Hand-Painted Rings

Nothing says "holiday weekend" like a good yard sale.

To me, yard sales are a lot like thrift stores; you never know what you're going to find. Inevitably, you're going to find the things that the previous owner really didn't have any use for: old children's books, an outdated television set, those ugly vases that just don't look right in the living room... But every now and then, you'll find something really quirky at a sale that you just have to add to your collection of oddities. When I stumbled across this nifty table-top instrument, I was more than happy to pay the suggested $3. 

This thing is so much fun - well worth the money.

Naturally, I was looking for some blog-worthy projects to go along with this quirky find. About a block away from the first sale, I stumbled across exactly what I needed!

This bag of 40 brass rings (size 8) was perfect for an adventure in hand-painted jewelry. As much as I love visual art, I'm not the greatest painter, so I decided to go looking for supplies that would be simple and easy to work with.

I ended up with a set of craft smart paint pens, a microperm ultra-fine permanent pen, two bottles of nail polish (that included a thin tip inside of the cap), and a small tray of nail art decorations. To start, I did a lot of experimenting; my big worry was that the paint from the paint pens wouldn't stick to the brass. After covering a lot of the rings in messy blobs of paint and tiny beads that wouldn't stay, I managed to paint some simple designs that I liked. First I laid down a page of newspaper and wiped the fingerprints off of the ring.

After that, I had to find the best way to hold the ring while I painted it. Luckily the paint dried quickly! There were many designs I tried that did not turn out the way I'd hoped (flowers that turned to blobs, letters that were unreadable, etc.) but I did end up with a few that I liked:

Obligatory Harry Potter reference.

I attempted steampunk gears.

I decided to try using the tip of the nail polish cap to scrape letters into the paint. It ended up looking like this:

All in all, I had a lot of fun experimenting.

I decided to seal the rings with clear nail polish (a tip I learned on pinterest... where else?) but unfortunately, it smeared the paint. Hopefully I can find something else to keep the paint from rubbing off of the ring.

After this simple project, I learned to love my new set of paint pens. I can't wait to find another craft for them!

Becca and Lottie's Fail....

So I know some of you are probably wondering where the blog posts have been for last week and this week. Here's what happened: Lottie had this awesome post planned for last week to do a Halloween pumpkin carving post, but she waited a little bit too long to buy a pumpkin. She went around to three stores and they were all out of pumpkins. At this point it was time for the next weeks blog post, I said we would just skip a week and I would just take my turn because I had a lot of yummy things that I was cooking this past weekend.

I made so many yummy things this past weekend including peroguis and baby cake chocolate cupcakes for my roommate's 21st birthday. Now usually I have my wonderful boyfriend take pictures for me while I cook so I don't have to worry about it or get my phone all dirty.

Unfortunately, he was either not there or playing video games while I was cooking this weekend, so the picture taking was left up to me. And as I found out I get distracted while I cook and ended up with pictures of all of the ingredients I was using then forgot to take more until I was done with what I was making. And at that point I had nothing else to cook.

So both Lottie and I had a fail for our posts these past two weeks. We'll be back on our feet and posting crafts and foods for the coming weekends.

Well here are the ingredients I used for Peroguis

And the ingredients for the cupcakes