I can do that!: DIY magnets

As I mentioned last week, daughter #1 recently moved into her own place. Well, the air vent thingy in the hallway of her apartment is covered by a huge metal cover. It doesn't look awful, it's painted to blend in with the wall. But, my creative self had an idea. Why not use it as a magnetic picture frame!?! Get lots of cute magnets and the girls can hang pictures and notes on it, like most of us use our fridge for. Low and behold, she and her roommates loved the idea! Pretty cool, I can still impress twenty-something's! Of course, she said "so mom you'll have to find me some really cute magnets". Again, my creative self said "I can MAKE them". I have all the stuff I need at home already. So, I left from painting the chevron wall (see previous post) and got busy gathering my supplies for an abundance of cute magnets.

This thing. Perfect magnet board, FREE!

Here's what I used:

Magnets- I had buttons and strips

Large clear glass marbles/gems with flat backs

Scrapbook paper

Craft paint

Glitter

E6000 glue

Mod Podge-forgot to put that in the pic.

I started with the marbles and some scrapbook paper. I picked a few patterns that I thought would look good, and laid the marbles flat side down on the paper to gauge how the pattern would look. Then I cut little squares of the paper making sure the part of the pattern I wanted could be centered on the marble. Then, I painted a layer of Mod Podge on the flat side of the marble and stuck it down onto the paper.

Once the Mod Podge dried- you'll know when it's dry when you don't see any white through the front of your marble-I cut the excess paper off around the marble. Don't worry if you don't have perfect circles of paper, the marbles are forgiving in that way. Then I added a few extra coats of Mod Podge over the back of the paper just to get a good seal.

This is a pic of the backs of the marbles while the Mod Podge dries.

Here are the first ones that dried, by now I'm in love with them!

My girl is a glitter girl, so next I made some pink glitter ones. I painted the backs with Mod Podge, then sprinkled the glitter on them and pressed the glitter down well with my fingers, then just let it dry.

After the Mod Podge dried on these, I sprayed them a couple of times with some spray clear polyurethane, just to harden the glitter really good.

For all of these, my next step after all the paper and glitter was dry, was to put a dab of the e6000 glue on each one and press one of the magnet buttons onto them. Now, my magnet buttons had foam adhesive things on the back, I didn't remove those. I took off the paper that covered the sticky part, and just stuck them sticky side down onto the e6000. After a while, I noticed that the magnets weren't settling down into the glue well, so I put them all together on my table, magnet side down, and placed a heavy book on top of them. The added weight helped make sure the magnets adhered to the marbles well.

And, here they are all done.

I should note, the 4 gem-looking pink ones aren't the marbles. I found this pack of pink gemstone embellishments on clearance at Hobby Lobby, and thought what the heck, stick a magnet on those too!

Next, I moved on to the clothespin magnets. First, I painted them, front, sides and the insides with some craft glue the same color as the glitter I was using on them. Hey don't have to be perfect, I just wanted the background to be the same color as the glitter so it would blend better.