Washer Suncatcher/Wind chime

I made it through ANOTHER round of the One Crafty Contest! I still can’t believe I was voted in as a contestant let alone that I’ve made it so far! Thank you to everyone who has been voting and sending me kind words of encouragement. You can find all my past projects and read about my participation in the contest HERE.

The latest round required us to use glitter. My entry was this washer and cookie cutter suncatcher/wind chime. It was NOT, however, my first project, and was really only half of what I wanted my final entry to be.

(it’s  hard to make out the letters without the glitter coloring each letter)

I worked SO hard on garden art made out of washers. I spelled out the word “bloom” with different sizes of washers and made the curves of the letters into flowers. I had the whole thing glued together (I even super glued my finger to a cookie sheet in the process). I had the washers glittered, but then I moved it to keep it safely away from my kids, and the whole thing broke since the super glue wasn’t set yet! I had planned to make it the top of my wind chime instead of the rod I used. So instead, I added the cookie/fondant cutters to my final project so it wasn’t so plain. I guess it was meant to be though, because the final project was good enough to put me in the top 5!

This project was actually pretty easy, but really time consuming. It required A LOT of drying time.

I covered cookie sheets with aluminum foil and then put wax paper on top. I started by laying out the different sizes of washers until I had a pattern I liked. Then I decided how many colors of glitter to use and what order they would be in. I filled the center of each washer with Mod Podge. It worked best to fill it with a thin layer, but not so thin that it would pull away from the sides as it dried. To prevent drips, I filled a children’s oral syringe with the Mod Podge. It worked perfectly! I filled the cookie cutters the same way.

Then I sprinkled on the glitter and waited, and waited, and waited for it to dry. Because of the deadline for the contest, I ended up putting the cookie sheets in my oven on the lowest temperature to speed dry the Mod Podge. The cookie cutters were especially slow to dry, so they spent several hours in the oven! I would have preferred to let it all air dry. The oven made some of the wax paper fuse to the back of the washers. The ones that did air dry popped right off the wax paper.

(here you can see the wax paper that fused to the back of the washers and some undried glue in the cookie cutters)

When it was mostly dry, I shook off all the extra glitter. The Mod Podge dries clear, so it created a little window in the middle of each washer with suspended glitter (unfortunately the pictures don’t show this well). Then I laid out all the washers the way I wanted it to look in the end, but upside down so I could glue strong fishing line to the back of each piece.

I primed and spray painted a wooden dowel in a metallic silver to match the washers. I tied on each string of the wind chime, measured carefully so they were evenly spaced, and then glued each of the tied strings to the dowel so they wouldn’t slide around. All that was left to do was hang it up!

(So pretty! I actually used ultra fine iridescent cosmetic glitter for all the white pieces to give it extra sparkle!)

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