Made Some Altered Dominoes

A few months ago I saw some dominoes altered. I swear it was on the Carol Duvall show with Tim Holz but I am not able to find the directions on the HGTV website. Did I dream it? I recall that he used either alcohol inks or water based markers to color the dominoes, then rubber stamped upon them, then hinged two together to make a mini-journal. Cardstock was used to make pages for the interior of the tiny journal and to finish it off it was hung from a cord to be worn as a necklace--a mini journal necklace.

Anyway with that in mind one day I was in a dollar store and saw a set of dominoes in the toy section. I bought one set. On another day I saw another set of 30 in a dollar store, these were smaller sized, so I bought that. I put them away for another day.

Yesterday I was reading on the Cherry Pie art stamp chat list about altering dominoes. Someone shared directions to use pigment based ink. The directions were this:
1. Rough up the domino with sandpaper on all surfaces.
2. Color the background with pigment dye ink.
3. Heat set the background with a heat gun.
4. Add rubber stamped images with pigment dye ink.
5. Heat set that.
6. Color the sides with metallic marker.

If you wanted a hole drilled through the domino so it could be worn as a necklace or attached to something with a string or thread or cord then the first step would have been to drill a hole through the domino. I skipped that step as my husband was not available to do that drilling for me.

Caution: the heat gun and the drill will heat up the plastic domino.

Today my son is still sick and woke me at 4:00 a.m. I was unable to get back to sleep so I got up and decided to tackle altering dominoes.

I followed the above directions but I used Color Box Chalk Ink instead of pigment dye ink. Instead of step #6 I used the chalk ink on the sides, the same color as the background. I am now considering either using the ink that the top design color was on the sides instead. I could still color the sides with a marker but for these designs I am not sure a gold metallic finish would look best on it. I was also thinking of going back and applying rubber stamped images to the sides, either tiny text or basic geometric shapes or something.

I am not sure if I will make these into pins or not. I could also drill them now and see how that goes.

I made 21 in all today. Here is a scan of my first attempts. All the rubber stamps were Zettiology brand. Most of these are small portions of the rubber stamp, because these dominoes are so small and I don't own many stamps that are that tiny.

As of right now these do not have a sealer or a top coat finish on them of any kind. If I do seal them I will use Golden Acrylic Gel Medium in soft gloss. I would seal them to act as a protective layer against scratching.

This was a fast and easy project. The hardest part or longest part of the process was looking through my stamp collection and deciding which stamps and which tiny portions of the stamps that I would use on it, and deciding on which colors to use.

If you do this project I recommend that you sand a bunch of dominoes and have them ready. Then ink your backgrounds in a large batch, then use the heat gun on the large batch. Then apply the images, then heat set those. If you were to do one domino with all steps from start to finish, then start domino #2 the process would take forever!

I stamped my dominoes on scrap newspaper. I left them there to dry while I worked on the others. Then I heat set them right on the same paper, not even touching them as I didn't want to smudge the ink or burn my fingers on the hot dominoes. I then left them to cool right there in the same spot.

TIP: Make sure your fingers are clean. I messed up two by getting one color of ink from my fingers onto a new domino.

Other idea: Due to one ink pad being dirty with another color, two colors went onto the background of the domino. I chose to use both colors in the background. It ended up looking interesting.

TIP: If you smudge your rubber stamped image, immediately rub it off. It will leave a shadow image. Re-ink and re-stamp with the same color ink and same stamp or choose a new color and/or a new stamp. I tried this with one of them to cover up a mistake and it actually was an interesting result. Lesson: turn mistakes into something else, don't trash them.

NOTE: I have tried for two days to upload a photo to Blogger and their photo upload function is not working, still. I see it is on Blogger's list of known problems, and that they are working on it. I decided to share this entry now and I will have to post the photo at some later time. Sorry!