Happy Crafty Thursday!
After I finished my crushed cement cup planter project I decided to play around with the extra cement and try out a few other projects. I don’t have specific tutorials for any of these, but I’ll try to write up a few tips for each idea.
First I made small versions of the crushed plastic cup project, with dixie cup sized plastic cups. I didn’t have a specific plan when I was making them, but afterwards I discovered they made perfect candle holders! I used the same plastic dixie cups to create the center opening, and I found it worked best when the depth of the indent was approximately twice the depth of the tea lights, since that way the flame is protected from wind.
My second project was a tweak on these candle holders, with a touch of gold added in. For the outside marbled effect, I took a tip from a tutorial video I’d spotted on Pinterest where they dripped liquid gold leaf into the wet cement before adding the interior indent mold. Unfortunately I didn’t think the final effect was as impressive as in the video I’d seen, most of the gold ended up looking really tarnished and more like brown stains than gold. So I decided to at paint the rim and the interior of the cups with the gold leaf after they had hardened. I think it helps add to the effect of the exterior gold, but they still aren’t my favorite project.
The final fun little project I made were alphabet magnets. I used silicon ice cube trays for the letters (purchased from Amazon) and then I used a two part epoxy glue to attach some rare earth magnets to the back. It was a little tricky because not every letter has a nice center spot for a magnet, and my magnets were a touch large for the skinnier letters. But it worked in the end. I found that with the smallish openings for the letters, adding extra water to the cement was really helpful so it flowed more easily. The ice cube trays were also really deep, so I only filled each letter approximately half way full, to cut down on the weight of the letters. They ended up about 1/2 inch thick. Unfortunately they are pretty brittle, I’ve already broken the ‘B’ in half, but super glue works well for any broken letters. And if the alphabet isn’t your cup of tea, there are a ton of silicon ice cube and candy molds out there to play with! I can’t wait until some of my nieces and nephews are a bit older and I can make fun magnets for them. I already have my eyes on some adorable dinosaur molds at Michael’s!
I made some cute puzzle piece magnets for school using the same technique. Unfortunately that mold was for candy melts, and was very shallow. And because the puzzle pieces had some thin joints, they’ve already broken in a number of places. But, the fun twist I added was that I painted the edge of each puzzle in a different color, using simple acrylic craft paint. It was so super cute I’m thinking I might try the same technique with these alphabet magnets. They would also look really cute dipped at an angle into the paint, so you cover about 1/3 of each letter to leave plenty of the cement uncovered.
I hope this has gotten your creative juices flowing! I have one more fun cement project that I’ll post a tutorial for next week.
Ciao until then, Allison
the 3 R's blog 
that looks so great, a perfect idea for my balcony!