This lovely piece of "bric-a-brac" cost me $6 at the local Salvation Army.  It was about 1 foot square, and those panels, besides being already ugly, were quite dirty and falling apart. 



So, I took it home, tore the panels off, sanded the whole thing (bleh!) and painted it.  Then I took my other SA purchase, a $1.50 copy of The Music Man on record, and chopped up the front cover into nine squares, using the old panels as a guide.  After gluing them onto the fronts of the drawers (along with replacing the old ribbon drawer-pulls), I poured a layer of Envirotex Lite over all of them to give them sort of a tile look. 

The finished product:



And some shots from the side:





The colors came out a little off in these photos.  The blue is much more teal, and the red has a bit of an orange tint-- both were picked to match the colors used in the title on the album cover.  My starbursts on the top and sides didn't end up matching the look of the ones on the cover as much as I would have liked, but overall I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.

I'd like to make some buttons/badges as a little thank-you gift to some people who are helping me out with something.  I'll be making the image for the badge with a hand-carved stamp.  My question is what to make the badge itself out of-- what to stamp *on*.  I may end up just buying some of those "make your own button" thingies from the craft store where they supply the plastic and you just insert an image.  That would work, but I'm wondering if there's something more special I could do.  I've made pins from dominoes before, and something like that would be neat, but it would need to be a bit larger than a domino (without being super heavy) and preferably circular in shape. 

Any ideas of a material I could use that can be stamped on and could also have a pin glued on the back to make it into a button?

For my song, I chose Elvis Costello's "Everyday I Write the Book": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgbSRCCSuwo
I love it for all of the writing metaphors, so I wanted to do something with that.  I found these great clip-art portraits of some famous authors and thought they'd work great for a project that I've been wanting to try-- a waterfall card.

I used this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US4hS0svDow
My card is slightly larger, but I used all of the same measurements otherwise.

Here's the finished card:



They're kind of faint in this picture, but I decorated the face of the card with day of the week stamps (to represent the "everyday" part of the song, of course).  And given the book theme, I thought a bookmark tassle would be perfect for the pull, so I poached one from an existing bookmark and used some brown inkpads to make it match the rest of the card.

Here it is pulled down:



I got the "Everday I Write the Book" words on there by printing them out in reverse, laying them face down on the paper and dabbing the back with acetone to transfer the ink.

Here's a video of the card in action: http://s21.photobucket.com/albums/b279/tdscrafts/?action=view&current=100_0575.flv

And a closer look at the stamps:



Left the right, up to down: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe and Louisa May Alcott

Hi there, long-time lurker, first-time poster.    This contest finally motivated me to join in the fun!

My resolution: Save energy (and by extension, money)

The downstairs of our apartment gets really drafty in the winter, so in order to keep the cold air out and not need to use the heater, I decided to make a draft guard.  But I wanted to do something a little more unusual than a door snake, so I decided to make a door dragon instead.  What better to keep out the cold than a fire-breather.    So, here he is, guarding the door from drafts and other dangers (please try to ignore the stains on the carpet-- the place was like that when we moved in, unfortunately):

http://www.craftster.org/pictures/data/500/medium/100_0562.jpg

And a close-up:

http://www.craftster.org/pictures/data/500/medium/100_05611.jpg

I failed to take any pictures of the process, unfortunately, but it was pretty simple.  His body's some fuzzy felt that had a neat kind of scaly look to it, his spikes, eyebrows, ears and nose are just made of regular felt, and his whiskers and claws are made from pipe cleaners.