non-fiber crafts Archives - Page 2 of 20

Craft Night 1: Decoupaged Notebooks

I had a craft night for my birthday party! I hope to have more, hence the “1” in the title. I’m finding there’s a lot to weed out when finding craft night ideas, so I thought I would post about the ideas I end up using.

My craft night standards are strict:

Anyone has to be able to do the craft successfully, without needing to possess any specific art/craft skills, and even if they are not having a super creative-feeling night.
Someone who really wants to engage in the craft should be able to do so – nothing so simple that you can’t sink your teeth into it – but no one should *have* to focus tightly on the craft in order to do it. I want people to be able to come and not do the craft and still have a good time.
The practical restrictions: it has to be doable in an evening, so no lengthy dry time between steps (say), and without any expensive materials or specialized tools. Ideally it should be doable mostly from stash and salvaged materials.
And finally, the aesthetic considerations: the final product needs to appeal to a wide variety of humans (or have the customizability to do so). Nothing that only fits a certain rustic-crafty decor, for instance.

I thought the decoupaged notebooks were a resounding success, so here’s the lowdown.

Decoupaged Notebooks: Process

Materials On Hand

Notebooks – I thought I would be able to find plain-brown-cover Moleskine knockoffs all over the place, but that was not true. I ended up with mini composition notebooks (3.25″ x 4.5″) from the dollar store and larger notebooks (4″ x 6″ and 5.75″ x 8.25″) from TJ Maxx. They worked just fine, and in fact having something already on the notebooks made for some fun design options – “the future is” on the largest notebook above was pre-existing printing.
Magazines, origami paper, and of course scissors – Originally I planned to get out scrapbook paper also, but it was too much. A big stack of magazines, catalogs, and tourism brochures, plus a few varieties of solid origami paper, seemed to be enough options to keep everyone happy. This gives me a whole different selection to provide at a future papercraft night.
Glue sticks and Mod Podge – I prefer to glue with glue sticks and seal with Mod Podge, just, you know, FYI, but a lot of people glued with Mod Podge and it works fine.
Foam brushes and a wide-mouthed mason jar with some water in it – the jar for putting used brushes in so they could wait for cleaning (which did not happen until the following day).
1/4″-wide ribbon and tacky glue – for bookmarks. Cut a piece of ribbon twice the height of your notebook plus 1-2″ and glue it along the inside back cover, close to the spine, so the excess sticks out at the top. That excess then folds down to be the bookmark, and you can cut a little v-shaped notch in the end to help keep it from fraying.
Wax paper – to slide inside the covers of your notebook to protect your pages from the glue and Mod Podge. I pre-cut a bunch of pieces and I think that worked well.
Miscellaneous buttons, beads, and small fabric squares – I had these around so I put them out, but I think one person used some fabric and the rest of the items were untouched.

Setup

We set up a folding table in the living room and spread the magazines and blank notebooks out on it. I covered the dining table with two layers of newspaper and set everything else out there (including the origami paper, so it wouldn’t get lost in the heap of other paper). Things moved between the two tables, but overall I think it was useful to have the separation, and people circulated during the evening depending on what they were working on.

14 people came and roughly half decorated notebooks, with many of those people decorating more than one. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves whether or not they decorated.

Lessons?

I would have started looking for notebooks earlier had I realized how much less available they are than I thought they would be. In particular, I only had 3 of the largest size notebooks, and I would have liked to have more.

I would not bother putting out buttons and beads if I did this again, just save them for a different craft they are better suited to.

I might have done a sample notebook, perhaps in particular a half-finished sample notebook, to leave on the table and demo the use of the wax paper and how to make a bookmark. I didn’t want to be in teacher mode and hover over the tables to give instructions, so that would have helped show some things, but it also wasn’t a real problem to have that information come later or not at all.

This worked really well overall, and there’s nothing significant I would have changed! It was a great choice for Craft Night 1.

Weeples!!!

At work I am the Google Analytics Evangelist, and as part of that I put together a training program for my coworkers. I wanted to gamify the program with some form of achievement badge, hopefully making it easier for people who want to learn in theory to motivate making the time in practice.

When I was a kid we got weeples as fundraising incentive prizes: small puffballs with eyes, feet, antennae, ribbons with messages on them, and sometimes other accessories. When I remembered those, I knew I’d found the perfect achievement badge.

So I made them!

…but how do you make your own weeples?

Puffballs and eyes are obvious, and I had learned sometime prior that artificial flower stamens were commonly used for antennae. The rest needed some research and development.

This got to be a very long post. More details than you likely require follow, behind a cut. Continue reading Weeples!!!

Hamburger cake!

I offered to make a little cake for some friends who were getting married, just for the formality of cutting a cake at the reception – they were having a very informal wedding and potluck reception, and didn’t want a big fancy cake. The bride deferred to the groom on type of cake, saying she liked anything and he was more particular, but said he’d probably want a hamburger cake because he’d been quite taken with some at the grocery store. He was not present for that conversation – when I asked him what kind of cake he’d like, he said “hamburger cake.” No hesitation. So hamburger cake it was!

Clearly before the protective strips of parchment were removed. Those bottles contain red and yellow icing for people to add to their slices.

The hubs did at least as much work on this as I did, I should say. I started with a Food Network cheeseburger cake “recipe”, though I couldn’t find a 2.5-quart bowl, only a 2-quart bowl, and we decided to make only the burger patty chocolate.

A couple of weeks ahead I did a dry run. I thought I would make a finished, decorated product, but I ended up only baking the cake. I used half a box of chocolate cake mix (1 layer) and a full box of vanilla cake mix (3 layers, which seemed annoyingly excessive at first but turned out to be the right amount).

I took photos with my phone for later reference so the next cake wouldn’t be so bottom-heavy – the top “bun” looked silly, like a little hat perched on top, and the bottom bun could lose up to half its thickness and still be fine. However – look! A burger!

At this point we also thought the bare cake for the bun looked nicer than the icing-covered version, though no icing meant no sesame seeds (rice krispies being the universal “hamburger cake sesame seeds” according to my research). That’s actually why we did the “condiments” – the lack of bun icing meant overall a low quantity of icing, and we thought it would be nice for people to be able to add more if they wanted.

The day of the wedding we worked on the cake for SIX HOURS. I did not expect this to be a six-hour cake, but we made a lot of icing and had to go out for more powdered sugar at one point.

preparing the pans with parchment and grease

Preparing and filling the pans: cut out circles of parchment paper on the regular pans, thorough vegetable shortening on the bowl (via paper towel). A lot more batter in the bowl this time around – two-thirds full. Note that the bowl will take a long time to bake and even the pans will take longer because of the full oven. The tomato slice will be quicker, but for everything else start with a 30 minute timer.

leveled chocolate cake with crumbs for siding

I leveled the chocolate layer on a plate, saving the crumbs so I could put icing around the outside and pat them on (a great idea from the Food Network version). Unfortunately I should have put parchment on the plate beforehand and I lost the middle of the layer when I flipped it onto the bottom bun. A lot of toothpicks and additional icing later and it was okay, but not stable – it kind of disintegrated on the way to the wedding. I was able to make it look all right but there is a reason there aren’t as many photos of the finished cake as there might be…

Flexible dough scraper with rounded edge: the perfect tool to get the top layer out of the bowl.

The hubs insisted on cheese, lettuce, and tomato, and fortunately we had a small-scale cake pan (in fact it was retrieved from the to-donate box, so good timing!). I baked a skinny cake layer and he soaked it in glaze-style icing (powdered sugar and milk, as opposed to the easy vanilla buttercream – plus cocoa powder as appropriate – of the rest). He colored all the icing, except the green which was commercial, and iced on the cheese and lettuce. It was a minor miracle when we added the tomato slice; suddenly it all looked right.

We’ll close with a failed experiment – frilly toothpicks. I cut strips of fruit roll-ups into fringe and rolled them around the ends of bamboo skewers. I corn-starched one side of each strip but probably should have done both… on the way to the wedding they just solidified into a wad of gummy at the end of the skewers.