Thursday, January 03, 2008

Magnet Craft Project

I am very sorry for the delay. Christmas was a very busy time for this girl but I do have a few holiday gift and craft ideas to share. Part of the reason I waited till after Christmas to share these is because I wanted to take some pictures for you to help illustrate my directions. Also, I didn’t want to ruin the surprise for any of my gift recipients.

The first project I will tell you about is an idea that I got from the great craft blog, Not Martha. They are homemade magnet sets made from recycled magazines as well as online Images I located on Google Image search.

The supplies needed for this project I picked up at Michael’s and consisted of one tube of clear drying glue like the one seen here.

The glass balls are actually the marbles that people use to make flower arrangements. They do have some in the mosaic section of the store, but I found these in the flower arranging section which gave me more pieces for less money. Little magnets are also available there in packs of 20 or more. I also did a little spin on the magnet idea and created some pushpins using thumb tacks to glue to the back of the pictures. While Not Martha recommended using a circle stencil to cut out the images, I found that just generally cutting out the images and then gluing down the marbles and then trimming up the edges after the dried to be the best process for me. I feel like this way I got just the right angle from the marbles which were not exactly round in the first place.

I made sets of the magnets of 5-8 that would match each other. Some of the sets I made were,

"Dogwood Blossoms"

“Impressionist Paintings”

“Old Masters Paintings”

“Butterflies and Roses”

"Puppies and Kittens"

"Colorful Gods”

...and then of course there are my Christmas Images.

4 comments:

lorrwill said...

These are really, really nice!

Joy said...

I was wondering, when printing off the internet how did you keep the images from bleeding when you glued them? I tried making some of these from images I printed myself and they always bleed. Is it maybe the glue?
Thanks for the help!

Seluj1980 said...

Hi Joy,
Try the glue I have listed above. I had no trouble with bleeding using that. If it doesn't work, it probably means you need to try a different printer, or maybe a different type of paper. I wouldn't use photo paper or anything glossy for sure. BTW love the illustrations on your site!

Lefty Lucy said...

These are so cleaver. The family spent all weekend making these. We got the magnets and half marbles from the craft store. We printed very small pictures of the kids and our last vacation and glued them in. They look great! Thanks for the idea.