Lesson Learned

I am a big fan of Fun Family Crafts.  They have a wonderful collection of tutorials, suitable for kids of all ages.  I've been submitting some of my tutorials there; they've accepted my Ribbon Barrettes, Paper Plate Lion, Halloween Crayon Resist, Paper Plate Pumpkins, Pipe Cleaner Spiders, Costumes for Halloween Candy, Coffee Filter Turkeys, Edible Ornaments for Wildlife, and Snowman Gift Tags.  It's really awesome to see my work featured.

Each time one of my tutorials goes live, I make a point of checking what else they are featuring.  Recently, I found an adorable Melted Snowman Ornament.  Follow the link to see what it is *supposed* to look like- basically, you make a nice puddle of hot glue and add beads and some pipe cleaner to create an adorable melting snowman.  Ours did not turn out so nicely.

Sometimes, my crafts don't turn out like the picture because I am notorious for not following directions and doing things my own way.  But this time, it wasn't my fault!  First, take a look at how our snowman turned out:

He looks a little worse for wear, to say the least.  What the heck?  The glue gun was hot and I squeezed the trigger with no hesitation.  Why didn't my glue pool attractively?

I tried again.  This time, I squirted the glue in a circular motion rather than random globs.  Trevor was hovering over the snowman to put the facial features on the SECOND I stopped the glue.  A tiny bit better, but still not smooth and icy like the sample. 

And then it hit me- my glue gun is tiny.  It is smaller than my hand, with itty-bitty little glue sticks.  It squirts out in tiny amounts, not giant globs.  I love that my itty-bitty glue gun can get into tiny spaces and apply teensy bits of glue, but clearly this craft was meant to be done with a larger, standard-sized glue gun.  Which I don't own.

Final attempt.  I aggressively pushed the glue sticks in so that the glue would come out as rapidly and smoothly as possible, then jammed in the facial features immediately.  (Before starting, we'd decided to try paper features for variety.  We put a coat of Stickles on them ahead of time.)  This final one came out slightly better.

When I put them against a black surface, the flaws really show.  Drat.  I'd intended these as toppers on some gifts, but they are definitely not gift-worthy.  Lesson learned.

A little behind-the-scenes... while I was photographing our snowmen, Trevor asked to make friendship pins using the colorful beads we'd set aside when we carefully sorted out the black ones for our project. 

The snowmen weren't exactly a success, but the friendship pins are cute!