Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

We spent last week camping in a cabin at Pine Lake State Park. It was a delightful getaway. Our weather was all over the place and we had a fair bit of rain, but we still managed to get in a great deal of hiking and several fires. When it was raining or hot, we read books and played board games. It was so nice not to have tv and the internet to suck up our time for a change (and the cell service was terrible too :)). Before we went camping, I made some fire starters . This year's experimental fire starter was shavings from my electric pencil sharpener. They were exclusively colored pencil shavings. I put them in paper cups and covered them in a ton of melted wax. We tried them out on our first fire of the trip. I was concerned that the cups wouldn't light very well or stay lit. They lit fairly easily, but the edges sort of fizzled before they got to the wax. We ended up putting a cotton round fire starter on top of the wax and lit it and the whole thing burne...

It's that time of the year again--time for me to make more DIY fire starters for the camping season. I set out everything I needed to make my old standbys: cotton round fire starters and egg carton lint fire starters . But this year I also am trying a new variety that's a total experiment--colored pencil shavings. I used a foil pie plate on my burner (set to low) to melt down some old candles. I also bought a couple of pillar candles from the dollar store. Just pop the wick off of the bottom and put it in the pan to melt. Tea lights work really well too, just pop them out of the metal holders and take the wicks out. You could use higher quality wax or wax for making candles from the craft store, but the whole point of this for me is to make something very cheaply, and goodness knows I always seem to have old candles to get rid of. I had some leftover cotton rounds in my candle stash, so I whipped up a few of these. I just used a set of tongs to dip the round...

Decorating glass gems with alcohol ink is one of my most popular projects on the blog. I've been fine-tuning my process and trying out a bunch of different variations. One of the biggest issues with using alcohol ink on glass gems is that you can't really see the colored ink, it gets a bit lost as you look through the gem at the colors. One way around this problem (or to at least diminish it) is to back the glass gem. I've tried paint , aluminum foil , and aluminum tape . All have worked, but the easiest was the aluminum tape. I punched circles out and placed them on the back of the gems like stickers....so it donned on me as I was looking at some basic office supplies-- 3/4 inch color coding stickers --that the white back of stickers would be a great way to bring out the color in my glass gems.  I started by laying out a craft mat and my alcohol inks , and I cut up a bunch of squares of felt for my applicator as I knew I'd want to change colors several tim...

I've been recovering from a nasty knock-down-drag-out of a cold virus this last week and a half or so, so the craft tutorials have crawled to a bit of a halt, but I'm on the mend (I hope). Hopefully, we'll have new craft tutorials up next week, but until then, I thought I'd share some of my favorite crafty YouTube channels. HGTV Handmade : Yep the cable channel has a special crafting youtube channel which features regular contributors (many of whom have their own channels too, so it's a great place to start your crafty YouTube binge). Karen Kavett : One of the regular posters from HGTV Handmade is Karen Kavett. She's also a graphic designer who's done a lot of work for the Vlogbrothers (the YouTube brotherly duo of Hank and John Green). Sea Lemon : Is another crafter that has been featured on HGTV Handmade (but I'm not sure that she's a regular contributor anymore or not). At any rate, her channel is full of fun craft projects. Mak...

For a list of all of Sarah Jane's Craft Blog's Duct Tape Crafts, click here: The Duct Tape Collection