Comic book rings- tutorial

These are so much fun and so fast. A great project to do with kids or tweens.

You'll need:

Adjustable ring blanks- the ones I used are the white adjustable ring blanks from Rings and Things

Small wood shapes- I have a bag of "woodsies" from the craft store

3/4 inch circle punch 

paint or markers

glitter

Mod Podge

E-6000 glue

a comic book or fan magazine- something with pictures!

I buy extra copies of cheap promo comics and comics from the 25¢ bin at my local comic book shop specifically for crafting. Before you cut it up, make sure it's not valuable! 

I chose circles for my rings, and the bag of wooden shapes has a bunch of these smaller circle shapes.

Base paint the wood shape or color it with markers. 

Mix up some Mod Podge and glitter then paint the shape with that. I used a cheap foam brush.

Then you should let it dry completely. I didn't which is why there are specks of glitter on my images.

Find an image that will fit well in the 3/4 punch. The best way to do this is to take a piece of scrap paper and punch out a circle on it. Then use the punched paper with the circle cut out to frame images until you find one you like. Because of the diminutive size of the circle, you could do something that looks out-sized very easily. Like one eye of a cover model. Ads for dvds, cds and such often have very small pictures that work well in the punch. The images above were from an ad for Buffy coffee cups!

Punch out your image, then put Mod Podge on the wood shape and put the picture down on it. Cover the whole thing in Mod Podge, let dry.

After it's dry, glue the wood shape to the ring blank with a dollop of E-6000.

If you're working with younger children, you may want to use a chunkier glitter and you'll want to be the one who uses the E-6000. But they can do the rest and will enjoy picking just the right image for their rings. If you've managed to get on Disney's mailing list, you probably get regular snail mail ads for DVDs that have perfect sized images for Disney themed rings.

The rings are very adjustable, and the glue on pad is slightly textured to grab the glue better. 

Button bobby pins and rings

The only decorative buttons I could find quickly in my huge box of beads and buttons were a package of small Halloween themed buttons so that's what I used.

You only need a few things to make very cute inexpensive button bobby pins and I'm sure you know how to make them. I'm posting the project mostly because of how I trimmed the shanks off the buttons.

If you look at all my supplies, you see inexpensive craft type buttons, decorative buttons, bobby pins and adjustable rings with glue on pads which I got very inexpensively from Rings and Things, the rings are 72 for 9.00, the bobby pins are 72 for 11.28. I used Household Goop which is a similar adhesive to E-6000. I use them interchangeably for most projects. The other thing you'll see is a pair of toe nail clippers.

I have a craft dedicated pair of toe nail clippers because they work really well for trimming small pieces of plastic like shanks on buttons and have a built in file for smoothing and texturing  surfaces. It's a trick I hit on while my son and I were discussing the best way to trim sprues from his plastic models and miniatures.

 

That's one untrimmed button and one that's trimmed so you can see them a little better. 

So after you get the decorative buttons trimmed, you just glue them to a plain button then glue that to the pad on the bobby pin or adjustable ring. Superglue will also work very well to connect plastics but my Superglue was super gunky. For younger kids, you'll want to do all the gluing because both glues have fumes.

My daughter and I are planning to do a table at least one of the local fairs this year so I've been looking for inexpensive things we can make to sell. We will package the bobby pins in sets of two on business cards.

If you're making bobby pins and they have a direction like my bats, make sure you make them opposites or you'll have two pretty button bobbies for the same side!

I also gave some of the ring blanks to my son, who will probably wind up making little toy gun rings using some of the weapons from his old toys and things like that. I told the kids if they like the adjustable rings well enough and they sell well, I'll also make them some sterling adjustable rings to decorate.