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Showing posts from October, 2014

Alcohol Ink Jack O'Lantern

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The last time I was at Dollar Tree, I saw this metal flower pot and the first thing that popped into my head was "I could totally alcohol ink that." My husband was suspicious, but for a buck, he just shrugged his shoulders and we kept shopping. Of course I didn't need another decorative flower pot, so I had to come at this from a different angle.  With Halloween fast approaching, I decided I'd try to make a candy bowl. I brought out all of my orange and gold alcohol inks, my craft mat, my ink stamper, and some wide painter's tape. Using a scissors, I cut out a basic Jack O'Lantern face and stuck it onto my flower pot. Then I loaded up my applicator stamp with all four shades of orange and started stamping. When I first applied the ink, it went on in big patches, as you can see above. It's more of a water color blotchiness.  I like a more stippled look, so I kept stamping until I covered the whole container and then came back over

Duct Tape File Pocket

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Midterms are due by the end of the day today.  I've been grading my butt off for weeks.  So it seems appropriate that I whip up a very quick school related craft so that I can get back to grading. In one of my classes I'm using one of these manilla folder pockets to hold a folder for each student that they can put homework in and take homework out of once it's graded.  The system has been working pretty well, but the pocket...that's another story. The sides are starting to fall apart.  So before I have a major malfunction, I figured it was time to tape it up. Of course if I'm gonna tape it up, I might as well make it look pretty. I decided on black and white stripes of duct tape with an accent strip at the top.  I started by striping the black and white along the front side. I cut the duct tape just long enough to overlap onto the sides and carefully placed it along the bottom fold. I alternated the tape until there was room for just one

Mod Podge and Tissue Paper Decorated Halloween Candles

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I have been wanting to do some crafts with those great plain white altar candles they sell at Dollar Tree for ages, but it seems like every time I go to Dollar Tree, they are all sold out of them. Well not this last time.  I picked up 4 and set them aside.  I knew I wanted to decorate them somehow, but I wasn't quite sure with what.  Later that week, I was at Walmart picking up some necessities and came across this cute halloween tissue paper.  For starters, who gives "halloween gifts"?  Someone must because there was a little endcap with halloween gift bags and tissue paper, so I snagged up the orange and "Happy Halloween" printed tissue paper (it's Hallmark brand, so it may be available at stores other than Walmart too). So I grabbed two of my altar candles and some mod podge and a foam brush. My first step was getting the darn sticker off of the side of the candle.  I filled up my kitchen sink with a few inches of warm water and they came off

Prepping Acorns for Display

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We have a young oak tree in our yard (well, young is relative when it comes to oak trees--it's about 15 years old, not too big yet), and this is the first year we've had noticeable numbers of acorns in our yard, so I decided to gather them up and get them all polished and sealed to use in a glass vase. Here they are just picked up from the yard, nothing fancy--lots of caps had fallen off, and I found more caps than acorns, but for my first harvest, not too bad.  I washed them off with some dawn to get all the dirt off.  Then I let them sit outside for a couple of days in the sun to make sure they were good and dry.  Then I put them in a zip top freezer bag and popped them in the freezer for a few days to make sure any bugs that might be crawling around in them were killed off.  I've read tutorials where folks spread them out on a cookie sheet and baked them at low temperatures for a couple of hours, but I didn't want to mess around with that with such a smal