Think Crafts Blog – Craft Ideas and Projects – CreateForLess

 Enter to win the Pretty in Pink Bracelet and Earring set by Janlynn! Be a little girlie and wear pink!

The Janlynn Pretty in Pretty Kit includes crazy lace agate stones mixed with crystals and sterling silver balls. Extra 4 mm sterling balls are included to make bracelet larger than average size, if necessary. Bracelet is finished with silver plated lobster claw and earrings are finished with silver plated leverback earwires. Wire & flat head pins for stringing along with instructions are included.

Every Friday we’ll post a giveaway on Think Crafts and all you have to do is comment on the blog post answering the question of the week. We’ll pick the winner and contact them via email. Deadline is midnight tonight and the winner will be announced Monday. One entry per person please. Contest opened to all US residents, no purchase necessary.

Question of week: What is your favorite breakfast food?

By Kid’s Craft Contributor, Gillian from the blog “Dried Figs and Wooden Spools”.

Last winter I went through a felting stage, turning old sweaters into flowers and coffee cup wraps and all sorts of things. But it wasn’t until I’d emptied our local charity shops of all their wool sweaters that I realized that you can also felt felt! Well, you can felt wool felt. And it doesn’t even need to be 100% wool to be feltable. Look for felt with at least 35% wool content for this project and run it through your washing machine on it’s hottest setting, repeating if you think it could shrink up a little more, then allow it to dry flat. Because of it’s thickness, the felt is great for protecting things like cell phones and glasses and cameras (it also helps to keep them dry at the pool, but don’t think that means you can drop it in the water!)

Here’s What You Need

1/4 yard of wool felt
Scraps of another color of felt (wool or otherwise)
Thread
Needle
Fabric Scissors
Yarn
Yarn Needle

Cut the felt to be just bigger than twice the length of your camera and a bit bigger than the width.

Using the other color of felt, cut a basic camera shape and a small circle. Stitch the circle onto the “camera” and then sew the whole thing onto one side of the felt square using a whip stitch.

Fold the square in half and, starting at the bottom corner, stitch with the yarn needle and yarn using a blanket stitch.

When you get to the top corner, tie the yarn off in a loop and trim off the tails.

What’s the biggest blunder you’ve ever made on a craft project?  That project gone wrong that still makes you laugh?  From two heeled socks to glue accidents, we’d love to hear your funny stories.  Send us your craft blooper and you could win a $100 CreateForLess Shopping Spree! Click to Enter!

Read the winning Craft Blooper from last year…

“A friend and I had organized a scrapbooking day to benefit the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. We called our event the ‘Crop for a Cure’. I was working on a small thank you card for one of our sponsors of the event. I had all the right papers, and stamps and inks, even embellishments. I was happily assembling each piece (between various event interruptions) and then came time to write my message inside the card. I was drawing each word out in a beautiful curly script. Each letter fell into place: ‘Thank You for Supporting the Cr…’ but then; the swirl of my ‘o’ in the word ‘crop’ turned down instead of up and suddenly I was thanking people not for their support of an enjoyable day of scrapbooking, but for a crass bodily function that apparently had mythical healing powers. My friends will never let me forget the day they attended the ‘Crap for a Cure’.” 

Enjoy some of our favorite craft “Oops!” stories from last year’s Craft Bloopers Contest.

Contest deadline is July 31, 2010.  Limited to three entries per person.  Submitting a photo of the craft blooper is optional.  The winner will be chosen by the CreateForLess staff and will receive a $100 CreateForLess e-gift certificate.   The winner will be contacted individually via email and posted on our web site.  After the contest ends, some of the craft bloopers will be showcased on CreateForLess.com, our Think Crafts blog and Facebook page.

By Kid’s Craft Contributor, Gillian from the blog “Dried Figs and Wooden Spools”.

I’m a menu planner, in fact, I have a hard time functioning in the kitchen without a solid plan. I even plan our meals when we are on vacation. It saves time and money and helps us to keep from wasting food because generally, we only buy just what we need for the week, so there’s not much that has a chance to waste away on a back shelf.

For the past year I’ve been using a cute little notepad to keep track of what we are eating and when, but this week when I sat down to write up our meals and our grocery list, I found that I had only two pages left. I could, of course, go pick up another one, but I love a challenge, so I decided to make my own.

The hardest part of this was designing the template so I’ll save you the trouble and give you a few versions of the one I made to download, but if you’re handy with Adobe Illustrator, the possibilities are endless! Design away!

This version is sized to fit an 8 x 10 inch clip frame but you could resize it at a copy shop very easily to fit whatever frame you want. I like the clip frame because it’s easier to write on.

Here’s what you need:

1 8 x 10 clip frame
Printed menu card
Ruler and Xacto knife

1. Print out your card and trim to fit your glass. My printer was a little low on ink so mine turned out light, but it works.

2. Clean both sides of your glass and wipe dry.

3. Assemble the clip frame with your menu card inside. Presto! Using a dry erase marker, you can keep track of your meals and have something fun hanging on your wallthat wasn’t created by a two year old!

*You can also glue strong magnets to the back to mount your menu card on the fridge!

Download your  menu template here:

Blue Menu Template

Yellow Menu Template

Red Menu Template

Congratulations to Staci Jones who was randomly selected as the winner of Free Stuff Friday and the Paper Accents Craft Pack!

The Pound O’ Paper are wonderful packs of paper that comes with a new variety each time. These varieties are great for making cards, invitations, tags or adding special accents to scrapbook and memory pages. It’s an assortment pack , the sizes and kind of paper change with each package. Create Your Own Journals are made with heavy chipboard on the front and back with 25 pages inside. Have fun decorating and personalizing these journals with stamps, stickers, embellishments, marking pens, and more. Each journal is spiral bound so they are easy to flip and stay together! Create Your Own Chipboard Pennants are great for Banners, Seasonal Sentiments, Names and much more. Made with heavy weight chipboard, they are acid free, and ready to decorate to your personal taste.

Staci’s winning answer to ”What is your favorite summer memory from your childhood, or your children’s” was…

“My favorite summer memories were visiting my grandparents in Seattle. It would take us 2 1/2 days to get there so we usually stayed for awhile. I loved going to the zoo and aquarium. It was so much fun.”

By Recycled Crafts Contributor, Anitra from the blog “Coffee Pot People”.  

It probably won’t be a surprise to anyone that my favorite art/craft shows  to be in or to attend are those where the art is constructed primarily from recycled materials. 

This past weekend was the Vancouver Recycled Arts Festival, and I was pleased and honored to be one of their vendors. Now, the hardest thing about that is being stuck in my booth. I want to see to all the other art! So, the second morning of the show, I made sure I was there early enough to cruise the show myself, camera in hand, and I had a mission: Photograph art that you might not see anywhere else. 

People are amazingly creative and talented. This is just a sample of what the show had to offer:

In the slideshow, you see:

• Pendants from broken china, by Tanya Meyer  of CuteGirl Creations
• Soft toys and wearable art from reclaimed materials, by Dawn Grunwald
• Blue & white stamped domino tray, by MouseHouse Designs
• Colorful garden whirligigs from vinyl records, by Christine Claringbold of EyePop Art
• Rings made from bicycle innertubes & beads, by Julia Garretson
• Fused glass cat faces and ladybugs from scrap glass,  by Brenda Lee Calvert of Halfmoon Farm
• Folding baskets and a handbag from reclaimed & sanitized chopsticks, by Kwytza Chopstick Art
• Playing card holders from reclaimed fibers, by Lyle and Arlene Gowing
• Musical instruments from cigar boxes and license plates, by Alan Matta
• Garden shrines from scrap wood & found objects, by Mike and Barbara Meyer, of Earth Tones
• Mosaic art from reclaimed windows and scrap glass, by Missy Lambert
• Crocheted bags, placemats, accessories, etc., from plastic shopping bags, by Molly J Walter
• Purses and wallets woven from candy, snack, & coffee packaging, by Rock Candy Art
• Creepy babies from baby dolls and found objects, by Jason Pickering
• Rustic  jewelry and accessories from sardine cans, smashed bottle caps, etc., by Chris Reitmaier
• Garden Tiki Monster & Fork Man from scrap metal & flatware, by Schell & Son Metalwerks
• A giant blossom for the garden from reclaimed glassware & tableware, by Anitra Cameron
• Marble-covered garden art, by Megan Klepp, of Ta-Dah
• Refrigerator magnets from small toys, by the sons of Megan Klepp, of Ta-Dah
• A 3-D collage from reclaimed painting and stuffed bird, by Casey Boketzian, of Therapy Bettye
• Painted polka dot tableware & radio, by Davell Seversen, of Zany Art

By Kid’s Craft Contributor, Gillian from the blog “Dried Figs and Wooden Spools”.

The summer I turned ten, my friends and I were all about friendship crafts. We made knotted friendship bracelets, walking around with in-progress projects pinned to the hems of our shorts, we collected plastic charms and tried to make our own to trade and wear, and we were obsessed with friendship pins. Our the laces of our shoes jingled and glittered with as many pins as could be crammed between the eyes of the shoes. We carried bubblegum tins around full of beads and pins and got in trouble the first weeks of class when we tried to make pins inside our desks during math.

But as much as I loved it way back then, I hadn’t thought much about friendship pins in twenty years, until I was puttering around the fabric store and found myself in amongst the seed beads. Although my son is younger than I was the summer that friendship pins hit it big at my school, he had no trouble at all working through my entire supply of safety pins over the course of 20 minutes. Simple and satisfying, it’s one of those crafts that kids will always love, especially on a too hot to go outside summer day.

You’ll need:

Seed Beads – lots of colors
1 inch long safety pins – as many as you can spare

Pour the beads into a bowl for easy access and open up a couple of pins to get them started. Beads can be strung randomly, all one color or in a pattern, just be sure to leave enough room at the top to fasten the pin back together. Once they are done, pin them onto the bottom lace of tennis shoes, stack a row on them onto a hair-clip or fasten them around rubber bracelets so your kids can show off and trade their treasures.