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Sunday, September 9, 2012

Sun Catcher

For Grandparents day we made Sun Catchers.  I read about this on-line & thought it would be kind of fun to try.  It is recommended to do it on the grill to avoid the melted plastic fumes in your house.

Place your plastic pony beads in a pattern in a baking dish
(cake pan, muffin pan for littler ones, etc). 
We used cookie cutter to guide our in our shape, but you can do
whatever pattern (or no pattern)

Remove cookie cutter & place on hot grill, wait about 10 minutes (we checked ours every so often to see how well the beads were melting)

Once all beads are melted, take off & allow to cool. 
TIP:  Don't get your grill too hot, I think that is why the first one did not melt into a smooth surface... it was hot enough to boil plastic!
Once cool to the touch, pop in the freezer for a few minutes & the plastic sun catcher will pop right out of the cake pan!
 Then drill a small hole & hang with ribbon.


Other Tips:
1) This did ruin my cake pan even though the on-line instructions said it was OK - if you have an old pan you don't care about - use it!
2) The translucent & opaque Pony beads melted best, I bought some pearlized ones & they melted, but were "clumpy".

Peepers really enjoyed this project & wants to make more fish sun catchers.

Thanks, Karla

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Spider Web

Last week I was home sick for a few days, at one point I went outside to get a little fresh air & almost ran right into this amazingly huge & intricate spider web. 
 I ran in the house & grabbed my camera & got a few quick shots.  This was between a tree & our yard waste bin next to the house by our garage.
It got me thinking about Halloween!





Thank you, Karla