Have you ever been hiking and come across a really cool animal track? Maybe you don’t know what animal made it, or maybe you do know, but the track is just so perfect that you wish you could bundle it up and take it home to admire? Maybe you’ve got a kid who loves animals and nature, who could use a little hands-on science enrichment?
You need to know how to field cast.
Field casting is easy, requiring just plaster of Paris, used cardboard food packaging, masking tape, and water. It won’t take a ton of time away from your hike, and it’ll leave you with a great memory and a useful piece of scientific evidence for studying the real animals who’ve walked your path.
Here’s how:
1. Find an animal track. We’ve chosen to hike in the woods behind our house the day after a big rainfall, and my ten-year-old finds just what we’d expect to find: deer tracks!
2. Make a cardboard collar around the track. Cut strips of the cardboard food packaging about 1″ wide and long enough to completely encircle the track; tape pieces together with masking tape to lengthen them if necessary.
Tape the two ends together into a collar that will circle the track.
3. Mix the plaster of Paris. Although there are specific ratios of plaster to water that will guarantee a standard result (and I used to do all our field casting that way), I went on a dino dig earlier this summer and learned there how to simply eyeball my plaster mixture. In a throwaway plastic cup that’s at the end of its life, dump some dry plaster, then add some water and stir with a stick. You’re looking for a pudding consistency, better thin than thick, so continue to gradually add plaster or water to reach this approximate consistency.
4. Pour into the animal track. We always need two people for this, one person to steady the collar and one person to actually pour.
The thinner the consistency of the plaster of Paris is, the better it will fill the animal track without bubbles, but the longer it will take to cure–use your own judgment about how much free time you have to kill making field casts on your hike.
5. Remove the cast. When the plaster is firm to the touch, you can remove the cast and clean up your work.
The field cast will be dirty, but you can rinse it, and then label or paint it.
If you’d like to hang the field cast on your wall later (we do this sometimes), unbend a paperclip into a hook, then embed it in the plaster after you’ve poured it.
If you’ve got an extra-savvy kid who needs a science fair project, have them see what information they can learn about an animal based solely on its track. Height? Weight? Age?
This is also a great technique to employ if you happen to come across an animal track that you can’t identify. You might come up with the first conclusive evidence of the elusive Sasquatch, or the wily chupacabra!
Actually… I have a story about the chupacabra. Buy me a margarita sometime, and I’ll tell you all about it.
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What is the material the item is made from? If it’s thrifted and/or doesn’t have a tag, you may not know for sure.
What kind of stains/dirt has the item been exposed to? Even with a very good pre-wash, an item might have a hidden stain or unknown type of dirt or adherent that won’t wash out and will react unpredictably with the dye.
What color is the item? The darker the overdyed color, the more accurate the result to the color you want, but if the original color of your item is anything other than white, that will affect your final result.
What graphics are already on the item? The materials and colors used for graphics take dye unpredictably.
That being said, if you like a little adventure in your refashioning journey, then overdyeing is a fun, eco-friendly, and often thrifty way to take something you don’t love and turn it into something you do.
To illustrate that, here’s how I overdyed some clothing items for my college-aged daughter using materials purchased entirely from the nearest big-box store. It’s a super accessible process, and the clothes turned out great!
Materials
My kid called my shirt arrangement "the Depop scrunch," lol. Apparently the kids all scrunch in the waists of their shirts when they do their flat lays.
To overdye your own clothing items, you will need:
clothing items. Ideally, your items will have the tags so you know their fabric makeup. If not, though, it’s okay–just know the results will be a little more unpredictable. For this project, the items are either definitely cotton or are likely cotton-adjacent.
dye. For this specific project, I am using 1 bottle of black Rit liquid all-purpose dye per pound of clothing. Note that this is double the amount of this specific dye that I’d need if I were dyeing it a lighter color. Black needs a lot of dye!
color fixative (optional). For this project, I am using 1/2 cup of Rit ColorStay Dye Fixative per pound of clothing for the non-denim items only. My daughter actually wants the denim to be able to fade a little in the wash over time, but if you want the color to stay super-saturated for denim, too, then this color fixative would also work well on it.
salt. You need approximately 1 cup of salt per dye pot. Iodized salt is fine.
dish soap. You need approximately 1 tsp of the dish soap you use for handwashing dishes per dye pot. This breaks the surface tension of the water and encourages even absorption of dye.
giant pot. Your dye pot should be able to fit 1 pound of clothing with enough room for the clothes to be able to agitate freely. If your pot holds less, you can divide the dye and clothes and do this project in batches.
Note that my specific project here is for cotton clothing. If you want to dye items with a polyester content, check out the manufacturer’s instructions here.
Step 1: Weigh, then wash your clothing items REALLY well.
Before you throw your items in the wash, weigh them on a postal scale. My specific project here is for 1 pound of clothing, because that’s what fits in my pot.
The thing about dyeing fabric is that anything on the fabric–dirt, sure, but also body oils, deodorant, soap residue, minerals from hard water, even oils from your fingertips–can affect how the dye adheres. This is exacerbated when you’re overdyeing, as I’m assuming that you’re overdyeing something that you’ve already been washing and wearing, perhaps something that you’ve thrifted. That’s a lot of history that you don’t know about!
So this is not the time for a quick wash. This is the time for a hot water wash with an excellent detergent that contains lipase but not optical brighteners (thank you, r/laundry!), and multiple rinses with a rinse aid like citric acid that will knock off soap residue and hard water minerals.
If you’re overdyeing immediately afterwards, skip the dryer because your clothing items will need to start off wet anyway.
Step 2: Prep the dye bath.
Into a metal pot, add 1 cup salt and 1 tsp dish soap, then fill the pot with water, leaving enough room for your clothing items.
If your clothing items aren’t already wet, soak them in water and ring them out. Don’t put them in the pot yet, though!
First, put the pot on the stove and heat the water until it’s just about to boil–you should see steam, and maybe just a little movement in the water, but it shouldn’t be boiling.
Shake the whole bottle of Rit dye well, then add to the water. I like to refill the bottle with tap water, shake it up again, and also pour that into the pot just to make sure that I’m getting every speck of dye.
Step 3: Add the clothes to the dye pot and stir.
This is where your real time commitment starts.
The Rit dye instructions recommend a dye bath time of 20 minutes to 1 hour, and since I’m dyeing clothes black, I’m using the longest dye time. Combined with stirring every couple of minutes, it’s a chore!
Especially if you’re going for the full hour, you’ll need to readjust the heat down a few times to keep the temperature just below boiling.
Step 4: Rinse, then color fix.
When the dye time is up, pour out the dye water and rinse the clothing items until the water runs clear.
While you’re doing that, refill the pot with water and heat it on the stove until it’s once again just below boiling.
Add 1/2 cup of Rit Dye ColorStay Dye Fixative to the pot, and stir well.
Wring out the rinsed clothing items, then add them to the pot. This time you only have to keep them in the bath for 20 minutes, but you do have to keep stirring every couple of minutes. It’s still a chore!
Step 5: Rinse again, then wash well.
Pour out the water again, and rinse the clothing items again until the water runs clear.
Wash the clothing items again exactly as you did in Step 1. Optionally, add color catcher sheets to the wash load to absorb excess dye, but the thorough wash should be sufficient.
Dry clothes as normal.
Afterwards, the fun part is seeing how your experiment turned out!
The denim shorts turned out super black and super even. They’re honestly a little darker than my daughter would prefer, since she likes a more faded look, but I skipped the color fixative on these and denim is notorious for fading, so I think it’ll look closer to what she wants after a few washes and wears. I’d already warned her that the thread on these garments likely wouldn’t dye, so that wasn’t an issue.
The long-sleeved shirt was more of a gamble, since I could tell by the feel that it’s not 100% cotton. It actually took the dye great, though… except for a couple of uneven spots, grr. The shirt was originally dark enough grey that the spots could represent stains that weren’t previously visible. Crowding items in the dye pot or insufficient agitation can also cause uneven dyeing, but I don’t think that’s the case here. If the color was very important I’d dye it again, but my daughter says she’ll wear it as-is, so I guess we’ll wait and see if that’s true!
Here is the real winner of my dye pot gamble!
My daughter LOVES how her Bowie T-shirt turned out, and I agree! The lightning bolt is present but more subdued, and the Bowie graphic now looks like a spooky negative. The dye is completely even and a lovely black, and the shirt has been promoted from a pajama top that she wears only around the dorm to one of her favorite everyday T-shirts.
Which is good, because I’m pretty sure that unevenly-dyed long-sleeved T-shirt will end up being demoted to pajama top…
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This wooden bunting can be hung indoors or outdoors.
I hung mine outdoors, where it looks so happy and colorful!
I wanted to make my outdoor space more cheerful, and this wooden bunting, while time-consuming to create, has added a LOT of cheer.
Want a cheerful permanent outdoor decoration of your own? Here’s how to make your own painted wooden bunting!
Materials
There are kind of a lot of supplies at play here, but you can likely scrounge most of them up from your stash.
wood. The amount of wood and the size will depend on the size of your individual bunting pennants. I chose my pennant size mostly because I had plenty of scrap wood that fit those dimensions.
primer. I would have liked a spray paint primer for its ease and efficiency, but I certainly wasn’t going to go out and buy new primer when I already own perfectly good brush-on primer. I used Zinsser Bulls Eye, which was overkill here, but totally fine.
paint. Since you’ll be sealing it, almost any type of acrylic paint will work. I used craft acrylics, artist’s acrylics, and indoor house paint–genuinely whatever I had on hand! The sample sizes of indoor housepaint are perfect for this project.
sealant. Again, anything that you’ve got on hand will work, as long as it works with your paint.
cording. You can use a natural material if you’re hanging this bunting indoors, but an outdoor bunting will need something sturdier. I used nylon clothesline.
staples. I knew I’d figure out a reason to buy a staple gun someday, and this was my reason! Excuse me while I wander off to staple EVERYTHING now…
tools. I used pencil, paper, ruler, saw, paintbrushes, and staple gun.
Step 1: Make a template and trace the bunting pennants onto scrap wood.
I made my bunting pennant template an equilateral triangle for simplicity (but I also think that a scalloped bunting would look SO cute!). I calculated an equilateral triangle with a height matching the width of the largest number of scrap wood pieces that I had, and used that as my template. Because board width varies a bit even on boards ostensibly of the same size, I had to fudge the template with some triangles, but it’s not noticeable in the finished project.
Step 2: Cut the wooden bunting pennants.
Pretend my partner is wearing safety glasses and appropriate footwear, sigh. Also, shout out to my seven-year-old picnic table refinish, and this pic of it that has let me know that today is the perfect day to drag out the pressure washer!
You can of course also make these cuts with a handsaw, and put your fingers in slightly less danger by doing so. Regardless of the tool, though, don’t be a Matt–wear your safety glasses!
Step 3: Prime the pennants.
Hand-painting each pennant on all sides, including the edges, was annoyingly time-consuming, but I got the job done without a single trip to Menard’s, so yay!
Step 4: Paint the pennants.
You could paint these pennants however you like, with fantasy scenes or garden scenes or just polka-dots or other embellishments, but my vision was a single color for every pennant, so that’s what I did!
This part of the project is VERY time-consuming, since every pennant will likely need at least a couple of coats of paint, with drying time in between, and rotation so that all sides can get coated equally. I set this up at a table in my family room and strongly insisted to my partner and two adult children home for the summer that this was a Fun Family Project That We Should All Do Together. Nobody was as enthusiastic as I was, ahem, but everybody chipped in at least a little, and other than one small adventure in which one adult kid managed to find a single tube of oil paint of unknown provenance sneaked into the acrylics and therefore paint a pennant that will essentially never dry, all the pennants got perfectly painted!
Step 5: Seal the pennants.
It took almost a week of chipping away at the project before all the pennants were fully painted, but I managed to seal the whole lot with polyurethane sealant in one afternoon. Choose a sealant that’s rated for outdoor use.
Step 6: Staple the pennants to the cording.
Everybody loves tools, so a couple of my helpers popped back up when it was time to start stapling the pennants to cording. I wanted one long single bunting, so I measured out twelve inches of cording on one end, then stapled the pennants to the cording with a couple of inches between each pennant.
When we ran out of pennants, I measured another twelve inches at the far end and then cut the cording.
Knot or burn the ends of the nylon cording to keep it from unraveling.
Step 7: Mount the bunting.
Use mounting supplies appropriate to your home’s exterior to mount your bunting. It looks nicest, I think, if a long bunting has several mounting points, so that it’s got lots of lovely looping drapes.
Lol at my partner wearing the exact same paint-splattered basketball shorts and beat-up Crocs on this day. He apparently has a weekend uniform!
Just between us, my brand-new painted wooden bunting is probably just a titch on the gaudy side, but eh, I personally feel like the more colors, the merrier! You could class it up for yourself, though, by limiting the color palette and/or only putting the bunting out seasonally. Which actually gives me the idea of, hear me out… how about a black and orange and purple wooden bunting for Halloween?!? You’d have the most festive front porch in town!
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
A super cute personalized greeting card is just a photo away!
The season of graduation parties is upon us! I’ve been running the joy gauntlet of 2+ graduation parties every weekend all month, and with my very own brand-new college graduate home for a few weeks, I’ve also been helping (i.e. nagging, prodding, fussing…) her prepare thank-you cards for the generous souls who added her graduation to their own May gauntlet.
I know, I know she’s grown and should be able to write and send her own thank-you cards without me nagging. Just let me get this one last thing off my mental list and then I promise not to care if she never writes another thank-you card again.
For all these occasions (and for most other occasions, too!), photo greeting cards are the perfect solution. They’re adorable as congratulations cards, especially with a photo of the recipient of your congratulations on the front–for a graduation card, ideally one from their toddler years! They also make perfect thank-you cards, especially with a cute photo of the gift-giver and the recipient together. And if you’ve got a hard drive full of Senior pictures, those thank-you notes for graduation checks is a great time to use them.
But my favorite part of these particular handmade photo cards is that the photo isn’t glued or taped to the front of the card, so that the recipient can, if they so wish, simply pop the photo out of its holder and allow it to take its rightful position on their refrigerator door.
Mental note: photo magnets would also be good for this project!
This really is the easiest project, totally do-able even if you’re not a scrapbooker or cardmaker, just as totally do-able if you don’t consider yourself crafty at all. Here’s how!
Materials
photos. All the photos in this particular project are 4″x6″, printed via one-hour photo from the cheapest big-box store I could find (and the quality shows it, but whatever), but you can use absolutely any photo of any size here, or a postcard, or original artwork, etc. Just scale the greeting card accordingly, if the photo is larger.
cardstock. An 8.5″x11″ piece or an 8″x10″ piece would work equally well here.
photo corners. This is the secret to THE quickest, easiest, and cutest photo cards! Photo corners are cheap as hell, made from paper so they’re not crap for the environment, and come in every color to match any photo.
measuring, cutting, and folding tools. I used a metal ruler, paper cutter, and bone folder.
Step 1: Measure and cut the card to size.
For use with a 4″x6″ photo, your cardstock should be cut to 7″x10″. If you’re using an 8.5″x11″ piece of cardstock, cut 1.5″ off of the short side, and 1″ off of the long side.
Step 2: Fold the greeting card in half.
Fold the cardstock in half, making sure the two short sides meet as precisely as possible. Smooth over the fold with a bone folder (or the fat handle of a butter knife!) to make the crease look nice and neat. This is your greeting card blank!
Step 3: Put a photo on the front of the greeting card.
Ignore that my photo is on the wrong side of the unfolded greeting card here, lol. I guess another good thing about this method is that when you realize you’ve put your photo on the wrong side of the card, you can just flip the photo upside down, since it’s not stuck to the card! You can also just as easily make a landscape greeting card instead of this portrait one.
Wrong side or not, the above photo does at least illustrate how the photo should be placed, .5″ from both the top and bottom edges of the card, and .5″ from the left and right edges.
The laziest method for attaching the photo corners is also the easiest method! Instead of doing any additional measuring, just firmly hold the photo in place while you put each photo corner on and stick it down to the card.
If you took the photo off, the photo corners on the front of the greeting card would look like this:
To finish, put your completed greeting card into a standard 5″x7″ greeting card envelope, or do what I do and take five additional seconds to DIY the envelope, too!
I get bored doing the same thing over and over, and I had a LOT of greeting cards to DIY this month, so as you can see if you look closely at the above image, I’ve got one more easy DIY photo greeting card tutorial to share with you (and it’s not even the washi taped one up in the left corner–that was literally just me wanting to use up the last bit of washi tape on the roll, ahem). Stay tuned for next week, when I’ll show you how to make a photo greeting card that’s approximately 1% more work but 50% cuter!
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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