Friday, February 3, 2012

Salt Dough Jewelry

Hello craftsters!

Over the holidays my friend Lindsey and I decided to release some of our pent up craftiness. Result? Salt dough. I'm sure some of you may have made a variation of this sometime in your summer camp pasts. Unfortunately I don't actually have a link to a website, as the pin I used as inspiration on Pinterest links to a random blog with no mention of salt dough. Such is life.

Here's the recipe we used:

"salt dough - 2 cups flour, 1 cup salt, cold water. Mix until has consistency of play dough. bake at 250 for 2 hours, then cool and paint."

And here is a sample of what I made:



I realized after taking this photo that it's a little difficult to tell what the bracelet is, so here is my debut as a hand/arm model:


Salt Dough Jewelry

Cost: Free (we had all the necessary ingredients, and I have a LOT of random jewelry making supplies)

Rating: Pretty good

Comments: With some practice, I feel like you could make some pretty cool stuff with this. Our first attempt turned out fairly decently, but we definitely ended up with good amount of really ugly unidentifiable pieces. My first tip would be to cut this recipe at least in half (maybe more). We had SO MUCH salt dough. It was ridiculous. Also, make sure you add the water VERY slowly and keep the mixture fairly dry (like the instructions say, similar to Play Dough... which is pretty dry and grainy if you haven't had a Play Dough experience in a while). If you add too much water it'll be sticky and unmanageable. Last tip: the dough rises a bit while baking, so make all holes a little larger than you think you need or they will all close up.

Overall, I think this has potential, and could probably work to make fingerprints/paw prints/other prints crafts.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Paintings textured with glue

My apologies for the lame title, but I'm not really sure what to call these. Boyfriend and I have a nice mirror (I believe originally purchased from a garage sale? I don't remember) in our living room above our couch. Given that our living room is shaped a bit like a bowling alley (very long with windows on the end) we have a TON of white wall space... and our mirror was looking a little lonely. I found this idea for using Elmer's glue to texture a canvas on pinterest:


Inspiration:


Nice right? But a little boring for this craftster. I made this version instead, using colors inspired by the rug in our living room.

 And here they are in action:
Pretty cool, right?

Glue Textured Paintings


Cost: Free (already had the glue and paint, canvases donated by mom)

Rating: Excellent

Comments: These are awesome! I used regular Elmer's glue to draw a pattern on the canvases (I went for geometric concentric squares), let that dry overnight, then used acrylic paint to make gradient colors that went with our living room. Upon actually reading the inspiration blog, I found that the original craftster used puffy paint instead of Elmer's glue. Oops. Oh well, mine still worked.