Old Hanger to new Card holder!

I was running out of creative ideas on birthday gifts and that's when it occurred to me to make a business card holder.  I thought of going to Michaels to buy some heavy gauge wire when I looked up and saw a wire hanger!  IDEA!  Why not cut up the old hanger and make a business card holder - upcycle!

The materials I used are shown here

I used an internet image that I printed on specialty paper that I bought from Texas Crafts they had a clear vinyl that you can print with inkjet.  Or Grafix also has some good transparencies if you chose to go this way.  Be warned that inkjet normally bleeds with glues and varnishes.  Lots of discussions on this, I found that when I print my inkjet image and I am going to glue something to it (whether under or over) I like to use an overlaminate such as this one from Texas Craft or Oracal overlaminate or MacTac Colorgard.  I buy a small roll and lasts me forever, I don't have a color laser printer.  But this is all a discussion for another day!

Side note: I chose to put an image that I printed on special paper to put on my Polymer clay.  You can really use anything you want, here are a couple of ideas lots of tutorials out there:

• you can stamp your raw clay using stazon ink, 
• stamp your raw clay with no ink and paint it later, 
• use a laser printer transfer, 
• water transfer decal

There are numerous options for decorating your clay so I am not going to get into how to decorate your clay using readily available things you might have.  If you chose to do the same as me you will have to order supplies and I firmly believe in using what you have (I had those from a previous project).  I will post a link to more discussions on images and polymer clay at another time.

Found your hanger? Good!  Get your wire cutters (or borrow from your husband) and cut the straight part of the hanger.  Mark your hanger like this:

 Starting with your 2.75" mark, bend the two - 2" sections up so that your wire is now in a "U" shape.  To bend your wire it worked for me to put the pliers right on the marks and bend them putting my thumb tight against it for a nice little curve. The picture below shows how I hold the pliers and then use my thumb to push it (I am holding both so I could have a free hand for the camera!)

 So now that you have a really long "U" shape like the back view, bend the 2.5" segment down leaving a gentle curve on both sides like the "side view" below.

It should now look like this

Bend again at the 1" mark to look like this:

Now I chose to bend mine at the 1" mark because my embellishment is a round 1.5" circle and half of that is .75" so bending it at 1" gives me .25" off the table.  So you might have to resize where you bend depending on what your embellishment is.  This is not an exact science so change it to fit your needs!

Now it should look like this:

Now for the fun part!

Condition your clay in a pasta machine or by hand, create a nice thick sheet, thick enough so that you can insert the wire from the hanger into your clay.  You can use a glass, pasta machine or acrylic roller you might have.

I used a cookie cutter I bought at Michaels for the circle, came in a pack of 3.  The circle is approximately 1.5" which matches my Recollection round punch that is 1.5" that I bought at Michaels.  

You can do something different - you can stamp, use powder mica, paint with acrylic paint and use anything you want.  

You can even layer cardstock punched shapes and glue to the front of the holder!

I had some white Krylon laying around so I sprayed painted it white and added an embellishment!