I got crafty with my present for Kate’s graduation – ok, I’m still not sure if graduation is the proper term. She’s still finished with her residency anyway. It involved my new love Etsy as well.
In looking for something that was interesting and different for my very deserving sister-in-law, I considered a lot of different things. There weren’t many things that I wanted to straight up buy so I decided to buy supplies (Etsy sells both handmade products and supplies for any number of different projects) and make something for her.
Basically – get crafty.
I found this lot of 40 x-ray clippings from old medical texts: 
My original idea was to select a few and frame them. Well, when they arrived, they were all much smaller than I’d expected. So I had to rethink my project.
What I decided to do was to use a piece of mat board that I had leftover (from when I bought a whole sheet, had it cut into 4 16” x 20” pieces but only used 3 of them for the pictures over our bed) and make something of a collage.
Here’s my “cast of characters” if you will: 
One 16” x 20” black frame, the 16” x 20” white mat board, Tombow removable adhesive, 3M spray adhesive, my Creative Memories picture cutter, and the x-rays, of course. I should have included a pencil and a ruler – preferably a yard stick.
My first step, sadly, was to trim each clipping so that they had straight edges – the woman I bought them from had done just slightly better than a random hack job with a pair of scissors. 
Next I moved on to layout. First I had to decide how much white space I wanted to leave. 
I decided on 3.5” all around with a 1/4” bottom weight (wherein you have 1/4 – 1/2” more border on the bottom edge of mat for a picture) and drew guidelines on the back of my piece of mat board so that I could begin to determine how I was going to lay out the clippings.
Clearly then, the next step was to figure out how to lay things out – a completely trial and error process. 
Once I had the layout mostly fixed: 
I used the removable adhesive to hold them in place while I determined which ones needed trimming. 
Having the pictures more or less stuck in place as I worked made it easier to be more precise with layout and trimming.
After I was completely satisfied, it was time to turn the mat board over to begin for real.
I lightly drew a box as guidelines and got to work spraying each clipping thoroughly with the adhesive putting them into place permanently. 
Almost finished… 
The final steps: erase the bits of pencil that show between the pictures, prepare frame, and then put the whole thing together.
Final product: 
It seemed to be a hit. Kate plans to hang it over her desk in her new digs.
I also found this: 
on Etsy and thought it would be funny for her to hang on the fridge.
No comments:
Post a Comment