Busy with the Online Store

I am afraid there has not been any craft happening in my world for the last couple of weeks.
I have been buying for my online store, and with that comes the task of pricing, and loading it to the store, and then my least favourite part, packing it all away.

I have added some wooden message tags to the store, this is a new range for me .. and my sister has used one on a card.

This is the tag before ...

 

Then this is what it looked like after it had been stamped and mounted on a Kraft card.

 

 

The wooden tags and buttons are fabulous as you can leave them raw, paint them, stain them, or as my sister found out, even stamp them.  Check out the message tags and other wooden tags here

 

The other new products that she played with was the Tilda paper roses and Tilda bird buttons.  This card is absolutely gorgeous

 

 

 

You can find the products used for this card here

Paper Roses

Bird Buttons

Vellum Tags

 

 

I have a friend that is coming to help make the Breast Cancer Drain Bags with me .. so I should be able to get back to being able to make and donate my usual six bags per month ... I promise Belinda!  I already have 3 cut out ready to go. 

 

We only have one more week officially of Winter, and I am really looking forward to Spring and the warmer weather.  More time to get outside and get active!

 

Until next time

Enjoy your day and your crafts

Judy



 

Recycled Business Cards

Do you have old business cards laying around, maybe from a previous job, or just ones you have collected over the years?

Here is something that you may like to do with them? Make them into Christmas Tags

This is what I did -

Get your business cards, they must be blank on the reverse side.

Age them, using your preferred method.  I used Parisian Essence (a Browning Essence in Australia), Vanilla and a sprinkle of cinnamon.  Allow them to dry.

I used a corner punch to round the corners, in the above photo. This is not necessary as I made them without this step and they look great.

Glue your aged business cards to the felt with ModPodge (ensure the printed side is face down).  You can fit 8 business cards on one sheet of felt, however to be really economical you can use up your smaller scraps of felt for this project.  Leave a little space between each card, so that you can cut around them.

Allow to dry.  You may need to place a weight on top of them, while they are drying.  A couple of heavy books will do the trick.  This ensures that they dry flat.

Use pinking shears to cut around each card, ensuring you leave a little bit of the felt showing.

Now comes the fun bit, glue on your decoration, in my case a Santa bottletop.  Use a strong glue like E6000 or Tiger glue.  Both of these are quite expensive in Australia, and I have found a really good glue from my local $2.00 shop.  It is called Silicon Glue by Craftworks. It did literally cost only $2.00 and it "Bonds metal, wood, fabric, card & glass" and "Glues like hot glue".

I am impressed with it, although this is the first time I have used it, so I will be interested to see long term results. It took a little longer to bond, but the adhesive is very strong when set.

Punch your tag hole in the top - use a strong metal punch, so that you can cleanly get through both the felt and card.

Stamp your greeting, I only had one stamp that would fit "Merry Christmas", although I like the finished result.  You could use rub-ons, stencils, write a message..

All that is left is to add a lovely Bakers Twine hanger to your tag, and you are finished.

I have about another 200 of these business cards, so I am sure you will see more projects with them being used in the future.

Imagine family gift cards, with a photo of the recipient in the bottle cap, and maybe birthday wishes?

You could glue pretty scrapbook paper to the back, or even newspaper or magazine pages?

Quick and Easy Project, and certainly one that you could do with your children.

Judy



Stained Wooden Tags

After seeing how well my little wooden signs turned out, I thought I would see how they would look using the same method but using tags ... I took some wooden ply tags and stained them using the DecoArt Wood Stain in Oak colour.

I then printed the verses for my tags on the computer using brown Kraft paper and used the "versatile" Modpodge to glue them to the tag ..

I think next time I will make the printed section larger and follow the shape of the actual tag.  What do you think?

Rainy Day Playing

What do you do on a rainy day? 
Watch a movie?
Read a book?
Catch up on the household chores?
NOT ME --- I head straight to the studio ... bliss..

Should I clean up?  Should I put those products away?  Should I play?

Yes ... playtime ...  also a discovery ...

Did you know that you can print on hessian?  You do not know what you can do until you try.  I have a relatively inexpensive Canon printer up in the studio, which is used for many things, however is not that important that if  I "wreck" it the world will come to a end. Hence the discovery that you CAN print on hessian.

I have printed these sayings onto hessian and then made then into little hangers ... sorry about the photo quality

I ironed some Heat & Bond to the back of the hessian to strengthen it so that it would feed into the printer.  Make sure that you do not have any loose threads or this will cause a jam in your printer.

Choose your sayings and a nice clear font ... I suggest printing out on paper first, so that you can see what it looks like before attempting to print onto the hessian.

I also found that the black ink was clearer than the red ... but I had to try.

Once the hessian is printed, cut each saying out, leaving a little extra around each word so that you can fray the edges.  Now use your Heat & Bond to secure the jute hanger and another piece of fabric to the back - just make a sandwich of the hessian, jute hanger in the centre, then the backing fabric.

How quick and easy is this ... although I would not recommend trying this in your good printer.

Have fun

Judy