Craft Projects, Jewelry, Quick and Easy Crafts

DIY Poison Ring

{A Smith of All Trades} Poison Ring cover

My friend and I have this ongoing joke that it would be totally badass to have poison rings. Of course, we don’t actually want to poison people, but it would be really cool to mess with people.

What do I mean? Fill a poison ring with cool aid and when you friend isn’t looking add it to their water. It will change colors out of nowhere. Bahaha! April fools is coming up and you could do some fun things with one of these.

Making your own poison ring is pretty easy — buy a stretchy ring, a few lockets and some E6000 from Michaels and you are ready to go.

{A Smith of All Trades} Poison Ring parts

First up, you need to pry the bail off of the locket using a pair of pliers.

{A Smith of All Trades} Poison Ring locket

Once that’s done, place a dollop of E6000 onto the base of the stretchy ring.

{A Smith of All Trades} Poison Ring e6000

Squash the locket on top and set it aside to dry. If your locket moves a bit, you can secure it with a little tape until it dries.

{A Smith of All Trades} Poison Ring glue

All dry — try it on for size!

{A Smith of All Trades} Poison Ring

Bahaha.. let the mischief begin. First up, “poisoning” my hubby’s tea (just to make sure nothing would fall out of the cracks, or course). It was only sugar guys, no worries 🙂

{A Smith of All Trades} Poison Ring 1

Even if you don’t want to use it to prank your friends or simply freak people out, you can fold up little messages and place them in the locket. Or, use the locket as a locket!

{A Smith of All Trades} Poison Ring 2

Doesn’t hurt that the ring is sorta pretty, too. Don’t worry, Ben — your locket is a bit less scrolly and more masculine.

Home Improvement, Paint

The itch to paint

Right before the Christmas holiday we had a radon mitigation system installed in our basement. Turns out Columbia has a lot of this cancer-causing gas just hanging around. Lame-o. Basically how it works is the radon guys come and drill into your foundation (we have two) and create a well for the gas to collect. Since gas takes the path of least resistance, the gas will pretty much all pool here instead of seeping into our house in other ways. Then they install a pipe that connects the hole in the foundation(s) to a hole they cut to the outside of your house. They seal it up nice and tight so no gas can eek out, then put in a fan that runs 24/7 to keep the gas flowing outside of the house. And with that, we are radon free! Woot!

The whole thing took about two hours. Not too bad!

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Gee, I sound so knowledgeable about radon.

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I was really happy to have this completed because our radon levels were a little bit higher than normal and I’d like to avoid cancer if at all possible. Crazy, I know. I was also happy to have it done because it inspired me to paint our laundry room/basement area! I bet you thought there was nothing left to paint… that’s what the hubby thought, too.

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There was nothing wrong with the color of our laundry room as it was.

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A boring neutral was just fine for the space. But I spend a fair amount of time down there, especially at those cabinets in the back. The cabinets in my craft room are a great sitting height, but the cabinets in the laundry room are great for projects you want to do standing. I wanted to brighten up the space a bit.

I set out to paint the whole space white. Yes, white. I never want to paint anything even close to white, but I didn’t want another blue room and I didn’t want to paint the space anything crazy. So white it is.

I went with Behr’s Waterfall Mist. It was a nice contrast between the white of our door frames, so that was a win.

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Well, it turns out Waterfall Mist is blue. Even though I tried to paint my laundry room white, I ended up painting it blue! I think there is something wrong with me.

Look…. even in the Behr virtual paint chip wall, Waterfall Mist is categorized as white.

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But it’s not. *Sigh*

So I painted the whole room and stood back to admire my work… then realized I had inadvertently painted another room in the house blue. Oops.

At least it’s brighter!! And I love blue…

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The other mistake I made, aside from painting it a completely wrong color, was I painted our stairs (which were orange before) the same color as the walls. That just looked weird. Really weird.

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So the day after Christmas I ran to the store to pick out some dark brown paint to match the floor you can see peeking in from under the door.

IMG_2520Ahhhh…. much better.

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All in all, the basement looks nice. It’s not some crazy huge improvement to what it was before, and let’s keep it real, I’ll probably want to paint it again in the future. At least for now it satisfied my itch to paint something. Now I just need to make some cutesy decorations for the laundry room and I can let it be for a while.

Maybe.