I'm a big fan of Moriah Elizabeth's channel, and I really admire how creative she is. Like, how the heck does she come up with all those ideas? I have a lot of imagination, but very little creativity. I just find it such a struggle to come up with anything original and interesting. Anyway, watching her Create This Book series, I was tempted to buy a copy of one of them, but now that I've lost my job (thanks, Mophead McLiarface), I can't really justify spending £12 on something that I lack the creativity to even do a good job with. So, I went kinda cheeky and copied out some of the prompts I liked in an old notebook I bought years ago and never knew what to do with. I'm planning on using some free prompts from the interwebz as well.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Crafts
Create Your Own Trading Card Game
The kids have been getting super frustrated during lockdown, and tantrums and general bad behaviour are on the increase. So here's an idea I thought of to encourage good behaviour, and give me something to occupy my time too.
It all started with The Missing Luke Skywalker Trading Card. I had one of these when I was about 14 or 15. I may have kept it in my Sonic the Hedgehog ringbinder, and it may not be there anymore, and I may be really sad about that.
So to cut a long story short, I decided that since I'll probably never find The Missing Luke Skywalker Trading Card, why not just make my own? In fact, why not just make my own series and hope Disney doesn't sue me for everything I have?
Just bear in mind, unless you're using either your own photos/images or images you have permission to freely distribute, these need to be for personal use only. No sharing among school-friends or the kids on the street. Hence I will not be uploading the files, but I will tell you an easy and cheap way to make your own!
Continue readingTrying Out Acrylic Pouring
Since I'd run out of craft projects and had 3 canvasses gathering dust, I decided now was the time to try this out!
You will need:
- Acrylic paint, in 3-4 colours of your choice. Try to choose colours that will look good together. Sometimes you think colours go well together and then when you try it out, they don't. I learnt this from experience.
- Water. Distilled is best, but I used tap water and it was fine
- Small cups or bowls
- A blank pre-primed canvas. It might be a good idea to start with a small canvas the first time
- Glitter or gold leaf. Optional, but adds a nice touch.
- Stirring sticks
- Old newspaper, plastic sheeting or anything else to catch the mess. There probably will be a lot of mess
- Cocktail stick or toothpick, to help create feathering patterns. Optional
- Rubber gloves. Optional, but recommended
- Something sturdy to hold up your canvas while drying. I used my paint bottles
- A desk fan. Optional, but greatly speeds up drying time
DIY Dollshouse Kit No.4: Elegant Times 2020
I think that's what it's called. So here we go, and I finally got to do my red and black theme!
The decor on this was absolutely hideous. I can't even describe how awful the master bedroom wallpaper was. It had to go.
One thing to bear in mind about this one is that it is wider than the other three, so I had to get the one with the dust cover, as it had to go on the top of the display shelves. Otherwise Biscuit would have quickly done some "redecoration" of his own.
This one seemed to be from the same manufacturer as my first dollshouse (Elegant Times 2018?), but there has been an improvement. You actually get a sheet with all the pieces mapped out so you can easily see which piece is which.
Continue reading Painting on Fabric with LIT Paint!
As I said in a previous post, you CAN use LIT on fabric. Previously, I used LIT mixed in with Tulip Fashion Glitter Bond, which I piled over dried fabric paint. While it worked, it didn't look very attractive, appearing very lumpy and just amateurish in general. This time, I tried LIT mixed in with the Tulip Glow fabric paints, and the result looks super good! It has a very painterly look, quite like watercolour at times.
I used LIT in the four available colours: original green, blue, pink and yellow; plus Tulip Glow fabric paint in pink, blue and yellow. Plus various Tulip Slick paints in neon.
So for my first experiment, I mixed up some Pink LIT with pink glow paint, and this time I used a regular paintbrush. So far, so good! The fabric did absorb quite a lot of paint (do make sure to place at least 1 layer of card inside the t-shirt. It's touch-dry within about 10 minutes, I think. I didn't time it, but it really wasn't long.
Continue reading Mini Bookshop
After the success of the faerie bedroom, I wanted to extend that and make a full building. This is going to go to B as soon as I can trust him not to destroy it (it may be a matter of years). I'm not sure what scale this is, but it's definitely smaller than 1:24. The only thing is, I have no idea why I went with a bookshop, given how darn tedious making miniature books is. No really, it's tedious.
For the structure and furniture, I used that card thingie that I still don't know the actual name of [edit: it's called greyboard or mountboard]. I used acrylic paint to paint it, scrapbook design paper for the walls and floors, cardstock for the window and door frames, and clear cellophane for the glass. For the decorations, I used beads, tissue paper, scrap fabric and leftover bits from my dollshouse kits.
So here are some pics:
Continue readingLittle Faerie House
Miniature Fimo Garden, and How to Recondition Fimo
I bought this Fimo like 9 years ago, and never really got very far with it. I've been watching a lot of NerdECrafter lately (and picking up way too many of her mannerisms, especially the "stop messin' ma stuff!"), and Tiny really wanted me to make a faerie garden, so inspired by this video, I thought I'd have another go with the Fimo, and see if I could make something passable.
I had two major problems:
- The Fimo was 9 years old, and had long since hardened and become impossible to use
- I have a gas oven, not an electrical one, and getting the oven to stay at 110° is not so easy (last time I made anything with Fimo, it had scorch marks around the edges)
How to Recondition a Hardened Block of Fimo
You may have seen several tutorials telling you to add vegetable or baby oil to Fimo to soften it.
NO NO NO NO!
Continue readingDIY Mini Lightsabers
As I mentioned, the kids are really into Star Wars. I originally planned on making full-sized lightsabers, but then I realised, dang, that would be expensive. Plus the potential for actual casualties would be high, so I scaled things right down to dolly-sized.
These lightsabers actually light up!
If you read this post, you'd know I now have the full complement of LIT paints. Now, LIT is expensive, so you can substitute this with any glow-in-the-dark paints you have, it just won't be as cool.
What you will need
Continue readingDIY Dollshouse Kit: Tranquil Life
Yeah, I did it again. Here is the one I chose this time:
That's the default style. Originally I was planning on doing a complete repaint, as I did with Blue Times, but I do have a weakness for pink, but at the same time, I wanted to introduce a little more variation, and make it more "mine". So the red-and-black theme will have to be saved for the next one (and yes, there will be a next one).
Continue readingSpace and Trains Box
The Chipmunk and I got a plain wooden box from The Works. The Chipmunk couldn't think of how to decorate it, so of course Crafty Auntie (who is apparently just a bigger Mummy?) stepped in. He wanted to just paint the whole thing blue, with his very own blue glitter paint, but I told him, that's boring, if we're gonna do it, let's do it properly! (We did paint the inside of the lid blue, though.)
So this is what we came up with.
Continue readingFull Complement of LIT Paint! Plus, the Answer to: Can You Use it on Fabric?
Aw yeah!
Everytime I get a bonus, they add a new colour! Well, I guess this will be my last bonus for a while, if ever. May as well make it count (gosh, I'm assuming they're still going to honour the bonus, but who knows now? We were all sent home indefinitely at 4pm yesterday, and since the Chief Buffoon won't order a shutdown of non-essential businesses, our shop may not make it). Anyway, I digress. I was actually going to ask if there were plans for a yellow LIT, and maybe even a lilac LIT (although that might be really hard to charge being at the end of the spectrum), and lo and behold, there was a yellow LIT. Heck yes, I bought it.
Continue readingI Finally Bought LIT Paint!
So I saw the Tom Scott video about the Pinkest Pink, which led me to Culture Hustle, which led me to Lit Paint. Oh boy, am I easily excited by shinies — or indeed, glowies. I had my eyes on it for ages, but £10 for a small pot of glow powder just seemed way too extravagant.
But, with the news that I'd actually get a bonus in December, I was all "Yay! Lit Paint! Lit Paint!" And, actually, it's a good thing I had to wait, because there is now a PINK LIT! So I get to see the Pinkest Pink + the Glowiest Glow! And now I'm writing about it in the Bloggiest Blog?!
So I have to say, the pinkest pink was actually not as exciting as Tom Scott made it out to be. It's just a fluorescent pink, and in fact, the day after I made some glow shapes, I had a customer at work with a jacket even more shockingly pink than my pinky pink star (well, it was more a coral-pink, but it was still way more retina-burning). The pinkest pink is still way more shocking than my pink hair, anyway. So there's that.
*sheds a tear for that paintbrush, which has since gone missing* I found it!
DIY Dollshouse — Blue Times: Silver Arrows-ified!
I got Blue Times in the end. This one took me aaaaaaaaaages to make, about a month, in fact. Partly because of how much I customised it, and partly because it took me ages to end up going to Hobbycraft, where I finally found some decent glue!*
First observation: this one was really well-packed. The last mini house kit I bought, shipped from China, was in a terrible condition when it arrived, and one bag was open, with many pieces having fallen out.
This one cost about £20 on eBay, shipped from the UK. It arrived in a few days.
The quality of this one, however, I found to be lower than the first house I made. Both main wall panels were warped, one of the kitchen table legs was about 5mm too short and didn't have the tapered end. I had to make it longer with silicone glue (see if you can spot it). A piece for the support bars for the highchair was missing, and in the end the one I did get was too small when assembled, so I had to make it out of thick card instead. They bizarrely tell us to chisel the corner of the bedroom floor to a right angle, but there was absolutely no need for it. I'll have to repaint the corner, but even without customisation, that would have required repainting anyway as the original colour was white, but they don't mention it in the instructions. So do ignore that step if you buy this kit.
I bought a bookshelf for the two, and I still have two empty spaces. I managed to hold back and not buy another one just yet, though! I think I need to recover from this one first!
Continue readingPrimary Colours, Plus Trying out a Moriah Elizabeth Craft
What are the three primary colours for pigment? I was always taught red, blue and yellow at school, how about you? It's so wrong though. Totally wrong. Well, 2/3 wrong, to be accurate.
The three primary colours are in fact: yellow, magenta and cyan. Which I should have known as I'm the one who buys the printer ink. But you know, we have it hammered into our heads at school that it's red, blue and yellow, and we don't really question it, do we? But in fact, red and blue cannot be primary colours, for the simple reason that you can make them with magenta, cyan and yellow. Yep, and we proved it!
The kids and I had a lot of fun learning about colours!
Here's a Moriah Elizabeth quick craft I really wanted to try out.
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