This week has been hectic, I’m headed out of town tomorrow, and my brain has had little room for a project over the past few days. I’m almost done with a hat for myself – a hat that I had to learn four new things to make – but last night I ran out of yarn, and I still can’t tell if it is actually someday going to be a real, wearable hat. A few nights ago I made a batch of earrings for my shop and for fundraising endeavors for a friends’ awesome life project, but that seemed like a cop-out because I make earrings at least once a month.
And then I got a message from my my twin saying that she had featured me here (yay! and thank you!), so I decided that I should probably do a legit project, as the kids say. I thought about what would thrill other-Emily-mother-of-other-Hazel as I tried to recall her birthday, which is nowhere to be found in my brain. I decided that she would say making homes for weird family artifacts is pretty legit, so that is what I did.
A box of delicious blue flashbulbs and another of tin Kodak film canisters have been sitting on a bookcase at my mom’s house since I was in college. I had claimed them as my own from my parents’ mystifying collection of Family Stuff. Things I know I will someday take over the Keeping Of because it’s Family Stuff and you can’t just get rid of all of that or we’ll all be beamed back to the mothership or something. I would like to keep all of my family here, so I will be the Keeper of the glass measuring cup my grandma used to mix my dad’s baby formula, and my great-grandparents’ silverware tray will dutifully house the remotes and the ancient baseball I found behind the dishwasher, and I will use the photography debris from my grandpa’s darkroom as decor. This fall I dragged them back here after Thanksgiving, determined to find them a home, and then ignored them until today.
I very much like collections of things in glass vessels, lately, so I let my brain wander with that as I drove to goodwill. I snagged a couple of clear glass containers for 99 cents apiece, and on the drive home decided that I had to do something really quick to them. Had to be done tonight, couldn’t go buy anything else. I settled on stencils and got most of this done in between dinner prep steps.
A quick google image search came up with a couple of easily stenciled images of vintage cameras, which I popped into photoshop to crop, desaturate, and up the contrast to make a silhouette. I printed them out at the right sizes, and cut a piece of adhesive stencil film that would fit them both. I taped the stencil film to a cutting mat and then taped the images on top of that. After taking turns with the xacto knife, I was left with simple sticker stencils to use on the glass containers. I don’t own one of those dabby foam stenciling brushes, but a regular foam paint brush left a nice little texture in matte all-surface black paint.
…and now I have homes for the weird family artifacts. :)
Go see Maggie, Erin, and Jamie for more 52 weeks projects!
17 January, 2013This entry was posted in 52 weeks project, Projects, Tutorials. Bookmark the permalink.
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Lady, you are busting out some really cool stuff in the first 3 weeks! I keep telling myself that maybe nobody will notice if I recycle some of your ideas for like week 32 or 48…I mean, who doesn’t need awesome stenciled glass containers for sweet trinkets?
Safe travels!