Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

While I was cutting the vinyl decal for last week's project on my Silhouette Cameo , I made a spare vinyl decal design (in case something went wrong). Since it was a simple design, I had the idea to try to use it as a reverse stencil (inside letters) and, if I could salvage it, a regular stencil (outside of the letters). To start out, I needed to prep a wooden sign to be used with the letters from the decal as a reverse stencil. Since the letters will be peeled away, I needed a nice surface or color to show through. I have used a paint wash in the past, but since I found out you could use alcohol ink to dye wood different colors, I thought making it green would be appropriate and a lot of fun. I got out a silicone craft mat to protect the table and a small container in which I could put some green alcohol ink. Then I added a bit of rubbing alcohol to thin the ink and grabbed a foam brush . I used the foam brush to paint on the thinned green ink and then set it aside to dry fo...

If you've been following the blog, you know that I'm addicted to these little metal signs you can pick up at Dollar Tree. So after acquiring a few more, I made a cute little St. Patrick's Day sign to add to my collection. I started by selecting a design one of my freebie designs from the Silhouette store and setting it to cut using standard glossy vinyl settings. I put my sheet of green vinyl on a cutting mat for easy loading and let it cut the design on my old Silhouette Cameo . I separated my design from the rest of the sheet of vinyl with a scissor. Then I grabbed a weeding tool and carefully peeled and picked away the excess vinyl. The thing letters were a bit of a pain (each one pulled off the backing and had to be freed from the vinyl and positioned back into place), but the weeding only made me swear a couple of times. I applied a piece of transfer tape to the design and rubbed it down with the handle of the weeding tool. I peeled off the paper backing and placed ...

After the last couple weeks' projects testing out T-Rex Alcohol Ink , I decided I needed to try out the plastic wrap method with these inks to see if it worked as well as the Ranger and Pinata Inks .  I grabbed a plate from Dollar Tree and all of the shades of green from the T-Rex Alcohol Ink Sets and spread out a piece of plastic wrap on a craft mat . I dripped ink from several shades of green ink onto the plastic wrap and then added a couple of drips of rubbing alcohol to a couple dark spots to help them spread out. Once the plastic wrap was completely covered, I set the glass plate on top of the plastic wrap. After the plate was wrapped up in the plastic, I let it dry for a couple of days before I peeled the plastic off. I usually let it dry for 24 hours before I remove the plastic, but this time, the ink looked a little tacky on the day after I wrapped it up, so I let it set for another day. That seems to be a trend with the T-Rex Ink (that it takes longer to dry). I had to ...

Since it's St. Patrick's Day this week, I thought I'd share a print project for the holiday. I picked this cute Shamrock Vase from the designs on Thingiverse to print on our 3D printer . I opened the design file in Cura and noticed that unlike the previous designs that I printed in vase mode, this one was a solid column. So, in addition to the usual settings for a vase (.2 res, 0% infil, Spiralize Outer Contour), I also had to set the top layers to 0 so it would print as an open vase. The original design file was also quite large and laying on it's side. So, I rotated it, and set it at about 37% it's original size. I used green PLA  to print the vase, but I noticed as it printed, it was over extruding. There were bumps all over the outside surface. It reminds me of a music box cylinder. The usual culprit for over-extrusion is the temp setting isn't quite right--which is odd since we've printed other projects with this filament at that temp (200 degrees) tha...

This post is a tale of two projects--neither of which went according to plan. But, after last week's shamrock sun catchers , I was in the mood for another St. Patrick's day craft. I decided to try to make some bottle cap pins. I thought it might work out well to print the thumbnail art on photo paper for a crisper image. So I shrunk a bunch of clipart I found through google searches down to one inch sizes and fit them onto a 4 x 6 sheet of photo paper. I printed it out on my ink jet printer and left the sheet to dry for a day before working on the rest of the project.  Next I took my bottle caps from various sodas and adult beverages and spray painted them green both inside and out. Then I punched the art out with a circle punch and selected the ones that looked the best and glued them into the bottoms of the bottle caps with some paper glue. I let that all dry over night before adding my glazes. I used some glossy accents and diamond glaze to fi...