Something to make! And it's easy!

The other day I was at Walmart and found these...

These are about 1 1/2 inches long! They are cute and teeny!

My little brain told me (that's something Madison used to say when she was a little one)  that I could make something out of them!

So.......here goes!

First I cut a small piece of decorative paper to fit the clothes pin, then I glued it on and trimmed the ends to fit.  (I used Elmer's for this - drizzled a little on the clothes pin and smoothed it out with my finger)

Here they are all covered with paper...cute but something is missing so....

I decorated them with little bits of things - words and letters from magazines, beads, paper cut outs.  Then I gave them a couple of good coats of glue - Elmer's again!  You can see the glue on them in this pic.

And here they are with the glue pretty much dry.  Now this would be a nice gift for someone on it's own, but I had something else in mind.  I wanted to make a sort of photo, keepsake display using the clothes pins to hold them.  In my mind I pictured a sort of clothes line look...

I keep a bunch of old leather belts around to re-use (now that sounds really crazy...) and this will be just the ticket for my clothes line!

I cut off both ends and unraveled the leather pieces...it takes a while but then you have all this leather that you can use for various projects!

Lovely!

For this project I'm just using one strand of the leather.  I folded the end back and glued it with E-6000.  A larger utilitarian clothes pin is holding it together.

Do both ends - this will be used to hang it up.

Now we're gonna make some hooks for those ends.  You'll need a 3 to 4 inch piece of wire (a medium gauge - not too stiff, not too thin)

 Curl one end of the wire and put it through the loop in the leather.

Now pull the end without the twirl around and close the wire loop.  Wrap the end without the loop around the other as shown.

Make another curl after you wrap the end around to finish it off.  The curl that is on top is the one that was just made.  Now you have a hanger upper thingy! If that made sense do it again on the other side. (If it didn't make sense please leave me a comment!)

Here is your new clothes line photo/keepsake holder - or as I am going to call it The Clothes Line of Memories....just jokin'!

You can just start clippin' things on!

Here is a bad pic of it hanging up - you can swoop it, or let it hang down straight.

Or pull it a little tighter...which ever way you like it best.  You can see here (sort of) how the metal hanger upper thingy we made can just be hooked over a nail.

There you go - you can stop at the cute little clothes pins - or go all the way and make your own photo clothes line.

Have fun and let me know how yours turns out!

xoxo     Elizabeth