The Mystery Thing Revealed: Sweet Release

Well, well, well.  This week's Guess The Mystery Thing challenge turned out to be quite interesting.  So many astute guesses - a few were close - but only ONE very clever smartypants got it right!  To recap: my readers were asked to identify the mysterious secret ingredient in this upcycled necklace:

That lightly toasted flower - what's it made of?  Think you know?  Are you the smartypants?  Read on to find out!

First, a sampling of Mich's Most Creative (Totally Wrong) Guesses:

Ashley: An evil teacher's burnt homework papers.

Rose:  Apple shavings!

Lorraine:  Uh oh,  you're in trouble now. You took those 'do not remove' tags off your couch cushions.

Anne P:  An old love note from an ex boyfriend (see, it is faded) - you tore it up, cut it into a flower and burned the edges. Great recycling!

Amy: Aunt Maisie's oily potato chips she left to dry on a newspaper.

Alex:  Instructions for putting together some umlaut-laden piece of furniture from Ikea.

Dena:  Subway posters from Munchkinland?

Casey:  White potato slices, very thin, dried and sprayed with varnish, then "burnished" with a brown marker. Beautiful!

Squarefeet:  The papillon chair cushions from Barbie's patio after that unfortunate Memorial day BBQ incident.

Keely:  Recently there was a space invasion where they dropped smoking hot disks from their alien ships, to wipe out both our print material and our big girl panties. You happened to find some results of the invasion, where the printed material fused to the big girl panties, and creative you made them into flowers. NASA will be contacting you soon.

Once again I salute you guys. Hilarious and sharp.  I am totally going to have to try the one with potato slices.

And now, the reveal.

Ready?

Set?

Are you sure?

Okay, then.

It's release paper (the stuff you peel away) from the back of a vintage roll of faux bois shelf liner.

How did that occur to me, one might ask?  You see, I actually created a faux bois flower first.  Lookit!  Pretty!

I rejected my faux bois flower as a Mystery Thing; not mysterious enough.  Then it hit me!  (Ow!  Why does that keep happening?)  Then I had an idea.  I had all these discarded release-paper circles, which had been peeled away from the faux bois petals.

I (carefully) toasted them over a flame, rubbed away the loose ashes and got the prettiest result!

So the release paper flower was born, and joined its faux bois cousin.  On this silver bunny, for no reason at all.  Except it made a cute picture.

(Coming soon: a DIY tutorial for both of these flowers.)

Winners winners!  Huge congratulations to Janice, the only one to guess shelf liner backing.  And my random.org winner: Day.  Huzzah to you both, you will each receive a flower pendant, set off perfectly by a gorgeous necklace from Styled by Tori Spelling.

Thank you thank you thank you, everybody!  What a blast it always is, playing this game with you!  See you next time!