So, I have deemed that pinterest was created by the demon of misdirection!  I could loose days on there, finding way to many things that I want to do.

So….that being said, we did our first Halloween pinterest project this year:

Now, I know there is a whole political ecological movement going on to do away with unnecessary cardboard being put in out landfills….but where would we be without toilet paper rolls, and paper towel rolls. This is a whole craft department that comes up with this to repurpose these things into purposeful things.  AND where would all the gerbals live if we did away with their homes? They would be homeless!!!!

You can search pinterest and google to get atleast 100 sets of directions on how to do these, here is what we did:

1. put the word out to co-workers, friends and neighbors that you are collecting empty, toilet paper rolls and be prepared for laughter and “WHAAAAT” when you ask. I work at a small company and we changed our own toilet paper rolls when they got empty so I had an endless supply of these things.
2. Get your supplies together:
   1. Small scissors
   2. pencil (I used a fine point sharpie, we could see the drawing on the card board better)
   3. wide, black duct tape (any heavy dense tape will work)
   4. 4″ glow sticks (ebay is the best resource for these: $20 for 50 of them)
3. Draw your designs: I measured the rolls and drew out a rectangle as a guide and set to drawing me some sneaky eyes. Now, because I am a perfectionist, I couldn’t just draw them I had to DRAW them – electronically. I have a cutting machine (the machine before the Cricut machines). So I drew up my sets of yes and took a piece of scrapbook cardstock and cut out my guide.
4. Then we setup an assembly line: I drew them on the rolls and my hubby started cutting out the eyes. I just happened to have these little bitty tiny scissors that I purchased at a fabric store that don’t cut fabric. Yep, impulse buy but because they are so small they worked really great here.
5. Next cut your tape in rectangle that will totally cover the end – make sure it’s wide enough that fits across the end. If it doesn’t you’ll need two pieces for each side.
6. We then put the tape on both ends of the tubes. Now, if you are paying attention, you will notice that we have not yet put the glow sticks in. That’s because the eyes that we cut were so big that when the tape was on there, we could slide the glow sticks in thru the eye sockets. This way we could have all the ends on the tubes so they were ready to go on Halloween.
7. We were doing this the Monday before Halloween, so we decided to try one to see how it worked.
   

   Test Subject

   

   24 hours later

8. On Halloween night, we snapped all the glow sticks and inserted them into the tubes and started distributing them around the yard.  We had so much fun trying to figure out where to put 28 sets of eyes.  You don’t realize how many that is until you are standing out in the yard trying to find places to put them all.

All in all, we had a great time and we get to chalk this one up as a Pinterest/Facebook Success Project!

So to help you have a successful pinterest/facebook project here are the guides that I used.  You should remember that I drew these up and cut them out of 12×12 piece of paper, so you might have to change the size a little bit if you are printing on 8 1/2 x 11 paper.

TP-eyes – zip file that contains the following files:

• TP-eyes-noguide.jpg
• TP-eyes.jpeg
• TP-eyes.mtc – Mate The Cut software used with digital cutting machines
• TP-eyes.svg – simple vector graphic file used by other digital. When you open this file, there is a small square about the first set of eyes on the right. I use this square as a sizing template. That little square is 1″ square. What I have found out, is when I bring in SVG files into Mate The Cut or any of the other digital drawing/cutting program it does not come in to the program in scale. So I put this little 1″ square somewhere in the drawing. Just delete that before you cut. If you don’t it won’t really matter – you will just have a small square in the void about those eyes – it doesn’t interfere with the eyes at all.
• TP-eyes.ai – original illustrator file that I drew the eyes in.

TP-eyes.jpg

TP-eyes-noGuide.jpg