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.

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…

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!

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!

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.

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. :-)

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.

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!

April is Crafty By Nature month over at CraftStylish. (Speaking of which, be sure and enter the contest for a free Yudu screen printer!)

So, here are a couple recycled project tutorials I’ve got over there now. The first is all about crafting with VHS tapes!

I spent a week with a dismantled video cassette, figuring out things to make from the tape. The Mutant Project Count was very high, but I finally managed several ideas, including these cathy of california - style loomed flowers. Pretty, and indestructable.

Thankfully, I live with the greatest engineering brain ever (K’s, not mine), so we collaborated on these simple VHS bookends. We love them - and have replaced pretty much every other bookend in the house with them. Anyway, there are how-to’s at that link.

And then these are some Easter baskets woven from chipboard food packaging - a pizza box, 12-pack soda box, and a Bisquick box, to be exact. They’re super-simple to make, and sturdy as all get-out. You can cut the handles off after Easter and use them for organizing.

I love these kinds of upcycling projects. They do take a little wrestling, but they really build your creative muscles.

So, Button Month on CraftStylish is just winding down. Here’s my latest tutorial: customizing plain white buttons with paint. I tried four different kinds of paint, and put them all through a washer-dryer test. You can see the results over there.

In the process, I discovered a freakin’ wonder-product: Sharpie Paint Markers. I’m working on a post about these for over here, by which I mean, I’m paint-markering everything that isn’t nailed down.

Don’t miss these other great button projects: Kayte’s cute button cards, Erika’s embroidered covered buttons, and Cal’s rad button monogram.