Abe Lincoln, the guitar man

Ahhhh.......back from a truly wonderful vacation, a Disney cruise with our family. I haven't asked permission of my adult kids to share their photos and hubby never wants his shared, but here I am with my favorite Pirate and then with both him and his sister as my beach buddies.

   

Now that we are back home, birthday mania begins. Immediate and extended family birthdays keep us going into mid-April before a break of a few weeks and the little Princess has her first bash. 

The oldest of three great-nephews turned 11 this week. Hubby and I began taking the easy way out on gifts, giving the kids cash but never just cash in an envelope. Examples of past gifts are here, here, here, here and last but not least, on my earlier blog here. 

This gift is Abe Lincoln, guitar man. I did not take pictures during the process because my hands were too busy. Here is Abe.

He is made from 5 bills, one each for head, shirt, pants, arms and guitar. Let me stress that crisp new currency would have been much better for this but it was cold out and I worked with what I had. 

I found this link to making Abe's head in a hat this morning which seems easier (or at least more clear) than what I used yesterday. A bit of fudging occurred in the backside of my creation's head but I don't think the birthday boy will mind. 

Directions for the shirt are here: Shirt directions.  The original shirt that I tried to make had a necktie but with worn currency, it just wasn't working for me. Those directions are here.

Shirt with Necktie, all one bill

The pants and arms were made by folding each bill in half lengthwise.

The pants were opened, then the long ends folded to the middle.

 

Fold this strip to make a point to define the legs. This will be covered by shirt and/or guitar.  Sorry that these photos are sideways. I've tried to fix the orientation but something is agreeing with Blogger/

 

The arms began with the same fold as the legs but after the third photo above, they were folded again to make a narrower strip. I placed this behind the completed shirt to figure out where to bend for elbows to hold the guitar.

I followed this link to make the guitar, pausing it more than once, but it actually wasn't difficult. 

I used removable tape to adhere Abe to the blue paper. The worn currency not holding sharp folds and the bulkiness of it all meant that removable tape wasn't holding well, even after weighing this down with a lot of metal paper punches. In the end, I use small rolls of regular tape and decided to put Abe in a page protector which lead to using a new (for me) tool.  

For a description of what this does, click here.  This was my first time using this tool which was a recent gift. It worked well but my first insertion of glitter......yikes! I wasn't thinking about static in that page protector and made a mess. I finally ditched that first effort, make a seam in a new one, using a static eraser on a plain sheet of paper to make a funnel and poured some glitter into the bottom area under Abe. Once that was sealed, Abe was inserted and left open at the top for spendability.