Fridge Magnets Out of Kids Figurines - Upcycling

If you have a kid like I do, you'll probably know the problem - they collect what ever they can. My daughter loves small figurines - from Kinder eggs, Filly horses and the give a ways from our grocery stores.

They do this quite often - buy goods for 5€ and get one mistery pack of the current edition - we have hundreds of this little things flying around the flat by now. So I decided to reuse some as something usefull. This project used a Disney themed collection named "Wikeez" - we had several figurines twice or even three times until the collections box was finally complete - enough excess for the magnets.

The things you will need:

• figurines of your choice made out of plastic
• two rasps - one coarse, one fine
• a drill 1 mm bigger than the size of your magnets, in this case a 7mm drill
• magnets - I used these Neodym ones, which are 6 mm diameter
• glue - we used Textile glue from Gütermanns, but hot glue or superglue would work as well

The first step is creating an even surface on the back of the figurine - we mounted the little plastic in a vice, secured between two scraps of wood to protect it from squeezing to much.

Now rasp away with the coarse rasp - untill you have a surface that will allow your piece to lay flat on the fridge or any other surface. That may take a while - depending on the figurine you used. Once you're fine with the surface, use the fine rasp to smooth it out and get rid of little chips on the edges. As you can see on the last picture - we had to take away a good amount of material on this one.

Now take your drill and carefully and slowly drill a hole as deep as the magnet into the back of your figurine. Better have one or two little breaks inbetween - if you drill to fast it will get hot and the plastic can melt and wrap itself around the drill and then you have a lot of fun getting this off the drill again. Check with a magnet if your hole is deep enough - consider the glue needs a bit of space too.

Use a bit of your glue and place the magnet in this hole - it should be a good fit since the hole is a tiny bit wider than the magnet. Let it dry and you're done.

As you can see we had to place the magnets in different positions. This was caused by the different shapes of the figurines, but it's not a big deal to find the right spot.

Now enjoy your new beautiful fridge magnets and a happy kid that loves the fact, that his toys are still there and usefull. We even gave away some at Christmas, because they were cute and who doesn't need some cute magnets to decorate your kitchen? ;)