You know how it goes. You're sitting there with your legs up, lazily exploring the strange and wonderful world via laptop, clicking hither and thither, wandering pretty much aimlessly when you're suddenly caught by an object of singular beauty. It stops you dead. It wakes you from your stupor. It moves you to action.
This very scenario happened to me just a little while ago, when my path of discovery lead me to Gingerbread Snowflakes, crafty blog of the one and only, Pam Harris. What did I unearth there? Well, let me tell you. It was this glorious mosaic egg, an egg that Pam had decorated with dyed eggshells. How sweet it was... I pert near swooned.
Naturally, I was inspired by Pam's egg to make a handsome faux-ceramic mosaic vase from eggshells and a plastic maple syrup jug of course. Goodness yes! Here's what I did.
First, I created my vase. I removed the label from the plastic jug and using a handsaw, sawed off the threads at the opening. Then I smoothed the freshly cut mouth of the jug with sandpaper.
I was then ready to decorate. The fun part! For this project I thought long and hard about the glue type I should use to adhere the shells. Glueing onto plastic can be dicey. I ended up gambling on the same glue I used for the cork stamp project: Aleene's FunCraft Foam Glue. Foam is a variety of plastic so I figured it would probably work here too. Happily, my gamble paid off. Those egg shells aren't goin' nowheres.
I dabbed on a little glue directly from glue bottle to jug, covered the gluey area with eggshells, and repeated until the desired area was covered. A pair of tweezers came in very handy here to handle and set in place the wee eggshells. On the edges of the eggshell-covered area, I made sure to completely cover any gluey spots with eggshells to ensure a neat and tidy edge.
Here's a super-short (4 second long) animation experiment showing the application of (most of the) eggshells on the jug. My Lo and I were playing. You may have to view it a couple times to actually see the whole thing. It goes by in the blink of an eye.
You'll notice that I used two colours of shells on my vase. I coloured a few shells with permanent markers (orange and black in my case). Two "lines" of coloured eggshells sandwich the natural brown eggshells.
I let the whole thing dry overnight; the glue will still be tacky even once dry. I then carefully gave the area - egg shells only, mind you - a few coats of satin-finish water-based varnish. You could go glossy here if you prefer. I used what I had.
Soon as spring arrives, throw in a few pebbles or a bit of sand to balance the weight of flowers, place your spring blooms inside, and presto-change-oh, you have yourself a delightful faux-ceramic mosaic center-piece! All thanks to the internet and Pam. Thank you sweet Pam!
Have yourself a fine day now. I'll be back real soon!
♥M
