Temporary Tattoo Necklace

This is probably my favorite of all of my projects I've done recently. It's super easy, and the time is almost negligible. In 10 minutes, you could have a necklace just like this!

As per usual with these projects, I used Sculpey polymer clay.

I also used a temporary tattoo. I got mine from one of my favorite authors, who my friend met. I also understand that you can get similarly cool ones as free handouts from cons, comic-cons, and dentists offices. Anywhere you get it, if you like it enough to want to be able to wear it more than just a day or a week, read on.

I rolled a ball of it to smush. The trick to this is that, unlike usually where you just go with however big you want it to be to look good, with this you also need it the right size to fit your entire temp tattoo on it, so make sure you do that.

Because I wanted this to me pretty uniform in shape, and to definitely be clean-ish, I rolled my ball out with a round marker. If you're super advanced, or just like crafty toys, a pasta machine would also work for this (MAKE SURE you do NOT use the same one for your clay and your actual pasta/food).

I like my pendants being about 1/8" thick. However, as I will discuss in a bit, you may want your thicker for structural reasons.

I placed my oval-shaped pendant into the tine that it would be baking in. Note that I punched its hole before putting it in there.

As you can see, this is the correct size for the temp tattoo that I chose.

I applied the tattoo to the clay as per the instructions for application to skin.

Remember not to get hasty or impatient with this part- leave the wet cloth on the correct amount of time, and peel off the paper carefully. If you do, then it should come out just about perfectly, like so.

Because this is polymer clay, the water shouldn't be there while it's baking, or it could inhibit the proper curing of the clay, so try to dry it off/out as much as possible. DO NOT try to dry off the surface of your clay with a cloth, as the tattoo will stick to your cloth at this point, messing up your currently-awesome design.

Honestly, don't be too worried about the water. Get out what you can, leave the rest. Let it sit in the sun if you're worried about it a lot.

Bake it according to the baking directions. I baked mine about 8 minutes.

As you can see, the tattoo is now cracked, but it has cured along with the clay, and shouldn't come off unless you really scrape at it.

Your pendant is now finished, but keep reading for more tips and etc.

Fingernail polish... such a benignly evil little thing. Those of  you who may or may not work with Polymer clay a lot probably know what is coming...

Becuase I wanted to protect the pendant that I had made (understandably, I think), I coated it in this stuff...

It created a really cool effect, and I let it dry and coated it again. However, here is the issue with this: fingernail polish, unless it explicitly says "acrylic" on it, is solvent based. This means that it will stay tacky OR it will dry, but it will eventually eat at your clay piece, OR it will dry, but get tacky 6 months later.

So, long story short, while the rest of this tut is a good thing, DO NOT use fingernail polish on it, unless you only want it for a year or two.
Use Varathane or Future Floor Polish. This is not an endorsement, and they are hard to find, but really your pendant is/should be fine without it anyway.

In any case, I think it turned out looking really nice. I just added a jump ring to the top, and put it on a leather cord from a different necklace that I had lying around.

A note on structural stability: polymer clay is very ahrdy, and can/will hold up to a lot of abuse. However, it may feel/seem odd to you to find that large, flat objects still remain somewhat flexible after baking. I myself thought it was odd that my pendant was still somewhat 'bendy', even after I put it back in the oven to harden some more, and let it cool a bunch.

The fact of the matter is, this elasticity makes it last longer and better, because it can handle abuse like being dropped much better than hard clay. However, if you want your pendant not to be able to bend, construct it differently- make it thicker, but mesh/screens/wooden pieces/coins (maybe a quarter?) in there, and it will help with the structural integrity. Ultimately, though, you just need to remember that you are working with an elastic clay, and it will bend some.

Steampunk Journal Necklace

Well, this was me experimenting with journal/book making, leather and rub-n-buff. All awesome things.

To begin with, get your pages. I used "cover stock" paper, but card stock would also work, as would regular printer paper, though that doesn't give quite as nice an effect when ripped.

Rip your pages to size. I used pages about 2.5"x 1.5". This resulted in folded-over pages almost square, which I liked. The ripping is also aesthetic. Once they are ripped and folded in half, place them in piles of 3-4 pages.

Next, punch through the pages in each pile and sew them together. Once you have more than 3-4 pages, this gets difficult, but with only 3 or 4 pages, your needle itself should be able to get through.

Try not to make too many holes, and make sure you use a lot of thread, or at least thick thread.

This is what the end product should look like for each pile of pages.

Get four piles of pages, like so, and a strip of paper as wide as your pages, and about 3 times as long.

Make folds in the middles, like so, so that each pile of pages will be able to fit in each crease.

Slather glue along this whole side of paper now, paying special attention to getting glue in the creases.

Tuck each pile of pages into each crease, and press it closed.

When everything is done drying (place it under heavy books and leave it for a few hours), measure the size of leather you want to use to cover it.

I used very thin leather for this project, actually taken from an old leather jacket. I initially used a piece a bit wider and about three times as long, but ended up trimming it.

My initial thought was to have the cover sit like this, but because I didn't have any fasteners that would work like that, I trimmed it back.

My cover finally looked like this. I glued it on to the pages with white school glue. Nothing fancy, but it did its job.

I decided to add a tie closure to the book to give a different aesthetic.

It turns out that adding the tie was one of the more difficult parts of this project, in that cutting slits just the right length without cutting through the leather was difficult, but I like how it turned out.

Next, I used a needle to open a hole in the spine that I then added a jump ring to, to attach it to a necklace.

This was the jump ring I used. Just a bunch of twisted wire that left room for the chain.

Next I used a pencil to draw gears onto the leather with rub-n-buff.

And there we go!

I actually made two more of these, and adding extra metal gears onto the covers, and random dangling bits makes it look even cooler.

Card Notebooks

Making mini-notebooks is kind of fun, and leaves you with a nifty little thing in which to write stuff, without having to run to the store, and these are completely customizable! As long as you have a card, or a sheet of card stock, this will work.

That being said, you will also need several sheets of notebook paper.

Get said notebook paper, and trim it to size. My card was conveniently sized for cutting the notebook paper in half, and then folding it. You do whatever will fit your card best.

Fold it in half, like so. You want your pages to be in two even piles now.

As shown here, cut a slit down the middle of the fold. It doesn't have to be perfect, but leave plenty of room on the ends.

On the OTHER stack of paper, cut the ends to where the slit ended on your first stack, like so.

Now, put your two stacks together, like so. Push it all the way through, fold and flatten it.

At this point, the only thing really left to do is put a cover on your notebook.

If you want more pages than 10, you will need to make several separate stacks of pages, then sew them together. I didn't do that here, but it can be done.

I made several of these notebooks- each of those piles got a separate cover.

All that remains for you to do is to cover the inside of the card with glue, sandwich the pages in the middle, and put it under a nice, heavy book for a few hours while it dries. When it's dry, your notebook is done!

DIY Camelbak Backpack

Well.. this is one of those things that I cheated on. Yes, it's a DIY, and yes, it is a functional Camelbak Backpack, but I cheated on it.
The Camelbak consists of two main parts: the bladder, that actually holds the water, and the backpack, which holds the bladder in a convenient position on your back. I spent $10 on a knock-off brand bladder from Walmart. Though I'm sure it could be DIY-ed, finding food grade materials that I was familiar with was difficult, and outside of my money range, so I cheated and bought a pre-made one.

The rest, however, I DIY-ed. I got an old pair of my brother's too-small jeans (they don't have to fit too snugly or too loosely- I did this part and the next mostly because I was worried that it would rip, tear, get ruined, or pull itself apart once full under the strains of a Via Ferrata that I was putting it through).

I cut off a part of the pants leg a bit longer than the bladder itself.

I then sewed the end shut. I repeated these steps with a pair of sweatpants, which I put inside the jeans/denim layer. this served to both hold the bladder and to provide padding for it against being hit and such.

I cut holes for the fill part of the bladder and the nozzle for the tube, and used paracord to tie the top of the sack closed, and also to tie the bladder to the top of the pack.

As it turns out, all of my concerns about the structural integrity of the bladder were pretty unfounded. It stayed together, and still works even now. Do I regret putting this much time into the padding, though? Not at all.

I then got a really old backpack we had around the house still. I cut a slit at the top for the drinking tube to go through, then cut slits along the sides, behind the zipper, and laced the bladder in.

I then attached velcro to both the strap I wanted the tube to stay on, and the tube itself. When I went to fill it and use it, it just worked. Ta-daa!

This could be accomplished with any size or style of backpack you want to use, and additional straps could be added for additional support.

Tree of Life Pendant

This craft was a fun one, and is very versatile in the way you can customize it, mess up, or anything else, and it still ends up looking cool and generally impressive.

I started out with just a normal keychain ring as my base.

I snapped it at the top where it doesn't overlap, forming two complete circles.

I then cut 16 pieces of wire, about 2 inches long each.

I twisted them into pairs, like so, leaving the ends of each one open.

I then twisted those into pairs again, and decided that 8 was plenty for the size circle I was doing- which made 16 the perfect amount for both circles, though that hadn't been my original intention.

I folded all of the ends on one side over to act as the roots, then folded the other ends over the top in a semi-tree-looking shape. As it turns out, once you finish twisting and such, two inches isn't quite enough for the one inch circle I had, so adding a half inch of length to that would be a good idea.

This was the other side of the same tree- as you can see, the top didn't have quite the length of overlap as the roots.

I then clipped the extra overlap, so the amount didn't matter as much as I thought. Still, having it to wrap around more than just fold was nice.

I then added a pearl bead on another piece of wire to serve as a kind of 'moon' decoration.

To finish up, I wrapped the edge in gold wire, then added a loop for it to be strung onto a keychain or necklace.