A while back, let's call it March 13th, I shaved my head for St Baldrick's to help fund children's cancer research. If you have followed this blog you are already painfully aware of some of the hand wringing that I did leading up to this decision. Well it is now June 19th and I am well into the portion of this adventure that caused the most angst.
Let's call it the clown hair stage.
I do say this somewhat in jest but it is, in all actuality, a fairly accurate description. It has just been the last week or so that I have been able to, if I use the term very loosely, style it. And by style it I mean squirting fistfuls of heavy duty product into it and slicking it down as best I can.
Now I am not going to say that I made bald look great but the first month of baldishness I at least felt that I looked somewhat exotic but somewhere around the beginning of month two, when the men in our head shaving group were getting the hair re-cut and the women in the group were sporting cute little short hair styles that lay in pleasant lines, albeit short ones, upon their heads, looking something like this.
my hair was and is doing this.
Now I think we can all agree that Mr. Einstein managed to make this Look iconic, on me, however, it is just plain silly. Still Albert was a proponent for curiosity and one of my reasons for shaving my head was a strong curiosity about, not only what it would feel like to be bald but what I would look like as my hair grew back in. And while the outcome so far is a little ridicules the experiment is ongoing. :-)
But let's get on with today's project shall we. It started with a large tin can and the need for a place to store some of my cooking utensils.
I have been wanting to try using this home made embossing paste recipe since I found out about it and while I originally thought that I would use it on an art journal page it occurred to me that I might work for this project. All you need are the three ingredients in this photo and detailed instruction are in the link above.
So I mixed some up.
And started slapping it on my tin can.
Once the can was completely covered I set it aside to dry.
Now here is where it gets a little weird. But for some reason I decided to make a design out of spaghetti, puffed rise and split peas. Maybe I was reminiscing about some third grade craft project, anyway I laid out a pattern.
I knew that I was going to have difficulty attaching the straight spaghetti noodle to the round shaped can so I thought, what the heck, and cooked them. :-)
Once the noodles were soft and cooled a little I cut them to the length I wanted and commenced gluing my pattern onto the can with more of my homemade embossing paste.
I used a hair dryer as I went along to help speed up the drying process.
Once the pattern was complete I covered the whole thing in another coat of embossing paste.
Added a coat of white paint
Once the paint was dry I added some accents by dry brushing on two different shade of gray paint.
The last step is to seal it with some polycrylic glossy finish.
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."
Albert Einstein
You can understand why I like this quote as I feel it supports my crazy project making. And while Albert Einstein is better known for his theory of relativity than for any experiments with pasta, it would be re-miss, I think, to conclude that he had never done any. Hence I feel a new connection to this brilliant historical figure and aspire to stretch my imagination as far as it will go. I will probably never receive a Nobel Prize for creative pasta uses but I feel that I have Albert's full support and if nothing else we will always have the hair.
So while you may not have any interest in using last nights leftovers for your next craft project I say dive in and make some spaghetti sauce finger paint. :-)
Happy Upcycling,
