Problems, solutions, adventures and prizes.

I'm slacking a bit in keeping this up, but in my defence I have been very busy. 

I spent this weekend away, first in a spa in Kent with the lovely Corrie of Plutonium Muffins, and then in Brighton with Corrie and JT. Corrie and I had much fun going round all the shops I wouldn't have wanted to drag JT round and had some awesome hot chocolate.

Here are some pictures of our adventures:

Dinner in the hotel/spa. Notice the teeny tiny pots of sauces. Corrie and I now have a LOT of these.

I tried to take a picture of the beautiful sunset we drove through, but it hasn't really worked.

And that's me being very uncouth drinking wine through a straw (as is my way) in the hotel bar before we (and a random pair of rich people) nearly drank the bar dry of coffee flavour cocktails.

In more crafty news, after my recent development of new stock I had been proudly wearing my lovely multicoloured gun earrings pretty much every day but one day when I took them off I noticed the colour had worn off in a lot of places.

Sad face.

Back to R&D.

Seeing as I'd made about 50 pairs of earrings up already, this was a bit of a blow. I discovered with some spare charms that the colour stayed pretty well under a coat of spray varnish so I dismantled all the pairs of earrings, sprayed them with two coats of varnish (one to seal and one for good luck), left them to dry and then rebuilt them and have packed up the two orders I need to send and they should be in the post today. 

Yesterday I also made some new things! 

I've been wanting to play around with salt dough for ages and finally got round to making some up. I loved playing with it so much I decided to make more in different colours and attempt to marble the colours as dough, rather than water marble them after as had been my plan.

The water marbling was.... Fairly ineffective. Salt dough likes to absorb water. Bit of a problem. 

The marbled dough was.... Fairly dull by my standards for colour but I think it picked up when I drew on the dried pendants. What do you lot think?

I also remembered making some cinnamon dough ornaments a while ago at a friend's house and thought

"Wow having a little gingerbread man necklace that smelt of ginger and cinnamon would be SO cool"

So I went back to the kitchen and I created.

Mainly I created mess. I realised the dough set too quickly to do much to without having a cutter of the right size (and my attempt at making a cutter did not go well) but I did manage to create a ball of cinnamon ginger scented awesomeness that I will probably find no use for, and these little fellows!

Pretty cute, yes? Sadly they don't smell too heavily but I think they will do more when next to warm skin, and if you sniff them they smell heavenly, but you do look a bit odd sniffing your necklace! 

If you would like to win one of these little guys, head over to my Facebook 

www.facebook.com/colourfulcrafter

And find out how!

I think that's pretty much it other than letting you know that pendants will be available soon in all types and designs. They'll be available on their own so you can attach them to any chain you like, or with waxed cord (as shown) or a thin 20" sterling silver chain for a little extra money.

I hope you're all well. Let me know what you think of the salt dough experiments!

Over and out

Janet

P. S. I also made this. I can hang useful reminders to myself on it too!

New varieties of stock!

A while ago, I used to make earrings like these:

I liked them, but my interests have moved on from simply buying charms and attaching them to earring findings, however I still have a load of charms left because I bought hundreds and then got bored selling them.

I realised yesterday, however, that I can marble the charms so here arises a new range of earrings which I think are pretty damn sweet. Made with the same technique I showed you yesterday, here are my multicoloured and silver earrings:

Uploading the pictures to this from my iPad is a bit tedious so to look at them all you will have to visit my rather lovely shop: www.colourfulcrafter.com

Check them out, only £4 a pair and cheap shipping!

I'm pretty pleased with myself, I've stolen quite a few of them for myself!

Other than making earrings I've had a pretty productive day, finally sent off some earrings I needed to, collected some things from the post office, ordered some things I needed and went to my henna course. While there, I did one design on me, two designs on fellow classmates and one on the college receptionist who came in to see the teacher and wanted some henna. I literally had a queue. I was pretty impressed with myself.

Anyway, speak to you lot soon, I'm going to eat a creme caramel and go to bed 

Over and out,

Janet

P. S. I got a haircut today too. What do you guys think?

Wednesday already?

Time really flies when you have two naps a day. Also I've been busy with some other work so that's been keeping me on my toes, however I did manage to find time yesterday to both play with some new marbling inks (more on that later) and buy a wonderful bit of crafting kit that I'm very excited to receive on Friday (Hopefully!).

The new crafting kit is a Silhouette Portrait, a machine that looks a little like a printer, but instead of ink nozzles, it has a blade so can cut out things for you. This is particularly awesome because it can cut shrink plastic, which is my main material right now. At the moment, I'm making a lot of triangles and that's because they're easy to cut out and they tessellate perfectly so I don't have any wastage. I've cut out more complex shapes in the past but always stop because my wrists can't cope so hopefully this bit of kit will allow me to do loads more designs and shapes.

I've also been doing some maths today. I tried yesterday and came up with a set of numbers but couldn't work out what they were meant to be telling me. It reminded me why I gave up doing maths when I was on lots of painkillers - numbers don't make sense when you're on opioids! However, I managed to do it today and have been working out the best value pack of shrink plastic and it turns out to be joint between the craft pack of shrinkles and artists grade polyshrink so I'm going to get some polyshrink because I already know how the shrinkles stuff behaves.

This was my maths:

So, on to the exciting thing I did yesterday which was play with some marbling inks.

They're fun little things that you drop onto the surface of some water, swirl it around, then dip the thing into. It's pretty awesome. 

Here are some pictures of what I got up to:

Pretty snazzy, but I think I actually prefer them before the marbling was shrunk so what I'm going to do today is make some fun shapes, bake them, then marble them and see how that turns out. Obviously that process will be a lot easier when I've got my Silhouette!

Anyway, I'm going to go do something useful now.

Speak to you all soon!

Janet

Craft fair aftermath

So we last spoke on Sunday? I think I told you about my fun times at the craft fair, written from my bed as I nursed my poor, overworked back.Got into a bit of a pickle with my back, had to get my dad to come round to make me some food because I couldn't move. A very important lesson for next time, don't neglect my joints while enjoying myself doing craft things. I think I shall add my back support and some valium to my craft fair kit.

Anyway, I still managed to get down to Brighton to see the lovely JT. I actually managed to spend a whole day awake with no naps while down south! It was a good day. I spent that day making JT buy lots of cushions and pillows for me so I can get more comfortable when I'm there.

I also took my shrink plastic and pencils down so I've got some earrings ready to cook so I can actually send the ones I need to send to Emma after I melted the previous pair!

Earrings I sent last week, and a bag and a t-shirt, went down well with their respective recipients which was good! And I've made a sale on Etsy! It's been a good week.

I've also been having a play at some craft projects with my smallest (although not that small!) cousin Eve who is reading over my shoulder as I type this so I had better be nice to her :P

We made cake decorations from fondant icing:

We did some pumpkin carving:

There they are in my parents' house's window.

My cousin got a bit sinister... Repeatedly!:

I did some henna:

Sadly it didn't really take as well on Evie as it could have done. I think it needs some good moisturiser and it'd take better.

Mine stained pretty well:

I've also ordered some oil based marbling inks because I thought they'd be really awesome on earrings so watch out for some in the near future. 

I'm going to attempt sleep again now, I'll check in next time I have something interesting to say!

Janet

P. S. I think this sloth might be my spirit animal.