window displays and waxed envelopes!

Posted on 10. Jan, 2011 by Princess Lasertron in CAMP, craft

When Rachel Jensen, one of my new interns, began working with me, one of the first projects we took on was creating some new fixtures and decorative crap to put in our beautiful front window at CAMP. I knew that I wanted to do some kind of huge pom pom, and Rachel devised a really ingenious way to make them using coffee filters. We used white and brown ones that we had in the office already for these, folding and pinning them into a 6” styrofoam ball. Easy, mindless work that you could do in front of the tv!

A few weeks later we decided to make a new window display, so we moved the poms over to my workspace in the back corner. To bring some additional light back there, we also created a lighted DIY chandelier out of waxed paper and embroidery hoops that Rachel picked up on the Junk Jaunt.

We ironed pretty objects (patterned tape, glitter, bits of trim and ribbon, vintage flash cards, tiny jingle bells) between sheets of waxed paper and hand-cut the pieces into circles. We glued the circles to strands of string and tied them to the embroidery hoops, then tied the hoops together to form tiers. A simple light fixture purchased at a local hardware store finished it up! I need to take a better picture close-up of these but right now this is what I have.

It took us a while to figure out the best thing to do with the waxed paper, and we made a lot of mistakes and messes along the way and had a whole pile of waxed paper mistakes. It killed me to just throw it all away, so Rachel thought of another idea:

You need…
…an envelope (it can be a used one. just grab one out of your junk mail pile!)
…scissors
…parchment paper
…waxed paper
…iron & ironing surface
…crayon shavings
…your favorite paper glue (I like Zip-Dry made by Beacon Adhesives)

1. Carefully unfold your envelope so it remains in one piece. This will be your template pattern.

2. Lay a sheet of parchment paper wide enough to accommodate your template pattern down on your ironing board and put one layer of waxed paper on top of that. Next, sprinkle just a few crayon shavings over the waxed paper–you wouldn’t believe it, but less is really better because they’re gonna melt all over the place. Finally, put another piece of waxed paper and another layer of parchment paper on top. It’s a waxed paper sandwich!

3. Iron right over the parchment paper to fuse the pieces of waxed paper together (and keep your iron clean!).

4. After it is ironed and cooled, lay your perfect envelope pattern over the melted wax paper. Trace the pattern with your favorite colored crayon. Make sure to mark the dotted lines on your wax paper to know where you need to fold.

5. Next, fold where you marked on the wax paper and glue the flaps down with your favorite glue. (We love zip dry glue)

6. Fold down the top flap and VOILA! You have yourself a cute new envelope! Now go send a handwritten letter to your mother and use your envelope-she will love it! (You can get labels similar to ours here!)

P.S. We found that you can virtually melt anything in between these layers, so get creative with it! Vintage stamps, glitter, bits of trim, tiny beads, tiny photos, fortune cookie fortunes, raffle tickets…limitless.

xo
meg

Tags: diy, interns