Our CRAFT WARS Pop Craft!

Here's a little bit of the "behind the scenes" on TLC's show CRAFT WARS. As you may, or may not know, I assisted my crafty friend Andrea Martin of A. Design Studio as she competed on the show. Our first project (affectionately known as the Pop Craft) was to create a working lamp in one hour using glasses as our challenge material. Talk about pressure!

Being from Wisconsin, we wanted to go with a "Northwoods Theme" and keep it natural. We built a simple wood frame that we partially wrapped with twine. At the last minute, we added wooden balls to the base to add a little flair and also allow a space for the cord to run through.

Andrea had a slight mishap with the nail gun and a medic was called 10 minutes into our episode. . . oops! We popped the lenses out of sunglasses and spray painted them in different shades. Once we wrapped the wood frame with twine, we hot glued the glass lenses together to form our flowers.

We then painted a slight vein in the flowers and added a colorful button center. They were suspended from the frame with a fine floral wire. As the judge Stephen Brown pointed out, we should have used fishing line or something that hung better. Oh well. . . hindsight is 20/20 but I think we did a pretty good job considering we had only an hour.

In the next post, I'll show your our Master Craft Challenge - the bedroom!