Epic Fail!

Yes Pinterest is great, but...not everything is as easy as it looks.  I've done ok, up until now trying to mimic some of the things I've seen on Pinterest, but by no means are they as good as what you see up there.  This is a prime example.  I've come to call it, my Epic Fail!

I took a shot at some more "artistic" types of coasters.  If you've seen my Mickey coasters they came out pretty good.  Tiles with scrapbooking paper and mod podge...how can you screw that up, right?!  Well I wanted to go for something vintage for my aunt's birthday.  She's a big wine drinker and I've never seen a coaster at her house so I thought I'd try the photo transfer on tiles using the medium gel.

1st of all, my printer decided not to print out quite as dark and clear as it usually does, after many tries. 2nd, don't use glossy photo paper.  It's too thick and doesn't peel off properly. 3rd it takes forever for the gel to dry, way longer than 24 hours.  4th, the tiles I used were very porous and just didn't seem to want to take the pics.

As you can see the wine bottles and grapes barely are noticeable on the tiles.  I'm going to give them to my aunt anyway.  It comes from the heart, right?  : )

I'll try it again and try to fix my many errors.  Hopefully it works next time.  I have 4 more tiles to test it on.

Coasters

Yes I am a procrastinator!  I do everything the last minute and may even be late often.  I have been since college...writing my papers the morning they are due : )  With this in mind, as I prepared to go to Bunco yesterday I realized it was not only my birthday month but one of the other ladies birthday month as well.  As she and I are the youngest on the Bunco Babes (average age is 50 something...that's being kind, lol...and I'm 42 and she's 32) we have what I like to think of as a bond. I didn't want to show up empty handed, so there was a craft that I've been dying to try.  I even had all the supplies to make them...tile coasters.

She is a huge Disney fan.  Visits Disneyland practically every week, so I dipped into my Disney scrapbook paper and made these coasters.

They are all over Pinterest, but I chose this site to work from http://blog.hwtm.com/2010/07/diy-tutorial-mod-podge-tile-coasters/ . Their tutorial was really easy, glossy white tiles from Home Depot, cut the paper to size, apply paper with mod podge, a layer of mod podge over the paper, finished it with lacquer, then felt on the bottom. I managed to do them in 30 minutes.

I really liked them and someone in the family is going to get some coasters for Christmas : )

Here are some closer shots of the coasters.

(I should have centered this last one, oh well, next time.)