Super Easy Wooden Clothspin Gift Tags

Here's another option for fancy homemade gift tags.  It takes a bit more time to make than my fabric gift tags but it really brings out the individuality of each gift.  With some precut wooden shapes from Michael's and some wooden clothspins, you have yourself some inexpensive and super easy wooden gift tags.  So, here's how I made them.

Materials:

 - precut wooden shapes from Michael's

 - clothspin

 - tacky glue (or wood glue, whatever you have on hand).

 - various paints for paint wood  and a paint brush.

 - Sharpie pen to write the name.  You can paint it on too, but I'm just not that talented. :-)

Preferably you'll want to pick shapes that will cover the clothspin completely.  I've played around with shortening the cloths pin by just cutting of a small amount of each side, but really, it's just easier to pick different shapes.  You might get away with cutting just one side (the one that's getting glued to the wooden shape) - but I haven't tried it (if you try it, please let me know how it goes).

1.  Put a small amount of glue onto one side of the cloths pin, as shown and glue it onto the back of the wooden shape. You'll know which side the back is by where the sticker was located and let me tell you, those stickers do not like coming off. I'm just saying.  If you're wooden shape isn't completely flat, you might need to clamp it down some way while the glue dries.  I just used a hair tie to hold it in place.  Just let it dry now.

2.  Once it's dry, you can remove the clamp, and clip it onto somewhere.  It sure does make it handy to paint.  Paint to your liking.

 

3.  Write in the name and clip to gift.

Gosh, I have more pictures than I do steps.  See I told you it was easy.

Happy Gifting!

(oh, and yeah, I do realize that Christmas is two months away. :-)  but if someone can request my Christmas wishlist this early, I can start posting Christmas crafts this early. hehe.  Besides, those two months go by fast.)

DIY TV or Monitor Stand

I saw this on a post a good while ago, I think via IkeaHacker. Anyway, I needed a solution to place my monitor on and still have a place to put my keyboard when I'm not using it. My computer desk = my sewing table. I wanted a quick solution that also looked cool, so this solution turned out to be perfect and super easy, and did I mention cheap, way to do it. Here's how I did it.


Materials:
- pine wood (any wood should work as long as it's about 3/4 inch thick -- shelf wood works well)
- 4 door stoppers (the non coily types).



1. Cut the pine wood to whatever size you need. I wouldn't recommend making these shelves too long, as the middle area will not be adequately supported.

2. Sand down the edges and corners of the wood, it's just nicer that way.

3. Measure an inch in on both sides of each corner of the wood and mark it with a pen, or in my case, a crayon.

4. Screw on the door stopper onto the mark on each corner of the wood.



That's it. I told you it was simple. To fancy it up, you can easily have painted or stained the wood before screwing on the door stopper "legs." The best part is, it's just the right height for the keyboard to slip under and, as you see in the picture, for my dvd player to fit under. Another good thing about it is that the whole contraption is also quite cheap to make. each door stopper was only $1.50 and the whole piece of pine was about $5 of which I used the one piece for both the tv stand and the monitor stand. Woohoo!

The above picture shows my monitor stand, and the below pictures show my TV stand. :-)

Making a Boomerang

Since I was young I've always wondered about how a boomerang worked but I never thought to look into actually making my own. My wondering was short lived and I was distracted enough by the next shiny object to never actually look into the "how". Recently, however, I was looking for the next cool project to try and thought hmmm... boomerang. Well, long story short, I found a website called dangerouslyfun.com who had easy to follow plans for boomerangs. So, I followed them. :-) It's actually pretty simple to do if you don't get into the engineering of making it perfect. I tried it a couple of times at the park and was happy enough to see it curve back towards me. I made a few more changes to try to get it to curve closer back to me. (I plan to test that out really soon).

At any rate, I followed pretty closely to the website with the exception of the airfoil not being as nice as the one shown (but that's due to impatience). Dangerouslyfun.com did such a good job in explaining and showing the tutorial of it all that I don't think I can do any better of a job, so I'm just going to share my pictures. :-)

Just a small note: I bought the wood at Michaels and seem to be able to get at least two boomerangs out of it and I used my scroll saw to cut it to shape before using an power sander to sand the airfoils down.



I'm hoping to test this out and take a video of the throws. Once I have one, I'll try to post it.

Good Luck in making your own boomerang, and do be careful as they do tend to come back after thrown -- don't forget to duck! ;-)

[Update: 6-7-09] I tried it out and it comes back -- for the most part. There seems to be a bit of a learning curve to get it to come back fully. Anyway, I tried to capture a video of the throws but I kept losing the boomerang on my camera (small digital cameras don't work very well when you're trying to track a small light colored boomerang in the sky). Oh well.