Personalising a Kendama II

Continuing with the post on "Personalising a Kendama", here's another way to make your kendama one of a kind!  I just took out some acrylic paint and just went with the flow... faces for each of the cups of the kendama.  What do you think?

Sad face :'(

Happy face :)

Angry angry

Personalising A Kendama

Kendamas are all the rage now amongst students.  What IS a Kendama, you say?  It's a traditional Japanese toy made of wood!  Our first close-up encounter with a kendama was a small one that Big One got as a Children's Day's gift from his teacher.  Big One practiced really hard and seemed really serious about it, so we got a bigger, more standard size kendama soon after.  The price difference between the plain ones (raw wood handle + black ball) and the fancy ones (think lightning paint effects or Spiderman mask on the ball) was about $10-$20!  Fortunately Big One was convinced that the plain one was sufficient and Mummy promised to personalise it for him.

First off, let's imprint some initials on the plain black ball!  I did this using masking tape as the "stencil":

Masking tape "stencil"

Then, with a silver inkpad, dab on the silver!

Inked on

I happened to have some varnish on hand and gave this 2 coats of it, letting it dry completely in between and there you are, a simple way to personalise your kendamas!  These were made as gifts:

Customised Kendamas

Upcycled Vase

I rarely get flowers, so when I got a lovely bunch of flowers for my birthday, the first thought I got was to find a vase for the flowers, but....... there were none!  I grabbed an empty milk powder tin, some acrylic paint and did this:

Acrylic Paint on Milk Tin

 Ah.... now there's a place for my pretty flowers :)

Upcycled Vase

Upcycled Infinity Scarf

Upcycled Infinity Scarf

What do you do when your friend passes over very pretty dresses that you can't fit into (Boohoo!!)?  There was no way to alter it to fit me but it had such pretty fabric - a sheer blue with white spots and flowers.  So snip snip snip went the skirt portion of the dress, and sew sew sew lots of straight lines and Ta-daa - here's my new infinity scarf for those chilly bus rides!

Circle Batik Skirt

I didn't realise how long it has been since the Hubby bought batik fabric for me from Indonesia - more than a year ago!

If you recall, the only item I made with the batik fabric was a skirt.  That first skirt was a really easy project; a rectangular piece of cloth with an elastic top.  This time, I wanted to challenge myself with something I've never done before - a circle skirt!

I remember reading the tutorial on MADE and the skirts looked so so cute!  Then I noticed that more and more people on the streets were also wearing circle skirts.  So armed with batik fabric and black elastic, off I went.  I'm quite pleased with result, I have to say.  What do you think?

Batik Circle Skirt

Tissue Paper Holder & Pouch

Have you ever encountered this scenario?  It's time for lunch and you grab your wallet, tissue paper, office access card and mobile phone, then you realise that you are juggling all these items while trying lock the office door and accidentally drop something or, even worse, everything on the floor!  Well, I got fed up of carrying everything separately and decided to make something to solve this problem.

1. I needed a compartment for tissue paper
2. I needed a compartment for office access cards and keys
3. I needed this to be able to attach to a lanyard so that it's hands-free!

So, I grabbed some fabric from an old skirt that my friend kindly donated to me and came up with this:

Tissue Paper Holder & Pouch

It is slightly bigger that the usual tissue paper holder, so it can easily hold cards and keys or some spare change, and the loop at the end allows for it to be attached to a lanyard.  Now, this holds everything I need except my mobile phone.  No worries!  I have a cute pouch for this purpose :)

Plastic Bottle Shark

Plastic bottle shark

Give a boy a plastic bottle and pictures from Pinterest and what do you get? "Mummy!  I want to make a shark!"  So there you go, a shark it is then.  What would boring Mummy's do without Pinterest?