Thursday, February 4, 2016

Geeky Valentine's Art - Chemistry STEM Canvases with Metallic OlyFun

Share your love of chemistry and STEM this Valentine's Day with these Easy Geeky Valentine's Art Canvases.

If you think geek as much as I do, you're going to love these are a must make.  My husband and I both majored in chemistry in collage and became chemistry teachers, so chemistry references are right up our alley, so I was really excited when Riley Blake sent me some of this fun chemistry fabric a few months ago.  (It's called Novelty by Becky Marie Designs for Riley Blake).  Fairfield World provided me with the  Oly-Fun™ and Poly-Fil®  and compensated me for this post, but all ideas and opinions are my own.  This post also contains affiliate links for your convenience in locating supplies.

I also got a new Silhouette Cameo for Christmas (thanks in-laws!) and I finally got brave enough to try it out.  Even if you don't have a Silhouette, you can still make this super easy I {Heart} U Canvas without a cutter.

And an extra bonus of this project was I got to go into my husband's classroom and play with all the fun chemistry glassware.

As chemistry teachers we tend to like poking fun at "chemistry" pictures in pop-culture that most of the time they just put colored water into glassware for effect rather than showing "real" chemical in use for an actual experiment...but I might have been guilty myself of just adding red food coloring to water.  Oops!

Quite possibly the only thing  more fun than playing with oversided Erylenmeyer flasks is playing with the teeny tiny glassware.  I do sometimes miss the lab...but maybe not quite enough to return to teaching.

Anyway, you can share your own love of Chemistry this Valentine's Day with this ea
Materials:





Digital Design Files available here:

Or if you prefer to have the images themselves and cut them out yourself:




Directions:

Start by cutting a square of fabric about 2 inches bigger on each side than your canvas.

Use a glue gun to glue on fabric.  Trim any excess.



To make the I {Heart} U Canvas, you'll of course need to use one of the Periodic Table fabric prints available in white, grey, or black.  I didn't have the I (Iodine) or U (Uranium) squares placed well on my canvas, so I cut I and U squares out of some of my extra.  (I know...it's a bit painful to have to cut them out if they're not on the edge, but it's so worth it.

Cut out squares of Gold Olyfun big enough to have your squares pop out.  Glue on with your Fusion Adhesive.

Glue your I and U squares on top of the gold.

Trace a heart your fabric scraps.  Rather than cutting the heart our first, sew along your trace lines, all the way around.  Don't leave an opening.  Then trim close to your stitching.  Snip a hole in the back of your heart just big enough to turn right side out and stuff with a bit of Poly-Fil.  Use hot glue to attach to your canvas.  No need to close up that hole because it will be against your canvas.  You could simplify this project by using a flat heart, but we love the pop and dimension that the stuffed heart brings.



For the other canvases, you'll need to use your Silhouette and provided cutting files to cut out your desired designs in Gold Oly-Fun™.  I used the blade at a 7 and the cut was nearly perfect on all the larger designs.  It had a bit of trouble with the smaller version of the "We Have Great Chemsitry" because the letters were so intricate.

If you don't have a silhouette and can't find a friend with one, you could trace and cut it out by hand, but it would be pretty tedious.

Glue on your Gold Oly-Fun™ lettering.  The lettering is fine enough that I found it worked best lay the lettering out where I wanted it.  Then peel back a few letters, glue them and place them back down.  Then repeat with another section.  The letters are designed so that they're all attached in one way or another, so you don't need to worry about placement so much as just keeping the placement that's already there.

Feel free to add heart embellishments.  We love the red pops of color on the black backgrounds.  This would be another fun canvas to add a stuffed heart to instead of the flat.

For the Beaker Love Canvas, use the discarded heart from the middle of the tube heart as a pattern for cutting a red fabric heart.  Cut the fabric heart just slightly bigger.  do the same thing to cut red fabric scraps for the "liquid" inside the beaker and flask.

I glued all the gold oly*fun down first and then went back and peeled up the sections that needed red, slipped it under and re-glued.

Ditto for the Lightbulb Love Canvas.  Use the discarded heart as your template for cutting out your red scrap.  We used a 5 x 7 canvas for this one, but the lightbulb would look great off center in a 12 x 12 canvas too!

These pieces are not happily decorating the bookshelves in my husband's classroom.

Who do you know who needs some geeky love this year?



Connect with me on...



Pin It

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for taking the time to comment. I love hearing from you. I also love responding, so please make sure your Blogger account is set up for me to be able to see your email address or include your email address. I've had to stop accepting anonymous comments due to spam. If you don't have any other way to comment, you can always send an email.