Last week, Anita and I decided to take a little day off to do some crafty fun. She’d seen this nifty little tutorial online on how to make bookends out of some dollar store plastic animals and plastic photoframes, and once she showed it to me, I got a wee bit excited as well.

Surprisingly, it was pretty hard to find plastic animals that were suitable – we hit up the Reject Shop, as well as several asian variety stores, and settled on some dinosaur toys from Kmart. Instead of photoframes, we got point of sale signage plastic holders, so that there was no slant in them.

We tried several methods of cutting them up in half. They didn’t cut well at all with sharp scissors, so we went for the next option in our arsenal:

nyahahahahahaa!

A little bit of overkill? Perhaps. But it was fun.

In hindsight, doing that with shorts and no protective shoes on was probably not a good idea.

Moving on!

We soon realised that a sharp box cutter worked MUCH better to slice through the animals cleanly.

that's MUCH easier!

see? much easier.

You will have to ignore the “bloodstain” on my hand. It was actually some 24 hr lipstick I’d tried on 2 days before. Yes, I bought it because its staying power is evidently impressive! (You can buy it too!)

Whilst I worked hard on the slicing and dicing, Anita busied herself with completely useful exercises, such as making a mutant managerie.

very very helpful.

After cutting them all up, we stuck them onto their plastic frames. It was hard to get them to stick, even superglue was pretty useless. The hot glue gun didn’t work at ALL, though we did have a fun time playing with it. In the end though, Gorilla glue did the trick.

Anita magically becoming helpful when it's not manual labour.

drying in the sun!

To be fair, Anita’s skillset is the fiddly stuff (like gluing these animals on delicately). I have no such claims to such skills. Once they’d dried, we took them to the very official spray-painting station in my backyard to get made over.

official. spraypainting. station.

Anita went for silver, and I went for (surprise surprise!) GOLD.

And yes, S did come home and ask why the garden rocks were metallic. He wasn’t impressed.

We used plastic spray paint primer, let it dry for 40 minutes, and then 2 light and thin coats of our colour of choice.

Annnnnnnd, TA-DA!

finished products! our own metallic zoo!

pwetty!

indoors under nice light...

in use...

And yes. I am aware that my bookend bodies don’t match. And that has everything to do with the fact that I LIKE mutant animals and NOTHING to do with the fact that we may have botched a few of the first specimens, OKAY?

Good.

Now that’s sorted, one last gorgeous photo of our wonderfully productive day!

TA-DA!