With every single party there is always as least one time I have to play artist and free-hand something because my printer can't produce the sizes I want for things like posters, pinatas, and signs. I usually employ the grid transfer technique I learned in 7th grade art - you know the one where you take a picture, draw grid lines over it, then use the lines as guides when copying it all in a different size? No? Well, anyway, that's usually what I do and I've had decent results. But I found this new technique yesterday (thank you pinterest!) and was excited to try it out. Prepare to be impressed because this is the absolute lowest-cost projector you will ever see ;)
Instructions found here but I'll give you the basics. All you have to do is trace whatever you want to blow up onto a piece of transparancy. I had a scrap piece of acetate from an old scrapbooking project but my guess is that this would work with anything clear like a page protector or maybe even plastic wrap if you were really careful. So - I took the acetate and traced one of the fish from the favor tags. Then I taped it onto the end of an empty taco box (because that's the first box I grabbed out of the recycle bin haha) and told the kids to bring me a flashlight (seriously, the hardest part of this process was having to change the batteries in Ty's Cars flashlight) and stuck it in the other end. The only other requirement for this is a dark room, which is why I was doing it at 6:30AM when usually we are neck deep in getting ready for school :)
See? There's the set up. Flashlight in the box, box on a chair, posterboard taped to the wall. It's a pretty simple process to play with the distances of the box from the wall and the distance of the flashlight itself from the drawing. As you can see, angling the flashlight off to the side actually gave me a clearer image than shooting it directly through the sketch.
I used a Sharpie to do the tracing, thinking it would give me a better line on the wall but as it then ended up 1/2" thick once it was blown up, I think using a finer pen might work better. It didn't matter too much for my purposes because the drawing was pretty simple to follow either way.
One minute later and with much applause from my cheering section (who thought this whole thing was WAY cool), I had converted a 2" drawing into a 3' poster. Go me! (ha)
Now are you wondering what I am now going to do with my giant fish? Well I took another 10 minutes to paint it (after getting the kids dressed and Kaitlyn off on the bus) and cut out a dozen tails.
I used a Sharpie to do the tracing, thinking it would give me a better line on the wall but as it then ended up 1/2" thick once it was blown up, I think using a finer pen might work better. It didn't matter too much for my purposes because the drawing was pretty simple to follow either way.
One minute later and with much applause from my cheering section (who thought this whole thing was WAY cool), I had converted a 2" drawing into a 3' poster. Go me! (ha)
Now are you wondering what I am now going to do with my giant fish? Well I took another 10 minutes to paint it (after getting the kids dressed and Kaitlyn off on the bus) and cut out a dozen tails.
And now I have a Pin the Tail on the Fish game for Kaitlyn's party. Which, by the way, was her idea - she loves the Pin the ____ games, for some reason, and we have one for most parties. That's my second and third tip of the day - always try to incorporate the birthday girls' requests for her party (within reason) and if you need a quick idea for a party game, pretty much anything can be turned into a Pin the ___ on the ____. Pin the tail on the dog, the crown on the princess, the eye patch on the pirate, the bow on Hello Kitty (that was last year), the tire on the truck, the.....
*I'm also using this project as my Pin It Challenge post this time around. In fact, a lot of the projects I've been working on for Kaitlyn's party would apply to the challenge. You can check out the other ladies that are participating in the challenge here:
Julia
Jackie
First test shot:
Yep see, shadows where I don't want them, and the vellum and aluminum foil aren't quite big enough so we're getting a streak of light across the bottom. I wanted to be able to compare them straight out of the camera, but I think with a little bump in editing this isn't bad. I do like the 
