I saw this craft on Jennifer Perkins blog that she did for DIY Network late this summer. I was really bummed that I had found it so late because I thought I wouldn't be able to get the products at Michaels anymore. I had put it out of my mind, but was perusing the clearance room at my store and was really excited to find these! I decided three was a good number.
I've linked her tutorial above if you're interested in reading the article. I used painters tape to make sure that I got clean lines. The pendants are made out of paper and the paint dried pretty quickly so it's great for those of us without much patience for waiting for paint to dry!
I decided that I wanted to take this one step further and coordinate the light covers with the color of the stripe. They had orange covers in the Heidi Swapp Halloween display, but I couldn't find any yellow ones online or otherwise, so I decided I had to make my own. I first tried dying them with turmeric to keep costs low on this project. Thus far my only investment had been the clearance pendants and a pack of orange bulbs that I of course bought with a coupon! Being vegan, we eat a lot of tofu scramble which means we go through a lot of turmeric. It stains things very easily, usually much to our chagrin. It didn't work this time, unfortunately, so on to the next! Michaels stopped carrying the Martha Stewart glass paint and I couldn't find any other glass paint besides spray paint. I didn't need that much paint, so I didn't want to go that route as it would have been wasteful. I decided to try iDye Poly before buying the spray paint. I had used it to dye synthetic tights many years ago when it first came out and was pleased with the results. I figured if it dyes acrylic fabric, it can dye other forms of it and it worked!
iDye Poly has great packaging that dissolves in water so you don't have to worry about spilling the concentrated powder everywhere. I put the dye pack and the intensifier in the water and brought it to a boil. Then I turned it down to low and waited for the water to stop boiling and cool down a little. I didn't take any temperatures because I am not familiar with melting points or anything, I was just winging this. The bulbs did melt a little and become misshapen in the open end where the string of lights are inserted. This made it a little difficult to get into the pendants, but not impossible. The result wasn't exactly what I was hoping for because they have a matte finish instead of the original shine. They are also weirdly tacky, but my main concern was getting them yellow and that worked out. So while I wouldn't call this a 100% success, it worked out well enough to satisfy me.
I can't believe today is the last day of September and Halloween is almost over! I haven't managed to get nearly any of the things made that I wanted to because my studio is still a store room for shop inventory and I've been working like mad to be ready for move in day. I was hoping that would have come already, but I'm crossing my fingers that we can get a lot of work done on the new space this weekend! Now I have to go catch up on household chores I've been putting off >_<
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