Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

The current trend for alcohol ink is to use a low power hair dryer or heat gun to gently blow the ink around on yupo or ceramic tiles to create fluid art. I have been meaning to try it out for ages, but I wasn't sure what would work best or how the ink would behave under the high heat (but I've set alcohol ink on fire with success, so I didn't have much too lose). So I decided to throw caution to the wind and try it out. I set protected my table  and picked out a few colors of alcohol ink that would mix to create attractive colors and thinning solution (pictured above is Pinata Extender ). I decided to try out my hair dryer on low first...so I squeezed some ink onto a ceramic tile and squirted some Extender onto the ink and then hit it with the hair dryer. The effect was similar to canned air. It blew the ink violently and created little tendrils. It also is much less targeted than the canned air and blew my ink bottles and pipettes across the table. ...

I've been sick this week, so instead of a new craft project, I thought I'd throw it back and show you some of my most popular past projects. Check out the full tutorials here: Most Popular Posts Collection

I recently received a couple of penny books for collecting pennies. Pennies aren't good for a whole lot else these days, so I dug out my jar of change (there weren't a ton of pennies as we have pretty much stopped paying cash for things these days and spent our change stash on a penny war fundraiser at husband's work a few years back). They were mostly pretty dirty, and I didn't want to put them in the book that way, so I set out to clean and sort my penny stash. I thought some of you might be interested in how I did it. First I poured the whole jar of pennies into a cereal bowl and covered it with vinegar . Then I added some salt to the top. The pennies changed color instantly. It's awfully satisfying. Since I had them all stacked on top of each other, I knew they wouldn't all be clean, so I swished them around and rinsed them off in clean water. It's important to rinse the pennies because the salt and vinegar will lead to oxidation if left an...

Check out the full collection of Easter themed crafts on the blog here: Easter Craft Collection

It's been awhile since I've tested one of those life hack tricks floating around on Pinterest and the Internet. But, I was cleaning my shower and noticed how gross the shower head was getting and I remembered seeing a trick for cleaning shower heads: a plastic bag full of vinegar tied to the shower head. It was an easy enough thing to test out, so what did I have to lose? I'm sorry about my gross looking shower head. But you needed to see what we were up against. It was not only a bit of hard water, but also some mold and mildew--so it was definitely time to clean it. I grabbed a gallon Ziploc bag because it's what I had--but any sturdy plastic bag should do the trick. I put about 3/4 of a cup of vinegar in the bag and attached it to the shower head as best as I could. I used a couple of twist ties and some scotch tape to keep it on the shower head and to keep the vinegar covering as much of the shower head as possible. I checked on my shower...

They recently opened up a Goodwill Outlet nearby my house. Goodwill Outlets are where all the stuff they can't or don't want to try to sell in their regular stores goes. So there are often lots of oddities (and sometimes some really awesome stuff that just didn't sell)...the only catch, it's pay by weight--oh and you have to dig through these trough-like tables piled with stuff to find your treasures. Since the stuff is often just dumped onto these tables, you never know what you're going to get...maybe you'll find a left shoe and never be able to find the right. But it's a total treasure hunt! So, on my recent trip, I saw these old tins. Tins don't typically weigh much, so if they are neat and old, I'll often at least pick them up to take a look at them. When I picked these up, they weren't light--they definitely had stuff in them. So I took a peak inside and saw sewing stuff--old sewing stuff. I figured a tin full of old buttons wa...

So we recently emptied a container of peppercorns that we had had for years and I thought it was a nice little plastic jar with a silver lid that I could totally reuse in some way. I pealed off the paper label and ran it through the dishwasher on the top rack to clean it up a bit. There was still a big chunk of glue on it, so I opted for decoupage. I found some leftover paper (card stock actually) from my spray paint marbling  project and cut it to the size of my container. I grabbed some mod podge and a foam brush and I was set to go. I spread a good layer of mod podge onto the container and lined the card stock up as straight as I could. I'm used to gluing much thinner paper with mod podge, so it did take a bit of persuasion to get it to stick. I had to hold the card stock down on the glue, and I used more glue than I typically would.  Once I got to the overlapping edge, I put some extra glue under the edge and held it in place. Then I put a laye...