Kids' Party Ideas

My seven year old daughter had some friends over last weekend and they soon found a stash of trays and epoxy stickers that I had hoped would have been a well-orchestrated surprise at the next birthday party.  They are all crazy about My Little Pony and Hello Kitty and I had some images that I knew would be great for making pendants and then taking home as part of the party bag.  

So whilst the cat was out of the party bag, making these necklaces kept them quiet, focussed and entertained for a good long while:  

(Incidentally, images of these and other popular characters are all copyrighted and as such you really should not make them up for sale, though I suspect a small bit of making for personal use may be allowed?)  

Next time I won't wait for a birthday - they are all asking to do it again!  But it would be a great crafty activity for a birthday party.   We have plenty of slight seconds that are cheap as chips and perfect for letting the kids loose on their creative adventures.  Get some magnets in also and some superhero images for the boys - they will all enjoy it!  

I mean really, who cares about cutting a perfect circle when the lovely Rainbow Dash is smiling at you?

Glasses Chain

If you are anything like me - myopic and astigmatic to a T - you probably won't have a need for these.  I never can take my glasses off, all hell would quite possibly break loose if I did.  But if you are an occasional glasses wearer, say for reading, you will understand the value of a chain for your glasses, that you can hang around your neck, always keeping your specs at hand ready to be put on at a moment's notice.

We now stock the handy little rubber bits that connect the chain to the glasses, so we thought a trial was in order.  We got together some chain, jump rings (not shown), some fancy bow connectors that have just arrived in the shop, two 10mm connector blanks and a set of epoxy stickers to fit - as the connector blanks are double sided we used four stickers.  We picked a piece of scrapbooking paper with a sweet little rose pattern for our inserts.  All the metal pieces are vintage copper finish.

We started by making the little connector blanks, first stick the epoxy domes onto your patterned paper and cut around this, then ModPodge the little pieces onto your connector blanks, allowing them a bit of time to dry.  If the glue is too much and overspills (like it did here!), it's not a big problem as it cleans up nicely when dry.

Then lay out all your pieces so that all your bows and your flower images are facing the right way up.

Attach to your chain, pop your rubber connectors on with a jump ring and model on your glasses.  Result!

Easy Wooden Letter Tile Pendants

Not sure if we ever showed you how easy it is to make a lovely wooden tile pendant.  All you need is:

- A wooden letter tile or Scrabble tile

- ModPodge glue

- E6000 or superglue

- Epoxy Sticker to fit the tile

- A bail

- A toothpick

- A pretty image

First gather your materials:

Then apply the sticker onto your chosen image - laser prints and professional prints on good thick paper work best.  Felt tip and inkjet inks may run, so try to avoid using those if you can.

Once the sticker is on, press all over the surface to ensure no air pockets remain, and carefully cut around the edge of the sticker.

Apply ModPodge to the back of the Scrabble tile and lay your image over the top.

Give it a few moments to 'grab', and then you can work on the bail right away. E6000 is very viscous and can leave trails of glue all over your work - the best way to apply it is to squeeze a drop of glue onto a piece of plastic,

and then using a toothpick, just grab a bit of the glue on the end (and if it trails you can wind it around the toothpick, like spaghetti!)

And apply it carefully over the middle of the bail, you won't need to use too much.

And immediately set it onto the centre of the tile.  Leave a couple of hours to dry completely.

Ta-da!!  

All tiles, stickers, bails and glues used in this project are available to buy from our shop - try it for yourself, and see how easy it is to make gorgeous personalised jewellery!

Back to School!

Things are getting busy here preparing for a new year of school.  For now it's important (in our house at least) to ensure coats and bags will not get lost in the coming year...  So in between getting orders ready we have been doing a bit of quick crafting.  Starting with a little someone's lunch box...

And her coat...

And for her friend's book bag,

And another friend's sports bag.  Difficult to see, but we chose a basketball background here.

All were made super-easily in a matter of minutes using a few images overwritten with text using Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop and are struggling to tweak your images, we have discovered a free system that covers more than all the basics (woohoo, layers!!)  Try it, it's called Paint.net and is available to download from CNET here.

You can use most smooth papers here, and most inks (however felt tip inks seem to run after some time, so watch out for that).  The trays are our 18mm silver plated round trays, and we have used epoxy stickers glued onto the tray using just a smidgen of tacky glue.  We have attached the trays to the garment using either our new little ball chains or split rings.

Cool, customisable to your little poppet, and easy enough that they can help to make it.  We can't guarantee that they will sit still for a photo however!

Sticker Love

We continue to be full of love for all our stickers - have you seen the latest offering?

19mm stickers on our new round lockets.

The cherries are my favourite.

16mm squares on our square cufflink fittings, which now come in all colours!

Super cute pendants made with our stickers - these come in a new size: 20.5mm.

Adorable, huh?  We only have these new locket rings in limited quantities - be quick!  New size of sticker to sit on top: 13mm.

Ah, my favourite - a quirky key ring for the home, made with our big hearts and a resin sticker.  We don't have any pretty keys to our house so the key above is a jewellery charm!

Have fun everyone!!  :D

Here's a New Idea - Word Necklaces

How about making some fab new necklaces for spring?   I felt the need to make something, and I did not have much time - so I opted to use epoxy stickers, which look great and are really really easy to use.

I gathered my materials:

• epoxy stickers in 12mm and 15mm sizes, 
• silver plated charm blanks also in 12mm and 15mm,
• ModPodge, scissors, printer, laptop! 

First I printed out a sheet with everyone's names written on it, in capital letters with big spacings.  Here I am showing you the necklace I made with my own name (part of a set I was making), and obviously you will need an adequate number of stickers and trays for the length of the names or words you are preparing.

I wanted to make these necklaces with a mix of big and small trays and found the 15mm trays went well with a 24pt font size and the 12mm ones suited the 16pt size nicely. 

Once printed, I just centred the stickers over the top of the individual letters - I went for a big-small-big-small pattern, but you could do this differently.

Then I cut around the letters to make reasonably tidy circles (!), and simply ModPodged them into the trays.    Finally, I used jump rings to join the trays in sequence to every second link in the necklace chain, and it was all done!   Really easy, it took ten minutes in all, and everyone was really pleased with their necklace!

Love it!

Below I made a slightly different necklace - firstly I used printed images instead of letters, or rather, the leftover borders from some images I used on another project.  I used the same stickers and same charm blanks but a different chain.

And the beauty of this one is that as the chain is smooth without links (much like ball chain or snake chain), all the charms dangle together clinking as you move, making this a lovely playful piece.

And just because I had some of the little flower print outs, I made some earrings using our new vintage copper ovals and matching 13x18mm stickers.  Easy!

Have fun making!!

Loving the New Stickers

I have spent a few days having fun with the new sizes of stickers - here are some examples of what I have made:

Here I have simply scanned and printed the pages from a dictionary and used our fab 25mm circle cutter to cut a perfect round to fit seamlessly into the tray.  So many inspirational words, we just couldn't choose! 

This one is destined for a rectangular tray

Here I used a vintage Japanese printed image and as the sticker was very slightly loose inside the 30mm tray, I have painted in a black border so it looks like it's part of the edge of the picture.

I love these vintage French cheese pictures!  They are actually scanned labels from the tops of camemberts and other round cheeses that come in wooden boxes. So pretty!  

Now, this handsome chap is accompanied by another handsome chap: 

...and they are both joined by another handsome chap:

...and they are all perched atop the new 30x40mm oval acrylic bracelets, showing off their handsomeness under the new oval stickers of the same size.  It literally took about five minutes to make this bracelet, from start to finish, and it looks truly stunning in real life!  

Digital downloads from Digitalya, Piddix, HarmonicaGoldfish and PlumBlossomStudio, all via Etsy. 

Sizing Issues

Those of you who use our glass or stickers and trays regularly will already know that sometimes there are very slight discrepancies in size - all our items have a small percentage of tolerance by which they can vary, this is normally fine and unnoticeable, but sometimes you find that you get a piece of glass or a sticker that feels a bit loose for the tray.  This happens more often than the other way round, it would be disastrous if glass was always bigger than the tray therefore the insert is usually made just a notch below the specified size, so even a small discrepancy in size should not normally make it impossible to fit the glass or sticker into your chosen bezel.

What is a lot more common, however, is that sometimes the insert can feel slightly loose in the tray, and often, especially if you use silver plated trays, you can see the back of the tray next to the glass and it doesn't look very appealing. See here my earlier attempt with one of our brand new oval stickers - can you see the base?

The best way to correct this is very simple - just grab a black permanent marker, and off you go!

Paint the visible edge of the tray:

All the way around:

And paint the edge of the paper, taking care not to go over the sticker or glass:

And there you have it, a lovely finish!