Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

I had so much fun the first time I embossed dominoes , that I had to try it out again. This time I thought I'd use some different stamps and try layering the embossing. It didn't work out quite as well as I had hoped, but I thought I'd share what I learned. First I stamped alcohol ink onto my dominoes. I don't have process photos of this step because I inked them up while I was working on another project, but I took pictures of it the first time I made domino pendants if you want a step by step of the process. After my dominoes were inked, I sprayed them with some matte clear acrylic sealer so the ink wouldn't smudge or smear. After the sealer was dry, I grabbed my cork trivet, some embossing powder , a clear ink pad , and some stamps and got to work. I put the ink on my rubber stamp and then set the domino on top of the stamp. The clear ink is the consistency of thin vaseline, so as long as you don't jiggle it around as you s...

I've made a couple sets of magnets with bottle caps in the past. I saved my own bottle caps from a variety of beverages and spray painted them when I made the magnets, but I found some crafting caps at Tuesday Morning for $1.99 for a bag. They were navy blue, so with Memorial Day coming up, I thought it would be a great opportunity to make some patriotic pins. So I searched the internet for some images that would be the right size and shape. I inserted them into a Word file so that I could size them to 1 inch. I printed them out on some matte photo paper and then cut them into strips so that they could be cut out with a one inch circle punch . After the circles were punched, I used some Tacky Glue to glue the circles into the bottle caps. Any glue that would keep the paper from floating up in the Diamond Glaze is fine. After they have been glued down, let them dry for a few minutes to make sure they won't float. Then fill the caps with the ...

A couple of weeks ago I used some Judikins Diamond Glaze to make some of my alcohol ink washers shiny . It didn't go quite to plan, so I thought I'd try some Dimensional Magic . At first it went much better. The nozzle on the Dimensional Magic is much finer and allowed me to put down a nice ring of glaze. However, the glaze is thinner than the Diamond Glaze, and it ran into the same problem of several of them losing surface tension and collapsing into the hole in the center. Also, the Dimensional Magic seemed to react with some of the washers and made the colors run together. As you can see in the photo above with  some collapsed glue that dried with a red tint. I'm still trying to figure out how to make the glaze work. There are a couple of brands I haven't tried--and maybe the Diamond Glaze in the smaller bottle with a finer tip would work better. At any rate, I took my best glazed washers from the last two projects and was able to make a coupl...

I've been trying to come up with some unique ways to use ceramic tiles since my last trip to the hardware store to stock up. A couple of weeks ago I made an art plaque with some tissue paper and a 6 inch tile, this week, I wanted to use some 4 inch tiles to make a craft. I love experimenting with the small ceramic tiles as the plain ones only cost about 13 cents a piece. That's a totally reasonable price to pay for an experiment, so I thought I'd try embossing powder on the tiles. I assembled my clear ink pad , some cute stamps from the discount section at Michael's (I think I picked them up last summer), some black embossing powder , a cheap 4 inch ceramic tile, and a cork trivet. Then I plugged in my heat gun and got started. I coated the stamps with the clear ink (which is about the consistency of vaseline and works great for embossing powder--it sticks like a dream) and carefully stamped it onto the tile, then I dumped some black embossing powde...

My most popular post on this blog is a project I did a few years ago with alcohol ink where I stamped washers (yes, the kind from the hardware store) and made them into necklaces. It's a really easy and fun project--and if you have the inks, it's pretty inexpensive too. After I had added more colors to my ink collection, I revisited the project and made some more necklaces . In the comments section I had gotten some posts about how I should coat them with resin or dimensional magic so they would be all glazed and shiny. I thought that was an excellent idea. To start out I grabbed my alcohol inks and applicator, laid down my craft mat , and cleaned some washers off with rubbing alcohol. I put a square of felt on the applicator and dotted a few different colors of alcohol ink onto it. I stamped at the washers 3 or 4 times to cover the washer and you get a light watercolor look with not very good coverage. So I kept stamping. 3-5 more times and you...