I’m cracking up at the pop-top page. I actually sorta liked the cheezy light fixture.
That leads me to bottle caps: In the 70s my aunt had made my mom a set of trivets out of crocheted-over bottlecaps sewn together. They were harvest gold, impossible to clean and always smelled faintly of beer. Yuk! She used those for at least 15 years and I bet she still has them in a drawer someplace!!!
Popsicle stick crafts. I remember making “jewelry boxes” like this when I was in Cub Scouts.
And then there were the macaroni projects. Using elbow macaroni to decorate things. Making plaques with the Cub Scout oath using alphabet macaroni.
Things made by children don’t count. I bet there are lots of parents out there who absolutely treasure the macaroni pictures their kids made when they were five years old, even if by any objective standard they would be a piece of junk. The same thing done by supposedly mature adults is just weird.
I’ve seen some of these things… My Grandma and aunts are voracious crafters. Usually they have some sense of non-kitsch.
That said, my Grandma has a ‘timeout’ doll in the living room. She made it herself :eek:
My aunt also makes stuff like figures made of bells (elves, cows and such), my Grandma has made elves on ladders that lean against the Christmas tree. Some of these things they see at the craft shows, but they only make them for themselves. Not for others (thank goodness) though I have recieved them in years past.
How can anyone like the garbage bag wreathes? Though my roomie when I mentioned them pulled out our leis from St Patrick’s Day. Essentially plastic wreaths 
Ah well. No accounting for taste.
Hey, I resemble that. I am all in favor of putting car parts in unusual places. I use fender badges as wall art, and hood ornaments mounted on blocks as bookends and paperweights… I’d put a spring from a '65 Impala in my yard. Might not put a bowling ball on it, though. Would try to find something else to do with it.
I like cars far too much.
Oh, and even though I think there’s nothing wrong with turning old items to completely new uses (provided they actually ARE old; somebody mentioned a reproduction potato box hamper, and that’s dumb because it’s a mass-produced thing that loses even the vintage nift it might have had at one point)… I have first-hand experience of The Abomination of Crafts. My mother derived a significant income from crafting back in the '80s and early '90s. Some of her stuff was kinda nice, most of it was completely pointless, but it sold well, made her quite a bit of money, and even got her work into some photo shoots of houses in Country Living magazine. She made stuffed cows, mostly. And Amish kitsch. “Pennsylvania Dutch” stuff (and my father’s family is Pennsylvania Dutch, while Mom’s completely not). She did quilts too, but I don’t know whether she sold them. Ah, I remember spending long hours hand-painting the spots on those cows while she sewed their tails on…
One of the other booths at the craft fair sold jewelry made out of “Fantastic Plastic,” which was this stuff that came in tiny little pellets with a low melting point - you’d plop 'em in hot water and it’d melt into a gob that you could then pull out with a chopstick and mold into Whatever. Gigantic necklace pendants, huge hideously ugly brooches that nobody would ever wear except old ladies with no taste… One of her favorite things was with a different type of plastic, which came in sheets printed with designs and metallic stuff. I don’t know how that worked, just that I remember seeing it for sale in racks at the craft store where Mom worked. She’d take little white ceramic heads, faces like masks, and use the sheet-plastic to give them hats. Sometimes there’d be real feathers stuck in there, and fake gemstones. Who would wear that? Why would they wear that? Why did she think they were a good thing to make?
Here’s my idea for a craft item–a do-it-yourself Homeland Security Alert Level monitor!
It would kind of be like those calendars with the slide-out dates and months. It would be a board with a slot for each of the 5 color levels, and would be all cutesy and stuff. It would say: “Today’s terrorism alert level is:” and you slide in the appropriate color.
ElwoodCuse, I’ll go you one better - sell it in a kit with a roll of duct tape and some plastic sheets… Perhaps stenciled with bunnies and lambs. Hmmm, I’m seeing a stroke of market genius here!
racinchikki I remember that stuff. I used it to make life-size models of Pernese fire-lizards, way back in my early teens when I was obsessed with Anne McCaffrey. It was kind of fun to play with, but very tacky.
You could probably make decent stage jewelry with it if you painted it. Hmm.
My mother-in-law has almost every piece of kitchy craft item you can imagine, including the timeout dolls. Geese, ducks, cows, pigs, wooden cut-outs, cheap dried flower arrangements, TP covers, cross-stitch wall hangings which are very poorly done, talking plastic animals (like Big Mouth Billy Bass), ugly paintings or decorative mirrors, all of it. She just tosses every bit of it up with no regards to how it looks with anything else. The end result is the ugliest house you’ve ever seen, and the idea of less is more has never entered her mind.
Love it! Make mine in cow-print…no no! Country goose pattern…No no! The stencilled pineapple motif!
Ok, here’s mine – it’s a spinoff on the “timeout kids” called “Useful Kids.” It’s a stuffed actual-sized child doing some type of menial labor. You could have one toting a cinderblock with bits of mortar stuck to him, one with Windex and a squeegee, one in the yard pushing a lawn mower, one with a martini shaker and drinks tray… Maybe a sign saying “Is THIS one dry enough, mother?”
You speak of the dreaded Friendly Plastic!
::Pauses for involuntary nervous twitching::
I used to manage a bead store in Southern California during the worst of the FP craze. Ugh! I apologize; part of my job was teaching classes on how to make these atrocities. Racinchikki, you described what I helped people learn to make to a tee. In private, I called the finished product “wearable bird droppings.” The brooches and earrings sold really well for our clients for about a year, until they started getting complaints from their customers about the jewelry melting at inopportune times. Note: It is not a good idea to take off your heavy, bulky FP and rhinestone earrings and throw them on your dashboard, especially in a subtropical, sunny climate.:eek:
Here’s some links to the alleged jewelry:
The scene of the crime. These are examples of the gewgaws used to make the stuff. Note the ugly ceramic head. The bird up front and center is somewhat terrifying.
Actually, I have also seen some really nice-looking jewelry made from FP, but I think it’s too unstable to make a good product. In addition to the risk of melting, I have found that it gets really powdery, brittle and friable after about five years or so.
While I was hunting up links, I found some websites that mention both “Friendly Plastic” and “Scrapbooking” together. I would strongly not recommend using FP for a sentimental project that could someday sit in a hot attic for posterity.
FP is a fun pruduct, but it definitely has its limitations.
[sub] Apologies for all the typos I probably missed on preview; my son broke his arm yesterday, and he and I did not sleep well last night. He’s okay, just very sore.[/sub]
That fun plastic stuff sounds like the stuff used to mould my vamp teeth to my teeth so they fit! You can’t drink anything hot with them in (coffee, tea hot chocolate whatever) and it’s not recommended to eat with them in either. Very flimsy stuff, but I can see how it would make an interesting craft. Something for the Girl Guides/Scouts to make for their Mom’s on Mother’s day
I’ll tell you…the “Modern Creators” club that I was part of in high school (I know, I know) had a big fundraising sale of Fantastic Plastic jewelry we’d made. The students weren’t too interested, but the teachers ate that shit up. Chunky earrings, mask brooches like you described, enormous and hideous “abstract” pendants made from the leftover scraps…everything was gone. And they WORE this stuff. All I wanted to do in that club was calligraphy, but I wound up spending a lot of time making funky stuff to sell. I will admit that I enjoyed making calla lilies out of Fantastic Plastic, though. I don’t know what the hell anyone would do with a 3" plastic calla lily, but I liked making them, and people bought them. Go figure.
Oh yeah! I love this!! Absolutely cracked me up!!
And speaking of macaroni crafts, my youngest sister and her friends have exchanged homemade gifts every Christmas for years back. My sister’s crafts always involve macaroni. Two years ago, she glued macaroni to shoes, spray painted them, and added a flower arrangement. She did the same thing for the centerpiece for our parents’ 50th Anniversary party - words fail me…
What the…?!?
MY EYES!! MY EYES!!
So… are you as talented as your sister? 
Ha ha, Kiger… you’re now on my list…
No, I’m afraid sis got that special artistic gift. I do more mundane knitting and crocheting. Afghans - not toilet paper cozies. And I think I can safely say I’ve never hot-glued lace or silk flowers on to anything.
Corner kids are scary. Freaky-scary.
I kinda want the pop-top lamp cover, though.
Incidentally, I don’t think I made it clear - the centerpiece shoe was not done seriously at all. We all got a laugh over it, including my parents. My mom gets a kick out of tacky crafts and lawn ornaments - she’s got flamingoes and frogs and coyotes and a gazing ball and a woodpecker with propeller wings around her pool, plus a 6’ tall windmill in the veggie garden. Inside the house is where she keeps the proper paintings, crystal, and more socially acceptable artwork. Outside is for cheesy.
My sister’s macaroni art projects are most definitely done to be tacky and wild. Trust me on this one.