I love to have lots of pictures of family and friends (and soon, many more pics of the little one!) on the refrigerator where I can see them all the time. There are pics of hanging out with friends, celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, our honeymoon in Europe, one of our trips to Israel, Av and his dad with the UVA mascot at one of the bowl games, a trip we took to Denver where we went on Route 66, our pets, beach pics, Av standing next to a Shoney’s “Big Boy”, and sweet-sweet ultrasound pics.
Of course, you need a lot of magnets for all that, so in the past I’ve made bottlecap magnets, Sculpey sushi magnets, Shrinky Dink magnets, resin-poured magnets, and picture marble magnets. Today, I made Sculpey watermelon magnets!
I started with these colors – Sculpey in dark green for the outside skin, bright kelly green and transparent color for the rind, bright red (plus not pictured: another large bright red, a pack of hot pink, and a pack of iridescent light pink to get the perfect red watermelon color), and black for the seeds.
The tools I used were: manual pasta machine, acrylic roller, razor blade for making the slices, sharp-pointed tool for making the seeds, use of a toaster oven, magnets, and quilter’s thumbtacks.
First, I rolled out the dark green sculpey on the pasta machine to a very thin setting, then the combined bright kelly green and transparent together on a thick setting (I used the acrylic roller some too, for stretching and thinning). Next, I combined the red, hot pink, and iridescent light pink until I got just the right shade for the inside of the watermelon, and I just rolled that by hand into a hotdog shape:
In this pic below, I’ve rolled the red tube onto the rind sheet and around that, the dark-green sheet. I’ve rolled everything together really well so there aren’t any seams, then used the razor blade to cut off the ends so everything’s nice and even:
To make the seeds, I used my pointy-end tool on a rolled-out section of black sculpey.
Here are all the watermelon slices – I even did two pieces where I took my acrylic roller and made one of the slices really thin (which increased the circumference), cut the circle in half with the razor blade, and used my pointy tool to take out part of the slice to make it look like it had been bitten into!
They were ready to be baked, so I set them in the toaster oven at 275* for 22 minutes (the timing depends on how thick the pieces are).
Once they cooled off, they were ready for hot gluing.
I flipped them over (to their non-seeded side) and made some into magnets and some into thumbtacks.
All done! I love the way they turned out!