I love giving homemade gifts as much as I love receiving them. On a trip to our favorite
Now, being an amateur musician with a home recording studio set up in a spare bedroom, he loves noisemakers, the more primitive, the better. He was intrigued by the design but not the price tag, so he asked if I could make something like it. "Sure!" I said.
Then, he loaned out the miter saw. Humph!
I managed to get the miter saw returned to us right before Christmas and I whipped out a tambourine in an afternoon. Here's how:
I'd been collecting bottlecaps for another project for some time, so I had plenty on hand. I tried just pounding with a hammer to flatten them, but I found it was easier to use pliers on them first to pull out the crimped edges.
Then, I could go after them with a hammer.
I keep an old cutting board on hand, which makes a great work surface.
I used a large nail to pierce a hole in the center of each bottlecap.
I had some scrap pieces of 1x2 in the garage and used the bottlecaps to measure how long to cut the wood. Then, I raided my jewelry-making supplies for some long headpins.
I clipped the head off the pin, and then twisted one end into a loop. If you had an eyepin, you could skip this step.
I pre-drilled small holes in the wood and threaded the wire and bottlecaps through it. After setting the second piece of wood on top, I clipped the excess wire, looped it, and pounded both ends of the wire into the wood. I used a nail set to really get the wire embedded into the wood and smeared a little wood putty over it. I wanted the overall effect of the shaker to be rustic, so I wasn't worried about hammer marks or a little wire showing through the finish.
I gave the whole thing a good sanding and painted it with black acrylic craft paint. Finally, I sanded the edges one more time to expose a little bare wood and finished with a rub-on polyurethane.
When Mr. Tallgrass unwrapped it, he beamed and pronounced it was his favorite Christmas present.
I knew it would be. :)
I'm linking up...
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