Getting Crafty

I’m an amateur crafter and as such, it is possible that I just don’t know what the big names in the crafting world are when it comes to supplies. Perhaps for these items that I struggle to find high performing versions of, everybody knows that you should only buy it if it’s BrandName X, while I have been haplessly buying things that have a pleasing combination of high quality, (which I decide based on a)whether I have heard of the brand before and b) the price of the item).

The supplies that are currently the bane of my existence are:

Paper cutters
I have two paper cutters, both by Fiskars and purchased almost two years apart: one is a guillotine, which comfortably cuts paper up to 9 inches wide, and the other is a trimmer intended for sheets of paper up to 12 inches wide. Admittedly, it may be my technique that is amiss, but I can’t seem to cut a sheet of paper and end up a square or rectangle with corners that are at right angles to each other. And when I try to fix one side with a pair of scissors, I end up snipping a bit too much, which I compensate for by snipping a bit more from the other side, and this continues until I’m left with paper that is too small for its original intent (and it’s still not straight!).

Adhesives
I am currently using the following adhesives:

• liquid glue that dries clear (but shows up under any paper or ribbon that is light enough in colour)
• small squares of double sided tape which are an alternative to liquid glue, yet time-consuming to use when gluing larger objects
• the glue that rolls out of a dispenser, much like the dry whiteout dispensers (either I’m applying incorrect pressure, or there is something wrong with the dispensing mechanism).

Every adhesive I find and use never seems appropriate for the occasion. Where can I find a good all purpose adhesive for paper that doesn’t leave me with puckered paper (due to a liquid glue), using up all my adhesive squares, or dealing with a tangled rolling contraption that seems out of my league?

Please help: what cutting tools and adhesives should I be using?

Are you taking part in our challenge? You only have until October 15, 2007 to complete it so get crafting!

Have you been coming here in search of fresh new content? If so, please allow me to apologize. I’ve been quite sick with a cold (the changing of the seasons always gets me) and this week is particularly busy as I will have been working 8 days in a row by Sunday, a couple of days I worked at both my full time job and my part time job. Shockingly enough, that sort of schedule is not conducive to either crafting, or writing about crafting.

I’d hate to leave you without some neat things to do so I scoured the web for some cute crafts that you can do very quickly. I came across J Caroline Creatitve! and when you check out her beautiful craft tutorials (which you can do here), you’ll see why I’m so enamoured..

(I was going to “borrow” pictures from the site but to avoid potential copyright issues, you’ll just have to go there and see for yourself.)

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Here’s a craft that I haven’t tried but I think would be really neat.

Get yourself a smooth piece of board, perhaps two or three inches high by 12-18 inches long.

Cover it with magnetic paint, the existence of which I just discovered today. I found the picture below here.

Use regular paint to paint a pretty border around the edges of your board.

Attach it to a wall, preferably around your dresser, maybe under a mirror you have on the wall.

Attach all your dangly earrings to it.

Voila–an earring holder!

Taken by me in early August

Are you itching to take up photography? Check out these sites to get inspired.

Andrea Scher
Andrea holds the distinction of being one of the first people I added to the blogroll of my personal blog that I had never communicated with prior to adding her (or since, might I add). I have read many of her entries, including most of her archives and I find that her words speak to me just as much as her pictures.

Ross Oscar Knight
I first found out about this Atlanta native’s incredible talent when I watched the slideshow of an engagement that he spent eight hours taping. From photos of weddings to casual family pictures, Knight became the second stranger I had to add to my blogroll.

Denise Andrade, Boho girl
I found her blog through Andrea’s, and I discovered that she has a separate photography site now, Boho Photography. I love how, like Andrea, boho girl includes a picture with each entry. As if the pictures aren’t beautiful enough, her words speak loudly to me too.

While crusing around on Craftzine, I came across the following cool looking craft ideas:

Silkscreening - looks complicated to me…I love the tealy blue of the result though.

Halloween origami - You could make these as cards for coworkers or classmates

Lunch bag - it’s so cute that it might make me decide to start packing a lunch to work, just so I can use it…or maybe I’ll just use it to carry my lunch money.

I have a desire to learn webdesign and become a quasi-graphic artist. Having no formal art training except for two years of art class in highschool, and during that time I discovered that I’m no natural. I like to measure and organize things too much to be truly free…although I am trying to learn this freedom.

I spent a large chunk of time (sixteen hours solid) working on the web page for my personal site. It’s nothing special but I am proud that I built it from the ground up.

Working on the header (or banner) was the part that challenged me the most creatively: putting together colours and a pattern that I liked into something pleasing to the eye…that was a bit of a challenge.

If you are a fan of photography in headers/banners, you must check out Boho Girl’s work here. If I had the money I’d definitely love to see what she can do on my site!

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Don’t forget: If you’d like to win the set of six marble magnets pictured at the end of the entry here, just leave a comment!

I’m slowly working on making the magnets that I promised to give away on my other blog. I have a tendency to get distracted so a job that should take 30-45 minutes has now taken many months as I agonize over the correct paper to use and such.

I held a contest for 451 Press bloggers only and the winner was announced back in April. I have yet to send her her gift but I will be mailing it off in about 12 hours:

The recipient indicated that she liked the colours pink and green so I tried to the best of my ability to use paper with those colours in them.

The fun part was figuring out how to wrap the gift. In the end, a little bit of tissue paper and some ribbon did the trick. An apologetic “sorry this took me a million years to complete” note was tucked under the ribbon and we’re ready to go…once I find an envelope, that is:

But why should my lucky winner have all the fun, right? I made a small set of magnets to give away to a lucky reader.

If you recall, they are made from the card I talked about here. Simply leave a comment indicating what you like best about the fall season and next Friday (September 7, 2007) I will make a draw from the readers who have left a comment.

Good luck to all!

If you’d like to make your own marble magnets, please check out my tutorial here!

I found the best little organizer at the dollar store. Look how nicely they hold my brads:

I thought two would be enough but with all those little things I’ve got to organize (eyelets, metal tags…) more of these organizers will be needed!

Remember the house warming card I was working on? I still have the last card that I began working on, but I decided to go with one of the iterations that I had rejected. I’m so glad that I didn’t toss it into the recycling box as I usually would:

(The colourful background is the wrapping paper for the gift)

It’s simple, it’s clearly handmade, but the recipient thought it was cute and (luckily) happens to be a fan of my handmade cards.

For my next attempt, I wanted to focus on black and beige, with metal accents. So far I have:

What a start, right? I have entirely too many metal embellishments to work with–brads, eyelets, and tags galore. And of course, none of them seem quite right.

I’m not quite a Martha Stewart, and getting ideas to flow is very slow.

Remember my last entry? Try as I might, my scant collection of materials didn’t yield anything that I liked:

I was trying to go for a quaint, old fashioned farm house look (why I don’t know–the new homeowners are in their late 20s) and this card just struck me as too old fashioned and rather plain. It is also not neat enough and looks extremely amateurish.

My next attempt was something more modern.

All my life I have dreamed of being creative, of being an ideas person. I have always wanted to be the person who’s given an empty room, 100 yards of fabric, a sewing machine, a bag of goose down and ribbon, and who manages to transform the room into something wonderful.

However, the creative process is continually stalled by one of my biggest sins: overthinking. And this tendency towards overthinking is related to my affliction of procrastination. While taking the time to think things through might seem like a good quality, when it leads to the halting of all possible and potential creative processes, it is not a good thing.

I was given some good advice about combatting this problem: Just do it! Cut up that sheet of paper to make that thing you want to make. If it turns out badly, a) now you know that the idea doesn’t work so well and b) you can start again. It seems so simple, so basic but I can read and dream up the coolest things but until I actually make a step towards turning it into reality, it’s pretty useless to the world (and to this blog). So I will try to do that more often. For example, last night, I took the following with the intention of making a “Happy Housewarming” card:

And almost two hours later, I hadn’t gotten any further. I spent an hour moving pieces around, thinking of the different things I could do. Why didn’t I just stick something down, decide I hate it and start over? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I will do that now. And tomorrow, I’ll report back on how the process went. To those of you who ever feel like this, I challenge you to go for it, do something, even it becomes a mess. Chances are it’ll give you some insight into your finished product!

A couple of months ago, I showed off some of my unfinished projects here.

Unfortunately, both are still unfinished. I have made an enormous amount of progress with the scarf though:

Goal: to be finished by the end of the month. My next knitting pattern will not involve a 1×1 rib (knit one stitch, purl one stitch) because it takes entirely too long to complete. I’m sure when the cold winter arrives I’ll be glad that it’s such a thick scarf though!

If finding time to craft is a problem, there are some small things you can in ten, fifteen or more minutes of free time. You’ll be surprised by how smoothly your craft time goes when you finally sit down to do it. But the best part about these ideas: you don’t need to set aside a several hours to do it!

Without further ado, why not:

• crop pictures in preparation for a scrapbook page
• do some quick journalling to accompany pictures
• untangle a skein or ball of yarn (this will take longer than 15 minutes unless you have lightning quick fingers!)
• organize your knitting needles and crochet hooks
• create bobbin spools of thread
• cut pages from magazines for collages
• group pictures needed for each page together, then group all pictures in order of how you will use them

How do you maximize the shorter time periods you may have?

Even if you have a large room for all your crafty supplies, complete with a mammoth table, you might find yourself getting cluttered. Crafting can be a messy hobby, so why not take the time to clean up your workspace? Here are some ways to declutter and tidy your craft space:

Get rid of non-craft stuff
Simple enough, right? Right! If your craft room or corner or desk is holding mail, toys, appliances, anything that isn’t meant to be used in a craft, banish them from your craft area!

Packaging
So many craft related gadgets and materials come overpackaged-they’re wrapped in plastic and cardboard, or put in styrofoam or other material for protection. Once you have liberated the item from its packaging, toss the packaging! Chances are you can come up with a more permanent housing for the item that will require less packaging.

Be generous and give, give, give!
Many crafters (I refuse to believe I’m alone in this!) find something on sale and buy, buy, buy with the intention of giving it away. Chances are, somewhere along the way you end up storing it in your crafting area, even though you know you aren’t going to use it. Well it’s time to do a little digging and get these items out in the open, then out of your house. Mail them to the recipient(s) if driving it over isn’t feasible.

Recycle vigilantly
So often I cut some paper and save every little scrap that I’m not using for the day when it will come in handy for some other project. Of course, the next time I need a little scrap, I end up cutting it from a new sheet because I’ve forgotten about my previously saved piece of scrap paper. How can I avoid this? By recycling regularly! If a cut sheet of paper isn’t used within a reasonable timeline for you, recycle it! Scraps add up; this is a way of keeping them under control. Don’t limit recycling to paper alone-if there is anything else you tend to hoard but never end up using, get rid of it!

Make stuff and give them away
This is related to the third point: instead of giving away extras you buy, why not use all your materials to make gifts? You can challenge to give only homemade gifts in an effort to slim down your stash. Instead of sending someone an extra kit you bought, they might appreciate receiving what the kit can make instead!

How do you declutter your workspace?

declutter, messy crafts, tidy your craft space, clean your workspace