Getting Crafty

Getting Crafty is off to a slow start, but that’s ok! As summer arrives I’m sure we’ll all be feeling energized and creative in no time. If you’re the type of person that can’t imagine being called creative or crafty, here are three easy ways to work on developing creativity without feeling too much pressure or stress (hopefully!):

Make a card…or twenty
If you’re a true beginner, you may not yet be able to make cards like the ones you’ll see at All Paper Arts but you can fold a piece of paper in half or a quarter, and use a nice bold marker to draw or doodle something that will appeal to the recipient. Use your imagination and don’t restrict yourself too much and you’re bound to come up with something nice. If not, your friends and family will surely laugh at your attempts to draw a birthday cake or wedding dress and as long as they’re laughing, it can’t all be bad. That and your heartwarming words will ensure they love your handmade cards.

Read about, then try a craft that interests you
There are a lot of books and magazines that focus on various crafts. Pick some up at the local book store or library and find something that appeals to you. Buy the required materials and follow the instructions! Start small: knit a potholder before attempting a cardigan and watch your ability to create grow. As you become more proficient you may start regarding patterns as guidelines rather than something to be strictly followed.

Let unlikely things inspire you
In order for you to get inspired, you’ll have to go out there and keep your mind and eyes open. Walk through a garden, visit a zoo, check out the produce section of a grocery store. You never know what colours or textures will inspire your next project. Let the colours in a peacock feather or the smoothness of a stone inspire you.

How do you get or stay inspired?

Buttons are so pretty and the craft industry has certainly taken buttons beyond their original purpose of fastening things together. Nowadays, buttons can be used in a number of ways:

• Large, antique buttons can be used to make interesting magnets, bracelets, or to decorate a bag (all courtesy of Martha Stewart’s site)
• buttons can be glued onto a frame to make a unique frame. You can use a monochrome colour scheme with a similar type of button, or include a completely random selection of your favourite button styles and colours.
• As eyes on crafts. Who can resist a handmade stuffed animal with brown button eyes? I can’t!
• To embellish your creations: a button can be the wheels of a car, a frisbee or a pancake.
• Make a necklace using unique buttons and a nice cord.

What neat things have you used buttons for?

This is a collaborative list so please chime in when you think of something:

• Paper cutter
• Adhesive (glue stick, liquid glue, decoupage glue, photo glue, mounting squares and mounting dots, etc)
• Cutting mat
• Scissors
• Rulers and stencils
• Paper (cardstock, patterned paper and blank white paper)
• Pens (in a variety of colours and thicknesses for various types of writing and colouring)
• Notions (brads, eyelets, jewels, buttons)

With these materials you’ll be set to make just about anything!

As you are aware, Martha Stewart is alive and well and she launched her crafts line at Michaels stores across the United States and Canada at the beginning of May. I visited my local Michaels to check out her new line and I was very impressed with what I saw. Never one to disappoint, Martha’s products invite the eyes to gaze and the hands to touch.

The pricing on many things is competitive with other products carried at Michaels but much of the products were priced higher than I’d spend…without a coupon, and of course Martha’s products are exempt from the infamous Michaels coupons of at least 40% off. That means a sheet of 18 x 18 paper, for example, will set you back $3.49 in canuck bucks and I find it hard to justify spending approximately $8 on enough paper to wrap a photo album.

I don’t begrudge Ms. Stewart her business sense (I was told by a Michaels employee that part of Martha’s agreement with Michaels was that her products would be exempt from coupon discounts) but to me that means her products are really for the advanced crafter, not someone starting out who doesn’t want to blow all their discretionary income on crafting supplies…yet.

Maybe in a couple of years.

A reader (Hi Dave!) would like an update on the magnets as I promised a week ago to provide an update.

I bought them but they scare me. Why?

The warning on the label that tells me to keep them away from everything in the entire world, for starters:

I want to know how far away from electronics I should be keeping my rare earth magnets. I have a magnetic board right beside my computer and now I’m scared that I’ll corrupt my stored data all because I wanted to make magnets strong enough to hold 2lbs of stuff. Why did I have to be so greedy?

And here’s what these teeny magnets look like:

…and all 60 of them:

They are really strong and prying one magnet away from the bunch requires a signifcant amount of strength.

I stumbled across the neatest little craft yesterday and I just had to try it. Check out this paper wallet:

(Instructions can be found at the Instructables site here)

This wallet is made from one sheet of A4 or 8.5 inches by 11 inches paper. Thirteen snips of the scissors and two pieces of tape later and that is what you end up with! There are two pockets for credit cards and a section for dollar bills.

This is a nice craft for older kids (age 10+ in my opinion) and takes about five minutes to make. You can make a new one daily or hourly to match your clothing choices. If you want to pretty up the closure and make it look less like a billfold, you could incorporate a ribbon closure that wraps around a brad, or use eyelets and tie a pretty piece of ribbon through it.

The only thing missing is a coin purse section!

Edited to add: I’m now obsessed and making them for everyone and anyone:

I’m fairly certain that being a packrat is a requirement of any crafter worth his or her salt. You have to be able to look at a cereal box and see a file folder, or look at a kitchen tile and see a pot holder or trivet. It’s hard enough to figure out the many uses of an item that you’d normally throw away or recycle, but how good are you at finding other uses for craft items that are generally used in other crafts?

Today, I’d like to suggest some other uses for metal tags which are a scrapbooking embellishment. As you can see from part of my collection below, I can’t seem to stop buying them! The different sheens of metal, styles of writing, and shapes make each set more interesting than the last:

Ways to use metal tags:

• to decorate the covers of plain photo albums
• to make a charm bracelet (or simply thread a ribbon through one as a simple bracelet) or pendant for a necklace
• make wine charms from the lighter weight ones
• include as a decorative ornament on a gift

How do you or would you use metal tags?

Summer is a great time to get your craft on: the warmer weather hopefully means plenty of time spent on your porch or outside in the sunshine, sipping your drink of choice. If the warmer weather comes along with a slower pace of life, even better! It’s a great opportunity to start making knitted, crocheted and other gifts for friends and family because Christmas is coming and wouldn’t it be great to have your gifts all made and ready to go by the end of the summer?

This summer, I hope to make the following things which I saw in books or online this past winter:

• Felted Ornament Coasters (the black and white picture I have of this craft does not do it justice)
• Easy Peasy Mouse Mat Cover I can’t wait to visit a fabric store and choose some funky fabrics for this easy craft.
• I have never knit anything for myself to wear other than a scarf, and I would love to challenge myself by making something from Classic Knits for Real Women, even if it’s just a cabled scarf.
• The winter femme hat (I’m determined to attempt the cable knit!)
• A mini wallet

What crafts are on your to do list this summer?

Some of my favourite types of crafts are paper crafts and I will be tuning in regularly to All Paper Arts to see what is cooking on that front, and I will also showcase on this site paper crafts that catch my eye, and hope you will share any neat crafts you come across too!

I will be a bridesmaid in a wedding soon and I have started working on the card that will accompany the happy couple’s gift. There is something very formal about black, grey and white for a wedding and although some balk at the idea of using black on a wedding card, it makes me think of tuxedos and surely that can’t be a bad thing?

Here is what I have so far for the card. Lavendar is a key colour in this wedding and the bit of lavendar ribbon is a tribute to that:

I used some square brads as the centres of the daisies and I will be covering up the backside of the brads with a piece of cardstock or perhaps more of the grey paper that’s on the front of the card.

In the instructions for making marble magnets, you can see that I’m using ordinary magnets (from the dollar store). I found that one side of these magnets was usually stronger than the other and I generally test out both sides before deciding which side will be the magnet side and which will be covered up by the glass glob. Even though these magnets are cheap, they can hold up a couple of sheets of paper without much trouble, but if you want something with a better hold, rare earth magnets are your best bet.

But where does one get rare earth magnets? Canadian customers can get them at Lee Valley Tools, where the tiniest rare earth magnets (1/4 of an inch in diameter and 1/10 of an inch thick) have a magnetic strength of 2.5 pounds! I’ll be picking some up tomorrow and will be sure to report on their strength and superiority to regular magnets.

If you’re interested in learning more about magnets, the site provides a fairly detailed writeup on rare earth magnets.

MAGCRAFT is a US-based site selling rare earth magnets in multiples of 100 for under $10.

I really appreciate all the comments that I received on my first entry because they revealed what a diverse bunch of crafters (or people interested in crafts) there are out there, and I suspect that with respect to experience I fall in the beginner to intermediate level. My hope is that I will be able to introduce the expert crafters to something new to try, and that they in turn will be able to show us how to step up our projects to the next level. And for the beginner crafters, I hope to find some projects that are easy but not overwhelming, yet not so easy that you become bored.

I hope you’ll all bear with me as I settle in and get organized.

On Fridays, I will profile a crafter and either share an interview, project or both by the crafter. If you would like to be profiled, please send me an email at jummy.gettingcrafty@gmail.com and I will be in touch with you shortly.

As promised, please find below the instructions for making marble magnets.

There are other sites that offer instructions and if you want some beautiful inspiration, I suggest you check out Not Martha’s site: it was one of the first places that I saw marble magnets.

MATERIALS

• marbles that are flat on one side (also known as glass globs, glass gems, mosaic marbles) and are approximately 3/4 of an inch in diameter



• a strong glue that dries clear (I recommend Elmer’s Silicone Clear Rubber Sealer but it has a strong odour; I have also used Aleene’s Clear Gel Tacky Glue which works but isn’t my first choice. If you come across a better glue, please let me know!)



• paper with a design, image or words that can still be seen clearly when the marble is placed over it



• magnets that are the same size or smaller than the base of your marble (I buy mine at the local dollar store. Some people use the rare earth magnets but I cannot find them here (they must be rare, indeed!). The rare earth magnets are small but reputed to be quite strong.



• a circle stencil or punch that creates circles that fit the base of the marble without being too big or too small

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Find the image you want to make into a magnet.



2. Cut out the shape.



3. Apply glue to the magnet and affix the image to the magnet. I find a toothpick works well to spread the silicone sealer (that was a tip from Not Martha).




4. Add a small blob of glue to the top of the image, press a clear marble over it and let dry for a good 20 minutes.




5. Voila!

I made some of these magnets for a friend’s bridal shower and they were a hit.

I hope you take the chance to try out this craft and report back with pictures of your creations!

Thank you for stopping by at Getting Crafty today. I am your new hostess, Jummy, and I look forward to getting to know the crafting crowd quite well.

I’m a novice crafter: I love everything from knitting to scrapbooking, and one simple craft that I do regularly is make marble magnets for friends and winners of a contest I run on my personal blog. Since my early days of jazzing up school projects with pop-up book elements and making friendship bracelets with embroidery thread, I’ve been interested in crafts and exploring my creativity; but unlike some (most?) crafters, coming up with original ideas can be difficult for me. This site will give me an opportunity to express my creativity, share tips, tricks, insights and bright ideas with you, and learn a lot from you too! And to those of you who claim to not have a creative bone in your bodies? I don’t believe it!

And now, before I tempt you to use your Exacto knife to slit cut something other than paper, I have a few questions for you:

• What is your favourite type of craft?
• Name a type of craft that you know nothing about but would love to learn to do?
• Who is/are the main crafters in your household or family?

And if you’d be kind enough to include a link to a handmade craft that you’re especially proud of, please do! I’d love to check it out!