Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

It's been a busy week here, so I just wanted to share an update with you. Last week I printed the pumpkin candle holder (on the right), but the sides weren't staying in straight all the way to the top. So I tried a couple of options for the stacked pumpkin lantern . Both worked. A lovely maker created some clips . They are a bit fussy, but they printed super fast and did the trick. I also printed a second base. This worked great, but I didn't have easy access to the led candle, so I opted for the clips. The solutions worked so well, that we made a second candle holder with the bat design . I hope you all had a very Happy Halloween!

I found a couple of candle holders from the dollar store in my craft stash and decided it would be fun to do some flamed ink. I hadn't done a flamed project in a while, so I got out my inking supplies and got started. I laid out my craft mats and some blue and green alcohol inks along with a sheet pan covered in tinfoil. The craft mats are heat resistant and protect the table from ink. Then a place cork trivet under the sheet pan just in case it gets hot (it usually doesn't get too hot, but it does help make it easier to turn the tray so you can see all the sides of what you're inking). And then I put my sheet pan covered in foil (just to protect it from ink) on top. I clear out all of the rubbing alcohol and inks so they are far away from the flames. I dripped various shades of green and blue down sides of the candle holder and immediately lit the line of ink of fire. The ink spread out, dried, and became a bit darker with the flames. For...

On my last Walmart run, I picked up a couple of these 79 cent candle holders without any idea of what I would use them for. Since it was the time of the year to start my Valentine's Day Crafts , it seemed like a great idea to ink them pink! I started by cutting some hearts out of clear contact paper with a sharp scissors. I cut some with a paper pattern and some where I just folded the contact paper in half and cut a heart--both methods worked well, but I went with the pattern cut ones for my candle holders so that I had two hearts that were the same size. I applied the vinyl heart onto the candle holder and grabbed all of my pink and red alcohol inks. I started out using a tinfoil cradle for my candle holders, but I decided that holding them was actually easier for application. I dripped a couple dots of each of my pink inks ( raspberry , wild plum , and pinata's magenta ) onto a felt applicator for stamping. They turned out very hot pink after stam...

This past spring I discovered that you could, in fact, use a paper punch to cut tissue paper. Way back when, I saw a project online using the punched paper, and I was pretty miffed when I couldn't get it to work. But I made a heart shaped bowl with heart shaped paper decoupaged onto it with pretty good success. So, when I found some new paper punches on sale at Tuesday Morning, I knew I had to try it again. Tuesday Morning had a good selection of Martha Stewart punches. Even this big butterfly punch (which makes a 1 1/2 inch butterfly) was only $4.99. What I learned from the last project was that the only way you can get the tissue paper to work with a paper punch is to fold it so you are punching multiple layers at once. How many layers it will punch depends on the punch. So there will be some trial and error. Sometimes it feels like you've folded too much, only to find out that the paper will only punch once you've folded it some more. So, if at first you do...

In January I bought a mirrored candle plate from Dollar Tree because I hadn't used alcohol ink on a mirror yet. I used bright colors and canned air and it didn't quite turn out the way I had hoped. I wiped the plate off several times with rubbing alcohol and restarted. After several months with color splotches, I cleaned it off again (some surfaces don't clean off easily after months--the less porous the better) and it came completely clean. After the initial rinse with rubbing alcohol and then with water, I wet down a paper towel with some rubbing alcohol for any spots that were stubborn and left it on the mirror to soak for a couple minutes and it wiped right off. This time I had the idea that I wanted to create a sort of galaxy pattern. I would cut stars out of painters tape and sprinkle them across the plate. Then after stamping and a little spattering of rubbing alcohol, it would look like outer space. First I tried cutting the stars with a scissors...they...

At one of my recent Dollar Tree runs, I got a package of tissue paper squares in their craft section. The package contained multiple bright colors of squares that were a little over an inch in size.  I had already done a faux stained glass project  using pieces of tissue paper glued onto glass candle holders with mod podge. I knew it would be easy to recreate that project with a new twist. So I grabbed my mod podge , a foam brush, and a cleaned pickle jar. I painted a stripe of glue onto the bottom of my repurposed jar and started applying my squares of tissue paper. I made sure to overlap them a bit so that there was no glass showing between. I continued randomly alternating colors and tapping the tissue paper onto the glue. Don't worry if it's not perfectly smooth or if a few edges are not completely glued down, you can add glue as you go. The more you fuss with your tissue paper, the more likely it is to tear, so just tap it on and move on. ...

With Easter just around the corner, I knew I wanted to make something festive. So I fell back on one of my favorite media to work with: Alcohol Inks. I decided to decorate a couple of the square candle holders from Dollar Tree with alcohol ink Easter eggs. I rolled out my craft mat and grabbed my alcohol inks . I also grabbed a roll of wide painter's tape to create a stencil on my candle holders. I ended up making my stencils freehand and it was a bit of a pain. If I were doing this project again, I'd probably draw out or print out an Easter egg the size that I wanted and then trace that onto a sheet of tape (made my layering the pieces on the craft mat). After I got my egg shapes masked off, I was worried they would just look like colored blobs, so I made some little tape zig zags to put in the middle of my eggs. I dripped pink, orange, and yellow alcohol ink onto the felt on my applicator and stamped it onto the top half of my egg. Then I u...