Make Magnets from Any Paper: My Three Favorite Methods

 

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

Magnets are a fun and easy way to show off your tiniest art, upcycle your favorite photographs, or display comic book panels, sweet love notes, or pretty papers of all kinds.

I am sooo glad that “cluttercore” is now a thing, because just between us, it’s always been *my* thing. A bare wall or surface is nothing but a spot that I haven’t put something cute yet!

To my endless irritation, my refrigerator isn’t magnetic, but I’ve made up for it by DIYing a giant magnetic wall in the kitchen, and a smaller one in the family room. I love displaying all the greeting cards, A+ schoolwork, concert tickets, and assorted other tchotchkes that one generally puts on a magnet board, but to be honest, my favorite things to display are the magnets, themselves!

Magnets are a great way to upcycle all kinds of cute little things that you’d love to have on display but that are too wee for mounting and framing. I love making all my special little mementos, from postcards to greeting card sentiments to Instamax photos to fortune cookie fortunes into magnets, so I can enjoy looking at them while they hold up other stuff I enjoy looking at–it’s cluttercore at its most decadent, lol!

Here are my favorite ways to DIY magnets from any paper!

Method #1: Mat Board and a Button Magnet

For this method, you will need:

• paper to display
• adhesive (archival glue or double-sided tape, AND E6000 or similar epoxy glue)
• mat board or book board
• button magnet
• ruler, craft knife, scissors

Cut roughly around your image, leaving a border that you can trim to size later. Then, use archival-quality glue or double-sided tape to adhere your image to the back side (not the pretty colored side, unless you want to chance the color being visible through the front of your art!) of mat board.

Use a ruler (a metal one is better than the beat-up plastic one I’m using in the photo below) and craft knife to trim the image and its mat board backing to size:

To seal the front of the image, I like to either laminate it in packing tape or cover it in Diamond Glaze or several coats of Mod Podge. Here, I used packing tape:

Any other fans of My Life as a Background Slytherin out there?

Use E6000 or a similar epoxy glue to adhere a button magnet to the back of the mat board. You can also add additional embellishments like gems and stickers to the front, Sharpie the edges, poke holes at the bottom and add tassels, and do whatever else you can think of to pretty up your magnet further!

Method #2: Sticker/Magnet Maker

For this method you will need:

• paper to display
• Xyron Creative Station Lite or similar machine, with a magnet+laminate cartridge installed
• scissors

If you’ve got (or can borrow!) a store-bought sticker/magnet maker, it makes creating magnets from your own papers SUPER easy.

I own this specific Xyron sticker/magnet maker, but I’ve also got teenagers and their friends who all use the snot out of it, so it gets a lot of use. If you don’t want to buy a whole entire one all for yourself, it’s worth checking out your public library’s DIY or teen space or asking your local Buy Nothing group for one to borrow.

To use a machine like this, you feed your paper into it and let it add adhesive magnet sheeting to the back and laminate the front:

The laminating is especially nice for papers that are glossy or ink that’s water-soluble. Kid art made with washable markers can be so delicate! It’s also an easy way to make a magnet out of an entire photo for display on my gigantic magnet boards.

Method #3: Adhesive Magnet Sheets

For this method, you will need:

• paper to display
• adhesive magnet sheets
• scissors

This method is best for papers that don’t need lamination, Diamond Glaze, or Mod Podge. I like it for my comic panels and my collection of vintage space-themed stamps, but basically anything commercially printed or printed on a laser printer could get away without lamination.

To make these magnets, roughly cut around your image, stick it to the adhesive side of an adhesive magnet sheet, then trim it to size.

Crafting this magnets is a fun kid project, especially for tweens and teens. Give them lots of magazines to cut from, plenty of adhesive magnet sheets, and let them have at it! The finished magnets make sweet handmade gifts for friends and family.

Pro tip: these easy magnets are awesome for the front of a college student’s mini fridge!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How-To: Kid-Made Puzzle Piece Valentine

 

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World way back in 2013.

Missing some pieces of your jigsaw puzzle, but still have a few mitchy-matchy ones? 

Your kiddos can create one handmade Valentine from just two perfectly fitting jigsaw pieces. Give them most of a box, and they can make all the Valentines for their class party. 

It's a fun upcycling project that won't cost you a cent. Yay for an eco-friendly Valentine's Day!

Here's how:

Big or small, edge or middle, this project relies on two linking puzzle pieces. Have your kiddos sort the remaining pieces from an incomplete jigsaw puzzle into linking pairs (save other orphaned puzzle pieces for more crafty upcycling projects!), then let them paint each pair a fun background color. My kiddos chose every color from red to green to black, and made themselves a glorious happy mess while they did so.

Set the pairs aside to dry, taking apart the pieces first so that they won't adhere to each other.

When the puzzle pieces are dry, fit them together again and show the kiddos how to paint a single heart onto the middle of the pairs, so that approximately half the heart rests on each piece. The kiddos can continue to decorate the pieces as they wish, with glitter and stickers and the other gaudy accouterments of kid-made greeting cards.

Once again, separate the pieces and let them dry. When everything is dry and set, the heart puzzle will be able to be taken apart and put together again. The kiddos can use the back side of their Valentines to write their name and some sort of horrible, punny Valentine greeting.

May I suggest "I love you to pieces?" Okay, I'm going to go vomit now.

Bleach-Painted T-shirts: A Tutorial

 

Twice in the past few months, I've wanted to make some kind of custom fan apparel, but I didn't want to devote a ton of time, energy, or money to it. The first was for a Mother Mother concert, and the second was a present for all of the children dancing the (kind of shitty, because you have to wear a fat suit and giant mascot head that's apparently hot, smelly, and hard to see out of) role of Mouse in our local university's production of The Nutcracker. 

You can do this project a lot more nicely than I did it, with super clean lines and really even tones, but here's how you can ALSO do it quick and dirty-like, whether it's for a concert tomorrow or you've got to make six in a row and you're already bored.

To bleach paint T-shirts, you will need:

• black 100% cotton T-shirt. The best shirt is obviously a thrifted shirt, and for my Mother Mother shirt I did find the perfect black T-shirt at Goodwill. Speaking of... y'all have the Goodwill prices gotten absolutely RIDICULOUS in your area, or is my town the only one in which the local Goodwills have decided that not only do they no longer need to offer any sales or discounts on the crap they're literally given for free, but they've also just absolutely jacked up their prices to Jesus? I'd long more-or-less abandoned the little indie thrift shops around me for more than just the occasional browse-through, because their selection is the pits compared to Goodwill, but 2023 is the year that I rededicate myself to their cause. Anyway, I picked up the six Medium Team Mouse shirts that I needed via a Black Friday Doorbuster from one of the big-box craft stores. I feel like those shirts have a reputation for being cheap in quality as well as price, but 100% cotton shirts are nothing to sneeze about these days, when pretty much every shirt and its dog is infused with polyester!
• backing material. This will need to be thick enough to keep the bleach from bleeding through to the back of the T-shirt. I used a brown paper grocery bag.
• bleach. Get the cheapest, and don't get it on you.
• cotton swabs.
• glass dish.
• paper stencil.
• glue stick (optional). 

Step 1: Prepare the stencil.

Both of the stencils I wanted to make were word art, so I just did them in Google Docs. Because I am basic.

But at least I printed them as outlines to save ink!

Cut out the stencils and save the widows, since you'll need to place them back on the shirt before you paint.

My Team Mouse stencil took up two pages, so I taped them together with the spacing that I wanted.

Step 2: Paint!

Place your backing material inside the shirt, making absolutely sure it will cover where you'll be bleach painting. 

You can either just set your stencil on the shirt, if it's fairly short and simple--

--or you can tape it down with more masking tape.

I even took the glue stick to the back of those fiddly M and U sticky-outy bits to make sure they stayed put, and I also glued down the widows. I was able to reuse this same stencil for all six Team Mouse shirts, gluing the bits and the widows each time and pulling them up afterwards.

Then, put on a podcast and start painting within the lines!

I found it easiest to first draw the outline of each letter, then color in the center. It made them look wonky as I went, since the bleach activates right away--

--but I think it evens out pretty well by the end:

I'm disappointed in how much the edges bled, but none of the recipients of these shirts seemed to notice, and you also can't really tell when you're standing a normal distance from the human wearing it.

Below is the first shirt I did, though, and for that one I just painted away and it also looks fine:

Step 3: Rinse and Wash.

After I finished painting, I gave the bleach a few more minutes to even out the last couple of letters, then I rinsed each shirt very, very well under cool water and then tossed it into the wash. I washed each individually so nothing else would accidentally get bleach stained, but fortunately my washing machine has an eco-friendly quick wash, so I'm not the cause of the nation's water shortage.

I haven't tried it, but this TikTok recommends a hydrogen peroxide rinse to deactivate the bleach:

Might be worth a try!

Step 4: Show off your beautiful work.

Here's what happens when you ask your husband to photograph you in your beautiful shirt in front of the theater where Mother Mother is about to play:

Seriously, it's a cell phone camera. You have to really try if you want to get your thumb in the way of a cell phone camera.

And here's one particular member of Team Mouse, coincidentally the one who walked by as I was finishing up and asked if she could use the rest of the dish of bleach to customize her own shirt. Since "her own" shirt is inevitably the shirt that I messed up on (can't give a flawed shirt to someone else's child, gasp!), I happily let her also make her shirt the most elaborately cutest:

It's very likely that I'll do this project a few more times this year, because it's SUCH a quick, easy, and cheap way to customize a T-shirt. I would like to get smoother edges, though, so next time I'm going to play around with thickening the bleach first so it can't run away from me.

The Best Homemade Christmas Present: Painted Building Blocks

The putting away of childish things is progressing, but it is a LOT harder than I thought it would be. The existence of the kids' playroom has allowed me to ignore all the once-beloved but long-ignored toys that they possess, since they're all stored tidily on shelves and not in the way.

But with one teenager headed off to college very shortly, I've promised the other teenager that we can remodel the playroom into a private bedroom just for her. It's long overdue, since the kids have shared one small bedroom for their entire lives without (much) complaint, but even I admit that I can no longer expect two nearly-grown adult children to continue sharing their decade-old IKEA bunk bed in their single tiny bedroom during college breaks.

I want to shrink these children back down to ages four and six just for a few hours, just so we can play blocks again while listening to Amelia Bedelia books on tape.

Anyway, we've already handled picture books and toy animals--

--we organized the LEGOs back during the pandemic lockdown, around the time that Matt got rid of almost all of the Barbies and their stuff (and no, I still haven't started speaking to him again...), and a couple of weeks ago, with a present idea for my toddler niece in mind, I decided to take care of the blocks.

The kids have a vast, well-loved, much played with building block collection. They wouldn't even be embarrassed to tell you that they played with blocks well into their teenaged years, because blocks are freaking AWESOME. Included in our collection were lots of scraps and seconds, though, so, first I sorted through all the blocks to cull the ones that the kids had had fun playing with, but weren't worth saving. Then, Matt helped me wash the blocks that we were keeping--and WOW, was that water gross!

We put most of the squeaky-clean blocks into storage bins--and I even separated the marble run blocks from the building blocks, a chore I'd been wanting to do for the entire time we've owned the marble run and yet somehow never got to--but first each person in the family picked out several blocks for a very special project:

Matt and Will each painted a few blocks, but Syd and I got VERY invested in our individual block-painting visions and spent most of the weekend just like this:

Syd designed her block set to resemble the work of one of her favorite artists, Mary Blair, specifically to mimic the Disneyland It's a Small World aesthetic. Here's how her blocks turned out!

I love how her blocks allow one to connect a line or continue a color in interesting ways.

I wanted to paint a set of triangles with a connecting rainbow on one side--

--and a complete color wheel on the other. Here's how that turned out!

I like how you can mix them up:

These are the ones that Matt and Will painted:

Obviously, we couldn't pack them up and mail them to our favorite toddler until we'd made sure that they work properly!

They work great!

Not gonna lie--I am VERY likely to dig some more building blocks out of storage so I can repeat this project, either for my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop or just for fun. It was QUITE satisfying, and I was left with the feeling that there's lots more to explore regarding block painting and pattern building.

How to Embellish a Composition Book with a Coloring Page

 This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2016.

Are you into coloring books? My kids and I are! We listen to a lot of audiobooks, podcasts, and read-alouds, and coloring is a great way to pass the time. 

 This means, however, that we have LOTS of lovely completed coloring book pages. I don't really have a problem with re-using and recycling paper, but often the pages are so thoughtfully and lovingly filled in that they just seem too pretty to toss. 

 At the same, the kids also have LOTS of composition books that they use for lots of different subjects. Composition books all tend to look mostly the same, mostly so that kids can mix them up and fight over them, I think. 

 Why not solve both problems at once, then? 

Here's how to embellish a composition book with a coloring book page, giving that pretty work of art a place to be shown off, and personalizing that composition book  so that everyone knows who it belongs to and what it's for. It's a little time-consuming, but it's not hard, and it's going to look really awesome when you're done.

   1. Do you need to prime your composition book? Even though composition book covers are glossy, they do pretty well with paint. Nevertheless, I usually cover everything that I paint with a no-sand primer. I lay my composition books open flat on my work surface, with the covers both facing up, when I paint them; I don't mind a little if a little bit of paint gets onto the edges of the top couple of notebook pages below, but if you do, spread out newspaper between the composition book covers and the notebook pages. 

  2. Paint the composition book covers. I've used both interior/exterior house paint and water-based spray paint for these book covers. I usually save our craft acrylics for smaller projects, although you can certainly use them here. 

 Even though the coloring book pages will be covering the center front cover of each composition book, I generally paint the entire cover, just so I don't have to worry about my placement later. Do whatever feels right to you. 

 Let all the paint dry well before you start the next step. 

  3. Trim and prepare your coloring book page. We have a family policy that we photocopy coloring book pages and color the copy, and we usually do this on cardstock, because everyone likes the color saturation of Prismacolor or Sharpie markers the best. This means that I don't have to worry about the translucency of a coloring book page, or the possibility of it being printed on cheap paper that won't take glue well. 

If you're worried about the quality of your own paper, feel free to back it with a nice cardstock or high-quality typing paper. You could even use scrapbook paper and make a nice border around the page for some extra embellishment. 

 Don't forget, of course, that you don't HAVE to use a coloring book page to embellish a composition book. If you want to embellish a composition book with wrapping paper, cut-outs from a magazine, comic book or dictionary pages, or anything else that you're dreaming of, that will work, too! 

  4. Adhere the coloring page to the composition book cover. I like to center mine, and I'm happy with my results using either spray adhesive (not eco-friendly) or Mod Podge (eco-friendly!). 

  5. Seal the composition book cover. Several more coats of Mod Podge, or a couple of coats of a spray sealant (not eco-friendly) or one coat of polyurethane (not great, but better than spray sealant) will seal and protect the cover of your lovely embellished composition book. 

 In my opinion, you don't need a reason to embellish a composition book, because the result is super cute, but here's one: these embellished composition books make great journals and sketchbooks, especially if you've colored the coloring page yourself. They also make cute presents, either for a parent using their kid's art, or for a loved one using something that you know they'll like. 

I mean, doesn't everyone need another notebook with a hand-colored dragon on the front?

How We Refinished This Thrifted Wooden Shield

 This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World back in 2016.

Some things you just cannot pass by, such as a great toy hiding underneath a gross one. 

 On a recent trip to Goodwill, my kid showed me this wooden shield. It was finely crafted, made from a solid piece of wood with sturdy straps on the back, but man, it was a mess. It looked as if it had been given to a kid to paint, and then that kid had painted one hundred thousand layers of muddy paint on it.

 I am all about process-oriented art, my friends, but when it's done on a great toy, an heirloom quality wooden one that some other kid would be absolutely thrilled to have?  It bummed me out to look at it.

 So even though the kid is probably a wee bit too old for it, I told her we could buy it. At a buck, the price was for sure right, but also, I knew that very few people were going to look at that gross toy in that Goodwill and see what I saw: a great toy that just needed some sweat equity and some TLC. 

  Step one: sand that baby down! I made the kid do some of the sanding with our trusty palm sander, but I took over when she got tired of it, because it was a big, tedious job. 

Friends, there were a LOT of layers of paint on that shield!  

Hiding way, way, at the bottom was also a printed outline of a two-headed dragon, probably what the child was intended to color. My older kid would have loooooooved to color a shield with a two-headed dragon on it, but alas, this dragon had one hundred thousand layers of muddy paint on it, so it got sanded down with all the rest. 

 To do a really bang-up job, you could use sandpaper with progressively finer grit after you'd sanded all of that paint off, and end up with a shield face that was as smooth as butter. I didn't bother going too smooth, though, because I knew that the techniques we were going to use to refinish the shield wouldn't require it. 

  Step two: base coat. If it had been up to me, I would have painted a nice design on top of the bare wood, then sealed everything, leaving some natural wood to show and be pretty. This is my kid's shield, however, and she likes things to shine; she spray painted a base coat of gold on top of the bare wood.

  Step three: draw a design. My kid worked on this for a while, because first she drew a bird, then decided that she didn't like it, so erased the entire thing and drew a unicorn. I had her draw her design in pencil so that she could erase it, but if that didn't work, it wouldn't have been a big deal to lightly sand the shield, repaint the base coat, and go again.  

After she was happy with the penciled design, she went over the pencil with black Sharpie to give her a better outline to color in. 

  Step four: paint the design. I gave my kid our nice artist's acrylics to use when she painted in all the colors on her unicorn. Craft acrylics are a good substitute, but artist's acrylics are thicker, and I think they're better for details and smaller projects.  

After she'd finished painting, she went back over the Sharpie lines, to cover any paint that had gotten out of the lines. The finished result looks neat and tidy. 

  Step five: seal the shield. This step isn't completely necessary, but the shield will last longer and hold up better to hard play if you do. I didn't want any of my kid's beautiful unicorn to chip off, so I sealed it with a clear sealant. 

 My kid and I are very pleased with the finished product--it's a great toy now, and is one hundred percent worth the buck that I paid for it. The wooden shield looks a million times better, will hold up for all kinds of pretend play and dress-up, and it's so lovely now, decorated with my kid's artwork, that I can certainly see it being a keepsake for her after she's grown.

 I mean, come one--she painted a unicorn on it. Can you get any more ten-year-old girl than that?

I Bought My Kid a Sticker Maker

 

I wasn't sure that this sticker maker was actually going to be a hit. Syd didn't touch it for the entire summer after I bought it for her birthday, and I'm the one who actually ended up getting it out early this autumn and messing around with it trying to figure it out.

But if there is one gold standard about parenting, it is this: if you want your kids to get interested in something, ignore them and get yourself interested in that thing. Whether it's dried apricots, The Lord of the Rings, or your latest awesome art supply, if you're into something and act like you don't know they're around, kids show up and try stuff out just to get into your business. 

On an unrelated note, ahem, I have also been woken up by the children from every single nap I have ever tried to take since they've been born. I swear that a kid can need nothing from me, can flat-out reject my company, and as soon as I close my bedroom door, lie down, get comfy, and doze off, I hear, "Mom?" And it's always something stupid, like where are the scissors or are we supposed to be saving the French bread for dinner or can we go to the bookstore this weekend.

Literally TODAY I lay down on my bed for like five minutes to TikTok as my reward for mostly-ish picking up the house, fell asleep, and fourteen seconds later Syd was all, "Mom?"

To be fair, she was calling for me to see if I was ready to drive her to ballet, but still! 

So when I got out the sticker maker stuff for the first time one day, set it all up at the kitchen table, figured out how to load and use the cartridges, and started cutting out some comic book pages that I thought might make excellent stickers--

--Syd found me and immediately figured out all the sticker stuff and off she went, making her own art into stickers:

Because you can't arrive at a dog's birthday party empty-handed!

Here are the sticker maker supplies that Syd now uses every week:

• Xyron Creative Station Lite
• Xyron Magnet/Laminate Roll
• Xyron Laminate/Adhesive Roll

She uses the supplies entirely to make stickers from her own art, and she prefers the simple adhesive roll, rather than the roll that both adds adhesive to the back AND laminates the front, because she likes to continue to add to and embellish her art even after it's made into stickers.

I don't make art, and so I've made stickers from comics, vintage books, and clip art, digital images, and the kids' scanned artwork all printed on plain copy paper. I also prefer the look of the unlaminated stickers, although I suspect that my comic stickers aren't particularly archivally sound.

Syd was mildly horrified to see that I'd essentially made fanart of another one of her projects.

I'd be curious to price out about how much each square inch of sticker costs, but I'm too lazy to do that right now. It feels cheap enough, though, that I wouldn't be sad letting the kids make stickers when their friends come over or bringing it out at a Girl Scout meeting. 

I'm also very eager to try scanning, printing, and then making into stickers the fussy cut graphics that I like to decoupage onto wood blocks. I'd lose some eco-friendliness and the coolness of using the actual comic, but I could use graphics from comics that I'm not willing to cut up and a sticker might be more reliable and less messy than a piece of vintage low-grade paper and glue.

Christmas cardmaking will be VERY fun, too.

And I can't wait to see what Syd makes next, too!

P.S. I can't let you go without mentioning that I'm also super into DIY stickers that I make using repositionable glue. These were awesome especially when the kids were little and sticking stickers everywhere, because they peel right off any surface--and stick right down again somewhere else!