Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

The last time I was in Dollar Tree, they had these galvanized metal signs , so I picked up a couple and decided the heart-shaped sign needed a Valentine's Day themed decoration. I found this free design from SVG & Me and set it up in Silhouette Studio to cut out of permanent vinyl. I sized the design and made sure it was set to vinyl settings and sent it to the machine. I have an ancient Silhouette Cameo , but it still works perfectly for cutting vinyl (well, truthfully, it could use a fresh blade after all these years, but otherwise, it works great). I plopped a 12 x 12 sheet of permanent red vinyl onto the craft mat (yes, you can cut vinyl without the mat, but it loads into ye olde machine a bit better on the mat). After I cut the design, I got out my metal sign and wiped it down and grabbed my weeding tool and got to work picking out the excess vinyl after the pattern had been cut. A few swear words were uttered as I realigned letters that pulled up and remembered that the

This week's print project failed...twice...so check out all of our Valentine's Day projects to tide you over!  

I was browsing Thingiverse looking for things to print when I had the idea that I could make a faux stained glass suncatcher using UV resin. So I went looking for stained glass frames that I could fill, and found that someone went to the trouble to design a few of these lovely faux stained glass birds--including designing the "glass" pieces to snap into the frame. So I figured I had to try it out. I selected the cardinal because it was only two colors (and they were two colors that I had). I printed the frame in black pla . The instructions suggested using 100% infil for the interior "glass" pieces (so you couldn't see the infil pattern--unless that's the look you're going for). I opted to set all the pieces to 100% infil and standard resolution (.2). The frame section took about an hour and a half to print on our printer . This print was pretty easy except that there were 10 separate pieces that needed to be printed. Our printer has a tough time with

So, you're thinking about getting a 3D printer, but you're just not sure if it's for you. I'm still a beginner when it comes to 3D printing, but we got our printer about a year and a half ago, so I hope I can answer some of your basic questions. 1. How much do they cost? Anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars. There's a really wide range of features and abilities available. If you're looking for something basic, they've gotten much less expensive in the last few years. There are some really nice printers under $500, and if you're willing to DIY the set up a bit more, you can get a nice basic printer for just a few hundred dollars. We ended up going the basic DIY route and got a Creality Ender 3 Version 2 . There are tons of articles comparing printers . We ended up getting an inexpensive one because we weren't sure how much we'd end up using it.  2. Are they hard to use? Well, there's a bit of a learning curv

Happy New Year from Sarah Jane's Craft Blog! As has been a tradition for the last several years ( Best of the Blog Lists ), I've tallied up the most popular posts/projects of the previous year to share with you. The #1 most popular post of 2022 was this adorable 3D printed octopus . The #2 most popular post on the blog this year were these blown Alcohol Ink Mugs . This wasn't my first time inking mugs, but it was my first time using these mugs from Dollar Tree. The third most popular project on this year's blog was my Alohamora Key Rack . Once I finally found the right sized screws to hang this up, it's been holding our keys ever since! The #4 most popular post of the year was this lovely heart plate I made with alcohol ink and a vinyl heart to block the ink. The #5 most popular post of the year was this alcohol ink Rose Bowl.  Trying to achieve a rose pattern with alcohol ink has been something I wanted to try for quite a while. I was excited when I got it to mos