Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

Ever have one of those, "Hey I wonder if I could..." moments when thinking up craft projects? Well, today I totally thought...hey, I wonder if I could spray paint those composition notebooks that have plastic covers . I had a small stack of them hanging out in my office, just sitting there....looking all lonely and sad, so I decided to jazz them up. I picked a couple boring blue ones. One appears to be Mead brand...the other one is probably Target brand. I slipped a gallon zip top bag over the paper in the notebooks to avoid the edges getting completely spray painted. I folded the excess bag under the notebook and put them in a cardboard box and took them outside. Then I grabbed some old spray paint. You'll absolutely need a black and probably a silver--everything else just depends on what you have in your stash. I had a medium blue and a bright purple and a teal and some white. I used a bit of all of those colors. They were all old, mostly Krylon, but

Over the years, I've decorated several sets of Dollar Tree's white altar candles. To see the whole collection click here: Altar Candle Collection

This blog's most popular post is from the first time I ever used alcohol ink on glass gems . Since then, I have tried out several strategies for inking gems. One that I could never get to work right was a simple drip and splatter technique .  I had tried a few times to perfect the drip and splatter. I've been successful with tiles and vases and other larger surfaces, but never on the gems. So when I found some slightly larger (bigger than an inch) gems at Walmart, I knew I had to try it again. I rolled out my craft mats and brought out my alcohol inks . I also grabbed some rubbing alcohol, some paper towels, and some canned air . I started out by dripping a single drop of orange alcohol ink onto my gem. Then I used the canned air to spread it out. A single drop will cover nearly the whole surface. Which leads to one of the biggest problems with this method on such a small surface, when you add another color, it often overtakes the first one, making it ver

I was at Walmart the other day picking up some essentials and noticed that they started selling giant clear flat glass gems in the floral section. This was exciting for me since Dollar Tree had changed their one inch clear gems so they were iridescent (which sounds cool, but ends up obscuring the ink). Also, these gems were bigger, some near an inch and a half in size, which make for excellent pendants. So I bought 3 bags of them (at 97 cents each). These flat marbles are made to be used in vases or jars as decorations, they are not designed to be crystal clear and many of them have fuzzy caterpillar like flaws in them. Some are chipped. And nearly all of them were dusty/cloudy. So my first step was to clean them and sort them based on their clarity/flaws. I used a paper towel wetted with rubbing alcohol to clean them and sorted them into clear, barely flawed, and very flawed (left to right) piles. I put the very flawed ones aside to use for something else. An

One of my most popular posts on this blog was from way back when I was just starting the blog about 6 years ago (has it really been that long!?!). I had seen a picture on Pinterest of a thrift store plate being turned into a magnetic pin dish. I though this was a fantastic idea. The original post I was inspired by has long since been taken down or disappeared into the ether of the internet, but my original magnetic pin dish post is still available. At some point or another, I revisit all of my most popular posts to see if there are ways I can improve on the original. This project I've never revisited because I hadn't come across a decent deal on the neodymium magnets needed to make the pin dishes. But I recently picked up a batch in an Amazon order, so there were no more excuses! The next step was to get some plates or bowls that would work for this project. I stopped at the neighborhood Goodwill and had several options. The plates or bowls need to have a few feat