Monday, September 28, 2009

Make It Yourself Monday - Metal Stamp Edition

It is Make It Yourself Monday, the time I share with you the ideas I've had for making hand-made gifts for Christmas this year. I know some will fall flat, but some will turn out really well and in the end, I'll have made myself proud and, hopefully, made my friends feel special by giving gifts from my hands and my heart.

If you read Little Birdie Secrets, maybe you've already seen this clever idea for a gift. She calls it a gift idea for guys, but I know a lot of girls who'd like to have personalized dog tags (with sayings or nicknames or whatever) for key rings or pendants or whatever. So, I headed out to Harbor Freight with Superman (who thought he'd died and gone to heaven) and bought my own set of the metal letters (1/8") for $8.99. Superman couldn't believe I had a craft idea that was right up his alley and immediately started playing with the stamps and some sheet metal.


What do you think? Pretty sweet, isn't he? (After he did this, we realized that instead of an "E" and a "3", our set had two "3"s and we needed to exchange it. Our next step is to hit the Army Surplus store for some blank dog tags.



See the "E" in this washer? It looks like a real one! (Yes, this is a simple washer from Home Depot...Superman had it and was still playing) Wouldn't this be cute on a long chain? (I'm thinking the words would have to either go completely around the circle or just be on the bottom half or 2/3s so the chain would get in the way. Obviously, this will take a little bit of practice to get the letters aligned properly and the ink in the letters to show, but I think we have the makings of some neat gifts here. What do you think?

(Do you have an idea for Make It Yourself Monday? Let me know and if we have enough, I'll add a Mr. Linky to this post.)

P.S. Did you know there are only 87 days until Christmas? Even if you're buying your gifts, it is really time to start planning!

(Oops...I scheduled this with the wrong date, so you didn't get to see it. Sorry!)

6 comments:

More Than Words said...

Cute, Erin!!

And I can't believe only 87 days?????? Wow!!!

Andrea said...

WOW.....can we not talk about Christmas, yet. I am not ready to think about it...

Blessings, andrea

onlymehere said...

Thanks so much for stopping by my sewing blog! I see that you're a friend of Tootsie's. I love that girl. I sent an email telling my kids and family about your facebook post so you may get a few visitors looking at it :) I kind of glanced through your blog tonight and I'll definitely be back! Cindy

Unknown said...

It is scary to me how we do many of the same things with out ever speaking about it. I have the metal stamp letters too, but I think yours are better and more heavy duty than mine since mine are meant for scrapbooking. I was actually thinking of using mine on polymer clay gift tags this year. Twilight zone freaky or what?

Clark said...

I know that the idea is for somewhat of a random placement of the stamped letters, but I would like to make something to line the punches up a little bit. I feel a jig coming on...

gail@My Repurposed Life said...

thanks for the kind words on my blog about the not so boring trays. Really sweet!
I bought these stamps from harbor freight also! Although I haven't really tried them out yet. I've been running around doing too many projects!
take care!
gail