When you have some extra roof flashing...

Make tea light holders!  I've been threatening to try this project ever since I saw a shoe box swap of this style at convention.  I've seen tons of pictures of these cool tea light holders all over the internet so it's impossible for me to give credit to any one person for the inspiration.  I'll just say to whoever thought this up first, YEAH YOU!!  This was so much fun!

Ok, Kelli...what are you talking about?  Flashing is a roofing material used to weatherproof your roof.  You'll see it around chimneys or vent pipes. It's generally made of some kind of sheet metal.  The stuff that's pretty easy to find your local home improvement store is made of aluminum.  It comes in rolls with sizes from 6" wide to 14" wide and as long as 50 feet or more on a roll.  Most of it is silver in color but I was able to find a coated flashing that was brown on one side and white on the other. (If you need to know more about flashing, check out this Wikipedia link.)  For my particular project, I purchased a roll of flashing that is 14 inches wide (the same size as the Bigz XL dies) and 10 feet long.

To put this in the simplest of terms, I cut the flashing to 6" x 14" and put it through my handy dandy Big Shot using the Flower Folds die.  I ran each piece back through the Big Shot using an embossing folder.  I bent the small flower up and the large flower down, assembled them with some sticky strip and voila!  We have a tea light holder :-)  I know that sounds overly simplistic but I'm telling you, it was SO easy.

 A couple words of caution.  Flashing is SHARP!  I cut myself and didn't even know I was bleeding.  This is not a project for kids.  Also, you will probably need a card stock shim when you cut the flowers out.  Even through it's thick enough to go through with a cut, you do need a little extra push because the material is so thick.

Go try making yourself a great little tea light holder out of roof flashing!  I bet your hubby will be pretty impressed you 1) know what flashing is ;) and 2) figured out a unique way to use some of those scraps.  I really want to stamp on this stuff.  I'll report back with the results!