Gifts I made this year, Part I : Marble Magnets

  I first saw these on Not Martha. She saw them a bunch of other places. When I started this project I thought I'd do a tutorial on it. I've never done one before, but then I thought, "Why fix what isn't broken?" so check out the link and I'll just tell you the stuff I did differently.


I also bought everything at Michael's. I bugged people for their coupon from the Sunday paper (40% off any non-sale item) and went shopping for one thing at a time. Luckily it's pretty close to my house. Unluckily, the lines are usually looooonnnng. I spent around $25 for everything I bought.

I bought:
1 bag of large (about 1 1/2") clear, flat, glass marbles (20-25 came in the bag)
1 bag of small (about 3/4") clear, flat, glass marbles (175-200 came in the bag)
** Avoid these if they look iridescent, it makes the images hard to see.
1 3/4" circle punch (I didn't have to have this, but thought it was worth it since I made 150.)

Aleene's Jewel It glue
3 50 piece 3/4" strong magnets

Then Grace & I spent time looking through magazines for fun images, patterns and words that would fit in the small marbles. We punched them out and glued them to the glass. We added the magnets the next night.

You can see they aren't perfect circles but we didn't trim any of the paper unless the marble was really lopsided. Once you get them together you can see if a tiny bit sticks out.

And then I became a stalker. I visited all of my family on facebook, copied a good picture of everyone's face, threw it in Picnik to edit, crop & resize it, then pasted it in a word document. I only wanted the face and I wanted it to fit in the 3/4" marble. I ended up with this:

Between facebook and what I already had, we had a picture of everyone in the family. I also did 'family' & 'I love you' sized for the small marble and each family name sized for the big marble. (FYI - The strong 3/4" magnets hold the larger marble no problem.) Here's a shot of the cookie sheet of magnets I ended up with:

Each family unit got the parents, the kids, 'family', 'I love you', larger family name and if they didn't have enough we filled in their magnets with the fun magazine magnets we did. Grandparents got themselves and all the grandkids. 

Grace & I decorated these boxes at a gift making party at church and I put the magnets in them with a tiny bit of double stick tape so they'd look nice when the gift was opened.

   

  














Everyone seemed to really like them. Here's ours, on our fridge. Grace thinks they need to stay in the shape of a flower, forever.

Even if my head does look huge. =0)