Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

Earlier this year, I made some Perler bead characters from a kit off of Amazon . Since I've been slowly but surely making ornaments for a small tree themed after Harry Potter , I thought it would be fun to turn the Perler bead characters into ornaments. This is a pretty quick project. On most of the characters, there was a center bead in the top rows of beads. I used a vinyl pick (but an awl or large metal needle should do the trick too) to poke a clean hole through the middle beads. For some characters, there isn't a middle bead, so to keep the ornament hanging mostly straight, I made a new hole between two beads in the middle. This required using a lighter to heat up the metal of the vinyl pick and then to poke a hole. Once the holes were poked, then I added a jump ring (small metal rings that are sold with the jewelry supplies) to the hole and pinched it closed with a pliers. Once the jump rings are added, you can use a cord or thread or, like I did, just an ornament hange

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a project where I printed ornament blanks on our 3D Printer and then topped them with recycled Christmas cards and UV resin . The blanks turned out so well, that I thought it would be fun to try to ink them. I've used alcohol ink on tons of ornaments (from plastic to glass to wood to ceramic ) and have had mostly good results, so why not. I have inked on 3D printed plastic before, but I've only stamped it (like these ornaments from last year) on. The reason I've only ever stamped 3D printed plastic is because of the grooves that are left from the printing process. The ink soaks right into those lines. So, I had an idea, why not put a tiny bit of resin on the bottom of the ornament to seal up those grooves. So I printed 3 ornament blanks and two of them got the UV Resin skim coat. As you can see in the first photo, I put very little resin on the ornament. Then I used a small piece of cardboard to swipe it around the ornament. Unfortunatel

I'm at it yet again this December. I've fired up the 3D printer and can't help but print any pretty design for an ornament I can find. These little flat ornaments are so satisfying. They take very little time and filament and turn out so cool. This time, I found a set of geometric snowflakes . I printed these using standard settings (.2 resolution, 20% infil) with white PLA on our printer ( Ender 3 v. 2 ). Each snowflake took about an hour and a half to print. I actually was only going to print 3 of these (only, I know, I may have a problem), but they turned out so well, that I grabbed the whole set.

Last year I went a bit crazy printing Christmas ornaments on our new 3D printer . This year, I'm being a bit more selective. One of the things I knew I wanted to find a design file for was a good ornament blank. I knew I could do all sorts of fun crafts if I found a good one. Well I found the first one to try from someone who made and advent tree using these blanks . I followed the recommended settings (.16 resolution and 100% infil) with white PLA . The 100% infil made them pretty solid and meant that a fairly simple print still took an hour and a half to complete. After I managed to print a few of the blanks, I went through my stash of old Christmas cards which I save like a total craft hoarder (but it's not the first time I've used them: Recycled Christmas Card Ornaments ). I found a plastic lid that was really close to the the size of the inside ridge of the ornament blanks and used a pen to trace around the circle on the greeting cards and carefully cut them out. In t

This is one of those weird projects that I knew I had to try as soon as I saw the design on Thingiverse: The Friendly Articulated Slug . If you've seen similar fidget toys in stores, as I have, you understand why I was eager to see if I could get this silly thing to print. I should mention that the first time I tried printing the slug, it failed. I followed (to the best of my knowledge) most of the recommended print settings from the designer, but the thing failed on bed adhesion and ended up a tangle of filament. The first layer didn't look right, though, so when I went to try it again, I scoured the comments (and there are a lot) for some advice. When I came across someone who had success with the printer ( Crealty Ender 3 v2 ) and Slicer (Cura) that I use. Set the layer height to .12mm, wall thickness to .8mm, move the z seam to the back (this setting was new to me--we had to look up how to turn on access to the z seam settings in Cura), Print speed 20 mm/s, initial layer sp

Just a quick silly Thanksgiving themed 3D print this week. I found this pattern for a pull-apart wishbone on Thingiverse and decided I needed to give it a try. I used standard settings (.2 resolution and 20% infil) and some brown pla filament to print this quick project on our printer.  I did have to enlarge the pattern quite a bit in the slicer, though. In the comments, the creator recommended a 2,540% increase, so that's what I went with. The project printed in about an hour and a half and fit together really well. The instructions said if the bones don't fit together tightly, you can use a lighter to adjust. Be really careful, though, a lighter can melt pla very fast. Ours fit together well. I might have to make one in white, too.  

In preparation for Turkey Day, I printed these adorable Turkey Napkin Holders . This set was the smaller paper napkin variety, but they also made a larger version for cloth napkins. This project was printed with an Ender 3 V2 using matte brown PLA filament . I set the slicer at standard resolution (.2) and 10% infil. The print came out cleanly and only took about 30 minutes. So, I immediately printed another one. These turned out adorable, and I look forward to using them for many Thanksgivings to come.

This summer, I picked up some wooden plaques from Michael's with a coupon because I didn't have any. I had no projects in mind, but I knew I'd use them eventually. Months ago, I spray painted two of them white and they'd been sitting in my craft cart since then just waiting to be made into something. (They were unfinished pine plaques, so it took several coats of spray paint to turn them solid white.) I found a website with free printable greeting cards  and found one that I thought would work well as a little sign and used the crop and resize tools in Word (top right when you click on the photo) to get it to a size that would fit on my wooden plaque. Then I taped a piece of white tissue paper to a piece of card stock. Make sure to tape down any loose bits so they don't get caught when they go through the printer. I put the tissue covered card stock in the paper tray of my ink jet printer . The first attempt was covered in ink--I hadn't taped it tight enough. So