Crafts: Screw up Stories

Before I begin telling the stories of how I manage to screw things up beyond human understanding I have a few pictures of new crafts I've been doing.

This book is my life story (part of it) so I decided to make it beautiful
Half the gems were pulled off from my mom's old shoes and the centerpiece was an old necklace I played with as a child

Above are some pink boxes decorated using Japanese Deco-Den with Silicon and things I've kept in a box for a while.
To the right are some projects I've made using Ducktape and some Happy tape.

Pencils

Duck tape School bag

 Last school year I decorated this computer bag with Happy Tape and Flamingo Pink Duck Tape. This year I used Tie-dyed, zebra, pink zebra, and Flamingo Pink Duck tape along with glitter and stickers to re-decorate it and start fresh.

Before and After

 These duck tape shoes were my most original concoction. I went to the fabric store with my mom and found a really cute roll of pink (I don't know what the design is called) duck tape. I arrived home realizing I didn't have any more space to put this new duck tape on my backpack and then I had an idea. There was an old pair of shoes downstairs which were old and kind of gross looking so I thought "Why not put tape on them?" Which is exactly what I did. It took about an hour.

Shoes for the new school year

There was another pair of shoes in my mom's bag of shoes to throw out. I tried them on for size and realized there was absolutely nothing wrong with them except I stepped on the back too much and they were covered in dust. I then  ripped the gross shoe laces out and duck taped them keeping in mind the errors I had made on the previous duck tape shoes. After that I put black nail polish on the front of the zebra shoes thinking I could just paint the front black. I realized that was the worst idea I'd ever thought of so I rubbed the black polish off with nail polish remover.

I then discovered some of the two year old dirt came off as well thanks to the nail polish and the cotton pad. After that I sat there cleaning my gray shoes with nail polish remover and now they look white and brand new! Two brilliant ideas discovered in one day!!!

Melted Crayon art

 I've heard a lot about "melting crayons" and I thought I'd try it myself so I asked my mom to buy a bunch of crayons. The ones she brought back from the store were not made by crayola and I didn't like the wrappers. They were an eyesore to me so I peeled them off and hot glued the crayons onto the canvas. After the first ten minutes of melting with a blow dryer all I could think was "Crap! I screwed this up already!"

Dip Dyed jewelry attempt 

There was a woman on youtube who made a tutorial for "Dip-Dyed jewelry". The main idea is to paint old jewelry with nail polish by using a sponge. I tried that and this is the result.

Regardless of how these projects turned out I screwed each and every one of them up. Only Jane.
 Scroll back up to the picture of my life story. You can't see what's wrong with it because the error was putting the hot glue gun in my hand. Yes I burned myself three times on accident. If it weren't for my high pain tolerance I would've been crying and giving up on hot glue forever. Then I tried using tweezers to pick up small gems. Unfortunately I dropped an orange gem and it landed on the plate next to me glue side down. I tried picking it up but it was too late. The gem was stuck to the plate made for catching dripping glue.

Now scroll up to the Deco-Den boxes. They turned out wonderful but the process of making them was a complete disaster.
My dad bought some Silicon for this project. I then set up all my supplies and cut open the top of the Silicon with scissors. I squeezed the Silicon can and tried to get it into the plastic container so I could color it. A few drops came out. I squeezed harder and heard a loud POP! The bottom of the Silicon container came OUT! I put a small sandwich bag over the open end of the silicon and scooped out some Silicon from the can with a spoon. After successfully mixing the Silicon with just the right amount of acrylic paint I spooned it into the plastic bag that was cut and taped to a cake tip. It was smooth sailing after that. Or so I thought. Eventually I ran out of Silicon and had to put more in. That's not too bad. Until the bag broke. I carefully un-taped the cake tip from the plastic bag and just decided to use a different color. (White) Carefully I taped the plastic bag to the cake tip and scooped in some more Silicon. After that the Silicon decided to ooze through the tape! I wiped it off on the box and just stirred everything with a toothpick. That's an awful lot of screw ups for a simple project.

Thankfully I didn't screw up on the pencils and ducktape bag but I did screw up on the ducktape shoes a few times. At first I thought I could use a hole puncher to punch shoe lace holes through the pink tape. Nope. I had to use a pen instead. Afterwards I pulled the shoelaces through and they are now sticky which is a little bit gross. The shoes are also asymmetrical which was not planned.

It's surprisingly easy to screw up on a melting crayon project. Most normal people wait for the hot glue to dry. Unfortunately I did not do that so some of the crayons FLEW off the page. Speaking of page I used the wrong type of paper. Speaking of paper it's kind of important to not peel the crayon paper off. The crayons melted in all directions except down which made the colors dark and depressing which was the exact opposite of my expectation.

The dip-dyed jewelry was easier to screw up than I thought. I put the nail polish on a sponge and instead of transferring to the jewelry and making it pretty the polish stayed on the sponge. I tried with a cotton ball. Same problem. I then painted the jewelry with a brush using at least 10 coats because the color was very light and painting a chain was rather difficult. Once that dried I had to move each chain and I pulled off a little bit of paint in the process which didn't look that pretty. Next I added some more coats (WHY!?) and made the chains stickier and smelly-er. The end result wasn't that bad but the smell was so overwhelming I couldn't stand wearing the necklace for more than one minute. However the blue ring was less of a fail even though I used the same technique. The rusty smell cancelled out the nail polish stench.
And this is my 50th Blog post :)

-Just Jane

"The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be."
-Marcel Pagnol