It’s my week again on HGTV Handmade, and today I’m kicking it off with a 30 Minute Ukulele Decorating Challenge with Andrew Huang! We’re always looking to do more collabs on HGTV Handmade, and you guys love the 30 Minute Challenges, so this was a fun way to combine the two. Keep reading to watch the video and check out more photos of the projects!
If you don’t know Andrew Huang, definitely check out his YouTube channel. He’s a musician and often makes music with things that aren’t instruments, such as dental tools, balloons, or water. We made a video together on his channel making music out of craft supplies, which was so fun.
When I was brainstorming the challenge, I knew I wanted us to be decorating some object or another, and since Andrew is a musician, ukuleles seemed like the best idea.
If you want to try out the same challenge, you can get the same ukuleles as us on Amazon. Just be warned – they’re fun to craft onto, but they don’t stay in tune very easily, so if you’re actually looking to play music from it, you might want to go with something of higher quality.
In the end, we were both working right up until the very last second. I’m so glad we didn’t make it a 20 Minute Challenge like I was originally thinking!
In decorating the ukes, Andrew went with a gold theme. He put washi tape on the frets, drew onto the body using a gold marker, and added some glam with stick-on rhinestones.
I decided to go the route of washi tape, which unexpectedly ended up taking the entire 30 minutes. I love how it came out though, with all the fun colors. My favorite tapes actually ended up being the blue floral tape and the thin green and blue tape, which are two tapes I had gotten recently at Daiso, the Japanese dollar store. I will definitely be using them again in plenty more projects!
After we finished filming the official challenge, I decided to go ahead and finish the design on my ukulele anyway, by adding a gold sequin border. To be honest, I think I sort of made Barbie’s Dream Ukulele, but I actually love it.
I also added washi tape and gold sequins to the head of the ukulele, which I didn’t have time to do in the original 30 minutes.
I hope you guys liked this challenge! If you want to see more 30 Minute Challenges, we’ve decorated purses, phones, and paint chips, and you can check out all of those videos in this playlist. Thanks for watching, and I’ll be back with another DIY on Wednesday!
