Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

Dear husband is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.  We've been talking about getting one of those belt displays that you hang on the wall, but they either looked really cheap and chintzy or were very expensive, so I told him I could totally make something.  Well, I still hadn't made anything when I stumbled across storing them in a vase.  I could do that.  I could totally do that.  So I wound up one of the belts and measured it.  Hubby wears a size 7 belt--which is the equivalent to a XXL(he probably only needs a 6, but better to be a bit longer than you need than to be too short).  At any rate, his belts measure about 5 inches in diameter when they are wound up into a circle. So I bought a vase that was 5.4 inches in diameter (according to the label) and 15 inches tall. He has 8 belts to display, so the height should be perfect with a little extra room at the top to toss in some medals from tournaments or maybe to make a lid for it later.  I thought I had hit the jackpot when I

I'm a relative novice when it comes to making things out of duct tape. This is only my third project. My first project with duct tape was to make a water bottle holder and my second was to make some covered boxes . I watched a tutorial video on how to make a fabric lined duct tape purse on the Second Hand Chances blog and thought it looked like something I could do.   Cut a piece of fabric the size that you want your purse to be. Find a purse or a box to measure and make the fabric the width of the front plus one of the sides, and then make the fabric twice as long as you'd like the bag to be long.  My fabric ended up being 12 inches by 23 inches.  I knew I wanted to make a wider bag than the one in the video, so I planned accordingly with the width. Next find the middle of the fabric and place a piece of duct tape straight across. I marked the middle on both sides of the fabric so that it stayed straight. Then once that center tape is applied, measure 1 1

About 3 months ago, I tried out a DIY  wood treatment to reduce the appearance of scratches that I had seen online.  I adjusted it slightly by foregoing the use of food grade oil for lemon oil designed to be used on furniture. After 3 months, the scratches have started to reappear in the furniture, so it was time to polish them again.   This time, I adjusted my ratio (since I later realized that I had flip-flopped the ratio from the inspiration articles) from 3 parts vinegar and 1 part oil (the inspirations listed 3 parts oil and 1 part vinegar) to 1:1.  The reason I tried this was that even though the inspirations used way more oil, when I used way less, it still worked, so I decided to try it out with 1 part oil and 1 part vinegar and see how it went. Spoiler alert--it worked perfectly--just slightly better than using 3 times as much vinegar, so if you're trying to stretch your lemon oil, feel free to use more vinegar. The next thing I changed in my revisit was

This week's project came from a need to store my headbands someplace other than the shallow drawer in my bathroom vanity.  I broke one that got caught in the drawer and snapped in half, so it was time to find a new place for my headbands.  I decided to make a ribbon organizer for them. You'll need: 3-4 feed of grosgrain ribbon a keyring or d-ring a glue gun and glue I didn't have any d-rings floating around, but I did have a bag full of keyrings, so I used them instead.  I folded the end of my grosgrain ribbon over the keyring and glued it in place with hot glue. Next up you'll have to decide how big you want your loops.  All of my headbands are skinny, so I knew I didn't need to make big loops.  I ended up using a pick comb as a template because it just happened to be lying on the table.  It actually worked out really well, but you could easily take a piece of cardboard that was 3 or 4 inches wide and use it instead (just make a mark o