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Paper towel tube, to be exact.

A friend asked if I could decorate a couple of paper towel tubes for her to use as holders for the ii's she carries to hula dance practice.

I said, look. I don't want to be involved in any of your bizarre nature rituals or drug fetishes.

To clarify, she showed me one of the paper towel tubes she was already working on, drawing very cute flowers and graphics with Sharpies of a million colors. I was intrigued! This was a craft project involving cardboard!

You know I go INSANE for that kind of thing!

Then I remembered Michelle Ward's latest Street Team Crusade, "Make It Your Own". This is a very instructive and intriguing topic, so go check it out. What can you do to take an object or a medium and make it your own, infuse it with your artistic spirit?

Now, upon first reading about it, I initially had a couple of grand ideas for this crusade, because I've really been trying more and more to bring a unique voice to my creative endeavors. And while those two grand ideas are in the planning stages for now, my friend's request did involve some imagining to make happen. By her directive, I couldn't line the tubes, I couldn't put fringe on the tubes, but I needed to make the tubes decorative. They couldn't have glitter, stickers, or beads, which would fall off in her supplies case or be difficult to handle. Basically, they had to be, simply, prettified cardboard tubes. Which didn't look like paper towel tubes.

Here are some photos. Why, you ask, are my photos seemingly always taken at night, the worst possible time for getting good photos? Well, the best answer I can come up with is that I work during the day, so I craft and paint at night. In this instance, I'm taking the tubes to my friend tomorrow, so I had to photograph them tonight.


Anyway, I got out a pair of paper towel tubes I had saved up, and my palette, which was still festooned with the dried paints of a thousand previous projects.


I pondered and ponned until my ponderer was sore.


And Then!

I got out some napkins. What loves paper pulp better than more paper pulp? And I remembered one particular napkin which actually had a luau theme!


I didn't just want to wrap the napkins right onto the tubes. I prepared the tubes with some reds and pinks (my friend's favorite color) and some oranges. I don't have a picture, but I basically let it the colors run and bleed together. I then tore some single-layer napkin bits and secured them to the tubes with gel medium. I touched up the paints a bit so that they pretty much blurred the boundaries of the napkins images. Then, I glazed those babies. And here, in its night-lighted glory, is the result.



A little close-up of a napkin luau in progress.



So. Paper towel tubes. Yes. And wouldn't they look great as columns on a scale replica of the Parthenon? A little dimensional medium, carving, more cardboard, a foundation, and a nice set of miniature patio furniture?

Actually, that wasn't one of my two grand plans for Crusade #31, but I'm definitely writing it down.