Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

I was organizing some of my board game collection the other day and realized I had some empty boxes from expansions. The extra pieces and new rules fit in with the base game, so the boxes were destined for the recycle bin. But they were such nice sturdy boxes, it seemed a shame to toss them, so I figured I'd try spray painting them. I started with an ombre method that I used before to spray some cylindrical tins and some terracotta flower pots . I used a teal, medium blue , and a purple spray paint. I started out with the teal ( Rustoleum's lagoon ). It's a pretty bright color that has great coverage, so I knew it would be my primary color. I sprayed the ends and the top half of the boxes with the teal and then set them aside to dry. Then I set them down and sprayed the blue across the middle. Then I sprayed the other end purple. I did have to set the boxes up and spray the edges to cover the printing and the bright orange color of the ori

I've been in major spring cleaning mode in my house lately, so once the kitchen was fairly cleaned out, I knew I needed to tackle this project that I had been meaning to complete ever since we got a new garbage disposal installed last spring. Our kitchen sink cabinet had a bit of water damage from the previous garbage disposal malfunctioning. And in general was looking pretty shabby from being 20 years old. So I decided to give my cabinet a bit of an upgrade. So I went to the local hardware store (in our case Home Depot is closest) and picked out some peel and stick vinyl tiles. I measured our cabinet at 2 feet by 3 feet--give or take an inch. So I knew I needed at least 6 tiles. Be sure to get a tile or two extra in case you make any mistakes in your cutting. These vinyl tiles are available at pretty much any home improvement store (and even sometimes Dollar Tree) and are usually around a dollar a tile. The first thing I did was dry fit my tiles into the space s

Earlier this year, I started playing around with starting alcohol ink on fire (a controlled burn). Lighting the ink on fire mixes the ink and makes the ink seem brighter or darker (depending on the color). It's a really addicting process. My first attempt was on a larger ceramic tile . I also tried it out on a mirrored candle plate and plain glass plate . I feel like I'm finally starting to get the hang of it. So, I knew I wanted to do the whole fired ink thing again, but I didn't know what to try it on. I dug through my craft stash and found some old 4 inch ceramic tiles that I had used as experiments in the past. They were in various states of cleanliness. Fortunately, alcohol ink comes off ceramic tiles pretty well (even after sitting for a year or more) with rubbing alcohol. I put the tiles in the kitchen sink, sprayed a bunch of rubbing alcohol on them, left them for 30 seconds, and came back with a paper towel and rubbed them off. They were good as new.

Last week I turned some old composition notebooks into pretty galaxy (nebula/space) notebooks . In the past I have covered the plain white glass altar candles from dollar tree in tissue paper and mod podge and napkins and glitter and even alcohol ink , so I thought, what the heck, why not give them the space treatment. I started by taking the sticky label off of the candles. The fastest way I have figure out for doing this is to run the hot water in your kitchen sink until it's good and hot, run it over the label until it's good and saturated and warm (probably about 30 seconds), and then use a plastic dish scraper and scrape the label of. If any sticker residue is leftover, use goo gone to remove it. Then I dried off my candles and put them in a cardboard box outside to start spraying. I filled the top of each candle with a napkin to keep the spray paint from getting inside the candle. Then I started spraying a black and blue base coat. I sprayed a thi