Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

Happy summer! Check out my collection of patriotic crafts: Stars and Stripes Collection  

I know I'm a bit late to the party on this one. The paint pouring craze peaked a couple of years ago, but I had already bought the supplies to get in on the craze, so as I was organizing some of my craft supplies, I decided now was the time. I even managed to convince my husband to help. Of course, the blank look on his face when I said we were going to do paint pouring reminded me that not everyone follows crafters on social media and spends their free time on Pinterest. So, for those who don't know, paint pouring is a method for applying paint to a canvas or board by thinning it down with a paint medium (or buying pouring paint which has been pre-thinned) and then pouring the thinned paint onto the canvas or board to achieve lovely abstract swirls. The first thing we needed was a place to catch the paint (since it will run off the edges of the canvas). So, we whipped up a paint station from a box. We cut down the sides and then I put a piece of parchment paper (a plastic tr...

Several years ago,  I made a binder to store my clear stamps . It was filled with heavy duty sheet protectors and white sheets of paper. I just slipped my clear stamps into the pages and could flip through it to find my stamps. This worked fine when I had just a few clear stamps, but as my collection grew, I needed a new storage solution. I had purchased a set of these storage containers filled with small boxes when they were on sale. They were originally designed to store photos, but I was using one of them to store card games. The other was sitting empty in my basement, so when I looked at the bulging binder and the stack of excess stamps, I figured it was the perfect solution. I sorted and cut apart the plastic sheets the stamps are stuck to so that they would fit into the boxes. I labeled each category of stamp with my little label maker, and I ended up with one spare box and a bit of extra space in most of the boxes (except Christmas, I may have to get rid of some of my Chris...

Last year, I used a simple method to ink the back of some dominoes with stripes . It worked so well that I wanted to try it out on a larger surface, so I dug out some ceramic tiles and my inks and got to work. I laid down a craft mat and selected some alcohol inks in shades of green and blue ( Cobalt , Sailboat , Turquoise , Clover , Botanical ) . I also pulled out a couple of foam paint brushes . I then dripped ink in a line on the beveled edge of the brush starting with a vertical line of the darkest blue and working my way toward green. I filled the entire brush tip with stripes of ink. The brush just looks wet on the end, but it was striped with ink. I set the paint brush on the tile and drug it across the top. The ink started to blend immediately. I filled the rest of the tile with my horizontal stripes. I might have had an easier time keeping the lines straight if I was pulling the ink towards myself in vertical stripes, but I didn't realize this until after I was done. The ...

Last week I tested out some T-rex alcohol inks that I picked up earlier this year. Today I decided to take a look at the other unopened box of inks I had in my craft stash. These Pixiss alcohol ink s come in a set of 25 inks and retail for around $39.99. I was able to pick them up when they were on sale for less than $24 which made each bottle less than a dollar. These small alcohol ink bottles usually retail for somewhere between $2-4 per bottle, so that made these Pixiss inks a great deal...if they were any good.  As you can see, each bottle came wrapped in it's own individual plastic bag. Which, I suppose is to keep ink from leaking all over everything, but was a lot of unnecessary plastic packaging. Especially since each of the bottles also has a little safety ring that you have to pop off when you first open them. So just like with last week's ink test, I dripped a single drop on a tile and tried to move it around by tilting the tile. That didn't go so well. The ink i...