Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

I teach at a local community college, so it's crunch time grade wise....and we had a lightning in a bottle kind of weekend where it was sunny with no rain forecasted, low humidity, and with warm but not hot temperatures for both days of the weekend. So, we had to do yard work. After our mowing and trimming on Saturday, we decided to refresh our deck. Between the deck and grading....I didn't get much else done, so instead of a craft tutorial, you get to see our deck painting project. Our deck was beyond beginning to get ragged. It hadn't been sealed since before we bought our house and there was a lot of mildew, cracking, and even some lichen on it. So we opted for a deck filler type product at our local Home Depot (because it was the closest hardware store). We bought Behr Wood Cleaner and followed the instructions (wear gloves, mix with an equal part water, wet deck, scrub or swab on solution, rinse off).   We scrubbed it on as we knew there were some

At one of my recent Dollar Tree runs, I got a package of tissue paper squares in their craft section. The package contained multiple bright colors of squares that were a little over an inch in size.  I had already done a faux stained glass project  using pieces of tissue paper glued onto glass candle holders with mod podge. I knew it would be easy to recreate that project with a new twist. So I grabbed my mod podge , a foam brush, and a cleaned pickle jar. I painted a stripe of glue onto the bottom of my repurposed jar and started applying my squares of tissue paper. I made sure to overlap them a bit so that there was no glass showing between. I continued randomly alternating colors and tapping the tissue paper onto the glue. Don't worry if it's not perfectly smooth or if a few edges are not completely glued down, you can add glue as you go. The more you fuss with your tissue paper, the more likely it is to tear, so just tap it on and move on.

With Easter just around the corner, I knew I wanted to make something festive. So I fell back on one of my favorite media to work with: Alcohol Inks. I decided to decorate a couple of the square candle holders from Dollar Tree with alcohol ink Easter eggs. I rolled out my craft mat and grabbed my alcohol inks . I also grabbed a roll of wide painter's tape to create a stencil on my candle holders. I ended up making my stencils freehand and it was a bit of a pain. If I were doing this project again, I'd probably draw out or print out an Easter egg the size that I wanted and then trace that onto a sheet of tape (made my layering the pieces on the craft mat). After I got my egg shapes masked off, I was worried they would just look like colored blobs, so I made some little tape zig zags to put in the middle of my eggs. I dripped pink, orange, and yellow alcohol ink onto the felt on my applicator and stamped it onto the top half of my egg. Then I u

I've amassed quite the collection. So here it is all in one place: The Alcohol Ink Tutorials