Personalized Bubble Magnets Using Text & Pictures

Hi all! It's been a week since I last posted and I am going to try to get back to posting a couple of times a week. I have been doing plenty of fun projects, just haven't sat myself down to share them yet but I will, for sure! Here I will tell you how to make customized magnets using text or free clip art that you can cut out and glue together!

I still LOVE this fun little project for gifts. It's great as teacher's gifts, gifts to family and friends or for yourself to decorate your refrigerator or metal cabinet in your office or cubical at work! They are so much fun and very easy to make. I first did a tutorial back in December to share how to make them for Christmas gifts and mentioned that I would soon share instructions on making magnets in a little more advanced way. It has been a while so here goes! 

The first tutorial was Fun Bubble Magnets! Please go there for the list of materials you'll need. In that tutorial I made bubble magnets using scrapbook paper. For these magnets above and below I used photo paper. I have tried printing on several different papers and photo paper seems to work the best. With thin paper, the ink will run when you apply glue.

These magnets are from a couple of years ago. That year I thought it would be neat to make gifts for all of my relatives and close friends and personalize them so they would be special to each person. I made a mess of my kitchen table for about a month but it was so much fun and everyone really seemed to like opening them!

The bubble magnets above were for my grandfather who is an Air Force Veteran and so I used a clip art of an American flag and then typed up some words of phrases he says to cut out. You need to use a text formatting program to create the text for your magnets. I used Adobe InDesign. You can use Word or Illustrator or another program that allows you to manipulate text in a text box so you can do cut outs for your magnets.

Below shows the dimensions for small glass stones (on the left) and the larger ones (on the right). In InDesign I created several text boxes (with no outlines on the text boxes) that were .55" X .5167" and 1.25" X 1.2667" like my diagram shows below. The glass marbles are not perfect circles so the "squares" are not exactly square. They are off just a tad. I lined the boxes up on an 8 1/2" X 11" size document by copying and pasting. I made sure each box had a little space in between the next one. Then I played with fonts and colors plus background colors and little sayings or inside jokes and I typed them up and placed them within the text boxes. After I had a full page of text and clip art sized to fit inside the boxes, I made a high res pdf and put it on a key chain flash drive that I took to Kinkos to have printed. I was out of ink at home and it's really cheap to have one sheet printed at Kinkos.

Once I had my sheet with my printouts of the text and pictures, I took the glass marbles and placed them over each item I wanted to cut out. I played with placement and then drew around the marble with a pencil and simply cut them all out and glued them together just as in my other post on Fun Bubble Magnets! 

I used a Pixar Cars child's sticker book to make these magnets below for my children's art display in their playroom! It's another fun way to decorate and make things fun for your children. Just make sure your child is over the stage of putting things in his/her mouth!

I used dollar store tins for the packaging and taped ribbons to the insides of the lids for the gifts. You can fit a total of six of the large bubble magnets in these. As for the smaller bubble magnets, I ordered some tin hinged containers(looked like small Sucrets tins) online to hold them. They hold six of the small magnets. The tin containers are lovely because the magnets cling to the them and they are a good size! Hope this helps!