Tiny British Phone Booth

 Since we are often making things that reference our love of British culture (Sherlock Holmes pillows, a Ms. Marple room box, etc.) we decided that it was time to make a little phone booth. The phone booth is small enough so that it can rest on a desk top or be included in a railway scene or used for whatever you want! I used blank Shrinky Dink paper but you could also make a phone booth out of cardboard, fimo, or fabric. The directions that follow are to make it out of shrinkable plastic. One drawback of this is that you will not wind up with perfection. My phone booth is a little crooked and the edges do not line up perfectly. However the translucence of the plastic does make for a nice effect.
Materials

• shrinkable paper. I used two sheets size 5 x 8 inches and had some scraps left over for future projects
• thin black Sharpie
• colored pencils
• scissors
• printout of a phone booth image, taken from directly in front, sized at 3 x the size you want the final phone booth to be  

Steps

1. Work on the scratchy side of the Shrinky Dink paper. Trace 3 identical phone booth sides around the outside and where the windows will be and cut them out around the outside carefully.
2. Use colored pencils to fill in color and accents like the gold crown at the top
3. Write the word "telephone" backwards and trace that using the Sharpie. Fill in around it in white
4. Leave the windows blank
5. Trace the back. This fourth side will be solid red
6. Trim the booths so the top edge does not curl out like it does in real life, or it will be hard to glue them together, Make a straight line on three of them. 
7. Bake in the oven at 350' for 1-3 minutes. This is where you can run into problems. You want the pieces to curl up while they are shrinking then relax back to being perfectly flat. You may want to use a toaster oven for better control and bake one or two pieces at a time. Flatten them with a spatula once they have relaxed back down and are still pliable.
8. After the pieces cool you can assemble them. Mine did not line up perfectly so I made a tiny box out of card stock and glued the pieces onto this.  
9. Enjoy! Now you can make one in blue, write "Police Box" on it, and make the Dr. Who fan in your life very, very happy.

Spooky Little Graveyard Tin

The Great Houdini Escape Necklace

This Sunday, March 24, would have been Harry Houdini's 139th birthday!

He lived a really fascinating life, his career starting as early as 9 years 

old, as a trapeze artist in the circus.

He went on to become a magician, taking the name Harry Houdini as his stage name.

He became the great escape artist, without using "smoke and mirrors" to trick the 

audience. 

He would calm himself into a meditative state to concentrate on freeing himself, along with his ability to regurgitate a key, and dislocate his arm, he could escape anything.

His death, contrary to what movies may have led us to believe, was not in any escape act. He died from peritonitis  from a ruptured appendix, after surgery trying to correct it.

 His appendix was ruptured when a college student caught him off

guard and punched him in the stomach, (before he could brace himself) after hearing the claims Houdini could withstand any blow to the abdomen. 

You can read more here, and all over the internet for more information on him.

Tiny Stained Glass Replicas- Featuring Wright and Sullivan

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This is a very easy and fun way to make tiny stained glass windows. They would be good for a dollhouse or a model of a church or for jewelry or window hangings.
You need to start out with some stained glass windows to trace. What I did was visit Google Images and find some pictures to copy and print out. First I looked for "church stained glass" and found a panel that I liked. Then, since I am from Chicago, I thought of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan. Both men are most famous for their architecture but they also designed gorgeous windows for many of their buildings. There are a multitude of Frank Lloyd Wright images available online. You can also purchase or locate a Dover book that features his stained glass patterns. For Sullivan I found a round window from his Auditorium Theater to complete my trio of pictures.
I printed the images out (remembering that they would shrink about 40%) and used a black Sharpie to outline them onto plain Shrinky Dink paper. You color on the rough side of the paper so that the ink adheres. I then used colored pencil to fill in the spaces. I cut out each image. You may decide to reverse the images before printing them out so they will be facing the right direction when viewed at the end, assuming you view them through the clear side of the Shrinky Dink.

 

After tracing them I punched holes using a hole punch in the Sullivan and Wright ones. The religious one I left plain as I think I want to build a frame for it and mount it in my daughter's dollhouse. I followed the directions and preheated my toaster oven to 350' with a foil-covered tray inside while it was heating up. I then lay my little windows on the foil and watched them shrink. You are supposed to cook them with the colored side up. In a minute or two they are ready to be removed from the oven. You can tell because they will have curled up and then relaxed. The second you get them out of the oven, transfer them to a flat surface and use a rubber spatula or cutting board or anything to flatten them.You have only a few seconds to do this before it hardens. If it does not dry flat you can always soften it again in the oven and try again. I know many people have been making really cool Shrinky Dink projects for years, but I am not one of those people. We never had the blank sheets before and so we just colored in lame shapes from the kits and made little, ugly jewelry. I really enjoyed this project and look forward to many more.