Bottlecap Art

This craft developed out of my dad's love of soda sweepstakes. He always has me enter the codes for him, and as many caps as I come across, one day I decided to just start collecting them. Before I knew it I had a bucket-full and I actually hadn't come up with a plan for their use, but just decided to start something without thinking about it too much. The result:

You may be looking for some explanation.
I belong to an online collaborative art community called hitRECord (the red circle is our symbol, if you will.) Artists upload their 'records' (works of theirs - images, text, video, audio, etc) so basically at the tip of my fingers I have all of this artwork I adore. I had been collecting smaller caps (Coca Cola caps in the middle) and larger caps (Powerade/Minute Made caps surrounding.) The main crafting part of this is the larger caps, which I laid out and spray painted navy blue. I then chose 64 images that I loved and created a circle template to resize them all to, then printing them out and cutting them. The final step was mod-podging the paper to the caps.

This isn't the final result because my original intentions were to hang them on a wall and I still haven't figured out the best way to do so.

Future rehashing of the same craft: When I first started collecting the caps, I had an idea of making one large mosaic, painting caps accordingly so that from afar you would see an almost pixelated image. I couldn't decide on one image though, but it is an idea I would like to try in the future. I cut all the circles by hand because there weren't sized punches at my local Wal-Mart and I was already knee deep in the project (read: impatient.) In a future endeavor I would buy a sized punch that matches the caps' size and perhaps just use pretty scrapbook paper on the lids, in no specific fashion. We'll see.

Hope you found this interesting and let me know if you try/have tried something similar!

xoxo erikah

candlelogra

I really love the look of candle wax and how it melts onto different things.

I originally started this as an art project. For that reason, I didn't photo-document my steps, so I apologize for that now!

The final product cost me $3.20! We had the wood in our backyard. I picked out one I liked then drove nails we had on hand into the wood, pointy part up. I held a lighter to the tip of the nails to make the candles slide onto the nail easily. After that, it was just a matter of letting the candle melt. I did use a lighter to speed up the process and make sure the wax on the bottom melted well enough to hide the nails (with the exception of the orange candle, which you can probably tell.. I accidentally hit it with something and it cracked up the side, so I replaced it.)

I really liked the autumn colors of the candle and my mom actually ended up liking it so she's putting it in the house somewhere with her autumn decor (which we can still get away with because we live in Texas - woot fall-like winters!)

I will probably do this with different candles for my room in the future! I love the natural feeling it has.

xoxo erikah

Outlook

I can't believe the last time I posted was a month ago! Holy sheesh!

Well, in that month's time I have finished up my summer job at OU. Summer camps was a good run. I am now out of school and taking a year off at home. I plan to look for work in September, hopefully finding work in one of the local school systems (either high school or collegiate) so that I may work an environment that I may work in permanently in the future.

I will apply for graduate school in January, to start my master's degree in Higher Education in the fall of 2011. Before then I hope to accomplish:

- learning more about the education field. I have started to follow great education and leadership twitter accounts and hope to familiarize myself with blogs and forums that discuss education.

- working on my design skills. I no longer have access to a mac, but I hope to learn a lot through online tutorials. I love love love design and I hope to learn as much as I can! I think every great communicator should at least understand the world of design.

- having fun with the extra time I have to enjoy my interests. I have picked photography back up (http://www.flickr.com/photos/scarletoak if you're interested) and am spending a lot of time on www.hitrecord.org - a collaborative art website. I have fallen back in love with creating and am glad I have the time to spend on things that bring me so much happiness.

- hopefully dabble in the PR real world a little. I didn't get my degree for nothing! :)

I am open to advice, insight, or feedback about any of the above.

I also hope to blog more in the future about my endeavors, honorbright.
Life is good.

xoxo e