Custom Utensil Organizer

My first project since the move! Our kitchen drawer for utensils measures 8.5″ wide. Fact: There are no utensil trays less than 9″ wide in Vancouver retail stores. The closest thing that I could find were those 3″ wide trays that you can piece together, but only 2 can fit into that drawer side-by-side which does not maximize the space efficiently.

The move resulted in the access to tons of cardboard boxes. So I taped and glued cardboard together, then covered it with kitchen drawer liner. It was a snug fit!

Materials: cardboard, drawer liner

Last-Minute Cards

This has happened on many occasions where we have to leave the house in 10 minutes to a party and I have to make a card. I suck at drawing, so I typically just take papers of different colours and try to glue something together that’s quick and passes as a decent card.

I managed to snap a quick shot of this card before we left the house just so I finally have something to post about! It was for our friend Ivy who’s headed off to Ottawa indefinitely and we wish her all the best!

I love strips of paper =) And I’m sure Steve loves getting his name attached to every card I make!

Materials: Paper, Sharpie

My New Desk!

Update: I ended up returning the desk… still searching for a new desk AND space for it actually…

Because I’m in the midst of packing, getting ready for the move in, oh, just over a month, I have decided to stop crafting just so I can start actually packing. It’s hard to pack when you’re still using everything. That may help explain why I haven’t made any new projects for a while.

On the brighter side, because my new house will be big enough to fit a desk, I get to make a purposeful purchase: a desk for myself! No more working on a glass coffee table, and I’ll actually get to sit in a chair while I work. I already knew exactly what kind of desk I would want. Basically, all glass top, I can just cut whatever I want. And what do you know? I actually managed to find one at a decent price.

They had a display at the store, and I took out my keys and attempted to scratch the glass, not one scratch can be made. Perfect. The wedge in between the 2 outer parts actually comes out so it’s in fact 2 desks. The keyboard tray actually works out really well as a paper disposal when I’m cutting. I had imagined a trough of some kind that I could pull out, swipe all the little bits of paper into it and it’s a clean surface again while I’m cutting. This is close enough! I’m picking it up tomorrow, will have to wait ’til after I move to actually assemble it but I can’t wait!

Dough Recipe

I realized it has been a long time since my last post considering how much time I love to spend on projects. My latest projects have been with the dough that I concocted using a recipe my mom forwarded to me (some of her products shown above). The bad news it that after a week, the entire supply began to mold. Clearly I didn’t put enough preservatives into it. People who have seen the figurines that I did manage to make and preserve have asked me for the recipe. I had to translate it but here it is:

You’ll need:
Sticky Rice Flour
All Purpose Flour
Salt
Alum Powder
Other Food Preservatives
Food Colouring

1. Mix 4 parts all-purpose flour with 1 part sticky rice flour, mix evenly.

2. Add 2 parts water to the mixture and mix evenly into dough, can add parts of water or flour to adjust to desired consistency.

3. Separate dough into palm-sized balls and boil in water until they float.

4. Retrieve the dough balls and let it cool to room temperature.

5. Once cooled, add refined salt, alum powder, and other food preservatives.

6. Mix primary food colours (red, blue, yellow, green) into dough (make sure you use gloves if you’re kneading with your hands). To obtain specific colours when making figuirines, just mix the primary colours together until you get the right colour.

7. Keep the dough in a sealed, dry place. If the dough dries out, steam it in a rice cooker or over some water.

Feel free to go nuts with the preservatives (salt, alum powder). Happy doughing!

Birthday Gift Basket

A coworker is having a birthday and I’m her assigned birthday buddy, which means I have to prepare a little gift to acknowledge their special day. I saw an opportunity to do some crafting.

Gift Box

Using cardstock and popsicle sticks I made a box to put the treats in.

Materials: popsicle sticks, cardstock

The Birthday Card

Why spend $2 on a card when I can make a personalized one?

I cut out the letters using an exacto knife, mounted it on yellow paper (going for a “summer” theme here) and added shadow to the letters because the yellow didn’t stand out from the cut out enough. The card opens up for the personal note.

Materials: coloured paper, fine liner

Flowers (the dough way)

I find that people are really big about giving flowers. Personally, I have very bad luck with flowers, in that they usually die in my hands. So to avoid giving dead flowers to someone on their birthday, I decided to use the coloured dough I recently made.

I used polyurethane for the first time as a finishing gloss, it actually worked out pretty well.

Materials: coloured dough, toothpick, polyurethane spray

Dough Figurines

Speaking of different mediums, here’s a retro-post of what I did in 2004 for my mom. She started playing with modelling dough making small figurines for fun. Then the SFU Cultural Festival asked her to man a booth to show off these cool figurines – and production began. Little did she anticipate that she had no time to make enough to fill the display. So she sat me down in front of her mounds of colourful dough and told me to make a monkey. I’ve never touched the stuff before, but once I started, it was really hard to stop.

She recently sent me these pictures and the recipe for the dough =)

Materials: homemade dough with food colouring

Home Sweet Home Part 1: Construction

I recently moved out of a house that I’ve lived in for almost 13 years. Even though I complained a lot about taking care of it, I miss it. I did most of my growing up there, and I have a lot of great memories in that house. I drive past the old street sometimes on route and I can’t help but peek down the street to see it.

The original plan was to make a scale model of the house. But houses look kinda funny as a whole, it’s quite irregularly long and rectangular. So I went a different route. This project is mid-stage, but the basic construction is done, now it’s just the paint and touchups.

Took me about 1.5 days, I was covered in tiny wood splinters and glue. Stayed tuned, I think windows and doors are next!

Materials: Sawdust board, popsicle sticks

Laptop Mural of Nintendo Decals

For the past week I have been working on plastering Steve’s MacBook (at his request) with decals. I have finally finished.

If you’ve seen his MacBook in a previous post, we had a mushroom where Toad is right now. I decided to replace the mushroom because the more characters I put on, the more the mushroom stood out of place.

For Bowser, Luigi, Mario, Goomba, and Kamek I was lucky to find images of them with clear outlines. Lakitu, Toad and Yoshi I’ve had to print out a regular image, and manually draw the outlines before I could do any cutting.

Materials: image printout on paper, black vinyl, exacto knife, masking tape, plastic card

Jeff’s Graduation Card

I had made the decal of mario with the hammer as a graduation present for Jeff, my future little brother-in-law who just graduated from UBC and got accepted into the education program. I had to present the gift somehow. Jeff’s a big Nintendo fan (as we all are), and I had these paper mushrooms at my disposal from when I tested the new exacto knife so I transformed them into a card. Transformed as in glued onto cardstock…

(Jeffrey Tan, B.A. Now that you’re all GROWN UP, it’s time to GET A LIFE, because after all, it’s HAMMER TIME!) Get it? You should if you’ve ever played a Nintendo Mario game.

Part of making custom and personalized cards and presents for people is the joy of seeing their reactions =) I just love it.

Materials: coloured paper, cardstock

Custom Vinyl Decals

We’ve been trying to find coloured vinyl for me to experiment with decals. After a tedious search (Michaels sending us to Home Depot, and vice versa), we finally found a roll of UNCUT black vinyl for me to play. I shoved the roll of vinyl in the face of the Michaels employee who claimed they didn’t carry it. Now I found out that eBay sells them for very cheap and with more than just 3 colours so will order from eBay in the near future.

First I made a simple design that Steve decided to put on his laptop.

Then for a graduation present, I tackled a slightly more complicated decal, testing the boundaries of this vinyl deely. Also taking pictures this time along the way for documentation.

I started with a google image, plunked it into Photoshop and grabbed the lines that I needed for the decal and printed it out onto plain white paper.

Instead of using staples as I typically do when working with paper, I used masking tape to fixate the printout onto the vinyl. Staples tend to raise the target off the surface especially if it’s a small image so I didn’t want to risk tearing the vinyl by pushing it down to the surface.

Then I started cutting as I usually do. Although with the vinyl, the good thing is that the liner behind the adhesive vinyl is harder to penetrate a blade through, which is great as it helps hold the image’s shape a lot better than if I cut all the way through. I no longer have to check the image from behind to make sure it’s a clean cut. You can see the shiny parts that is the backing to the vinyl I removed as I was cutting.

At this stage, it’s cool if you look at the back while holding it up to the light. I actually cut too hard near his hat – the “M” area was difficult as everything was close together and the vinyl started coming off the liner before I could finish the cut.

Then I cut the outermost edges and removed the paper before removing the vinyl (it’s cleaner and easier).

I divided the excess vinyl into small sections for easier removal.

Then I put some masking tape onto the vinyl cutout and burnished (new term I learned – it means to smooth something out by rubbing) with a credit card edge. It’s okay to cheap out on the transfer tape when the image is this small. Now it’s ready to be transferred! Once Jeff decides where he wants to put it, I will post an update.

Materials: adhesive vinyl, masking tape