I wanted to hang portholes around our church sanctuary, but I needed them to be light and cheap, which are two things that decorative portholes are not.
This called for a trip to IKEA!
They have these clocks for $2 each (they tick very loudly)
Using a flat head screwdriver, carefully pry off the clear plastic face cover. There are three tabs holding it in that you can access from the back. Just don't break the tabs. You'll need it in one piece when you put it back together.
Now take the guts out of the clock. Sometimes they come willingly, and other times it take prying and breaking and brute force. You won't need the clocky bits again, so no need to be gentle unless you just want to.
I highly recommend leaving the number face on. It doesn't come out easily or in one piece.
Spray paint the empty clock the color you want your porthole to be. I went with gold, but silver or copper would probably work just as well.
This clock has a 7 inch face. You'll need 7 inch blue circles for your background. My lovely husband bought me a Cricut for Christmas, which I have slowly been mastering. It was extremely useful for this.
After the blue circles, I used the Lifeway clip art files and some other sea creature png files I had to make under water scenes for each.
Make sure you glue your scene into the clock paying attention to where the hanger in the back is.
Now all that is left is putting the cover back on.
The goldfish turned out especially cute. I used markers to add in the black and shading, and then a white paint pen for the whites of his eyes.
When I did my trial run I was still working out how to transfer clip art into usable Cricut files, so I made this scene instead. So, even if you don't have a stash of art or a cutting machine, you can still make cute stuff.
