Jonathan's Projects

So Pushing Daisies my just be the best tv show ever. The show revolves around a pie baker and his pie shop. Cassie also pretty good at baking pies, so for her birthday I wanted to give her a reproduction of the pie box from the show. I had a pie box, so the only hard part was applying the image to it. The process looks simple enough online, but I found it to be tricky to get good results. I used Mod Podge Photo Transfer Medium. The idea is that you print out a mirror image of your photo on a laser printer, then apply the modpodge to the face of the printout, place it face down on wood, and remove the paper backing, so the image shines through. When I tried it, I kept getting white spots in the middle of the image.   Eventually I figured that some of the solution was getting onto the back side of the paper when I pressed the image into the wood. Since the paper and the solution are both white, you can’t see it. And once it dries, the spot’s there for good. After getting that straightened out, I was able to get a good photo transfer.  To remove the paper, you dampen it with a wet rag, and then rub the paper off with your fingertip. You can’t see the paper while it’s wet, so you have to remove the paper, let it dry, remove some more paper, and so on.  It’s a slow and tedious process. On the third try, I got a transfer that actually worked.

Here’s the results:

Later I tried a similar project, covering a step with an old paper map of one of our adventures. This time I used the original modpodge, and the process was much easier.  I just brushed a coat of the modpodge over the step, placed the map onto it, and brushed another coat over the map. Once it dried I covered it in several layers of polyurethane to make it water proof. So easy. The only problem is that you can still see the paper – It doesn’t look like the photo was painted onto the wood, the way the photo transfer medium does. Still, if I do another project like this, I’m going to use the original modpodge method.

So a while back I ended up with a couple MREs. The disposable bags they come in are really, really strong, and it seemed like a shame just to throw them in the trash. So instead I made a lunch bag out of two of them.

For our wedding proposal, I build a little house with some gnomes. The gnomes and the house were set up in the hobbit village in the woods at Federation Forest State Park, spread out with about 7 or 8 feet between them. The idea was that Cassie would see the first gnome, holding the ‘Cassie’ sign, walk towards it, and then see the second ‘Will’ gnome, then the ‘You’ gnome, and follow the trail of gnome  until she reached the house with the “Me’ sign. It didn’t quite work out like that. Instead, she saw the first gnome, but then saw some other interesting gnomes, and decided to take photos of those. I had to intervene to point out the next gnomes. Eventually we made it to the house. The male gnome had done a face plant into the mud since I set him up the day earlier, but otherwise everything was still there. Also, she said yes 🙂  We left the house and gnomes in the hobbit village for future visitors.