Some ideas are just too good to ignore. This morning on Twitter, I was giggling at how K, whenever he does something nice for me, says “Hey Girl…” a la Handmade Ryan Gosling. And then Rachel said:

…And I thought, she is absolutely right. And so, dropping everything, I made this collection of Handmade Pushkin images for you. I made myself stop at six.

Have a great week, everyone!

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Thought I’d share a bit of sorta crafty, sorta science-y tomfoolery we’ve had going on over here this week. (I’ve always wanted to use the word “tomfoolery” on this blog!)

So, a while back, I did a post on CRAFT about this amazing bouncy digital camera. Go ahead and check out the little video; I’ll wait.

The magic ingredient of this project is Sugru, which is a silicone clay. It sticks to lots of surfaces, molds in any shape you need, and then air dries – so you can use it to fix, remodel and hack all kinds of household objects. When this stuff is fully cured, it not only resists impacts, it’s dishwasher safe and heat-resistant to about 350 degrees.

Anyway. When I did that post, Sugru’s inventor, Jane ní Dhulchaointigh, sent me a nice email and offered me a little Sugru sample to mess about with. And I was all, “Hmm, let me think about tha – YES, THANK YOU!”

I went all over this apartment looking for the perfect item to improve with Sugru, and eventually settled on this stockpot. It’s a gift from K’s mom, and I love it and use it all the time. The handles, however, aren’t heatproof, so I thought see if Sugru could do away with the need for pot holders.

The clay is very soft, like a cross between Play-Doh and cookie dough. It comes in a range of colors, so you can mix them together if you like, or create interesting marbled effects.

First, I rolled some out and smooshed it over the lid handle. There was a lot of anal-retentive smoothing, which in the end only resulted in minimal smoothness. If I’d been thinking, I’d have pressed something flat over the whole thing once it was covered.

(Also: Focus FTW!!)

Then, I made some covers for the side handles. And then, I let the whole thing sit. It takes about 24 hours for the clay to fully cure. There are some fumes while you’re working with it, so use a well-ventilated area. But they dissipate pretty quickly and didn’t bother me at all during the dry time.

OK, then it was time to put this bad-boy to the test. My original plan had been to cook something in the pot, but that didn’t really work out. So I just boiled some water. I let it boil for fifteen minutes or so, letting the pot get good and hot.

And you know what? Those Sugru-ed handles are now nice and heatproof! I can grab right onto them and they aren’t even warm.

I should say, though, that this is far from being the most original Sugru project in the world. If you want to see ingenuity in action, you should pop over to the Sugru Gallery, where people all over the world have been sharing the things they’ve done with this clay. It’s amazing!

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K and I have some home improvement going on this weekend. We had been talking about moving this year, but ended up deciding that staying put another year was more prudent. But after six years in the same place, let’s just say a refresh is needed.

BOY, would I love to replace this sofa! It’s eight years old and getting all kinds of saggy. But, like moving, replacement isn’t prudent at the moment. Okay, so, I decided to at least correct this ridiculous-looking swayback it’s developed.

The back cushions are filled with fiberfill, which of course has become compressed with the years of lounging. We did some measuring, and found that two 18″ x 18″ blocks of dense foam would fit snugly across the inside, with some room at the top. So we un-stuffed the cushions and wiggled in the foam.

Then, I used my softie-filling skills on a large scale, and firmly re-packed fiberfill around the top, sides, and front of the foam. This rounded out all the corners again. And took a fair amount of fiddling, but in the end…

…Much, much better! Still an old sofa, but at least, not one with a U-shaped back.

Bonus: fiberfill for, oh, about fifty softies. :-) Total investment: About $30.00. Works for me!

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Just popping in today to share links to a couple kid-craft articles I’ve done recently for CRAFT.

The first of which is a tutorial for this life-size board game. We had a blast putting this together and playing with it. I got an awesome deal on carpet squares at SCRAP, and everything else (big dice, big game cards) was made from cheap and readily-available materials. K’s sister Jen was kind enough to round me up a couple adorable boys (Logan and Charles, age 7) to play.

(The carpet squares have since been appropriated by Pushkin, who uses them for regal sitting, not gaming.)

Then, I did a piece on zine-making for kids of all ages. It includes some interesting zine projects you can do with young children, grade schoolers, and middle schoolers. I loves me some indie publishing, and to my mind, it’s never too early to get kids making media.

So, there you go. Enjoy!

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Warning: Not-So-Great-Photo Alert!

(Although, next time you’re trying to shoot in low indoor light with an ancient Nikon Coolpix while the room you’re in is tossing about on the ocean, let’s see how well you fare.)

Here’s a little something from the Crafty Chica Cruise. Each night while we were at dinner, we’d get turndown service. And as part of that, our cabin steward would make up a little animal from towels and leave it sitting on the bed.

How freaking cool is that?

Each night, it was something different. Apparently, there are many, many designs – do a Google Image search on “towel animals” to see what I mean.

They sold a whole how-to book on the ship, and there was even a class. But in most cases, a little careful reverse engineering revealed the secrets.

You definitely need older, harder, stiffer towels for this kind of folding. Your lovely, fluffy towels will yield animals that just kind of flop over.

According to the Towel Animal Wikipedia Page (HAHAHAHAHAHA!), these animals are a tradition on Carnival cruises, and on some other lines as well. If you’re curious, you might also like this Squidoo page.

(Bet you’re wondering about those eyes and noses. Well, they’re torn bits from the ship’s daily newsletters.)

Sigh… aside from the crafty, I have to say, the thing I miss most about the cruise was turndown service. And having someone clean my room every day.

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Ooooh, what a fun time we had this weekend! Peggy of Chocolate Craft Studio opened her doors to a group of PDX crafty types, and we spent a blissful couple hours making stuff from chocolate.

Peggy offers an incredible array of chocolate shapes to play with – flat ones and dimensional ones, some decorated with shimmer, some with chocolate “paint.” Her skills with chocolate are just incredible.

Here are some lovely eggs in progress that Sally made. We had a great time with all manner of decorating bits – brush-on luster powders, sprinkles, tiny candies…

…And you can glue pieces of chocolate together with Peggy’s special “chocolate glue.” Here, Holly’s constructing a really cool dimensional plaque.

Heather constructed this sailing ship out of a half-egg, and then decorated some sails with white chocolate “glue.”

Look at this adorable diorama Susan built! Those tiny mushrooms are amazing.

Here’s another one, by Sally. Wondering what the bunny, grass, and tiny flowers are made of?

…It’s a wonder-material called modeling chocolate! Eats like candy, models like clay. Hoooooooo, boy, is this stuff fun.

Here’s what I made with it. The wavy green ribbon was Lee’s idea. I only know how to make simple petals and leaves.

Kathy, on the other hand, has skillz. That lacy chocolate butterfly? Made from chocolate glue. I am not worthy.

Here are all our creations collected together – and it’s thanks to Mom’s presence of mind that we were able to get this shot.

Heh – here’s what happens when you get a bunch of bloggers together! :-)

There are SO many cool things in this group! If you want a closer look, there’s a Flickr group in progress (thanks, Susan!) to which we’ll all be adding our photos.

Locals, be sure to check out the studio sometime. What an awesome place to do a bridal shower, girls’ night out, or birthday party!

If you aren’t local, Peggy also ships chocolate craft kits and modeling chocolate sets from her website.

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Here’s something I’ve been noodling around with lately – embroidered metal discs!

Wait – what?

I bought a bag of these perforated beading discs a while back, intending to make some beaded pieces a la Miriam Haskell.

Only I never quite got around to those, and eventually a different light bulb went on over my head. I could use the holes as embroidery guides!

The resulting discs are so cute and easy to make, and lend themselves beautifully to lots of crafts.

Like this simple cuff bracelet!

The stitchery part is dead simple. I like pearl cotton thread better than stranded floss for this – the stranded stuff tends to split and get messy.

Just leave a few inches of thread hanging from the back when you start stitching.

Then you just follow the holes, making stitches in different colors and patterns. The possibilities are pretty endless, and it’s really fun to see what emerges, kaleidoscope-like, from your fingers.

At the end of the strand, tie the ends of the floss into a double knot. (This method is way easier than making a traditional embroidery knot, by the way, since the back of the disc is bowl-shaped and harder to navigate a needle into.)

The only thing to watch out for as you stitch is the fact that, for some reason, the outermost row of holes in the disc is not in a symmetrical pattern. But you can work around this pretty easily.

The back of your stitching, then, forms a nice, porous surface, which you can easily glue to things. I recommend a nice, thick glue like Aleene’s Tacky, which won’t ooze through the holes and damage your stitches.

Here, I glued a row of them to a paint-chip card. Love those color names!

They’d also make cool little scrapbook elements…

I used some E6000 to glue two discs together back-to-back, making a little two-sided pendant.

Cute, eh? Imagine these as earrings! Or dangly charms on a bracelet. Maybe a zipper pull? They’re very lightweight and easy to wear.

(Before I glued the discs together, I attached a jump ring to the edge of one of the discs by sewing it in place. See the next photo…)

You can use that outermost row of holes to sew a disc to fabric – or sew on that aforementioned jump ring. Just match your thread color to the embroidery, and your stitches will be invisible.

(Another possibility: you could glue a felt backing to these, and add a little thread shank, and you’d have some awfully cool buttons.)

And incidentally, those metal discs are super inexpensive, and come in different sizes. Happy Stitching!

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I’m knee-deep in a couple big projects this week, but carved out a little time to do some more playing with my Hambly rub-ons. I had a thrifted ceramic plate and a dollar store candle holder. Perfect!

I was mostly interested in how these bad-boys perform on a curved surface. And I was really happy with the results!

So first, I figured out how I wanted to position the motifs. I also cut a little off some of the dandelion stems so they’d follow the contour of the plate’s edge.

I found it best to work with one motif at a time – you can press the pieces into the curved surface more easily that way.

If you’re working with a larger piece, you might even try clipping here and there into the edges so that it can lay flatter against the surface. The flatter you can get it, the nicer your rub-on will turn out.

…Still liking that crochet hook as a burnishing tool.

The whole key to success here is to peel the backing up very, very slowly when you’re done burnishing. If you see any evidence at all of the design not quite sticking, put that plastic back down and burnish some more.

So, it probably goes without saying, but the minute you add rub-ons to a ceramic dish, it’s no longer food safe. But it can still be useful! It’s a good idea to seal the rub-ons, because they can be scratched off with heavy use.

You can always use a spray sealer over the whole plate, but I wanted to try a couple of simpler options: Diamond Glaze and Mod Podge, brushed just over the design.

The Diamond Glaze was dandy, drying nice and smooth. If you’ve never tried this stuff, DO. It has a thousand and one uses.

The Mod Podge wasn’t bad – perhaps a little brush-stroky.

Incidentally, the glass was even easier to work with than the ceramic. All I did was gently press the rub-on to the glass along its center. Then I pressed out toward the edges.

This finger-press was enough to release most of the design to the glass, and a little burnishing with my crochet hook took care of the rest.

If you want to see more uses of these rub-ons, check out this gallery at the Hambly blog.

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So, I reviewed this book a while back, but the nice people at New Sheer Creations sent me a copy to give away, and some supplies to make flowers with. (Thank you, Fe!)

Last night, I entirely redeemed a not-so-great day by diving into nylon flowers. Wanna see?

The materials are simple – I’ve made pantyhose flowers before, but I will say, New Sheer’s stuff is the Cadillac version. Wondering what those nested circles are?

They’re petal forms – just choose the size, wrap the wire around it and twist, and you have consistently-sized petals in seconds. Awesome!

The real genius bit, though, is this nylon thread. See how it’s kind of spun in texture? Well, that gives it incredible stretch, so when you wrap it around the base of a petal, it “grabs” the nylon fabric and stays in place. This makes it super easy to tie a double knot and anchor the petal.

UPDATE: Fe emailed me to say that you don’t even have to tie a knot – you can just wind the thread a few times around the base of the petal and it stays in place!

I love this stuff! It’ll have lots of other crafty applications…

Initially, I cut the nylon fabric into squares before stretching it over the wire. But that created more waste than I wanted. So then I tried leaving the fabric intact, stretching the end over the wire and then trimming it off. Worked great – and I was able to get a lot of petals out of a very small amount of nylon.

Incidentally, I love this variegated color! New Sheer also has solids in gorgeous colors.

…Then you gather up a group of petals, with a clump of stamens in the middle.

Oh – and you also need some leaves.

From there, it’s a matter of arranging and floral-taping. The book gives you great guidance on how to place the flowers and leaves along a stem to create replicas of specific types of flowers. Not that you couldn’t go wild and invent your own.

Voila! Here’s my take on a Eustoma from the book. I’ve been obsessively tweaking and curving the petals since I made it.

Now for the giveaway! Just leave a comment here and tell me what flowers you’re looking forward to most during this gardening season. I’ll draw a winner at random at noon PST, Thursday, June 11. International readers, you’re welcome to enter.

Good Luck!

UPDATE: Congratulations to MelodyJ, who won! I’m emailing you for your address now…

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By the time you read this, I’ll be on a plane to Maker Faire! So I thought I’d wrap up this Provo Craft week by sharing some cool resources I found online for the Cricut.

The Cricut message boards are filled with users figuring out interesting things to do with the machine. If you’re curious about anything, ask it there.

Also, YouTube is a treasure trove of how-to videos for Cricut-hacking. Check out:

- Cutting a stencil to use in bleach-painting a T-shirt

- Cutting stencils for glass etching

- Engraving on metal! (But you need a special tip for that…)

- Cutting rubber stamps – although it should be said, Provo makes a stamp-cutting kit, too. I’m using it up top there.

- And the ultimate mark of internet cred, Will It Blend?

Have a great weekend, all – I’ll be tweeting from Maker Faire, and will have lots for you to see and hear when I return!

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So, I’ve also been playing with a Cuttlebug for the past week. It’s a cute little embosser and die-cutter – again, designed for paper crafting, but I fed a bunch of other things into it instead.

Above is a wallet I made by laminating fabric to duct tape and then embossing them. You would think that, in the fifty or so prototypes it took to get this to work, I’d have taken a photo of the machine. But I didn’t! So here’s a manufacturer’s photo:

It’s super easy and fun to use. The embossing area is about the size of a standard greeting card, though, so you have to get creative with your hacks.

My yellow duct tape was a little translucent, so I laminated it to some apple-green fabric to create contrast. That’s transparent duct tape at the edges – my new favorite thing!

Here you can see the fabric interior. I had to starch the fabric heavily to help it hold the emboss. The starch prevents the duct tape from sticking initially, but when you put fabric and duct through the Cuttlebug, they bond beautifully.

If y’all are interested, I’ll be glad to make a tutorial after Maker Faire.

Now here’s an idea that really intrigues me – this is what the fabric side looks like after embossing. Cool, huh? And it really holds the emboss nicely. But – there’s that size limit again!

What would you do with this, using pieces no more than 6″ wide? Let’s crowdsource!

A couple other things I’ve run out of time to explore: the Cuttlebug does a dandy job embossing metal. This is a piece of tooling foil, and I got similar results with layered kitchen aluminum foil.

Even more intriguingly, you can emboss Friendly Felt! Imagine adding some embroidery to this, or a little seed beading, or maybe some fabric paint. I have a stack of FF sheets awaiting my return…

…And by the way, playing cards also emboss nicely. Here I colored the raised design with a Sharpie.

ACK! I leave for Maker Faire tomorrow! I hope to see you at the Provo Craft booth this weekend!

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I’ve been crafting up a storm over here in preparation for Maker Faire! (I’ll have more details next week on that, too.)

One of my projects was to learn the wonders of the Yudu, that personal screen printing machine you’ve seen on other blogs lately. This was my first foray into screen printing. Hoo-boy, that’s addictive, isn’t it?

K. and I designed this tiki logo together about 100 years ago. He’s rather a genius in Photoshop (and its poor cousin, GIMP), and was able to separate the two-color design into separate layers, so we could burn the two screens.

Holding them up to a sunny window, we could see that the two parts would be well-aligned when they printed out. So next, we printed them on transparencies.

(Red stuff on the right, black stuff on the left.)

One of the cooler things about the Yudu is that it burns your screens for you. All we had to do was use a little tape to mark the corners of the transparency, so that we could place the other transparency in the exact same location later.

…All of which made a two-color print really easy. And we’ve been printing these tikis on everything that isn’t nailed down around here.

I’ll be blogging more about the Yudu after Maker Faire. What, specifically, would you like to know about it? Leave a comment here, and I’ll answer all your questions when I get back.

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Ah, the joys of being in a community of crafty minds!

A couple days ago, I asked for some help figuring out how these ric rac flowers were made.

Astaryth shared this link, and Alice shared this link. Both are pretty ric rac flowers, but not quite the same as these. As you can see in the photo below, the bottom of my flowers is flat. How did they do that?

Then Alice mentioned “reverse engineering” in her comment. And it finally dawned on me: DUH! I could take one apart and see how it’s made! Yeah, I know – forest for the trees, Baby.

So, I grabbed a flower. It was held together at the bottom with glue. I pulled it apart.

Here it is unrolled. And there’s the secret!

The ric rac was folded in half first, pressed, and then rolled up!

Pretty amazing – there’s no stitching or glue holding the flower together along the way – just a spot of glue at the bottom to anchor the end of the ric rac.

. . . And now we all know. :-)

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Just a few goodies for y’all while I’m flying around meeting deadlines…

Here’s my tutorial on CraftStylish this week: I made this flower brooch by cutting up a soda can, and then stitching two metal cut-outs together with beads and craft wire. I like how it came out.

And if you ever need, say, nine million of these blue and green cans, stop by our place. It’s soda-and-bitters season!

Crafty By Nature month is wrapping up at the site. These were some of my favorite posts:

Linda‘s genius Reversible Swiffer Sock.

Erika‘s beautiful T-Shirt Quilt.

Kayte‘s amazing lamp made from a CD spindle.

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I finally got some time last night to noodle around with my new Sharpie Paint Markers. I first discovered these bad-boys while doing this embellished button project, and had to go acquire a bunch more colors.

(Interesting side note: In one of the Jo-Ann stores I shopped, these markers are out on a public shelf with the other paints. At another Jo-Ann, they were under lock and key and I had to sign a police department Graffiti Tools Registry in order to buy them.)

Anyway, I’m super excited about what these babies can do. (And no, I am not getting any promotional consideration from Sharpie here.) You should know that they come in a water-based variety, which is good for paper projects, and an oil-based variety, which I’m using here.

The oil-based pens produce an opaque, slightly glossy line. They work beautifully on lots of surfaces, as you’ll see here. (I adore my stapler now!)

I was really impressed by the opacity of the white paint on this red surface. And, the paint dries very quickly.

I also got great results on glass (and the metal tealight cup). I love the possibilities of glass – you can easily do some reverse painting by drawing on both sides. You could also draw a pretty frame right onto a mirror.

I found that these pens give nice coverage on a wooden surface – although, for an object like this wooden spoon that will see a lot of handling, I’d definitely apply some sealer over the paint.

(You may want to seal non-wood items, too – there’s more below on how the paint cleans up and rubs off.)

Here’s a scrap of tablecloth vinyl – it takes the pens nicely, too. This shows you how you can overlap colors. Imagine the possibilities here: you could customize a vinyl tote, or let your kids draw on a vinyl tablecloth and use it as a picnic blanket. You could probably also customize a pair of flip-flops. (Mental note: buy flip-flips immediately.)

And, you can draw right on a photo! I used the extra-fine point pens here (they also come in a fine point). Wow, does THIS unlock lots of artistic ideas! (Those are, by the way, either fireworks or giant invading spiders from Mars.)

This is a good moment to mention that the metallic pens have slightly uneven results. On some surfaces, the metallic sheen fades when the paint dries (on the tablecloth vinyl above, for example, the gold paint faded to a muddy beige). But you can try adding a second coat.

The second-coat trick works for the colors, too. This little soap dispenser is a long-ago IKEA purchase. Notice how the red lines have gotten muddy against the blue plastic. You can draw a second coat over the first and get much better opacity.

(In fact, take a look at my cell phone above – that flower was painted in several coats.)

I only had a couple fails, but they were born of pushing the material too hard. I thought it would be fun to draw on a pillar candle. This worked great at first, but the wax quickly clogged the pen tip.

. . . And fabric is a bit too porous for this material.

The paint is water-resistant, but I found that rubbing alcohol would remove it without a trace from most surfaces while it was still wet – so a moistened Q-Tip will take care of most mistakes as you’re drawing. Depending on the surface, you may be able to remove dried marks with the alcohol, too – but on some surfaces, I end up with a bit of color stain.

I’d recommend doing a little test on an inconspicuous area of your object before you get started: make a few little marks with the colors you plan to use, and then see how they rub out when they’re dry.

There are MSDS sheets and a bit more info at the Sharpie website. Have fun!

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