Newton's Law of Crafting

Photo found on jgoode, edited with PicMonkey

As I am here sitting at my desk browsing through Pinterest trying to figure out ways to save my business and gain more fans, I realize that everything I need is here until I actually need it and then at that point the Gremlins have run away with whatever it is. 

So, I have decided to come up with Newton's Laws of Crafting. Here is a brief intro on Sir Issac Newton to bring everyone up to speed. Bet you didn't expect this post to be educational!  

Photo found on Department of History, University of California Irvine

Sir Issac Newton (1642-1727) was a Natural Philosopher and Physicist, he came up with three laws during his lifetime. 

Newton's First Law (Inertia) says that an object at rest, stays at rest as well as an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted on by a external force.

Newton's Second Law says that a force that is applied on an object equals the rate of change of its momentum with time. Force equals mass times acceleration.
Newton's Third Law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Newton also came up with the theory of gravitation.


Now, onto the regularly scheduled post :)
Newton's Laws of Crafting:
First Law- Everything is there until you actually need it and then it is nowhere to be found.
Second Law- You will run out of thread either on the spool or bobbin 3/4 the way through a project. Which will also be right after you come back from a trip to the store.
Third Law- When working on a quilt, Wal-Mart will run out of the scrap pack you need to finish. (Mine has been out of the same one for six months)
Fourth Law- You will realize that what you needed to purchase at the craft store was on sale last week, for 50 percent off, and will not go back on sale in the near future.
Fifth Law- The craft show you really wanted to do quit taking applications a few days ago.
Sixth Law- When you are trying to finish items the night before a festival, all sewing machines in your presence will go on a hiatus and refuse to work.
Seventh Law- No matter what the forecast is, if you plan to do a festival in the summer you will encounter a monsoon with hurricane force winds.
Eighth Law- When you sit down to work on a project, or find one you want to do, you will have all the materials except one.

That is all I can think of for now. Let us know in the comments if you have any to add.

Stay Crafty,
Becka

Washing away the memories...

Well my husband and I separated for around nine months, during that time new memories were created and we are now trying to wipe them away. Things have changed by leaps and bounds for sure and we recently realized that we needed to wipe away memories and start things fresh. When you have been married for two years, it is hard to start completely over but rearranging your home and getting new furniture is a good start!

We moved into our house in May of 2012 when my husband lost his job, he had this house with his first wife but moved and let a friend rent it, the house ended up in foreclosure and with the lost income, we decided to ride it out as long as we could while trying to get our house back on track.
Note: Home loan re-modification with Bank of America is no walk in the park.

We realized that the furniture being in the same spot, having the same furniture and being in the same routine was going to do nothing but bring us back down after we managed to get our house back. What was the first step? Moving furniture, you have no idea how much it will brighten your mood to just simply move things around. Second step? Acquire new furniture, even if it isn't brand new "new to you" is perfectly acceptable. My brother in law is also trying to 'wash away the memories' so we become the lucky owners of all his old furniture.

All of this has brought out a lot of DIY projects, I have two stepdaughters and they love quotes just about as much as I do. You can find a FREE website where you can print quote pages to color HERE.

 

We have decided to print a bunch of them out, frame them, and decorate our house with them. 

 If you are artistic, you can create your own! They also have a lot of cool pages to color at Doodle Art Alley. 

I love to color so if I can incorporate coloring into a DIY project and make my house prettier, it is a winner for me. 

What DIY's have you done lately to spruce up your house or to try and wash away memories?

Stay Crafty,

Becka

Bloglovin!

So I have found this new thing called Bloglovin, it's really neat (no, that wasn't meant as a shameless plug by the way, I really do think it's neat). My favorites is full of blogs that I really love and want to keep up with, however and to be perfectly honest, I have a terrible memory! This is where Bloglovin helps me. It has a button similar to the Pinterest "Pin It" button, this one however shows when the blogs you follow update (Yay!). Rebecca and I are also talking about starting an Instagram account for Crafting for Sanity, we both already have Instagrams and you guys are more then welcome to follow us on there. Fair warning though, some of the stuff really has no rhyme or reason, I shared one picture the other night I took on my Ipod that is from my College Criminal Law book

I still can't believe that this in the book, it probably shouldn't surprise me. 12 years of retail and customer service with 7 in management you would think that I had pretty much seen it all! Not a chance! The inherent stupidity of mankind assures that!

Just wanted to pop in, say Hi! Make sure everyone knew that we hadn't fallen off the world somewhere. Hopefully I'll be updating more since my semester ends after my Ethics final tomorrow.


 <a href="http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/4731485/?claim=79g825rsnx9">Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>

My sewing machine is suffering from months of neglect...

Yes, you read that right. My sewing machine is suffering from several months of neglect and I'm not exactly happy about it. Since the separation and divorce process has started, I haven't had a ton of time or motivation to really craft. I've done a few special orders that I made time for but other than that, my sewing machine has been neglected since probably November/December. The last thing I really remember doing on the sewing machine was the rice packs for the festival in Belmont which was early December I believe but I think at that point I just took the ones I had made for the festival in November.

Well today, after finding my thread and the numerous other supplies I needed I finally got to use my sewing machine again. My cousin wanted a rice pack for her shoulder but she didn't want any of the ones I already had made so I made one that is bigger than normal and took almost a full 3lb bag of rice. It finally measured 13 x 6 inches.

 

I realized I really missed sewing. 

Ever since I brought out my sewing machine today, I've had the motivation to start a new project. I haven't decided if I want to create a blanket or a quilt but I want to make something PRETTY I know that much. I've been perusing Pinterest and I've found a few patterns I like as well as some good deals on fabric. 

Who remembers Perler beads?!?

Well a few weeks ago my boyfriend and I were at Michael's and of course, I had a 40% off coupon burning a hole in my pocket. I found a Perler bead kit for $11ish and decided that I would give it a go. It was a huge hit with his 11 year old sister. For some reason though the beads they are producing now do not melt as easy as they use to. The instructions say 10-30 seconds in a circular motion on medium heat, it took at least a minute on high heat to get them to set. 

Here is what we created.... 

Keep checking back to see what other crafty things we come up with. Enjoy your blast from the past.

-Rebecca

The things I do when I should be doing my homework.......

Everyone always told me that when I made it to college I would take everything more seriously and that it would be different the High School. Well, yes it is, high school didn't come with a $1200 price tag every semester (ok, this semester wasn't that bad. I only took four classes instead of five). Something that didn't change was that I still hate doing homework (especially when it deals with politics, I still don't quite understand why that was required for a Paralegal degree, that and Pre-Calculus). In theory right now  I should be working ahead on American Government, doing Criminal Law tests that my half senile teacher hasn't even said when they are due (trust me, I'm not making this up. I could sit in my seat at the back of the class and play Everquest 2 on my laptop and he wouldn't know). I bet that about here people are starting to say "Amanda! Get to the point!"

                                                 Viola! I give you! THE POINT! hehehehehehe


About a year ago I tried the baked marble thing, somewhere I even have pictures to prove it, but they seem to be hiding at the moment.

http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=324990.0#axzz2N4vsFrzZ

The link will take you to the original forum post on Craftster.org where I found it. It's very easy to do, fairly inexpensive, and the only thing that would hold you back here would be your imagination. Mine however hit a road block. I simply couldn't find anything that I like with these! They also tend to be fragile, most of mine broke after my son knocked the box over three or four times and cleaning shards or broken cracked marble out of carpet is no fun! They only bad thing I found was that even though dark colors did crack, by virtue of the dark color, you couldn't see it unless you were looking through the marble at a light.

Then we have today's experiment. 

                              

                           http://candicecharlson.blogspot.com/2012/09/flat-marble-necklaces.html

I thought this was neat, and it didn't look that much different from the marbles. This is what happened.......

The bag on the left is from the Dollar Tree, the bag on the right is from Michael's (I know a lot of people that  like purple. The bag was mostly clear but as you can see it had some dark purple and even some lavender mixed in)

I personally believe that the Dollar Tree is a crafter's heaven. I keep a set of pans specifically for crafting, these came from Dollar Tree and were the perfect size. Coincidentally, I really did like that purple. Shame.

Another wonderful opputunity presented itself though, after the marbles come out of the oven you have to drop them in cold water so that they will crack. We're talking Will-make-your-hand-hurt-frostbite Cold. I needed to clean out the Ice Maker, I haven't been able to replace the filter for the ice make so the ice that comes out when the ice maker is on is kind of gross. I managed to manhandle the fridge out so that the bin would come out and used the nasty ice to get a good sink full of literal ice cold water.

Dollar Tree rocks looked good cracking, the colors look good, had a nice sizzle and they went into the sink,

Not so much with the Michael's rocks. It's a good thing my son wasn't home, I make a point of not swearing around him, but when I saw the rocks as they went into the water I started cussing. The lavender turned an Amber color, which is much more noticeable then the lavender was before. The dark purple turned a dark red/magenta color.

Here is the final product.  In the end I'm pretty sure that the problem was that the oven was to hot. The first tutorial said to bake the marbles at 350 for 30 minutes, the second said 500 for the same time. So in a way I really did cook them. 350 would have been fine in this case, 500 was simply too hot.  I wouldn't call this an epic fail, that would have been if the fire extinguisher had come out.

*sigh* Now it's time to work on homework, stay crafty everyone!

Amanda

Crafts with the Stinker

So I started playing with magnets and bottle caps, I've always thought that bottle caps were neat, but all I've ever seen them on are hair bows for kids. Don't get me wrong, bows are cute, but EVERYONE makes them!
This is what I came up with:

My only complaint with the second set of bottle caps is that they have holes in them. My son decided that he wanted to help as I was carding earrings, it is however not easy to card earrings with a 6 year old. So I had to get creative. 

The whole project is fairly simple, the original bottle caps with magnets I think I found on a clearance rack at Michael's. The set with the holes I also found at Michael's, on the aisle with the feathers. If you can't find bottle caps with magnets its simple to put them together. You need magnets, as crazy as it sounds the ones from Walmart and Hobby Lobby work the best, while the ones from Michael's will work they just don't seem as strong (by the way, its the magnets that look like little hockey pucks, they're maybe the size of a nickle). I used E6000 to glue the magnets to the bottle caps, has worked very well so far. Keep the E6000 handy, you'll need it later! You'll also need the epoxy stickers (Hobby Lobby has them with the scrapbooking supplies) a 1 inch circle punch, and a sheet of white scrapbook paper, you could probably also use card stock, but all I had was white scrapbook paper.

I've always tried to encourage creativity in my son, he got a lot of arts and crafts things for Christmas. I used my 1 inch circle punch to make a bunch of little circles,

CJ decided that he wanted to draw on the circles, he asked what to draw and I told him he could draw whatever he wanted

Unfortunantly it's upside down, but I believe CJ said that this was supposed to a person getting rained on with ice cream. Yeah, I think someone may have seen Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs a few to many times! We haven't quite finished them yet, I need to get some more bottle caps, but they should make killer birthday or Mother's day presents!

We hope you had a great Christmas!

We at Crafting for Sanity hope you enjoyed your Christmas with your friends and family and we hope Santa was good to each of you.

I spent Christmas with Amanda and her family this year and although it started off rough, things quickly turned around and many laughs were had. We woke up Christmas morning and CJ (Amanda's 6 year old) was upset that Santa didn't leave Mommy anything in her stocking. I tried to tell him that Mommy had already gone through her stocking.. I'm not sure how successful it was but he was quickly distracted by Skylanders Giants and Angry Birds Jenga.

This year Amanda got me a Loops & Threads Knit Quick long loom so I am sure I will have a ton of flops (and hopeful successes) to post for you soon. I've started playing with it today but I wasn't having much luck. From what I've heard I also have a circle loom waiting for me at home too.

Stay Crafty,
Rebecca