DIY Eyeball Accessories

Hey guys! Are you ready for Halloween tomorrow? As promised from my previous blog post, I mentioned that I would be posting a second blog post on things that you could do with the eyeball decorations. If you guys have not seen my previous blog post on how to make the eyeballs alone, you can click here and check that out before proceeding on with the projects in this post. Also, if you are into cute and creepy accessories, then this blog post might just be up your alley!

DIY Eyeball Bat Wing Hair Clip ♥

For the first project, we're going to be making an eyeball-bat hair clip and for this, you will be needing an eyeball (Eyeball tutorial), a hot glue gun, felt, and fabric paint.

1. First cut out two felt bat-wings.
2. Hot glue the two felt pieces together. Gluing two pieces of felt together should help the wings keep their shape and prevent them from flapping around. If you're still worried about the wings losing their shape, you can even glue a third piece of felt to the wings.
3.  Paint on the wing design. It's best to use fabric paint because it's glossy and stands out against the matte felt surface. It's okay to skip this step if you do not have any kind of paint on hand. If you're skilled enough with needle work, you could even embroider the wing design on!
4. Glue on your eyeball!

Glue on the hair clip to the back of the wings, and you're finito! 

DIY Eyeball Earrings ♥

For this project, you will need two small eyeballs (Eyeball tutorial), a hot glue gun or a strong glue, and a pair of earring bases or an old pair of small stud earrings. The instructions are very simple. All you need to do is glue the earring base or stud earring to the eyeball.

If you don't have earring bases on hand, I believe that the above step only works if you are using any type of clay that when dried, will become semi-hard and still soft enough to create a hole. If you are working with a harder clay, I suggest that you create a small hole just large enough for the stud before the clay dries and hardens. Otherwise, if you are using an earring base, you can go ahead and glue it to the back of the eyeball.

Now you've got a pair of cute eyeball earrings ♥ Besides the above two examples that I've given you, there are numerous other things that you can do with the eyeball decorations. Here are a few examples pictured below: 

You can glue them to bows and wear them in your hair, or around your neck.

 For pretty much all of these projects, it might be wise to use a clay that is lightweight. If you were to use a clay that dried solid (e.g. polymer clay), it would be much more dense and that means it would be heavier, which may not be the best idea if you plan on making large hair clips or earrings. I just wanted to warn you guys that your finished projects may be a little bit heavy.

Overall, I think that the eyeball decoration is very versatile and can be used to embellish pretty much anything. The projects and ideas that I provided you guys with were just a few examples of what you can do with the eyeballs. I feel that they might also look nice if you strung them up to be a garland or if you stuck them to the walls or on a jewelry box. If it were up to me, I would probably stick them all over the house! Personally, I don't believe that these accessories should strictly be used during Halloween because that is such a waste and besides, these eyeball accessories are too cute to not wear everyday.

Would you guys go out wearing these eyeball accessories? Leave your comments and questions below!

As always, thanks so much for taking the time to check out my blog!  

Until next time~♥

DIY Eyeball Embellishment

Hey guys! It's been a while since I last posted, but I really wanted to post something since Halloween is this Friday. Now, not all of us are going to be dressing up unfortunately, but there are ways in which you can still get into the Halloween spirit! With that being said, I'm going to be showing you how to make this last minute eyeball embellishment that you can use for pretty much anything!

Here, I'm using leftover white paper-clay that I bought for 1.50 from Daiso (Japanese dollar store). You can use any type of clay you have lying around the house or any kind you can find in stores. I personally like to use paperclay because it is lightweight, it dries into this semi-hard foam like material, and you can still work with the clay even after it's dried by adding a little water to it. As for the measuring spoons, if you don't have any that are half dome shaped, you could always hand-shape the little eyeballs.

Start by getting a small amount of clay, enough to fit exactly into the spoon(s). It's really up to you how big you want to make your eyeballs. For mine, I wanted eyeballs for varying sizes so I used the 1tbs, 1tsp, 1/2tsp, and the 1/4tsp. You really want to pack the clay into the spoon so that you don't end up with any cracks in your clay eyeball as shown above.

After packing the clay into the spoon, if you're using air dry clay or paper clay like me, let them sit for a while. I let mine sit for roughly one 30minutes-1hour checking on them often to see if the surface has dried. I've tried using a hairdryer to speed up the process a little bit. If you clay is a little more solid, then you can go ahead and skip this step.

Getting the clay out is going to be the hard part. The clay will not have fully solidified yet, but the exposed flat surface should have hardened enough so that when you poke at it, it doesn't give in to the pressure. Grab a blunt and flat object, I'm using an exact-o knife, and stick it into the clay at a slight angle as if you are only trying to dig out the parts of the clay that have solidified. Carefully lift your tool up to remove the clay piece.

Don't worry if the back of the eye doesn't look perfect. If the surface of the eye looks a little cracked, depending on the type of clay you are using, you may or may not be able to smooth out the surface. 

 

Now, let the eye balls sit for a couple for hours, checking on them often to see of they've dried. Once you feel that they've dried enough for you to handle them, it's time to start adding the details! 

1. Start by painting or drawing on a circle in the color that you want the iris to be.  
2. Grab black and paint or draw in a smaller circle in the middle of the iris, this will become the pupil.  
3. Grab a tooth pick and dip the end of the pick into some white paint or nail polish and just slightly dab it onto the pupil. This gives the eyes a little more dimension and keeps them from looking so dead, unless you want them to look that way. 
4. At this point you're done! You can go on to add in any additional details you want. You could add in some veins for up the "creep-factor. 

Overall, even if it's not Halloween, I would say that you can stick these eyeballs on anything you want and it would still look cute. Although it's VERY last minute, I'm going to be posting a second blog post tomorrow about ways in which you can use these eyeball embellishments.

 What do you think of these eyeball decorations? How would you use them? Leave your comments below, along with any questions you may have.  

As always, thanks so much for taking the time to check out my blog!  

Until next time~


UPDATE: if you guys are interested in creating some cute and creepy eyeball accessories, check out this blog post right HERE. 

 

Broke For Christmas: More Holiday Decorations

Hey guys! If you haven't checked out the first of my Christmas themed blogs check out it here. As I had mentioned previously, I said I would cover Christmas wall decorations, so here I am back this week with another Christmas themed home decor post!

DIY Window Stickers

Let’s start with some easy window decorations!

I remembered that when I was a kid, I had this art kit to make these window stickers and I thought trying to find a way to recreate those window stickers for winter would be a good idea.

In this picture is my old, cracking lamp shade that I've had since the 6th grade. I remembered that I had used some glow in the dark fabric paint to paint on some stars. It's been about 7 years and they are still intact and I am still using them. This is what we will be doing for the window stickers today!

All you will need is some fabric paint or 3D glue, a transparent silicone pad or page protectors (basically anything with a smooth surface will work), and some printouts of things you want to stick on your windows.

All you really have to do for this is place your silicon pad over the design you want to trace, trace it over with your paint, and just let it dry….. and then you’re done! 

NOTE: Try to make sure that you pick a design that doesn’t have too many little details and also try to make sure that the lines you are creating with the paint are thick. The window sticker might be more prone to ripping if the lines are too thin. The a piece of blue and white snowflake on the top left had ripped off because I made the lines too thin, so be careful and be gentle with your window stickers.

TIP: If your window sticker does rip, you can fix it by dabbing on a bit of fabric paint onto the ripped parts. The paint will act like a glue and once the paint has dried, the ripped bits should be reattached.

The “Technical” Stuff: Fabric Paint vs. 3D Glue

I’ve tried using fabric paint as well as the Elmer’s 3D paint/glue and I feel that the fabric paint may work as a better window sticker in the long run then the 3D glue. 

Elmer’s 3D paint was a bit harder to control because it was so thick (thicker and stingier than Elmer’s regular school glue) and it took 10x as long to dry then the fabric paint. I had to let the window stickers sit for almost 12 hours for them to dry completely. 

The fabric paint, on the other hand was more fluid and easier to work with. It also dried fairly quickly and they last pretty long as you can tell from my 7 year old lamp with the fabric painted stars. 

I felt that the 3D paint was too thick and more glue like than paint (makes sense because Elmer’s is a glue company) and I’m sure you guys have done this before, but when you leave glue out to dry and it dries completely, it doesn’t stick anymore. The same seems to go for this paint. It does stick on my windows for a little while, but once all the moisture from the 3D paint sticker is completely gone, it doesn’t stick as well anymore. My suggestion would be to apply a small amount of water to the back of the sticker before sticking it back on the window if it isn’t sticky anymore. On the flip side, I don’t ever seem to have this problem with the fabric paint stickers. After trying both, I prefer to use fabric paint, but the choice is yours :)

DIY Wall Christmas Tree

If you’re looking for a way to fill up a naked wall or if you would really like to show some Christmas spirit but don’t have enough much space to spare, then this project is something you should consider. It’s a very easy and space savvy way to bring in some festive decorations into your home to cover up those bare walls.

Here are a few things you will be needing:

All of the optional items I purchased were fairly inexpensive. The circle cutter was $3 from Ross and the mini clothespins and lace were both from Daiso (Japanese dollar store in Japantown) and were priced at $1.50 each item. As you can see from picture above, I have a bunch of circles already pre-cut. This part of the project might be a pain in the butt if you don’t already have a circle cutter, but it shouldn’t be too hard if you stack the papers and cut circles out all at once.

 

Here, you can see that I cut out 55 circles and one star. Lay out all your circles and arrange them into a Christmas tree ahead of time to get an idea of how you might want it to look on your wall. You don’t have to make it look exactly like mine. You can experiment with different shapes and sizes to make your wall tree more interesting.

Did I say that cutting the circles out was a pain in the butt? Maybe this part is a little more tedious. What you’re going to do now is attach each row of circles to a single thread and, using tape, stick them to the wall working from the bottom up. You can choose not to stick them to the thread and just stick each individual circle to your wall. I find that attaching them to a thread makes it easier to create straight rows of circles on the wall. 

TIP: If this is available to you, it might be better if you use painter's tape (a type of masking tape) because it won't leave residue on your walls when you remove it, so no damage will be done to the wall. If you use the clear scotch tape as I have used to tape the circles to the thread, it's more likely that the tape will leave a residue on your walls if you leave the tape on the wall for too long.

Here is the finished product! Although I’m not sure you can even see this, I also taped some lace to act as a garland for the wall tree. The addition of lace is a good way to display all your Christmas cards as shown below!

These projects are great for people who are tight on both money and space. Perfect for college students living in dorms because they don’t damage the walls, take up any space, and they also liven up your room.  Have fun and get creative with your window stickers and wall tree! Let me know in the comments below what you think of these projects and also anything else you may want me to cover.

As always, thanks for stopping by!

Until next time!