Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

As the summer months draw on, there is one constant--iced tea. My favorite brand comes in these lovely tea tins, and because I have a hard time throwing out potentially useful things, I have several of these things floating around. So, I decided to jazz a couple up to make some storage tins. I started by washing the tins and removing the date sticker on the bottom and then spray painting them with several thin coats of white spray paint . This ended up taking several coats before I was happy with the finish. Light coats are best when spray painting, and it took quite a few to cover the printed design on the tin. Once my tins were spray painted and had a couple days to finish drying, I got out my supplies. I brought out a silicone craft mat , mod podge , a foam brush, and some die cut card decorations from my craft stash. The die cuts were from a tablet of scrapbook paper that I was gifted, I just punched out shapes that I thought would fit on the tins (and that there were two of so my

The last time I made a run to Dollar Tree, they had these wooden plaques in their craft section. They seem to be a veneer applied to mdf instead of a solid piece of wood, but the surface of the plaque was super smooth, so I figured they'd be excellent for crafting. Since the surface was so smooth, my first thought was, "Can I ink that?" So, can I use alcohol ink like a stain or wood dye? And, if so, can I use some traditional application methods with the raw wood? Let's find out! I covered my table with a silicone mat and got out my alcohol ink collection. I decided to try one of my thinner inks as a stain. So I grabbed the Pixiss ink in grape, since purple is my favorite color. I squeezed some into a little container and thinned it even further with some rubbing alcohol . It was probably about a 50/50 mix (1 part of each). Then I used a foam dauber (a foam paint brush would work well too), and rubbed the paint on the plaque and then used a paper towel to wipe it of

After last week's post revisiting all of the different ways I have decorated glass gems , I was inspired to make some more. Most of my gems are decorated with multiple colors, so I thought a new spin could be a more monochromatic palette. I found that when I was making washer necklaces , I was much more likely to wear them if I stuck with one or two colors. It was so much easier to coordinate them to the clothes I was wearing. So I decided to bring out a bunch of different purple inks (I was using Ranger , Pinata , and Pixiss inks). I started by dripping some Ranger Vineyard onto a felt applicator and stamping it across the backs of the glass gems to get a base color. You can get good results just from a stamper, but with all one color, the purples would have run together a bit and not been very interesting to look at. So I started dripping, blowing (with a hand bulb ), and dabbing ink onto the glass gems. I found out rather quickly that working on a black silicone mat caused s

This week I've been working on updating links and cleaning up some old posts on the blog. Some of the most popular posts on the blog are about Alcohol Ink decorated Glass Gems (cabochons, flat marbles, glass floral stones, etc...). I have tried so many different strategies to make these colored glass decorations that I did my first " Recap " post some 7 years ago. So, as I was updating links, I realized I really needed to update my recap! (Click on the link in the descriptions above the photos to get to the original posts or check out all of the Glass Gem Projects .) It all started with the first post where I stamped some alcohol ink on the back of some glass gems, and it turned out well enough that I made them into some necklaces. Then I turned them into magnets : Then I made necklaces again , because the first time was so much fun. Then, in an attempt to make them more opaque, I glued aluminum foil circles on the back of the gems. Then I tried spraying them with white