Wednesday, August 10, 2011

IC 32: Summer Contest

This week's challenge is the summer contest.  I decided to make a sun catcher.  A friend gave me a big box of little jars of the plastic pellets left over from sun catchers.  It looked like someone had saved all the leftovers from various kits.  There were only a few of the metal frames in the box, mostly it was just the plastic pellets.  I'd been thinking about what I could use them for, various ways of making my own frames, etc.  I saw where someone had made frames out of soda cans.  Problem is we don't drink much soda here and didn't have any cans.  So I decided to improvise.


Suncatcher supplies

Supplies:
1) Extra plastic pellets left from the sun catcher kits
2) A metal cookie cutter
3) Foil
4) ribbon
5) A study cookie sheet (not shown)
6) Hot glue gun

Instructions:


1) Take the foil and lay a piece on the cookie sheet (at least the size of the cookie cutter)
2) Take another piece of foil and line the cookie cutter with it (I took strips a little wider than the cookie cutter was tall and ran them around the inside, wrapping the foil over the edges, trying to get it as tight against the cookie cutter as possible.
3) Sit the cookie cutter on the cookie sheet and fill it with the plastic pellets.  Since there's no frame to stabilize this when we're done, I filled mine pretty full (1cm deep).
4) Bake according to the instructions with the suncatcher plastic pieces. I did mine at 375 for 20 min.
5) Cool enough so you don't burn yourself when you touch it
6) Pop it out of the cookie cutter and peel off the foil
7) Glue the ribbon to the back with the hot glue gun

Suncatcher

8) Hang it in the Window!  (funny how you don't really notice the screen, until after the picture's taken!)
Suncatcher

1 comment:

kat said...

Good improvisation there with the cookie cutter. I know what you mean about the screen. I took a bunch of pictures only to notice the screens shadow in every one.