How to Make a Lightsaber for $7

Wapley and I saw this lightsaber from Pottery Barn Kids and we fell in love with it.....but not the price. So, I decided I would try to make my own. I went to Home Depot and walked around until I could come up with ideas for materials to build it with. I finally decided that PVC pipe would be the cheapest and easiest to work with. I played around with the different pieces and came home with this little assembly:


First, you want to spray the small long piece red, and all the other pieces black. After they dry, you can assemble them to look like this. Just ignore the random piece of fabric in the corner, I don't really know why it is there...


Don't forget to buy a piece to put on the tip of the lightsaber to give it a rounded edge. Sorry, I am not familiar with PVC pipe piece names, but you can see the little red piece in the picture above and below. Just hot glue it on the end. Next, we move on to the handle:


All you need is some silver paint, and popsicle sticks or tongue depressors. Paint with the silver as you wish; I chose to paint the upper handle silver and then just make stripes on the larger part. Take three of the sticks and cut them in half. Place one horizontal on the handle and then stack the remaining 5 and glue them together. It should look something like this:



Then, paint the single piece silver and the stack black and add two silver buttons. Also, I chose to add glow in the dark paint on top of the red paint to make it extra fun. You can see the streaky paint drying in the pic:


Here is the glow in the dark paint I used. Can't wait for tonight to see how it looks!




I then hammered on the back some little picture frame hangers, and hung it on the wall. Done! Total cost: $7



Wednesday was Gum's first day of preschool. She was SO excited to go!


She had a great first day and loved playing with her friends! Now if only Wapley felt the same way about school....

How to make a Star Wars Shirt

Now that Wapley is at school all day, my priority (according to Wapley) is obviously making Star Wars things for him. I decided to try and start making shirts for him, since now that he is in school he is just going to ruin them anyways; this option is much cheaper. Total cost to make this shirt: $4.

I saw this R2D2 shirt at Old Navy a few months ago that I wanted to buy for him, but it sold out in his size. So, this shirt was my inspiration.

First, you need a plain shirt, freezer paper, an exacto knife, and screen print paint.



Draw any Star Wars design that you want on a piece of paper. And yes, it must be Star Wars. Then, place the freezer paper over top of your drawing, shiny side down and trace your image onto the freezer paper. You can then cut out your stencil with the exacto knife. Don't you just love my craft table?



Place the stencil on your shirt, shiny side down, and iron it on. The heat should cause a seal between the shirt and the stencil. Make sure that you put a layer of freezer paper between the front and back of the shirt so that the color doesn't run through. You can then paint whatever colors you like. This shirt was a little bit complicated, I had to make multiple stencils for the different layers of color.



Here is the first layer completed. Now on to the next layers of stencils....







For the red beam, I used puffy red paint to give it some depth and texture. Almost done...



And, done!



And because this post is way too serious, I will leave you with Wapley's new favorite game......