Cute braided bracelet

My new obsession is polymer clay. It is SO fun! I am currently work on a few items to sell on etsy using polymer clay. 

Here is one of the fun projects I've done....

So adorable. It's really too bad that I am not use to wearing bracelets. I found the adorable tutorial HERE on Delighted Mama's website. For the record, she makes it look so easy. Well...it isn't hard to make these bracelets, but it does take some practice to get the snake/worm thing perfectly even. Here is my attempt to do them.

Roll out 3 snake/worm shapes. This was the part that took the longest time. When I did my dark purple bracelet, the clay was quite stiff (despite me conditioning it) and it took forever to roll them out. However, it is the one that ended up being the most uniform.

When you're done rolling them out, just braid the clay together.

Measure it against another bracelet that you know fits and cut the ends off...then smush the ends together and work them into each other. Carefully lay the bracelet into a circle on your baking pan (I used foil on a cookie sheet) and cook for the amount of time the clay says.

You end up with a beautiful product. I do have to warn...the thicker your snakes are, the more sturdy your bracelet will be. This bracelet got fairly skinny at the ends and it isn't very sturdy...but still cute.

My girls love these bracelets and they will have tons of fun wearing them. I don't know how much I'll wear them since I'm always cleaning up, picking up children, etc and bracelets aren't really conducive to that.

Super easy model Teepee.

I LOVE scouts. My oldest son is currently a wolf. He only has about a month and a half left before he is a bear. I used spring break as a time to work on some more arrow points. I was originally scared of doing Elective 10 in the wolf handbook. It's all about native american stuff...mostly recreating stuff. One thing that I was freaked out about was making traditional clothing. After googling it...I found out that a paper bag turned vest was perfectly acceptable...score. That was easy (and free!) and my 8 year old did it totally on his own.

Elective 10 E asked the scout to "make a model of a traditional American Indian house". After I actually sat down and thought about it...duh...a teepee was so easy. 

Materials: (use what you have on hand)

• straws (I used coffee stirring straws)
• ribbon/string 
• hot glue gun
• construction paper/card stock/ printer paper (any kind of paper really)
• tape
• scissors

I had my son use coffee stirring straws because we have tons of them (no coffee, but someone in the house takes a medicine that needs to be stirred into water). We arranged the straws and my son tied the ribbon while I tried to hold the straws in place. The ribbon didn't hold well at all, so I (I'm not letting my 8 year old play with my glue gun) put some hot glue on top of the ribbon between the straws. It dried super fast and it ended up being quite sturdy. 

To finish off the teepee, my son cut triangles out of construction paper and taped them to the straws. Easy peasy.

After we were done with that, we had some fun with paint. I pulled out some red, yellow, and blue paint and had my son do Elective 12c from the wolf book "Mix yellow and blue paints, mix yellow and red, and mix red and blue. Tell what color you get from each mixture." All of the kids joined in and had a blast. Oh, and I didn't feel like pulling out paint brushes, so we just used qtips. hehe. Cheap and easy to clean up.

Irish blessing board

I'm so thrilled with my latest project and can't wait to share it, so here we go....

It turned out super cute.

After doing my "lucky" blocks, I really wanted to do another St. Patrick's day project. I had some wood in my garage that I had gotten for a project, but oops, I got the wrong size. I pulled the wood out and used my first power tool on it....a belt sander. That was SO fun!! I used a 40 grit sand paper to just get the rough splintered edges off and smooth it down some. NOTE: this didn't make the board smooth, it just made it so it wasn't going to give me splinters. I made sure to take a damp cloth and wipe off all the dust.

Before

After...MUCH better. 

The next step was one of my favorite...I got to paint the wood the beautiful "shamrock" green that I used for the "lucky" blocks. Beautiful.

Now, came the hard part...figuring out what I wanted to board to say. After much searching and narrowing down, I finally decided on the cute Irish blessing that I used. It was short and made me think of St. Patrick's day. I used my awesome Silhouette to cut out white vinyl for all the words. I then put them on the board. Ya, they aren't perfectly straight, but oh well.

I was super excited for the next step...putting the word 'gold' on. I cut the word gold out of the white vinyl and used the outline as a stencil. I took extra special care to make sure it was attached to the board in every little crevice so that paint couldn't leak past.

I made sure to only put a little bit of paint on at a time. I made sure the layer was completely dry before applying another layer. I think I did 4 layers of the gold. I wanted to make sure that there was no green showing through. 

After one coat.

Yay! No leakage! 

Oh, this next step frustrated me so much...but it should be much easier for you. The word rainbow.
I tried rainbow scrapbook paper...that didn't really work. I bought printable stickers with the hope that I could make a rainbow pattern on them...only to learn if I want to design my own, I need photo editing software, which I can't locate at the moment (it got lost in our move 2 years ago). I bought card stock with an adhesive back...eh, it didn't work great, but I made do...because I was NOT going to go to the store again.

I ended up having to glue the letters down with Mod Podge...and then had to paint the whole board with Mod Podge because you can totally tell if only part of the board is painted.

After that was dry I added two coats of polyurethane to make sure it was good and sealed.

Oh Blogger...why do you constantly turn my photos. 

It turned out SUPER cute!

Resting in it's home. I'm excited to get my door in the St. Patrick's day spirit. 

 On a happy side note, my kids are loving this Irish blessing. They are going around the house singing it. haha.

*Note, I didn't find the Irish blessing on a certain site. It was on many sites and seems to be an old Irish blessings and the origins are unknown to me.