I Am SO Not Martha Stewart

I have plans to put some gifts into the Samhain basket for the RT Convention in Pittsburgh this year. For the paranormal gift basket, I'm putting in some jasmine incense and a small incense burner; for the large basket, I'm sending in beautiful sterling silver tiger's eye drop earrings that I lust over and plan on ordering for myself.

So I bought the incense burner today, and it came in a lovely silver tube that I thought, "Gee, I bet I could make something with this!"

snicker snort

Yeah. Right.

So I took off the gluey logo paper that was on the front. Too bad I couldn't get the glue itself off.

Lightbulb!

I have textured cardstock paper from one of my eldest's school projects! Let's wrap it in that!

Okay, that worked. Mostly. It stuck to the tube, I can tell you that!

So I finish wrapping the lovely silver and glue tube with the lovely black paper, and realize two things:

1) The edges of the black paper are stark white, which looks pretty crappy;
2) On the evenness scale of 1-10? I hit about an 8. Slightly off center.

Oops. Crap.

Lightbulb!

I'll unwrap a christmas bow and viola! Instant ribbon!

Unfortunately it looked like it had been attacked by my cats, but hey! I can make it work! Right?

snicker snort

I finished my lovely ribbon edges and realized two things:

1) I could still see the white edges down the long side of the paper, because the ribbon only covered top and bottom;
2) It looks kinda like a pipe bomb.

I can fix (part of) that!

LIGHTBULB!

Black magic marker along that white edge, and viola! It blends.

Unfortunately, I nicked the rest of the paper in three spots. Shiny black magic marker spots on matte black textured paper.

Dusty peeked over my shoulder and said. "What is that? A pipe bomb?" Then Dusty got that LIGHTBULB! look on his face and added, "Why don't you drill a hole in the top and have one of the incense sticks sticking out, then it will really look real!"

Needless to say, the pipe-bomb-incense-thingy will NOT be making an appearance at RT this year...