Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

I had so much fun printing the articulated t-rex and dragon , that I went looking for more articulated prints and came across this pretty butterfly design . I immediately knew that I wanted to print it in white and try to decorate it with alcohol ink. We have an Ender 3 v. 2 printer which works great for small prints like this butterfly. I followed the recommended settings and set it to .2 resolution and 15% infil in the slicer. The design post also recommends rectilinear or lines type infil. For those of you new to printing, that just means that the layers are printed in lines across the design instead of a specific pattern. I prepped our print bed with a little bit of hairspray to help with adhesion to the print bed. I printed it with white PLA  so I could easily decorate it with alcohol ink. The print ended up taking about 3 hours and came out great. I liked the first butterfly so well that I ended up making a second one with the same settings. After I had two printed butterflies,

A few years ago, I bought some small white bowls at Big Lots. They were a lovely satin finish that allowed ink to run, but not slide across the surface. I've used these bowls for several projects, and I found one lonely bowl in my craft stash just waiting for decoration. So, I thought I'd try out a simple project with alcohol ink that would be good for beginners. I chose a few shades of alcohol ink that wouldn't turn brown if mixed together (on the same side of the color wheel ), I ended up adding a fourth later on. I used all Ranger inks for this project: Mojito (green), Cobalt (blue), Boysenberry (purple), and Turquois (aqua). Then I flipped over my bowl and put it on top of a folded over paper towel (that's on top of a craft mat to keep it from bleeding on to my table). Then I squeezed the Mojito green ink onto the bottom of the bowl, starting at the base, and let it drip down to the paper towel. You don't need too much ink to get there. If your bowl is very

Some of the most popular posts on the blog have been my alcohol ink glass gem projects , so I thought I'd share all of the different ways I've attempted this project over the years. If there's anything you'd like to see me try--put it in the comments! My first and second attempts at glass gems turned out pretty similar: Glass Gems , Glass Gem Revisit . I used felt stamps to apply alcohol ink to the black of flat marble/glass gem/cabochons. I even made some of these into magnets . After I got the process for stamping the gems down, I tried to back them in multiple different ways to make the colors pop. My first attempt was with spray paint . It sort of worked. Next, I tried to back the gems with some foil (first with aluminum foil , then with foil tape ) to make the gems more opaque. The foil tape became a fast favorite (as you'll see later). The gems in the picture above were also slightly iridescent instead of completely clear. Next I tried using some dot stickers

Since this week's craft project post day falls on the 4th of July, I thought I'd print something to celebrate the holiday. I found this cool sparkler holder on Thingiverse and decided to give it a try. I printed this design using the standard default settings (.2 resolution, 20% infil) using white PLA filament. The print project took about 4 hours, and it came out smoothly. When I first saw this design, I thought it would be awesome if if worked, but I was worried about the PLA (which starts getting soft/warping at fairly low temperatures) holding up with the sparklers lit. After reading comments about it working fine with PLA from other users, I decided to give it a shot. I used about a dozen sparklers. The cone holds 27, but we didn't have that many on hand, so we tried it at half capacity. So, time to light. It does take a little bit of work to get all of the sparklers lit, but after that, it's a fun way to turn some cheap sparklers into something that looks mor