Eyeballs By Day, Crafts By Night

So in the midst of all the hoopla getting the booth set up, I haven’t had time to work on a lot of craft projects. I have however, been slowly perfecting my marble magnet technique. I know there are 1000 tutorials online on how to make them, but I have found that your technique and materials can make all the difference between okay magnets and awesome ones! By awesome, I mean clean, clear, and durable.

Here is the latest set! I made them for my friend with pictures of her little girl, Melanie!

For custom sets like this one, I have found it’s easiest to print out the pictures at the size I need them, by bringing them into Photoshop for quick and easy size adjustment.  Start by opening up a new document sized at 8.5 x 11, with a resolution of 300 dpi.

Tip: Remember, if you are going to print an image, the ideal resolution is 300 dpi (dots per inch, or ppi, pixels per inch). Anything less than that, in terms of resolution, will come out pixellated and unclear. For web viewing only, (images for use on your blog, website, etc.) you can get away with 72 dpi.

Then, open up all the images you want to use for your magnets. Select the crop tool. Set your crop settings to 20 mm for the width and height, and the resolution. See the screen capture below. I use 20 mm because that’s the size of the marbles I am using…so obviously size according to your materials!

Crop all of your images and drag them onto your new document one by one. They should look like this:

You can see I did two of each. I selected them (one at a time) in the layer palette, right clicked to make a duplicate of that layer, and re-sized them a little smaller using edit > transform > scale. Sometimes 20 mm is slightly too big, depending on the content of the picture. I like having options. 🙂

I suppose instead of all this, you could just eyeball it and use your magnet to test and see if the images are small enough. I am just slightly obsessive-compulsive and  I’ll use any excuse to play around in Photoshop!

I used this technique with other images I found online. Here are a few sets that I plan to make!

Supplies to get if you plan on mass producing these things:

A 20 mm hole punch, found in the scrap booking section of the craft store. Saves a ton of time and makes a nice, clean cut.

A bulk order of clear, “cabochons”. They are flat backed, perfectly clear, acrylic little marbles. They come individually wrapped like this:

I hate that it’s such a waste of packaging…it’s not very “green.” BUT, it does mean your marbles are perfectly clean and clear and have virtually no defects. I would never go back to using the marbles from the craft store….they aren’t clear enough for my liking.

I bought mine in bulk here! The rest of the supplies/technique can be found in my old marble magnet tutorials; this post was just about tweaking them. 🙂

I would love to see your magnets if you try these! Check out The Graphics Fairy for AWESOME, free vintage art, which would be great for this project!!!!

HAPPY ALMOST SPRING!!! Talk to ya’ll later! 🙂