Steampunky Goodness

I'm helping my former roommate (and still current friend) plan her steampunk themed birthday party for next week. As part of the preparations today, we did a little shopping...

We started at DI and scoured the store for old analog clocks and kitchen appliances that looked like they might contain gears. We had a strict price limit, since there's no point in spending $5 for something that might not have what you need, so the rule was it had to be $1. We found two clocks and one hand mixer that were promising (and $1 each). We also saw a music box but it was $3...

Next we went to Hobby Lobby and got some copper and silver acrylic paint. (Amy, my friend, already had some gold, or we would have gotten that too.)

We brought our treasures back to my apartment, where we then took apart the stuff from DI.

Partway through dismantling the clocks.

Our pile of treasures (or clock guts)... I was disappointed to see half of the gears were plastic.

I really, really love taking stuff apart.

The hand mixer yielded a disappointingly small number of gears. But it did contain a pretty cool motor we haven't decided what to do with yet.

Since half the gears were plastic, we had to paint them to look more authentic...

Gold, silver, and copper gears.

I was rather pleased with how they turned out. There aren't very many silver ones though because for some reason, that paint took forever to dry. Like, upwards of 20 minutes per coat, vs. 2-3 min for the other colors of paint. Weird.

We have a few more to paint still, but we ran out of time. Now the question remains... what to do with them? We're thinking about having party guests decorate nerf guns with the paint and gears, or possibly making the gears into bracelets or earrings... If you have any other fantastic ideas, feel free to share them in the comments.

Other planned decorations include silver tissue paper cut into gears for the walls. I really want to rig up some sort of dirgible too, but I'm rather stumped as to how to do it for cheap.

I have some pretty awesome ideas for food, too, but that will have to wait til tomorrow...