amaze) and so I pressed names into the ornaments I'd like to give as gifts to my family to hang on their tree in future. Just a little something extra that makes my gift a typical "Caryn" gift... They know how much I love to make things. :) But you can use stamps or anything really to make it your own.....

Bake these guys on an ungreased baking tray - they need to dry out, they won't stick - for 3 hours. Once they're done, use your glitter glue to squeeze blobs on the ornaments and smear it around with your fingers til it's nicely even on your ornament. Then when that's dry, thread your twine through and there you have it!

Vinyl Book-Ends

No idea what to do with old Vinyls? Recycle..... :) Or at least that's what I read when I was looking for ways to craft old records that I would soon buy just for that purpose. Reason being - I'm not old enough to have old records just lying around collecting dust and waiting for means and ways of reincarnation. Either way, the weblinks, images and ideas were there and so I attempted the ones that deemed the most useful to myself or anyone I know.. It looked to be a potentially wet mess, but turned out just fine. :)

So I guess when you're about to perform some form of sacrilege against music of any kind - this kind being the one where we dip records into boiling water.... it is best to choose some really shitty old record that have no meaning, or had one song on, or some awful rendition of what good record sounding music should be. Whatever that means... but I think you do. So I chose to buy 2 records of artists so old and insignificant (I'm guessing this based on not knowing who the hell it was) that they would be in the R10 CD bin in your local musica if they were to be compared. And so the process was followed to get the book-ends that would hopefully not only look uber cool - coz it seems fancypants book-ends are the 'it' thing at the mo.... if only people actually read the books they bought their fancypants book-ends for. Hahaha. Anyway... so here's how:

After filling a sink with boiling water, I took each record (one at a time) and dipped them half way in - just to get all of what would serve as the base of it to become pretty pliable. Once I had that feeling soft and easy to mould, I placed the record on the counter top and folded at the point where I wanted the base to be perpendicular to that of the side stand that would hold the books up. Was pretty simple really, and then I repeated this with the other. All that was left once they had held their shape (2 mins or so), was to glue on a piece of felt that replicated the exact shape of the bottom of the new created Vinyl book-ends.. :) And Voila!

Heart Wall

So I saw this online and among the many, many things I love, pictures or photos, awesome images or taking photos are a big 'hobbiest' thing for me. The other thing is 'hearts'........ it might seem girly... and maybe it is, but it's more the hipster inclination that I am drawn to and the fact that it's a shape I can't get enough of... in any shape form or visual :) So back to the drawing board.... I found a heart wall online that I absolutely had to do! There were different shapes and forms of it, but I really liked the look of the old school polaroid photo and using a number of them to inevitably create a heart shape on my wall. I wanted it to be the backing of my bed wall, so as to fill the gap replacing where a headboard might go.

So, firstly a template resembling a polaroid print was created in Corel Draw. I then made a collection of all the pictures I thought consisted of fond memories and people that either played a big role or still do in my life. This was important, as I didn't want to have a bunch of lunatics to look at every night before I go to bed a year down the line. So far - so good. They're all still ok, hahaha. I counted the amount of photos used in the image I found online and the amount of rows and pics in each row that were needed. I imported these pics one by one and placed them in the template on Corel. I saved all the new polaroid 'photo's' I'd now created and took it my my local printer and printed them! Voila..... :) I would have to draw a starting point pic on my wall, and with everything I was about to pluck on my wall being rectangle shaped......... I had no need to draw or stencil anything else on the wall. They all just neatly placed above and next to each other. In the end this was the very, very cool result. So glad I took the time to choose the pics, choose the heart shape and do it right. This was my first 'craft style' project.... much more to follow :)