With summer well underway here and COVID-19 still out there, I'm taking plenty of opportunities to play Animal Crossing and enjoy myself, especially since I have perfectly acceptable reasons to avoid people now, like not getting sick 😅 Excited by the summer event, I thought it would be fun to rope my sister into some fun DIY's inspired by Animal Crossing to add to our desks, and hopefully add some fun color to our work/play spaces.
After some research into a few DIY's and trying to limit how much we head out of the house, I stuck with things I could get during normal grocery store trips, thing I could order, and thing I had around the house. Hopefully this means that you can make these without too much trouble, and perhaps you have all that you would need.
For the first DIY, we made silhouette candle holders with some mason jars and black paint. Don't forget you also need a candle, or in our case battery powered lights. These were super easy! We just took some black acrylic paint and paint the shapes we wanted around the jar!
My sister went for a few different scenes from around the island: KK Slider, a waterfall with shooting stars, and the campsite. I went with a little scene of me wishing on a shooting star. Simple, easy, done in 30 mins max!
You could do more if you wanted and painted it in color, I think you would still get a pretty silhouette with the light inside. In retrospect, I think we should have used some paint markers, as that would have made cleaner lines. We also kind of were running out of black paint 😔 Definitely added to the list of possible redo DIYs in the future, so if you have any ideas for the next one, let me know in the comments.
DIY #2 was a little more work intensive. We made Snowglobes! Well, maybe more like water globes in this instance since we were inspired by diving for sea creatures, but 🤷♀️ same difference right? I love all the glittery goodness 😍
I recently picked up a pack of Starbucks frappe drinks from Costco to reuse the jars for our homemade coffee creamer, and I thought that we could use 2 of them for this fun project. What's really cool is you can orient your snow globe however you would like. The bottom can be the top or vice versa. Or you could go with a ship-in-a-bottle vibe and lay it on the side.
We also used polymer clay, acrylic paint, some sea shells, lots of glitter, and other little odds and ends like beads and buttons. You could use pretty much whatever you want to put in it! Just make sure that what you put in it is oil safe, since the liquid you fill it with is baby oil! We sprayed our painted things with a Rustoleum clear spray to seal them.
We sat and made fun polymer figures to add to the jars. They can be simple or more complex. My sister used one of the crafting molds I had to make some seashells and an octopus. I made some little images from in-game. I am super happy with the fossil one, but the bell looks kind of derpy... Here they are on the foiled cookie sheet prepped to go in the oven! Also my sister ended up taking the large clay seashell out because it got in the way of all the other small bits - it basically was so heavy and large that it held the smaller pieces at the bottom - so do keep in mind the size of what you put in your snow globes.
She also had the insanely clever idea to paint the names of her villagers on the little seashells. She then proceeded to repeatedly quote Lilo when she says "My friends need to be punished." Kind of creepy, but that's my sister 👍
She made a cute "jewel" beetle to go on the lid. She found a little wood round and some dried moss that I had in my crafting box and put together a cute little display. She also wrote the name of her island on her bottle which I promptly copied 🤣
I also added little palm trees to the bottom of the lid to make it more island-y. I used hot glue to attach all the parts.
You can use baby oil to fill the bottles, but I also hear glycerin and distilled water works too. I opted for baby oil, since it's readily available at any general store. Plus, I typically have some in the house since I use it to clean my makeup brushes. Using oil instead of water makes the glitter and stuff float more, making it more similar to a snow globe. In water it would fall too quickly or just float, which could also be cool if that's what you want! Just make sure to use distilled because tap water has other things in it that could make your snow globe go bad 🤢
I'm very happy with the way the water globes turned out. The only thing is that I wish more of the things we added floated, or sank slower. Research incoming, and maybe if we redo this there may be some more fun stuff in them.
Also, I shared some big news on Instagram yesterday, but I wanted to put it here, too. This is a very rough sketch but I was considering opening Kickstarter for this! This is a small daily to-do checklist for Animal Crossing. Let me know if you would be interested in having this as a physical notepad! I looked into having this in a small notepad with 100 pages. I also designed Pascal and Celeste themed ones. If these don't ever make it to Kickstarter, I still want to finish them and maybe sell printable PDFs here for cheap, just to help support this blog. Any feedback and shares would be very appreciated! My goal is to maybe make my art available through useful items like notepads, stickers, and maybe even enamel pins one day 🤗
That's all and if you enjoyed make sure to like this post, leave a comment, and subscribe if you haven't already. If you make a snow globe or candle jar, make sure to share and tag me @love_batsy as I'd love to see it!
Love,
Batsy 🦇💗