Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

A while back I bought some Dishwasher Safe Mod Podge with the intention of using it to seal some alcohol ink projects (go figure), but when I came across these nice big glass bowls, they were just begging to be decoupaged. So I thought it might be cute to decoupage cartoon strips from the Sunday funnies onto the bowls. I knew this would be the perfect test of the dishwasher safe part--because who's going to use cereal bowls that can't be safely washed? I found the cereal bowls at Big Lots. I'm sure I bought them on a 20% off day or something like that, so they were pretty inexpensive if the ended up being sacrificed in the name of an experiment. I grabbed a copy of the Sunday funnies and a foam brush and I was set to go. I cleaned the labels off of the bottom of the bowls and then read the instructions on the mod podge. They recommend cleaning smooth surfaces (like glass and ceramic) with rubbing alcohol before gluing anything to them. Fortunately, I buy...

I have been wracking my brain all week trying to figure out what to do for this week's craft post. I knew I wanted to do something Halloween-y since the post is set to go up the day before. After much hemming and hawing, I remembered I still had a bunch of the craft bottle caps I used to make Patriotic Pins with last year, so I set out to make some Halloween/Fall pins. The bottle caps are 1 inch on the inside (as are the kind you salvage off glass soda bottles and beer bottles--so both will work). I did a google search for Halloween art and chose ones that I thought would look good as 1-inch circles. I probably saved twice as many designs to my computer as I ended up printing. The icon size ends up being a good indicator of what will look good in the small size. Then I use Word to print them out. Word has a handy feature that will tell you how large the photo is in inches when you're resizing it, so I made all of the photos a smidge smaller than 1 inch tall and wi...

I have a bit sickness, a crafty sickness, where I look at something--any random thing--and find myself asking the question, "Can I ink that?" This was totally the case when I was emptying some packaging and saw these small pieces of thin chipboard that had a slightly glossy white surface. Chipboard is the thin cardboard that's used in cereal and cracker boxes, but this chipboard was even thinner. Because of the glossy white surface, I thought stamping them with ink might just work. I took out my alcohol inks , a craft mat , and my homemade applicator (it's just a block of wood with a piece of double thick craft foam and the hook side of hook and loop glued on top). I chose some bright colors and got to work. I randomly dripped a few dots of each color onto the felt square that I stuck onto the velcro of my applicator. Then I stamped over the surface of the whole piece of cardboard. It felt like there was just a bit too much white space, so I...

Though gem necklaces have overtaken them as the most popular post on the blog, the washer necklaces I've created with alcohol ink are still some of my most visited posts. I was surprised at how long it had been since I had tried something new with or revisited washer necklaces, so I picked up some washers at the local hardware store and decided it was finally time to try glazing again. A while back, I tried using Diamond Glaze (one of the resin type glues on the market), and they didn't turn out very well . Way back when I first started the blog, I had some success using Paper Glaze with some washers decorated with scrapbook paper , so I knew I could get a better result on washers. Since I didn't have any Paper Glaze (and the smoother surface might not work out as well as one covered in paper), I tried out some of the Ranger Glossy Accents . So I started the same way I would any time I make washer necklaces, with a craft mat , some a lcohol ink , and a felt a...

The last time I was at Dollar Tree, I saw this cute little jar with a lid and thought,"Could I ink that?" If you've been following Sarah Jane's Craft Blog for any amount of time, you know that's a common question I ask at Dollar Tree. :) So I thought, "Maybe, I could." I actually like the "maybe" answer the best because that means I get to try something new . So I bought the little jar, and it sat on my craft supply shelf for months (yes, it's been months since I've been to Dollar Tree--time for another trip!) before I finally decided to try to tackle it. I brought out my regular inking supplies ( craft mat , alcohol ink , applicator and felt ), but I also grabbed some makeup sponges and a few cotton rounds. I knew that if I tried stamping the ink onto the jar with the regular wooden applicator, the ink would just sit on the top edges of the ridges. It would be very stripey--which probably wouldn't be a bad look...

I haven't had any time to do a proper craft this week, so I thought I'd share a test experiment that I tried out using acrylic paints on glass gems and metal washers. A while back I got a set of these little metallic paints. They are called Lumiere paints by Jacquard (yep, the same company that makes the other set of alcohol inks ). They come in these little ink like bottles, but they are, in fact, just metallic acrylic paints in fun colors. Truth be told, I didn't really know what to do with these little guys, so I set out on an experiment. I grabbed the felt applicator that I use for applying alcohol ink (it's just a wood block with some fun foam and velcro glued to the top that you can stick a piece of felt onto) and put a couple of dots of paint onto the felt. I had no idea if it would work. The first layer went on fine, but it didn't cover very well. So I layered on another color and kept stamping. It seemed to work fairly well on the...