Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

Around Memorial Day this year, I cut a couple of designs out of blue vinyl to make into signs. The first was applied to a Dollar Tree metal sign , the extra design cut through the backing, so it was set aside (I wasn't sure I'd be able to weed it without it coming to pieces). So, with the 4th of July holiday coming up, I thought I better try to salvage the vinyl. Both of the patriotic designs were freebies in the Silhouette design story at some point. I found them in my library and cut them on some blue permanent vinyl . I set it to the standard glossy vinyl settings in Silhouette Studio but upped the force to 11. Usually, this works well to make sure the design cuts cleanly without having to increase any other settings on my old Silhouette Cameo . The extra force worked fine on the other design on cut on this same sheet of vinyl, but parts of this design cut through the paper backing. The outside vinyl came off the design cleanly and easily. But I had to be a bit more careful ...

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...

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...

The 4th of July is just around the corner, so I thought I'd try some inking techniques in patriotic colors. Last month, I tried a technique to create stripes of alcohol ink with a foam brush . It worked fairly well (it worked really well on smaller surfaces ), but was tough to apply in straight lines. I figured I'd drag the ink across the tile vertically to see if I could get a straighter line. I also wanted to see if I could use the Pinata white ink to keep the red and blue from turning into purple on the tile as I striped. Well, the white ink worked well, but striping vertically (I turned the tile after) did not seem to improve my wonky lines. So onto project #2. This time I wanted to test out using a piece of permanent vinyl (the kind you buy for Silhouette or Cricut cutting machines) as a resist for alcohol ink. I had some vinyl scraps leftover from some previous projects , so I drew a star on the paper backing and cut it out. It wasn't a perfect star, but I was mostl...

A couple of weeks ago, I tried making sun catchers with laminating pouches and tissue paper. The project worked pretty well, and I wondered if I could use ink on those laminating pouches--they are plastic after all, which usually inks well. So I got out my alcohol inks , a craft mat to protect my table, a can of air , and my laminating pouches . I opened up my laminating pouch, and I chose a rainbow of ink colors. I wanted something bright and fun. I started with some sailboat blue drops that I spread out with the canned air.  I kept dropping ink onto the surface of the laminating pouch and blowing it around to spread it out and dry it. The surface of the laminating pouches is textured to keep items from slipping around too much in the pouch, so the textured surface absorbed the ink a bit, but it still worked pretty well. I did get a bit of ink on the opened side of the pouch and a bit along the edges, but I wasn't too worried about it being perfe...