📎 Hair clips, reduced to glue and pebbles

For a strange set of reasons, this article sat in my drafts for more than a month, even though it was practically finished. Oh well, better late than never, happy reading...

So: somehow, one day my mother's name day mysteriously arrived, and I therefore found myself wanting (having to?) give her a gift.

But what gift to give? It's always a mess with these things. Even at the Chinese housewares shop, that magical place where if you turn around you discover things on the shelves that you couldn't see before, sooner or later, the gift ideas run out. Let alone elsewhere.

Fortunately, although I lack good taste, I believe I have plenty of creativity, and for this reason once again my only real option was do-it-yourself. (But I bought the raw materials from the Chinese anyway, and where else...)

I enter into housewares without having too precise ideas in mind, but with the plan of wandering around a bit, seeing objects that are more or less dissonant with each other, and waiting for my brain to invent something.

In the end, I bought two items:

1. A set of 10 paper clip style hair clips; of slightly different colors, to have an acceptable variety, but all in a solid color.
2. A box of beads of different shapes, sizes, and shades of color; 8 types in total. However, each box only had about one shade of color, a slightly limiting but not serious factor. I got a set with colors between purple and pink.

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Just €3 later, I get home straight away with the desire to do the job, and I don't even start when I'm already on the verge of making a mess: when opening the little box of pearls, I was tilting it a little too much, and some of those colored crumbs ended up from one compartment to another... a little more carelessness, and I could have lost at least a good part of them across the room in an instant.

My idea was to place the smaller beads (~1 mm in diameter) all over the top edge of the clothespins. The larger ones are almost like pebbles (~4mm in diameter), there's no way they'll stick together at all. Especially when you are in the situation of having to do all the work in just a few hours.

In this case I therefore had to use hot glue, whose greatest advantage, the almost immediate grip, was however a slight flaw, because gluing these beads properly requires a certain precision; at least in the way I initially tried, that is, letting a few beads fall onto the clothespin from my fingers after placing a little glue.

With this method, I should have gotten there sooner, yes and no only a quarter of the colored pebbles stuck (badly), and the rest ended up everywhere. So I tried it again, this time dipping the glue-covered clothespin into the bead container, and this method actually worked a little better.

However, this way is not magical in itself, and has not been able to solve other problems:

• The beads don't hold much on the sides, where the body of the clothespin becomes thinner... promptly, after enough open-close cycles, they all come off.
• In general, when opening or closing the clip, some pearls will pop off even after the glue has completely dried. In any case, by doing this movement about ten times, you can ensure that those who really have to fall do so at least immediately, avoiding problems later.

Meanwhile, in the frenzy of everything, I had beads going right, left, on the desk, on me, and then on the floor. While doing the opening and closing, some even splashed into the air...
Most of what I lost I found again in the next few days, however, when I walked around my room and felt something crunchy under my slippers. I couldn't find a very small part, obviously, also because in the meantime I vacuumed shortly afterwards.

In the end, after making these 3 for my mother... I almost started wanting some made like this too though! 😅️
So I made at least one more, but this time, having infinite time, I tried with vinyl glue.
I don't know whether the decoration made in this way is water resistant or not, because my vinyl glue is so-called "washable", but I don't know if it can only be washed with water or soap is also needed. I'll avoid having it rain on my head when I wear it, I guess.

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Despite this potential risky side, I think that using vinyl is still the best choice, for an aesthetic reason: when it dries completely, it becomes totally transparent. Hot glue, on the other hand, remains dense and visible, making the final work look dirty and messy. It's fine when I have to join cardboard or fabrics, but not in this case.

After a few days of use, however, I noticed that the vinyl glue does not stick very well to the rubberized plastic of the clothespin, and it has come off slightly at the edges. Nothing serious, but it should be kept in mind; to solve this, I think it is enough to add a little more glue (vinyl or non-vinyl) which also goes around the side of the clothespin and incorporates it slightly.

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So, in the end, my mother had a product that was almost not even truly complete, compared to the more refined one that I created just a moment later! 💀️ Her real gift was therefore acting as a beta-tester. I then offered her to rearrange the first three clothespins a little, but she said that, at least those three, she wants to keep them like that, and at most she'll make her some more new ones. Well, I don't know what to say, there are those who prefer to use betas for life, apparently (absolutely not me about Minecraft...).