Upcycling - Bringing in Some Color

Our sliding door has this narrow panel of a window above it. I've always thought it was rather asking for some kind of embellishment, but was never really sure what. Then, in my internet wanderings, I saw this idea for sun catchers. Turns out, my CD-collecting hubby has quite a few old CD's lying around. So, I snagged a few and got to work.

I was happy to find that CD's are easy to drill through. Yay for no cracking! Since these stain glass paints were a new medium to me, I drilled through a few extra CD's, to leave some wiggle room for any smudges or bad color combinations.

There are tons of cool patterns online; it was an effort to narrow them down! Though, since the liquid leading paint doesn't come out in a super fine line, that helped narrow it down to the more simple patterns. I was having so much fun, I painted a few more than would fit on my door, just 'cuz I loved how they were turning out.. plus, it'd give me more options for picking the best ones when it came time to hang them up.

Then, to add color. Boom! CD's never looked so good.

It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to string these... beaded, or not beaded... Ultimately, I went with beaded and added some translucent beads between the discs. Initially I used some stretchy thread that I had on-hand, but restrung them on some non-stretchy thread, in the end, and it worked better.

Here they are, all done and installed above my glass doors.

They're so pretty!