Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

The last time I was at Dollar tree, they had these cute star-shaped wire wreath forms for deco mesh wreaths, but I thought I could use it to do a fabric scrap wreath. A couple years ago I made a wreath out of strips of denim from a few pairs of jeans that were too damaged to donate. I had a whole bag of denim strips and triangles leftover from that project that were just sitting in my craft stash waiting for a home. The first thing I did was make several different sized strips of denim to see what worked best. I ended up with strips that were 3/4 of an inch wide and about 7 inches long. A slightly shorter and wider strip would probably work better if you were doing this wreath out of cotton quilt fabric. I first learned how to do these scrap rag wreaths when I was a kid in 4-H. Explaining how to make one of these wreaths was my demonstration speech project that year. It's funny how stuff like that comes back to you. At any rate, it's really simple. 1. Fold your fabric in half...

We just got back from our annual camping vacation, so I thought I'd share with you, once again, that the best homemade firestarters are made from dryer lint. They aren't pretty, but they work well and are easy to make. I stuff a cardboard egg carton with dryer lint instead of throwing it in the trash. Then I melt an old candle in a tinfoil tray on my stovetop (If you had a candle making pot , that would work even better). Then I carefully pour the melted wax over the lint until the top is mostly covered and the wax is starting to bleed through the bottom of the egg carton (make sure to set it on parchment or wax paper to keep your counter clean). Then let it cool and it's ready to go. Tear off a section of the egg carton and light it on fire (the one in the photo above is actually a pencil shaving firestarter that I made last year and we had some leftover--I didn't get a photo of the lint ones in action this year, but they look pretty similar on the fire). Over the yea...

Over the years I've decorated dollar store altar candles in lots of different ways: with napkins and mod podge, tissue paper and mod podge, spray paint, and alcohol ink. I can't wait to come up with even more ways to decorate these jar candles. To check out the whole collection click here: Dollar Store Altar Candle Collection .  

Just a quick 3D Print project this week. We've been having some issues with our 3D printer (extrusion problems), but hubby did a "cold pull" (pulling the filament out with a pliers when the machine is turned off and the filament is cold), and it seems to be working better. So, to test it out after the cold pull, we made these little toothpaste catcher guards for our toothbrushes. If you're wondering about the vinyl letters on our toothbrushes , it was one of the first Silhouette projects I did, and they've held up for 5 years so far. I printed this design file with 100% infil as recommended with some Blue PLA Plus . The whole thing prints in 10-15 minutes, so it's a very quick print. Our first couple weren't super clean, but the prints were working way better after the cold pull and the third one was practically perfect.  If these work well, I'll definitely print more. Hopefully they are easier to clean off than the toothbrush bases, and when the gua...