Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

Ages ago I bought some Yupo. Yupo is plasticized paper that's used for mixed media art--especially media that thrives on glossy surfaces like alcohol ink. There are other similar products now, like Nara , and other Alcohol ink "papers."  But it's not cheap, so I haven't used it for much. But I thought it would work perfectly for making necklaces with the bezels and cabochons that I have since it would use so little of the paper to make them. So to start with, I needed to get some ink onto some Yupo. I decided to use my T-Rex ink for this project since the colors are lovely, and I'm trying to get more use out of them. So I got out a craft mat , a can of air , some rubbing alcohol and a hand bulb. I also grabbed a paint brush in case I wanted to make some fine details. I'm just using a 5 x 7 sheet of Yupo, and it should be plenty of paper for this project. I started with a magent-y purple. I dripped some ink on the paper and then used a bunch of rubbing ...

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...

So, a couple of weeks ago I posted a retrospective of alcohol ink glass gem projects . After going through the old projects, one of them was bugging me. Not long after picking up the Pinata ink sets (that come with white ink), I tried adding white ink to the back of my inked glass gems to help make it easier to see the color on the transparent surface. It was pretty much an abject failure. I figured I could make it work, now that I know so much more about inking...well...we're not quite there yet, apparently. I chose some large flat glass gems. I think I picked these up at Walmart ages ago. I don't know if they still sell them. But you can usually pick up large flat glass marbles /gems at craft stores. Or pick up cabochons somewhere that sells jewelry making supplies. I used a paint brush to apply the ink to my gems for this project, but a felt applicator also works well. I started with a layer of Ranger Mojito (green) and added Pinata Baja Blue . I dipped my paint brush i...