Make Mostly Dollartree Faux Brass or Tin Vintage Christmas Bells Just Like All the High End Stores

Hello my crafty tribe! This is Artsy Maddie and let's get creative! So today we are going to be recreating some of these gorgeous vintage bells that I keep seeing on every high-end home decor store and Pinterest and Instagram. I'm just seeing them everywhere so I wanted to try and create some. As always this video is just for inspiration. I'm going to show you lots of techniques. Do not feel you have to do them all. Just take what you want, leave what you don't, that sort of thing. So I'm going to try and make this with handy products. So I found these set of three large cups at Dollar Tree. So you get the three for a dollar. So I made a template for you guys. I'm going to be wrapping them with foam. Again not necessary, it's just another step that I'm taking. So I will have a printable pattern on my Google Drives for you. I made it a little bit large just so you can trim it down if you need to. And this is the first layer. So what you do is cut out the pattern. We're going to tape it together just with some scotch tape. You'll have to flip over the one side. I wasn't thinking when I made the pattern but just flip them over so it does say the taped together parts. They are together, just one will be flipped over. And then I'm going to roll up some tape, make it double-sided just to tack this down to my craft foam. So this is just your regular, I think they call it EVA, I believe that's what it's called, EVA craft foam. They sell it at Michaels, Hobby Lobby. You might be able to find some at your dollar store, just check around. So I'm going to get that pattern all cut out. So again I left it just a tad bit big for you just in case, like I want it to be big enough that you don't end up with a piece too small. And then you can just trim it down to size. So you want to do a dry fit around your cup just to make sure that it's fitting right. So I used some tacky glue to get this put onto my cup, however this wasn't really necessary. I was worried about hot glue showing kind of lumpy bumpies through the hot glue, but I did end up doing that on the second layer and I actually didn't mind it. So I think you're good to just use hot glue for both of these layers of foam and not have to worry about using the tacky glue. And it took forever to dry as well because the EVA foam doesn't breathe at all, so it just takes forever for the glue to dry. So I do suggest just using the hot glue. So I had to let these set up overnight and then here you'll see, so this is that little bit larger piece here, and then you can just trim that down afterwards too if you want. Just make sure that the lines that butt up together meet up and then you can trim down the rest after it's all dried and put on your cup. So then for the second piece of foam, this is going to be the second layer that wraps around, I'm just going to sand down the bottom edge and one of the sides just so that it looks like a thin sheet of tin, like that metal. So because I was doing six of them I just ended up using my Dremel tool just with a little sanding disc on there just to make quick work of it, but you can totally do it just by hand with some sandpaper. It sands fairly easy. So here I'm going to show you now using the hot glue just to get this second layer of foam wrapped around it. So again I made the pattern just a little bit bigger so you can decide how far you want it to come down onto your cup and then you might have to trim away like a half a centimeter depending how much you want on your cup. So I got that all tacked down so then on this second layer you're going to overwrap that second sanded edge on top of the first edge just so you get that little layered look of the tin just like you see on the fancy ones. So then if there's any gap at the top there I just use some glue because it wasn't much of a gap at all but if you do have a bigger gap just use some filler, joint compound, whatever you have. So then now I'm going to show you three options for making that little bump at the bottom of the cup, the little raised little rounded part. So I found these three options. I've also found links now for all of these on Amazon if you're not one for going out and finding stuff you just like it delivered right to your door. I have links for all three of these products so whichever one you prefer. This one is the weather stripping and you just peel it in half and then you will get separate little rounded lips. This is just a foam garden tie. I've used this before in crafts so I'm able to get these all at Dollarama. However I will have the links to them and then you just pick whatever you think you like the best. I'm just showing you here how to use a couple. The third option is that kitty litter catcher mat and it is so easy to trim because it's just foam as well and you just trim out the little pieces in the middle and then you get like a nice rounded beveled sort of edge here. So this is the weather stripping one. I'm just showing you how that looks onto the cup. Now I cut my green foam down quite short because I knew I wanted a double lip on the bottom of my cup. However if you wanted to do just a single layer like this you could just have your green foam come down a little bit further to meet up with it. So I just love the look of the double lip on the bottom of the cup so that's what I chose. And this is that kitty litter catcher mat here and I just trimmed out a whole bunch of pieces just cutting out that little middle part. There's like a funny little middle part that I guess is to catch the kitty litter. So just cut all that out put the like butted up two pieces together and just got it all hot glued down to my cup. So then here on the edge I am just taking my time just cutting a little bit at a time just to get them butted up really nicely together. So just trimming a little tiny bit away it's still a little bit too big so just one more little trim and then it'll fit great. So then I'm going to be putting little brads onto this cup just to make it look like the little brads that like the high-end fancy ones have as well to kind of hold the two edges of the tin together. So I'm going to show you here I have some little mini brads and then I'll compare it to a regular fastener brad like from Staples. The Staples ones are about one inch long these are about a half inch long so I found these on Amazon as well and I will have a link to them in my description box as well. Now for those for those holes you saw me just use my wood burning tool to make the holes it is so stinky I don't recommend it definitely if you need to do that do it outside for sure you can also just drill a hole into your like through your foam and into your cup as well I was just being lazy and I had my wood burning tool right here and I'm trying to do it on camera. Very stinky I don't recommend it but if you do just be sure to do it outside with good ventilation. So then you just put those little fasteners through and fasten them tight as you can and you'll get that perfect little brad nail look. So now for the top I found these very hard foam balls at Dollar Tree they do sell a softer foam ball that would work as well but I do recommend this one if you can find it it's just a much denser harder foam and then you're going to cut over about a centimeter from the middle so it's just a little bit less than half hopefully you can see that there when I was cutting it so a little bit less than half and that just fits perfectly on top of this cup with the two layers of foam if you're not doing the foam then you might just want to cut even a little bit less than one centimeter over like you might want to do a centimeter and a half sort of thing just so it kind of lines up nicely with your cup now for any raw foam that was showing I just used a little bit of joint compound or spackle whatever you have for your filler and I'm just filling in that edge now the great thing is it can be rough because it's just looking like a welded bead so you don't have to be super neat or fancy with it it can look a little a little rough a little rustic that's what these vintage bells are all about now I have this hard tube this little cardboard tube here I can't remember exactly what was on it I tend to see things like this that are a little bit better quality so it's just a nice heavy thick cardboard tube if you don't have one of these you could buy like a PVC pipe or something from Home Depot if you're wanting it to be really sturdy if not you could just roll up a toilet roll just a little bit tighter and I think that would work as well so I'm just going to get them glued right on the top of these little foam balls here and another great part where you can just add some extra glue and that's going to look like you're welded like it's welded onto the top of your ball so again you don't have to be neat you kind of want that rough welded look to it so now I'm going to create a little bit of texture I wanted it to look like it had little bits of corrosion so I added some baking soda to some latex paint I just have some mist tinted black latex paint that comes in handy for a lot of things if not just use your acrylic paint it's no big deal so I'm just going to build up little spots of corrosion onto my bell so just randomly pouncing little bits of this textured baking soda paint just so that it looks like it's corroded a little bit so just randomly try not to do it in any patterns or any exact size just randomly all over the bells now I'm going to go in and do just the plain black latex paint and just give these a nice coat just to cover up any of these wild colors that we got going on here so I just want to be sure that wild pattern on those foam balls is all covered up and then for the inside of the cups I'm just going to give them a quick shot with some black spray paint and make sure those are nice and dark as well now we're going to start building up textures of paint so of course all of this is not necessary I just want to show you lots of technique to build up metallics because they're so great they're always a little bit transparent and when you build up layers you can get this real richness to the paint so I'm just using again a mist tint it's like a light grayish kind of color like a bay grayish color and but just anything similar like if you have an ivory or beige whatever you kind of have on hand I'm just going to give this a little bit more of a base coat so I'm going to let some of that black show through because I really want to build up some dimension to the paint so I am just pouncing on some of this grayish over the black letting some of the black show through very randomly so you don't want any pattern particularly just very random if you can see here and then I'm going to use my favorite glaze so this just helps your paint be transparent and gives you a little bit more time to work with it so it doesn't dry quite as quickly I'm going to go in with this majestic gold which is a darker gold color from folk art beautiful highly recommend this paint if you're going to go out and buy metallics just go for the folk art because it is the very best paint so I've mixed some of that majestic gold with the glaze and I'm just pouncing it on this is a bit of a softer brush so not so hard bristles it's just a little bit of a softer brush if you have something similar to this if not not to worry you can definitely do it with those chippy brushes or the children's paint brushes from dollar tree work great as well so that was the gold one now for the silver I'm going in with a darker silver this is called gunmetal by folk art and again mixed with some glaze to get that transparency and that long open time just to kind of blend it all over this bell so this will be our first coat of silver again all of these steps aren't necessary I'm sure you can make a beautiful bell with just black and then some metallic pounced over top of it I'm sure that will end up looking good as well I just like to show you guys lots of options and how to get some great depth with your paint so for my second layer of silver I'm going to go in with this platinum by folk art and it's just a little bit of a lighter brighter silver so that will be our second coat of paint just getting it mixed in really well with that glaze and then just pouncing all over the bell so you can see that that little bit of black is still showing through but you're just getting some really great depth to those metallics so for our second coat of the brass the gold we're going to go in with some majestic gold and then some gold so we're just going to get kind of that medium tone of the gold so just again mixing it in with the glaze we're going to pounce on our second coat and just start to build up that beautiful metallic metal looking paint so for our last and third coat on the silver bells I am just going in with just pure silver by liquitex and it's just really bright and beautiful and this will be our third and last coat of the silver so again just using that same soft brush pouncing it all over so it always dries a little bit deeper than what you're seeing when it's wet for the third coat on the brass bell I am using just the gold and that's a folk art paint so again it'll look a little bit lighter until it's dried now for that little bits of corrosion that I had built up onto those bells I just want to add in a little bit more to those so I'm just using this tiny little stamping foam brush here from Dollar Tree and I've mixed a little bit of black with a little bit of that gunmetal that darkest silver and a little bit of glaze just so it's going to dry a little bit transparent and I'm just barely touching those little bits of corrosion that we built up there just so it looks really old and like that corrosion is just coming right through the metal again not necessary you just use your creative mind and and do what your heart wants to do whatever steps you think are necessary or maybe you're going to add some different ones now for the brass I wanted it to look really old and aged so I'm going to make a glaze for all over the top of it so I used a little combination of burnt umber and raw umber again not necessary if you only have burnt umber that will work as well you could always try like antique wax I don't have any of that so I'm just going to build up my own glaze here that raw umber didn't want to blend in too well so I just added a little bit of extra raw umber that I had just some some other Liquitex and then I'm going to pounce that all over the bell and then I'm going to like pat a little bit of it off with a makeup brush so I don't want it to be too heavy or too globby or anything I'm just going to pat it soft with that makeup brush or the makeup sponge I should say not brush so just putting the glaze all over the bell and then just patting it soft with the little makeup sponge and then it just sits into any little divot and groove and it's just going to give it that nice aged patina so then for the inside of the bell the little chime part we're just going to do some faux little chimes here with wood so just showing you a couple options I had some little half inch by half inch square dowels that I'm going to use but you could also just put together two of those tumbling tower blocks from Dollar Tree or a real Jenga block or just whatever scraps you have I watered down some black acrylic paint and just gave them a little bit of a stain just so they'll blend in with that black inside of the cups and then I just tied a little knot on got them glued on with some hot glue so I just scraped away some of that spray paint off of the cup put down a little bit of hot glue I'm just trying to get the best adhesion that I can put the little knot on the end of the twine down into that hot glue and then put a little bit more hot glue on top just to hold it in secure and now for the fun part we're going to try and put a rustic looking rope onto this gold this brass bell here so I don't have the best technique for this maybe I should have watched more knot making videos on YouTube but I just kind of did a little makeshift knot here so doubled the rope put it through this little bell here and then just wrapped it around the edge just to try and get a nice finished edge or as nicely as I could now I took all these outside after and you can burn the fuzzies off of the rope with a lighter I just don't want to do it inside I have too much on my table it's just a real hazard so be sure to just do that outside just to be safe now for the silver bells I'm going to be styling them all together so I wanted a thinner rope for that this is just the one from Dollar Tree and I'm trying to remember the length of it but whatever the length of it was I cut it in half for each bell so that I have lots of length to stylize these with I want to layer them at all different heights so I just wanted to leave myself lots of extra rope to do that with so each of these pieces I cut them in half doubled them through the little loop that we have on the top of our bells here so hopefully that's hopefully you can tell what I'm doing just by showing it here I don't have the right verbiage for knot making definitely not a pro at that now because I'm just styling this temporarily this year I'm not really sure this is how I'm going to keep them I tried to make it kind of a temporary fix on the top of these knots next year I might work them into my mantle or something like that so I just want to leave it so that I have some options to do that so I just kind of looped all the ropes at the top there looped them back down and then I'm just going to cover it with some more of the rope so you guys are going to see here I'm going to run out I didn't plan this super well here I get about halfway down and run out and then I had to just match it up with some dollarama rope luckily they're just about identical you couldn't quite tell the difference so I just finished off with that so you can see they're pretty close and just about the exact same size so it worked out okay so just whatever rope you have make sure you have enough before you finish your project I kind of didn't plan that out super well but it worked out okay so it's not the neatest rope just because I wasn't wanting it permanent I didn't want to glue rope to rope I just glued it to that duct tape that I was using just as this temporary fix so then once we have that all done then I'm just going to cover it up with just kind of a temporary styling here so not nothing super fancy just kind of a natural look I had these funny little ornaments that came in a random grab bag from the thrift store they're like plastic pine cones I just thought they were really funny they look pretty natural though for plastic pine cones and then I just have this burlap ribbon it's about three inches wide I can get this at dollarama but I think you can also buy this at walmart I've seen other crafters using it as well from walmart but just kind of this this is where you pick whatever stylize works for you like whatever you're decorating with whatever colors ribbon greenery ribbon whatever you like whatever you like to stylize things with so I'm just using some green zip ties from dollarama just to get this all put together and these zip ties are a little bit finicky but we got them to work and then here I will show you guys that finished project again so the silver bells I just layered them so they were just touching each other because they are so big and I just kind of wanted them to just barely reach the top of the other one if that makes any sense you just kind of hold them all together and then pull each string up until you have them where you want them but I've seen these stylized so much on pinterest and instagram on a mantle and they just look so beautiful or on the end of a stairway on your newel post or your banister what would you call that I think it's just called the newel post and then just hang it down with some greenery it looks so beautiful the options are endless so here it is just on the wall here so again you can just take this outside and burn all those little fuzzies off of the rope too that makes such a difference those dollar tree jute ropes are so fuzzy so many fuzzies and then here is a close-up look at the brass bell you guys will have to let me know um if you're gonna make these like definitely tag me on instagram I love to see what you guys create or how you're inspired even if this doesn't inspire you to create bells but just to do a paint finish on something or create corrosion on something that's what I love you guys are so creative too and just run with it I love to see what you guys make that makes my day and then here is how I have them for now just this is my pantry door in my kitchen and I think I'll just leave them here for this year we're really enjoying them you just bring that nice bit of of christmas to your kitchen they'd look so pretty too on a door like your entryway door as well so hopefully this video has inspired you guys if it has I would love it if you would consider subscribing it is free to do so it's just that red button on my channel and then there's also a notification bell beside it that you can select as well and youtube should let you know when I post a new video I don't have a regular posting schedule yet so that is a great way to keep up with any new videos that I post and if you haven't connected with me on instagram I would love that it just makes my day when you guys tag me and your creations and what you guys are doing or just send me a message hopefully you guys have been busy creating lots of christmas creations or holiday decor for your home as well and I would love to see them so be sure to share thank you guys again so much for always coming back and watching my videos it means the world I hope you guys have a wonderful week and we'll talk to you soon in the next video