Upcycling Aluminium Cans Into Junk Journal Treasures #upcycledcrafts #junkjournalideas

what I'm about to share with you today has been on my to-do list the longest over 3 years since I've plan to do a video on this topic and I'm so happy that I'm finally doing it and this video is about recycling aluminium cans such as beer and soda cans and creating various little embellishments and charms for my journals all to use in mixed media projects and today I'm going to share with you how I go about this project how to cut them up how to make them less sharp so that they can be safely used in your projects without injuring yourself what type of glue to use how you can paint them and what to use to paint them and how I cut these shapes from aluminium cans using sizzix die cutting machine in a way this is another sizzix hack video so let's get going hi everyone it's dragon from cebo welcome and welcome back to my channel I hope you enjoy that introduction as I've mentioned I've been meaning to do this for such a long time one of the First videos that I've done on my channel it was a flip through video of a journal and on the inside of the cover I have shown one of these embossed pieces of aluminum cans that are painted since then I've gone much further than just doing boss and paint I've been cutting them up creating other elements for the journal such as paper clips tags little embellishments that I can use to decorate especially mixed media projects little flowers and butterflies and of course charms one of the reasons I did not want to do this video earlier is because I was worried that people might injure themselves while cutting up those cans because aluminum when cut is very sharp so I just want to say that from the start if you're not 100% certain that you can do this without cutting yourself use some protective gloves and be very very careful I just want to say that straight away first of all once you finish your drink you need to rinse wash the the can if possible and let it dry a little bit or just have something on the surface in case there's any liquid still left and any aluminium cans will do okay so I like to start like this I just take a knife and I start cutting off from here okay so you just go in just carefully keep your fingers away from it you see how sharp these edges can be I don't use this part for this project I recycle that I suppose other things can be made but we're not going to do that in this video okay so now you have to do the same here so we are using just this portion [Music] okay the part that we can flen sorry about the noise perhaps I can continue with scissors okay and there are ways to upcycle these uh these things as well and I'm going to recycle that okay okay so now we need to open this up so I'm just going to cut it with my scissors and that is it now be careful when you do this part this is when the injuries tend to happen let's a little bit okay you can use the inside part which is like silver color linium or if you have a can that has like interesting design and color you can use that as your starting point when you're designing things and I've been making these little panels and these are great as decorations in various craft projects I think these would be great to use when making cards perhaps a stoppers on journals in mixed media projects to decorate boxes there's so many creative minds out there I'm sure you're going to come up with even better applications of this than what I can as you can see with these they have been embossed okay and I've used these embossing folders okay I'll cut this in half it's easier all right and I'm going to emboss one and I'm going to cut different shapes with this one and I'm not going to emboss it this one really looks like metal so I'm going to go with that one so what you do is you have to figure out which way to place it and this black side shows me that these parts are going to be raised so I'm going to place that because I want the raise Parts on this style all right again be very careful when you do this okay now let's get the sizzix okay here's my sizzix I don't need this adapter plate because these are quite thick so just going to put this big one and those two and just push it through and it's surprisingly easy look at that it's perfectly embossed okay so that's how you emboss now I want to show you how I cut and I'm going to have to put that one back in and that before I start cutting I just want to share this with you how I actually came about this I've read somewhere that if you cut aluminium foil with your scissors you will make your scissors sharper and I had some Thin dyes that were kind of blunt and I thought if there was a way to make them sharp so I thought I will just cut up some aluminum cans and try to cut them with these to make them sharper and that's when I realized I can actually uh create things with this not just to sharpen my THS but to cut little shapes that I can later on use in projects I'm going to cut some flower shapes from these areas because I really like that there so definitely some flowers and it's a good idea to secure perhaps with a little bit of washi tape or masking tape because metal and metal tends to just slide everywhere oh let's make a button why not and this one yeah put that one there okay let's just cut this and then we'll turn it the other way around and cut some more okay so you just do like you would normally cut anything and the reason I prefer to do these with sizzix die cutting machine is because the edges are a little bit less sharp than if I was using just scissors or knife this is a very thin metal and when you take things out you have to be careful not to tear it actually it can tear there it is okay let's take that one nice I think I broke this one a little bit it's all right okay I can flatten it like this yeah it's a little bit better isn't it so we have those three okay so you can cut any shape that you have I liked to use these for the charms that I've shown you earlier for these ones I've cut some with aluminium and then I cut some with recycled cardboard and glue them together and that way these edges are not sharp anymore you know if it was just aluminium it might have been very sharp I think I think these are interesting to use perhaps these little Keys as well that one would be fun maybe I'll do that one from this B this little bit again the whole time you work with this just be very careful can make little stars let's just cut some see there's some GE oh a little leaf why not Tiny Little Flower I like to just put whatever I can and just do do it once okay what else can we fit in here that's another Little Flower all right that's probably enough what's really amazing to me is that my sizzix cuts these aluminium shapes easier than the paper ones just really interesting everything just comes out immediately let's have a look at the little star oh we can cut a lot of these shiny Little Stars let's see there's the leaf a gear oh we have that oh all I'm going to take this one out doesn't have a hole there you have to just pick somewhere and try to get it out to get that one out okay here nice I just do this way these little holes is just to help it get out of the shap to lift it up a little bit please it will work yeah just peel it off slowly so it doesn't break it is would love to make this one look Rusty nice we have a little flower and another one these didn't seem to cut properly was on the side you can choose to run through once small okay and there's the leaf I think the leaf turned out really good this one was a bit harder to take out but I use this to push it underneath did damage it a little bit but that's all right okay so once you have your textures or your shapes you have several options you can leave them just the way they are like this just have that clean like silver look and that is fine and that's what I've been doing here just cutting up these flower shapes and I didn't paint them I've done nothing else to them just cut them and I use them to make this charm same here I did not paint them they are as they are but these ones look really nice on a colorful background when you have just this I think it's really cute okay so that's one of the options you don't have to paint it at all I just like to experiment with different things and first I experimented just with acrylic pants in this case Okay this was painted just in acrylic without gesso and then it was sanded back this was painted also in acrylics and then I used gilding wax on top these are as they are so that's when you do it with acrylic paints then here I have done some with nail polish just cheap nail polish okay and they take a bit longer to dry and the smell stays quite a long time but eventually it evaporates I've used nail polish for these okay then what you can do is use inks just regular inks and make them look a little bit Rusty like that I used yellow and brown okay I've used that here as well I embossed then I painted and then I cut okay these are just regular inks spray inks but I've protected the surface with varnish at the end because these inks are not permanent this is also done with nail polish okay these ones here were painted with alcohol inks and I really love this because you get the results really fast almost no drying time alcohol inks dry in seconds so I really love it I suppose you can use alcohol markers as well so I'm going to show you on one example each of these techniques I'm going to show you a c technique on this one because it is Big okay you can use brush or you can use a sponge I think it's just easier with this one and I'm going to go with just Brown and this turquoise I'll just blend that you may choose to go with gesso first and that is fine just cover it with Jesso and then paint and that is a good idea if you really want to make sure that the paint adheres properly but I prefer to see a little bit of metal showing I don't want to take the shine away completely okay just that so I'm going to let that dry a little bit that's how you do it with acrylic and then once it dries you either use gilding wax on top or you sand the surface so we'll we'll try a little bit on on half half okay I'm going to do alcohol inks on these ones I'm going to go with this blue red orange and just Brown and if you have one of these that's great if not you can just use this but when you inhale move it away from your project otherwise you'll inhale all the fumes okay so I'm just going to put a few drops and then blow let's add some orange it's amazing how quickly the alcohol inks dry and I'm going to add some blue and you can play with this to get nice results I'll just add a little bit more Brown I love it just here going to hold it that's enough I'm going to do this one maybe we can change the colors a little bit I think I'm going to go with brown and olive green let's see what that does to it just hold it I like it just bit more brown maybe a bit of yellow there it is there's that one there's this one you can see better like that okay so we've done acrylics we've done alcohol inks let's do some with nail polish and I have a few here that I've cut earlier because uh I didn't want to spend all video just cutting so I'll cut up a few maybe I'll do nail polish on those two the butterfly and the star any nail polish whatever you have you know so just you just paint and I like to use like a lot of paint to make them really thick and I especially concentrate on the edges because another thing with painting with nail polish is you actually making these edges softer and you can play with different colors just now hold it like that we'll just let it dry I have some blue do that it's really good with nail polish is because it doesn't dry so fast you can even play with a marble effect and let the colors mix I'm just going to add some white just a big amount that really thick and then I'm going to just do this all the day okay going to add a little bit more white in the middle so yeah you can experiment and play with it and have fun with it you know I think that's cute stuff okay now I said I want to show you how to create that effect and for that I use just regular inks I use this brown and yellow and this does get a little bit messy I'm going to show you on this example so messy in here you probably won't be able to see anything from the mess so I'm going to do that and these are water-based inks not alcohol inks you can spray but I've tried with spraying and it's just a lot of mess as you can see they don't really stay on you tend to collect in certain areas because these inks and not permanent inks so it's a little bit harder to do the drying takes a bit longer I've tried to use real rust rust water on these and I left some in Rust for like 2 or 3 days and nothing happened they didn't go Rusty so I'm not going to do that again maybe it would eventually after I leave it for like two weeks but you know I think it's much quicker with just inks okay and then you just either leave them to dry or you use a blow dryer or heat tool think I'm going to speed up the process so I'm going to use the heat tool on this one I wouldn't recommend using heat tool with nail polish because nail polish is highly flammable so you might start a fire or your paint might start burning so better let it dry naturally 15 minutes half an hour whatever it takes that's dry now so on one half just going to use this scenting block I'm just going to sand off the paint from these raised bits for this to work your paint has to be really dry that's one way just scrape it off sand it off or if you have some guilding wax just use this Rag and put some on and then just go like that okay so I hope you can see the difference this is much more shiny than that but I think they're both nice in their own way I've shown you The Cutting process and the painting process now it's the glowing and basically assembling these parts into a finished project let's just do this one first with these ones I like to use sections as part of a collage for a mixed media project on Journal Toppers and things like that or like this as backing for a tag I think it looks really nice doesn't it and to do this you will need to cut a piece of that the same way as a piece of for example card stock I have this little die cut shape of a tag and I'm thinking I'll just cut that and I'll cut one from this upcycled card stuff I think that one kind of looks interesting maybe like that so one is going to be the front and one is going to be the back okay let's cut this first and the other part I will cut using this D cut cuz it's a regular shape and I think it would be great to use in future projects as part of a collage I could also just cut it with scissors and have it like that but I do like to do this with d Cuts because the edges kind of tend to curl to the inside so it's less sharp around the edges when you cut it with scissors or with knife you always left with that really sharp edge which you can sand a little bit and make it less sharp but I prefer to do this with the scissors I'll cut them both at the same time [Applause] nice I love it there's so many applications for this especially if you like grungy look if you like steampunk journals and that is really nice too still have that piece left that I can use maybe cut smaller shapes or one of these something like that and I want to cut this other part all right so now I have that and I basically just glued them together like this and I've experimented with different types of glues it works well with the f6000 which does State it's great for smaller metal pieces and I've tried with this one so any glue that states that it's good for metal I guess okay whatever is available where you live if it says that it's suitable for metal I would use it maybe E6000 is similar to that one so you just put them together like this align properly you need to put a good amount especially if the metal part is embossed there's a lot of holes underneath if you know what I mean not everything is flat so you do need quite a bit of glue okay and then you let it dry put something heavy and you let it dry and then you can ink and you'll find that then these edges are sharp as a cardboard not as metal so it's much safer and then if you further just sand it a little bit it's even better I'll just put this book over Okay so we've done that I'm going to keep that for a different project if you're still not convinced that that is safe like that you can do this oh I love this I should make more of this painted cardboard recycled cardboard that was such a good project I'm going to make like a tag or a bookmark with this one and I think that looks really good there so what I would do I would glue it I I'll do with this one just so that you can see that that works as well okay this one is good for like smaller pieces because it has this tiny opening on top so you can add glue precisely you have to hold it for a little bit because the metal has tendency to curl up and it's really important that it's pressed down firmly while the glue is drying so just hold it like that what I like to do with these I add the glue and then I run it through the physics again to basically press it into the card stock and almost becomes part of it it becomes flat with the surface so there's no way of you catching onto these metal Parts I like to put a piece of cloth over some of my unsuccessful Ecco prints just like that and I just go like this there is you can see how flatten it is and it has become almost a part of that that you can't really tell that it's not the same level so I've shown you how to do that in this case I didn't even glue it to the surface because what's underneath is wider so it's not like the edges are really exposed and it has some 3d effect and I like it I use this flower I have those two round ones also cut from recycle packaging actually put it on this one all right so what I did I used a bread I punched the hole through the middle here like that and then I used one of those tiny breads put it through and I secut it on this side open it up so it's not going anyway it's held in place by this bread and then you simply take this other one and glue and you hide that just like that and you can put it underneath something heavy to press it down a little bit one more thing you can do if you don't have Brads you don't want to mess with glue you can also use your sewing machine to attach and I have a few examples here this one was attached with a sewing machine okay this one as well it was glued and then still on the sewing machine and this butterfly here as you can see I've just done like a vshape so it serves as butterfly antennas and also to hold it in place that's if you want to have that 3D Loop perhaps we can do that here I haven't done anything with this little star I have here a few Stars cut I could actually glue it onto larger one like this or I can glue it onto the same size star and have it like that but I'm going to go with the large one just going to spread this glue a little bit and this is acetan based glue and we have nail polish so be careful not to touch it because you might erase your nail polish on the star there I think these would be cute Christmas tree decorations but I would make them bigger and also a simple shape such as this one can be done without sizzix let me just add some of this paste around the edges [Music] use this crochet hook to push this through a little Christmas tree decoration I like it it's cute okay this is done now maybe we can just just cut it there and I'll use a different piece on the back almost glued it to the wrong side let it dry a little bit and then I'll straighten the edges just quickly take this to the sewing machine there we go so what I do I just bring all the threads to the other side that and you just t tie them up and cut the excess let's have a look here maybe we can add a little bit of ink here just to round it up you can cut out some words from a book phrases and glue on the back be nice ink here as well I use this because it's here okay and then we have this one that one's done too I just quickly checked my list of things I wanted to show you today and I think I've covered everything if I think of something else that I might have forgotten I will share it in our Facebook group crafting with SBO you're welcome to join I really hope you enjoyed this video and find it useful this is a great little project if you're into recycling like me I hope it opened up a whole lot of possibilities of the things you can make with these recycled soda cans or beer cans anyway thank you so much for watching and I hope I see you soon in my next video bye for now

Channel: Saacibo

Views: 71,774

Keywords: upcycling tutorial, trash to treasure, upcycled crafts, beer can art, aluminum can art, junk journal, upcycling aluminum cans, aluminum can crafts, trash to treasure aluminum cans, how to flatten aluminum cans, upcycled aluminum cans, trash to treasure diy, trash to treasure ideas, upcycling soda cans, junk journal ideas, junk journal ephemera, diy junk journal charms, making junk journal charms, how to make junk journal dangles, aluminum can art diy, aluminum can ideas

Id: 9T4oh-9WVN4

Length: 44min 0sec (2640 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024