Mad Magnet Making Skills

So a friend of mine came over and braved craft night with Mason and I. She also has a daughter who is just a couple months younger than Mason, so they mostly played while moms crafted. Really, we picked the craft with their abilities and interests in mind. Don't tell Alan, but Mason loves to stamp and he's actually pretty good at it.

Gotta love the face-pulling adorable little maniac in the background!

This was a pretty dirt cheap way to make some cute little refrigerator magnets. We've got to have something to hold up the paper mountain Mason is coloring at school. So we combined my Valentines scrapbooking supplies with that need and started out on these. Props to my mother-in-law who allowed me to borrow her circle cutter. It made this project much, much easier. Plus, she introduced me to this crafting idea a few years ago.

What you'll need:

-flat-bottomed half marbles (Roberts is the only place I've found them, this is the closest I can find on their website. They are about 2" in diameter and over with a lot of the mosaic marbles. These are the same marbles a lot of people use in floral arrangements/decorating, etc.)
-sturdy cardstock
-stamps, stamp pads, etc. to embellish as desired. Use only flat things for this: stickers, glitter, etc. Stay away from bows, brads, buttons and the like.
-scissors and/or a circle paper punch that will cut circles approximately the same size as your marbles
- a glue stick
-medium sized magnets
-hot glue gun


1. Stamp desired images on your paper. We used Valentines themed sorts of things. With the "crystal clear" marbles, the pinks seemed to work the best for some reason, but really the sky is the limit with this part. We've done them with names, words, patterned paper, small stamped images... whatever suits your purposes. I happen to have a lot of scrapbooking supplies on hand, so this didn't cost anything. Just make sure whatever you do will fit in the circle you're going to cut. I also recommend staying on the outside borders of the page, or cutting it down so it will fit in the circle punch.

2. Line up and cut your image out.

Sorry, the light reflected off the marbles and made the stamp a lot harder to see than in real life

3. Coat the image side of the circle with a glue stick. Make sure the marble is free of fingerprints on the flat side. Press hard and let the glue dry. Really, it's dry by the time I walk across the room to the hot glue gun that I didn't show the four year old we had. That step alone made my life much easier.


4. Hot glue magnets to the back of your marble/paper combo. It was easier for me to put the glue on the back of the marble thing than on the magnet. I'm not the best with a hot glue gun, so I was trying to make as little direct contact with the hot glue as possible. Use a somewhat liberal amount so the heavy little magnet will hold.

5. Attach to fridge. Clean up. You're done.

One bag of the marbles, two packs of magnets, and we made 16 magnets. Because all we needed to buy were the marbles and the magnets, this craft cost about $5. The kids were busy stamping for an hour; the craft itself probably only took about 15 minutes. They helped and were interested in everything right up to the hot gluing. We put newspaper down on the table where the kids were stamping and cutting, so clean up was as fast as bundling up the newspaper and tossing the whole lot in the recycle bin.