Obviously, as is evidenced by this blog, I’m absolutely mad about awesome DIY projects and while I love to come up with my own spin on things, every once in a while, I come across another fellow blogger who has an idea that is nothing short of brilliant and instantly gets my creative brain spinning in new directions.

Case in point, this incredibly simple skeleton hand DIY from Cat over at ‘ctrl + curate.’

When I saw Cat’s DIY skeleton hand wall decor post, I instantly knew not only did I want to make them, but that there had to be other ways to use these skeleton hands around the house.  Thus, the ‘three ways to turn skeleton hands into helping hands’ DIY was born, starting with the easiest first, and progressing all the way to the hardest.

The first DIY we’re going to tackle is a redo of Cat’s original project.  The only change I’ve made to her already incredible original DIY was to add a small decorative piece of wood to the wall plaque to just dress it up a bit more.

So, lets get started!

Skeleton Hand Wall Hooks

Difficulty:  Easy

For project #1 you will need:

• Plastic skeleton hands (I got mine at JoAnn’s)
• Wood plaques (as many as you have skeleton hand hooks you want to make)
• Black paint
• Decorative wooden trim the same size or smaller than your wooden plaques
• 2 wood screws for each skeleton hand
• Small felt furniture pads (optional)
• E6000 glue
• Picture hanging kit (I personally like the sawtooth kind)

Begin by first giving your plaques and the wood trim you’re using to decorate them a good coating of black paint.  I used a high gloss black spray paint and gave each piece two coats, letting them dry between coating.

Use your E6000 glue to attach your decorative wood to your plaque and set aside to dry.

While those are drying, we’ll need to prep our skeleton hands.  The ones I got from JoAnn’s have slightly uneven wrist bones (the radius and the ulna…ooh, look, that forensic pathology class I took in college is finally paying off!).

In order to make this project work (and actually, to make all three of our skeleton hand projects work) we’ll need the two bones to be completely flush with each other.  I used a table saw to accomplish this but if you prefer a less overkill approach, a handsaw, sandpaper, or even a good pair of clippers can get the job done.

Once they’re trimmed, make sure you sand them to ensure they’re perfectly even.  The flatter the edges and the more closely matched they are to each other, the tighter the fit to the wooden plaque and the more professional a result.

Once your wrist bones are even and sanded and your plaques are dry, we’ll need to drill holes into our wrist bones for the wood screws.  Drill them out using a drill bit that is 1 size smaller than the wood screws you are using and then drill corresponding holes through your plaques using the same drill bit.

To help keep the plaques flush against the wall, I like to countersink my screws a bit, but that’s totally up to your level of comfort with power tools.  If you skip the countersinking and want the plaques to rest flat against the wall, a small felt furniture pad in each corner does the trick.

Using a screwdriver, simply screw your skeletal hands to your wooden plaques from the front to the back.  For added strength, I like to add a dot of E6000 glue between the wood and the bones of my skeleton hands.

To get your finished hand hooks to hang on the wall, you can use either the sawtooth picture kits (available here) or simply option for the Command Strips Cat suggests in her DIY.  Either works!

These hooks are surprisingly robust, and I found they can easily hold the weight of hand towels, baseball hats, aprons, and pretty much anything else you have around that is under 5 lbs in weight.  In fact, once I finally get my own place, a few of these attached to the wall in my bathroom with some command hooks will be a perfect way for me to finally sort and organize my necklaces!

Skeleton Hand Jewelry Tray

Difficulty:  Medium

For project #2 you will need:

• Plastic skeleton hands
• Small wood tray (as many as you have skeleton hand jewelry holders you want to make)
• Black paint
• 2 wood screws for each skeleton hand
• E6000 glue
• Decorative scrapbook paper
• Spray glue
• 2-part resin
• Disposable plastic cups for mixing our resin
• Popsicle sticks for mixing our resin
• Blue painter’s tape
• Heat gun or hair dryer with a high heat setting
• Sticky back felt sheet OR Small felt furniture pads

Because we’re using 2-part resin, I’m moving this project up the difficulty scale to medium.

The project starts out very much like our first skeleton hand project and we’ll begin by painting our wood tray both inside and out.

We’ll also need to cut the wrist bones of our skeleton hands and sand them flush exactly like we did in project #1.

Once your tray is completely dry and your skeleton hand bones are flush and even, it’s time to drill the holes into both our wrist bones and corresponding ones in the bottom of our tray.  Drill them out using a drill bit that is 1 size smaller than the wood screws you are using and then drill corresponding holes through your wood tray using the same drill bit.

After your holes are drilled, it’s time to line the tray with our decorative paper.

Carefully cut your scrapbook paper to fit the bottom of your tray and use a light layer of spray glue to tack it into place.  Make sure you smooth it out completely and remove any air bubbles.  Don’t worry about covering the holes we just drilled for our skeleton hand, we’ll reopen those in a bit.

Once the spray glue is totally dry, carefully poke holes through the back of your tray (and your scrapbook paper) and use your wood screws to attach your skeleton hand. Again, for added strength, I like to add a dot of E6000 glue between the wood and the bones of my skeleton hands just like we did with project #1.

Now we need to prep our tray for the resin layer by wrapping the base of your tray in a layer of painter’s tape.  Pay close attention to not only any corner seams, but also the spot in the tray where the screws protrude.  I like to give those spots an extra layer of tape.  Resin is nothing if not an escape artist, and the last thing you want to do is flood your tray only to find your resin leaking out the sides through an almost microscopic spot (and trust me, if there’s a spot for it to escape, the resin will find it!).

 

Prepare your two-part resin according to the manufacturer’s directions and flood your tray with approximately enough to cover the entire bottom by about ¼”.  This will not only give your tray some durability but will also help really secure your skelly arm.

Help pop any bubbles that might be floating in your resin by going over it with your heat gun or your hair dryer set on high.

Set the entire thing aside to dry for at least 12 hours, preferably 24.

To help offset the small bump on the bottom of your tray that comes as a result of the screws and to help your tray sit flat, I suggest either popping a felt furniture pad into each corner or placing a protective layer of felt across the entire bottom of your tray.

While we did countersink our screws in project #1, the thin balsa wood base of the tray I used in this project made that impossible, which is why I suggest the felt pads and/or felt backing.  Plus, it helps protect whatever surface you put your tray on.

These little trays are just the right size for holding miscellaneous jewelry including my earrings and rings and I like to keep one in the bathroom and one in my shop so I can always have a safe spot to drop my rings without worrying about losing them!  And yes, in case you were wondering, that crown belongs to Lucifur, the Lord of Barkness.  She enjoys wearing it a little too much.

Ok, we’ve knocked out helping hand projects 1 and 2…ready for the hardest yet?

 

 

Skeleton Hand Catch All Tray

Difficulty:  Advanced

 

For project #3 you will need:

• Plastic skeleton hands
• Plastic groundbreaker skeleton hands with attached arms
• 2-part 5-minute epoxy
• Heat gun
• Metal clothes hanger
• White paint
• Off white paint
• Brown paint
• Small paintbrush
• Sand paper or Dremel
• Medium wood tray (as many as you have skeleton hand catch all trays you want to make)
• Black paint
• 2 wood screws for each skeleton hand
• E6000 glue
• Decorative scrapbook paper
• Spray glue
• 2-part resin
• Disposable plastic cups for mixing our resin
• Popsicle sticks for mixing our resin
• Blue painter’s tape
• Sticky back felt sheet OR Small felt furniture pads

The idea with this tray is the hand is high enough over it that I can loop my sunglasses through the first finger and thumb and have them hang in place over the tray.  Then, down below, the tray is large enough to hold my car keys and anything I might have hanging out in my pockets.  The entire thing lives near my door and when I come home at night, I use it to drop off my keys, empty my pockets, and stash my sunglasses.

Now I’ll be honest, this project is by far the hardest of all the three and requires a substantial amount of work, but the end result looks so good that I say if you’re comfortable tackling this one…go for it!  We’ll be doing a little ‘plastic’ surgery (ahahah, yeah, I laughed.), removing our skeleton hand’s thumb and rotating it around in order to create a loop with the first finger as well as adding some length to the overall hand through the addition of new wrist bones.

Again, we’ll start out this project much like the first two by painting our tray and setting it aside to dry.

Now here’s the first major deviation from our earlier projects…we’ll begin prepping our skeleton hand by removing the thumb right at the base where it joins the rest of the bones in the hand.  Sand any rough spots off and gently round off the area where the thumb was originally attached.

Once the thumb is removed, go ahead and finish prepping our skelly hand by cutting the wrist bones flush with each other and sanding them flat like we did with projects #1 and #2

Now I love these skeleton hands because they are the most realistic looking ones I’ve ever found for the price, but unfortunately, they’re also really short, which means in order to get the height I want, we’ll have to add some length to them with some ‘donor’ bones.

I picked up a cheap groundbreaker arm from the same JoAnn’s and figured it was close enough in size to match my skelly hand.  While it’s entirely possible you can skip all this plastic surgery and use the hand the arm comes with, it just didn’t look real enough for me to do.  The wrist connection is flimsy, and the hand looks cheap to me. Luckily the wrist bones are perfect!

Disassemble your groundbreaker arm and discard your ‘crappy’ skelly hand (I chucked mine into my ‘bone box’ where I stash all my extra bits and pieces for all sorts of projects, like extra bones for the top of Lucifur’s Cozy Cauldron Cave).

Use your trimmed and sanded ‘good’ hand to mark on your wrist bones where you want the two to join.  Try to find a point where the two sizes of bones match the closest.

Carefully cut your wrist bones on your groundbreaker arm flush and sand them flat.  At this time, do NOT cut the bottom off of your groundbreaker arm where the radius and ulna connect.  We will do that step later, but for now, it’s easier to work with it if the two bones remain connected.

Because we’ll be joining our skelly hand to our wrist bones and then asking it to hold stuff for us, we’ll want it to have some structural integrity that is stronger than what we’d achieve just using glue.  We will need to reinforce our wrist as well as our thumb with a bit of internal scaffolding using pieces of our metal hanger.

Carefully drill out the center of both your wrist bones on your skelly hand as well as the wrist bones on your groundbreaker arm.

Using a bit of your 5-minute epoxy, glue a piece of hanger wire into each of the holes on your skelly hand, pushing the wire all the way down into the hole you drilled out.  Trim the wire off roughly ½” past the end of your bones and let the glue dry.

Using more of your 5-minute epoxy, fill the holes on your groundbreaker’s wrist and then press the metal ends of your skelly hand into them, making sure that the metal prongs go all the way into your wrist bones and the two sets of plastic bones meet.  It’s okay if there is a small gap between the bones, we’ll fill that in with epoxy.

Allow your epoxy to set and then use additional epoxy to fill in any seams between where the bones join.  Don’t worry about being perfectly neat at this point, we’ll sand it all flush later, so really goop it on there for now.

We’ll be doing the same thing to the thumb bone on our skelly hand.  Again, drill out the center of the bone and embed a length of hanger wire, trimming it so it extends about ½” past the end of the thumb bone.

Find a spot on the front of your skelly hand were the thumb looks the most natural and can curve up to form a loop with the pointer finger.  Don’t worry if the two don’t meet perfectly, we’ll fix that later.  We just need them to be at least close at this point.  Drill through your skelly hand at an angle, pointing downwards in order to allow for enough space for the ½” of your thumb wire to really secure to the bones.

Test fit your thumb and carefully bend the wire embedded in it to allow your thumb to sit naturally.  I found a rough 45 bend in my embedded thumb hanger looked the best for me.

Fill this hole with 5-minute epoxy and then attach your thumb and let it all dry.

By now all the epoxy on your wrist bones should be dry and you can start sanding down any areas where you have too much epoxy built up or where the bones don’t meet up quite perfectly.  Because the epoxy is clear, you’ll have two bands of clear bisecting your wrist bones but don’t worry, we’ll hit that with a bit of paint.

Give the area where your thumb was epoxied a good going over with sand paper as well (or if you’re lazy and impatient like I am, hit it with your Dremel using a sanding pad and knock the whole thing out in a matter of seconds…just make sure you’re wearing a mask as the process can kick up quite a bit of resin and plastic dust and nobody wants to breathe that stuff in!)

Once you’re happy with how all the seams and joints look, we can touch them up with a bit of paint.  I found I got the best results by first hitting it with a layer of white and then going back in with a bit of off white. I then did a final dry brush with brown and used a bit of water on my brush to help wash off the heaviest bits, leaving me with the same streaky brown and off white of the rest of the bones.  I’d say it turned out pretty damn good!

Give the tip of both your thumb and your pointer finger a quick sand to rough them up. To get your thumb to meet up with your pointer finger and form the circular loop we want for our sunglasses, use your heat gun (or a hairdryer set on the highest setting) to soften your pointer finger. Quickly hit both the tip of your thumb and pointer finger with a bit of 5-minute epoxy and while the plastic is still soft from the heat gun, press the two together and hold.  Because your pointer finger is going to naturally want to return to it’s original position, I actually ended up holding the two in place for the full 20 minutes it took for the epoxy to cure rock hard just to make sure it didn’t slowly separate while the epoxy was still soft.

Now is the time to finally cut the bottom off of our groundbreaker arm and prep it in order to attach it to our tray.  Again, as with all the other bone cutting we’ve done in these tutorials, make sure you sand them flush and flat and then drill them out so we can use wood screws to attach them to the tray.

Drill corresponding holes in the catch all tray and line it with your decorative scrapbooking paper using spray glue just like we did in project #2.

Using your wood screws and a drop of E6000 glue on each wrist bone, attach your skelly arm to the bottom of your tray.

We’ll be filling this tray with protective 2-part resin just like we did on project #2, so you’ll want to again make sure that all your seams and holes are properly taped over using your painter’s tape.

Mix up your 2-part resin according to the manufacturer’s directions and flood your tray with ¼” of liquid resin.  Pop all your bubbles by hitting the liquid resin with your heat gun or hair dryer set on high and then let the entire thing cure for 24 hours.

Once your resin is cured, give your tray a protective layer of sticky back felt on the bottom or pop some furniture pads into the corners and you’re done!

Congratulations!  If you’ve made it this far, you’ve now got three totally awesome and unique helping skelly hands that you can use almost anywhere in your house or office!  And if you can think of even more ideas for ways to use these skelly hands, let me know!  I’m having so much fun with them and I know there are way more than just three ways to use them!

How are you going to use your skelly hands?

For more epic DIY projects, or for a way to help get rid of those extra bone parts we cut off, why not use them to make your own Glow in the Dark smoking cauldron?

And for a way to repurpose those tiny skeletons they always have at the craft stores during Halloween, we have a DIY Memento Mori clock here.