wood – Dabbled

How to: B&W wood photo ornaments and keepsake gift tags!

Dot — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:01:31 +0000

I recently did a guest post on the FedEx Out of Office blog, with a tutorial on making personalized wooden ornaments and gift tags from photocopies of your photos and drawings. It’s pretty cool, go check it out: Personalized Black & White Wood Ornaments for all the step by steps.

It’s a really neat technique that just uses acrylic gel medium from the art store– no toxic chemicals or anything like that. The toner from the photocopy remains on the wood, so the white areas of your photo become wood colored, which is a really nice natural effect. I’m planning on make a bunch using some wood veneer cards to use as keepsake gift tags for gifts this year.

For the tutorial I used one of my squid watercolors — in the example above I used a photocopy of a photo of The Boy, perfect for grandparent gifting! And it’s easy to do, though I will warn you it does take a little practice to get the timing exactly right, so plan on practicing on some scrap wood first.

I didn’t really go over how to use photos for the ornaments in the tutorial, and there’s a few things I’ve learned. Pick a photo with a lot of contrast, and ideally use photoshop, or some other photo editing software, to turn it black and white and bump up the contrast. In Photoshop, use play with the layer Levels to get a good effect. Remember to reverse it, especially if you add text! Make a bunch of copies on the same page (try different sizes). Then print it out, and photocopy. For the ones shown here, I actually printed out the text separately, and put in on first, then put the photo on top of the text, so I get the ‘white’ background behind the text.

Wanna do it yourself? Go get the instructions…

(Past ornament tutorials: Resin Stars, Easy Gift Card Holder, Champagne Chairs, Sweater Photo Frames, Shrinky Dinky Santa)

The Finger Puppet Bus

Dot — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:18:45 +0000

Does your child have finger puppets that get lost and scattered about? Or is your child really a little small for wearing them on their fingers, but still likes to play with them? This is actually a re-run from 2008 when the boy had just turned 3, and was not really dexterous enough to wear his finger puppets, but still wanted to play with them. I’m busy working on a new project today, and there might be a few of you who missed this tutorial back then, so I figured I’d share it with your today!

This is a very simple design, which could of course be expanded upon and be made even more creative. And wouldn’t something like this be a great accompaniment to a gift of homemade finger puppets?

I had the handy hubby write up detailed how to instructions, so if you’d like to make one yourself, go here!

Some other kid-related blasts from the past you might enjoy:

OK, back to work on my new top secret project! I’ll share it with you guys as soon as I can :)

Make a Hot Wheels Car Launcher — Fun!

Dot — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 18:06:00 +0000

This was featured in Make Magazine!

You know you want to… Go check out the instructable here. (Uh, and sweetie, darling, dear child… please keep it on the ground, and away from the glass window panes, okay?) Thanks Handy Hubby for helping to make my latest crazy vision a reality! Oh yeah, and I’ll remind you that you have to go vote for it (if you like it of course…but remember I REALLY need a fifth instructables t-shirt.) on 4/20. edit: if you like this, go VOTE for it! (it’s the 7th one in this list, i think)

Rubber Band Powered “Hot Wheels” type Car Launcher – More DIY How To Projects