How I Made Button Earrings (It’s Easy!)

For my creative project last week I decided to make earrings out of buttons and apparently I had os much fun with it that I totally forgot to write a blog post about it.  Here it is, a little late but with just as much love!

Basically, I headed to a really cool button store in Tel Aviv that was literally packed with stacks and stacks of boxes of buttons of all colors, shapes and forms (for those of you in TLV, the store was off Nachalat Binyamin on Ha Shomer, next to Shuk HaCarmel). I also went to a bead store by my house to buy earring backs, hooks and some little metal loops to hook the earrings together with (sorry I don’t know the technical term for those things) and I bought some super glue.  I came home and started gluing the backs on the buttons, attaching the hooks, and looping the buttons together to make earrings.  For buttons that had thread holes on the back, I melted the extra chunks of plastic off with a lighter and then filed them down with an emory board.

Here are my results!  You can see more on my Flickr photoset here.

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My New Plant: An Experiment In Time-Lapse Photography

Last weekend my boyfriend, Elior, gave me two plants.  One of them was already in bloom but the other was just a couple of green sprouts.  I asked him what kind of plant it was and he told me, “It’s a surprise.”  The florist told him it would bloom within a week so I knew right away that for my fourth creative project of 2011 I wanted to make a time-lapse video of my new plant growing and blooming.

My tripod is M.I.A. so I set up a pile of books on my desk across from the plant with my camera on top of them and got to work (click here for a pic of my setup).  Every hour (approximately) I took a picture of the plant and you know what?  It was so exciting!  You never really think about growth until you see how much a plant can grow in a single hour and within less than one week my plant was in bloom.  Some new buds have formed so I’m still taking pictures and I’ll be updating the video as my plant grows more, but here’s what I’ve got so far.  The flowers got to heavy and started to fall over so we put sticks in to hold it up at the end.

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What did you do for fun when you were 10?

This week I started reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, in which Rubin spends a year keeping resolutions and taking part in activities to add to her overall happiness and well-being.  I was struck by one particular part of the book, in which Rubin is trying to increase the fun in her life.  She has a hard time figuring out what activities she finds fun and a friend asks her what she liked to do when she was ten.  After all, if you liked it when you were a kid you probably would still like it now.  That was the inspiration behind my third creative project of 2011– Making comic collage stationary.

When I was in middle school I went through this phase where I loved making comic collages on envelopes– buying cheap comic books, cutting them up and sticking them on envelopes with a glue stick.  There’s something pretty satisfying about it, though I can’t quite put my finger on why I like it so much.  In any case, I haven’t made a comic collage envelope in at least fifteen years, so I decided that I’d give it a try and see if I still found it as satisfying as I did when I was younger.

I headed to a comic book store on King George here in Tel Aviv and got three old comic books for 20 shekels (that’s around $5.50) and I bought a glue stick and a cheap stationary set with envelopes and simple card-stock cards.  As for the comics I used to be all about Spawn and Spiderman, but this time I went for Swamp Thing, Flash, and The New Titans.  I went home and started cutting and gluing away, and here are the results. And by the way, it was just as satisfying as it was when I was a kid.

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Photographing Fire or How I Turned A Blackout Into Art

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for my second creative project of 2011 until a leaky ceiling filled my fuse box with water and left me without electricity for two days.  Flashlightless, I resorted to seeing by candlelight and I couldn’t help but notice how even my dog was mesmerized by the jumping flames.  Fire is beautiful, and I think pretty much everyone can agree on that, so I decided for my second creative project this year I would try to capture it on (digital) film.

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