Photo Magnets

I love the look of Stickygrams, the little magnets you can get printed of your Instagram photos, so I decided to make some as part of my Secret Santa present for my friend. I made them because Laura doesn't have Instagram and because I have printable magnetic paper.

I started by picking out photos of Laura and her boyfriend, her sisters and her friends. Then I edited them and made them all squares, then I printed them on to the magnetic paper. 

I cut the out using a craft knife, leaving a little white border around each photo.

I miraculously found a cellophane packet from a greetings card which fit the 9 magnets in exactly.

I mean exactly!

Laura loved them! Except it turns out her fridge isn't magnetic because it's built into a cupboard, Doh! But she's going to put them on the side of her microwave or a radiator instead.

Photo Gift Tags

I've seen the idea of printing on to stuff that isn't printer paper around so I decided to use that idea for the gift tags on my sisters' Christmas presents.

The key to printing on to stuff that isn't printer paper is to stick the stuff onto printer paper using double sided sticky tape. You also need to use a simple ink jet printer because you do not want random bits getting all up in your fancy laser printer.

The other key to this is to print the images on the printer paper first, then stick the gift tags over the images so they print in the right place when you send the paper through again with tags attached.

I printed a couple at a time just to make sure it would work, because I didn't fancy trying to fish out 5 crumpled tags from the printer if it went wrong. But fishing 2 out at a time is fine! 

I think these are really fun and a great way to use photos from throughout the year.

Paper Confetti and Jumping Photos

More fun with photos, paper and a scanner.

I love how this one turned out. It makes me happy!

The first thing I did was find a photo of me jumping, which wasn't that hard because it turns out I have quite a few. The one I used was taken in Disneyland which would explain the jumping around.

I composed this image by placing the cut out photo of me jumping in the middle of the scanner, then I sprinkled on the tiny bits of coloured paper and put the letters in place, making sure to put them right side down.

Then I carefully put the piece of yellow paper on top and shut the lid.

I also tried it with white and black pieces of paper on top, but I think I like the yellow best.

I think the image would make a fun 'congratulations' card!

Then for fun I played around with what happens if you leave the lid of the scanner open.

I'm like Tinkerbell!

Paper Pictures

I made this thing!

This little project was inspired by the header on Dos Family. I don't frequent the blog but I saw it once and liked it, so I decided to make an image about me and my people based on it.

I selected my photos and made them black and white on Word, where I also put the triangle around them. 

Once I had all the bits cut out I started playing around with the composition. I used a piece of tracing paper over purple sugar paper for the background and layered the photos and triangle on top.

I took a photo of my chosen layout and replicated it on the scanner. Because nothing is stuck down I could easily move things around after seeing the scanned image.

This is the sort of thing that could be made on Photoshop, but it's nice doing it all by hand! Especially cutting around the main photo. I could never do it that precise on the computer. 

Little Guitar

I made a tiny guitar! My secret?

A novelty ice cube tray.

I was gifted this ice cube tray many years ago and only used it a few times. It came with plastic stirrers in the shape of guitar necks and then the ice is the body of the guitar.

Anyway, I thought this would be a perfect plaster mould so I tried it out.  

I mixed up some plaster and, not very neatly, put it in the mould. Once it had started setting I put a pen in the middle to make the hole in the guitar.

Getting the plaster out of the mould was not very easy. As you can see the neck was very brittle.

Using a trick I learned at a model making course I fixed the neck by sticking the bits together with super glue and sprinkling on bicarbonate of soda which makes the glue dry immediately and bulks it out.

After I painted the whole thing and added a painted cardboard fret board I stuck a tiny wooden peg to the back of the guitar head...

...making it into a photo holder!

Love photo holders as much as I do? Check out this dog, cat, tortoise, owl, another dog, an elf and Taylor Swift.

Frame update

I've had this sand art thing for years. I don't even remember where I bought it from, I think it was on holiday somewhere. When it was new there was blue liquid in it and you would turn the frame to watch the sand fall through. I think it was meant to be calming. I thought it was pretty cool.

Anyway, over the years the liquid has dried up so it's become a bit redundant.

Until I had a really simple idea.

I decided to use the frame as a photo frame.

The most difficult part of this project was picking two photos I wanted to display. I settled on a photo of me and my friends at Disneyland, and for the other side me and my sisters in Central Park.

I just printed the photos to the size of the window and slotted them in with a bit of blu-tac so I can change them out when I feel like it.

I can guarantee that whenever my sister is over she'll flip the frame to the photo of her.

Have you made any simple changes lately?

New Photo Books

I recently got a few photo books printed with Snapfish that I wanted to share with you.

(Not sponsored, these were purchased by me.)

The first is an engagement gift for my friend Lizzi.

When she announced her engagement on Facebook she had so many congratulatory messages I thought it would be nice to put them in a book for her and her fiancé to flick through for years to come. 

I took the comments from Facebook and compiled them into image files on Photoshop. I also added photos from their New York holiday where they got engaged throughout the book.

The second book is full of photos from the past year to add to my collection.

I talk about starting to do this here.

This is the back cover of the book. I had the idea to put a selection of my phone photos on the back as they're single photos that don't fit in any groups of photos, so this would be a good way to feature them.

Snapfish only allows you to put one big photo on the back cover so I compiled this collage on Photoshop and saved it as one image file.

Since I last made a photo book like this, the website has added lots of graphics that you can add to pages so I used a few of the Christmas themed ones.

I decided to label the photos directly on the photos, instead of making a gap between photos to put text on, which is what I did last time.

Now I can add this book to what will hopefully become a big collection.

Dog Photo Holder

I'm gearing up for Christmas craft fair season so I made this little guy to add to my stock.

I sold some of the animal photo holders I made last year, so I thought I would make some more.

The dog is made of Sculpey and when moulding it it spends a long time looking really bad until suddenly it looks like a dog. There's a lot of doubt in that first period though.

I used a pokey tool to give the fur a little texture, and painted it with acrylics.

I think my favourite part is the tongue!

What other animals do you think I should make? I am open to suggestions

Double Exposure

When I was at uni one of the guys on my course produced amazing double-exposure photographs and ever since his presentation about his work at the start of 3rd year I've wanted to try the technique.

Check out Rob's work here.

Once I'd found a film I spent over a year taking photos.

I finished the film once and then put it back in the camera for a second time round.

Here are some of the best photos from that roll of film.

This one is my favourite.

An image of my cousin overlapped with a sign on a gate.

The only planning I did was to only take landscape and building type photos on the first go round of the film, and then take photos of people on the second go round. 

Because the whole thing took over a year (as I kept forgetting to bring the camera places) there was no way of remembering what I had taken the first time to match it with something specific.

And that's the fun of it!

In a lot of the photos one of the overlapped images is a bit faint and that's because I instinctively took bright photos, and of course two brights make an even brighter.

So if I were to do this again I would not take so many photos of the sky!

 The process creates some interesting juxtapositions.

The background photos were taken in Norwich while I was at uni and at home, and the people include my family, my friends from home, from uni and from camp.

So it's interesting when a friend from home ends up with a Norwich background even if they've never been there.

The opposite happened with this photo which has a faint image of my sister over lapped with a scenic view of the town she lives in, which happened completely by coincidence.

The next time I do this I'd also like to experiment with textures as the background image, not just landscapes or buildings, but still with people being the over lapping image. 

Of course this type of image could be created on Photoshop but the image choices would be too deliberate.

Kicking it old school with a roll of film is much more fun.

And developing the film was only £4 at Tescos which isn't too bad these days.

Rustic Wooden Photo Frame

I made a photo frame!

This project was good because it used up two things I've had for ages.

The first was this plain wooden photo frame I bought from Hobbycraft years ago.

It was probably on sale. I don't think I would have bought it if not.

 

The second thing I got to use up was some of these little wooden things that come with canvases.

I used some of them a while back with these garden fence cards but I've still got so many more.

I quite liked the rustic, beach shack type feel of the little planks around the frame so I went with it.

I used wood glue to attach the wood to the frame and left it to dry under some heavy books.

I picked out some wood stain from the garage and did some test pieces to decide which colour I liked better.

I went for the lighter one and applied it with an old rag.

There were some parts where the glue had got on the surface of the wood so I had to sand the glue off so the stain would...youknow, stain.

Any excuse to show you my signed Ian Somerhalder photo

Then I popped a photo in the frame and it was done.

This was such a quick and easy project, and it's given me loads more ideas for decorating plain frames.