ILoveToCreate Teen Crafts: Sparkle and Shimmy Earrings

ILoveToCreate Teen Crafts: Sparkle and Shimmy Earrings
Margot Potter for ILoveToCreate
“Mom crafted, kid approved.”

Avalon just got her ears pierced this year, so it will be a while before she can wear anything that swings and dangles.  Still she’s been observing my jewelry box with a glint in her eye. Teens love bold jewelry and these earrings fit the bill.

These feature the new Katiedids™ components my friend Katie Hacker created for Beadalon. They have empty chambers that can be filled with a variety of items. I don’t know why I thought wired tinsel when I saw these, but Aleene’s Platinum Bond Glass and Bead adhesive made quick work of this project. You can whip these puppies up in twenty minutes or less, which is the perfect project if you’re an impatient crafter like me! Try filling the chamber with fibers, crystal chain, regular chain, gemstone chips...just be sure you thread the head pin through so you can turn them into fun jewelry components.

Materials
Aleene’s Platinum Bond Glass and Bead Adhesive
4 Katiedids™ 1” open center circles
2 10mm black faux pearls
2 10mm acid green moonglow Lucite rounds
Wire sparkly tinsel
2 silver plated or sterling ear wires
4 thin gauge silver plated or sterling head pins

Tools
Wire cutters
Round nose pliers
Chain nose pliers

1. Cut tinsel to fit half of chamber. Repeat four times.

2. Thread the wire through the holes in the edge of the components and the center bead and back through.
For the green beads, you need to leave equal amounts of wire exposed on both sides, for the black beads bring the head pin flush to the bottom of the component.

3. Place a thread of glue into one of the components. Gently place tinsel into glue, compressing into chamber on either side of center head pin, repeat with second piece of tinsel. Repeat for all four components. Allow glue to dry.

4. Use round nose pliers to create loops at the top and bottom of both green bead components. Bend wire flush to component at a 90 degree angle, grasp wire end with round nose pliers and form a loop. Cut off excess wire with wire cutters.

5. Use round nose pliers to create wrapped loops at the top of the two pearl components. See my YouTube Channel for a video on how to do this.

6. Attach pearl components to the bottom of each green component. Attach the ear wires. Adjust loops so earrings hang properly.

ILoveToCreate: A Little Birdy Mother's Day Card

A Little Birdy Mother’s Day Card
Margot and Avalon Potter for ILoveToCreate
Copyright 2010
“Mom crafted, kid approved.”

Mother's Day is coming soon and here's a great way to give Mom something handcrafted and from the heart.  This card is a work of art she can frame and enjoy for many years to come. You can use any layered dies and coordinated papers you prefer so your card is custom made for your Mom!


My daughter Avalon and I love all things Hello Kitty. I mean we LOVE all things Hello Kitty and particularly the array of characters in her pantheon. So when she picked out this adorable bird die and wanted to do a project with it, it was kismet. I'm really happy with how this all came together.  This card has everything I love on it and is from the person I love the most in the world. It really doesn’t get better than that, does it? You can use any layered dies you like, just gather up a variety of coordinating papers and cut the layers so they are multi-patterned. It is so easy to stick it all together with Aleene’s glue stick and Liquid Fusion glue. You can take a trip to pick up the materials and stop by your local thrift shop or Antique mall to score the buttons and have some good quality mother/daughter time. Let’s face it-every gal likes an excuse for a shopping trip!

Materials
Sizzix Hello Kitty Big Shot Die “Birdie”
Sizzix Large Folder Flowers, Spring and Paisley Embossing Set
Martha Stewart Lace Edge Punch
Coordinated Patterned Scrapbook Papers (you’ll need 5 different sheets)
Coordinated Heavy Cardstock in a solid color to match patterned papers
Various coordinating vintage or new buttons and buckles to stack in layers
Printed out text in Mia’s Scribblings 24 pt. from daFont.com “A Little Birdy Told Me It Was Your Special Day” and  “Happy Mother’s Day From Your Little Birdy”
Aleene’s Liquid Fusion Glue
Aleene’s Acid Free Tacky Glue Stick

Tools
Sizzix Big Shot Machine with accessories/platform
Scissors
Wire Cutters
Bone Folder
Precision Paper Cutter (I have a big office sized one here, but you can use a smaller one. )

1. Create your card background by cutting a large piece of cardstock to 11.5” tall and 7” wide on a paper cutter.

2. Fold paper along center, lining up edges and use bone folder to make a sharp crease.

3. Cut the Birdie die three times, using three different coordinating papers.

4. Use scissors to cut out elements in various colors for layering, following the marks left by the die cutter. I did the wings in one color, the flower and beak in another and the background in a third.

5. Use glue stick to adhere layers together.

6. Emboss a fourth coordinating patterned paper with the flowers folder.

7. Cut this on a paper cutter to 3.5” tall by 5.5” wide.

8. Cut a final coordinating paper to 4” tall by 5.5” wide.

9. Use the fancy edge punch to make a decorative edge along the top and bottom of the embossed sheet. Line the holes up with the image on the punch to make sure you get an unbroken line.

10. Print your text. Cut around text leaving a thin border.

11. Place inside text segment on a final coordinating piece of patterned paper and mark so you can cut it to frame your text.

12. Use a glue stick to layer the various elements. The front of the card starts with the centered 3.5x5.5 rectangle, followed by the centered embossed rectangle on an angle and the bird which is on an opposite angle. See photo for details.

13. Adhere text to the bottom left corner of the card with a glue stick.

14. Select buttons for top left and bottom right edges of your design, the flower and the eye on the bird. I took an old plastic buckle and cut out the center rung for the bottom left accent. I also placed the buttons so the inner buttons were flush to the edge of the central image. See photo for details.

15. Adhere the inside text to the border using a glue stick. Adhere that to the center of the inside of the card on an angle.

Product Review: CraftOptics Telescopes

The fine folks from CraftOptics sent me a pair of their telescopic lenses to explore recently. So far I really like them. They were originally developed by a dentist and used in dental and surgical applications, and I can see how they'd work well in those formats. I also think they're brilliant for crafts and fine arts. If you need to see things clearly up close, you need a pair of these glasses. If your eyes are not as adept as they used to be and it's meant you've had to stop doing detail oriented work, you need these. If you work on a regular basis with seed beads, chain maille, wire wrapping, sawing, dapping, punching...any jewelry work that requires you to see little details, you need these glasses. If you paint, sketch, sew, quilt, embroider, knit, crochet...you need these glasses.

They are admittedly expensive, about 400 dollars for the frames and optics and that's before you add your own prescription to the frames if you wear glasses. That being said, I think they're worth every penny. This is a professional quality tool and not a toy.  They are an invaluable tool for your work, just like a top of the line die cutting machine or a professional ergonomic set of jewelry pliers or a kiln and if you're serious about jewelry making and you're finding it difficult to clearly focus on little details, these will be a tool you'll use on a regular basis. I'm over forty now and I find, particularly in the evening when the light in my studio isn't so great, that I'm starting to have trouble seeing things like jump ring closures or coiled wires clearly. Having these glasses (along with my OttLite) will make an incredible difference. I often stop studio work after dark because I can't see things well, now I can opt to continue if I'm on a roll or I have a looming deadline.

You order CraftOptics through your optometrist so they can add your prescription lenses to the frames, or if you don't wear glasses like me you can purchase a pair with frames that have clear lenses either through an optometrist or directly from the company. They're surprisingly lightweight and comfortable, so you won't feel weighed down while wearing them. If you watch TV or work on your computer while you craft, it's easy to flip up the telescopes so you can multi-task.

Here's a link to information about how you go about ordering a pair. The website has a lot of information about the product and how it's used. You get titanium frames with the telescopic unit attached, a carrying case, head strap, lens cloth and a screwdriver for adjustments. You can read more about the company here. I'll keep you posted on my experiences with them as time progresses!

Until next time...craft on with your bad selves.

Cheers,
Madge

Farewell, Mr. McQueen

I have been a fashion lover since my early 20s. I can remember first discovering the fashion magazines from Europe and Japan and feeling as if I’d entered a secret magical world. I far prefer the whimsical and wild to the dull and pedantic.  I love to peruse the pics of the runway collections and see what new and inspiring directions the design houses are exploring. I know that fashion is silly and frivolous, yet as a designer I can't help but find it endlessly inspiring. So when I heard that Alexander (Lee) McQueen had committed suicide last week, I was, as were many people, utterly shocked and dismayed. Today it was confirmed that he had hanged himself in an armoire in his apartment and left a note, the contents of which have yet to be revealed.

There are are small handful of designers who are in my mind true artists and McQueen was among them. McQueen was a designer with a deep sense of irony and an impeccable sense of tailoring. He took things to the extreme, but if you look at his clothing you will see he was an unparalleled architect. He understood structure and he understood dimension. His work confronted, disturbed and excited, but his outrageous sense of design made it tough for him to gain the mainstream acceptance it takes to build financing and licensing opportunities. It’s hard to get the Average Jane to get behind butterfly headdresses and lobster claw shoes and it’s even harder to get the corporations that own the fashion houses to get behind a designer who isn’t willing to be bland.

When someone of his talent and vision kills himself, it’s totally baffling and deeply disturbing. Why would he wake up one day and decide that it wasn’t going to get better and he wasn’t going to be able to soldier on? What drove him to choose death over life? It is impossible to know what demons haunt people, so much of who we are is hidden, perhaps even from ourselves. It is incredibly sad to think that the world has lost someone with so much left to offer.

I think that every creative personality finds it difficult to continually create from their heart and have their work analyzed under the critic’s lens. When a designer is willing to dance on the edge, like McQueen did, they are often misunderstood. Perhaps he’d grown weary of the ever shifting whims of fashion, perhaps his mother’s death sent him into a tailspin of grief from which he felt he could not recover, perhaps he’d had enough of the pressure to continually exceed expectations or perhaps he felt he had said what he needed to say and was simply ready to move on...we’ll never know.

Goodbye, Lee McQueen. I hope you've found some respite from this weary world.

xoxo,
Madge

iLoveToCreate Teen: Un-Valentine's Day Card

Love can rock harder than a Nine Inch Nails CD...or it can quite frankly to paraphrase a popular 80s band...stink.  If you're in love, Valentine's Day is a wonderful cotton candy colored day of smoochy goodness.  If you've been dumped, it's a nightmare.  As a teen, I had more than my fair share of crappy Valentine's Days, and I'm sure I wasn't alone.  If you've got a BFF who has been unceremoniously dumped, why not give them a Happy Un-Valentine to cheer them up a little and let them know you've got their back?

iLoveToCreate's new Fashion Graffiti line gives you all of the cool tools you need to whip up a funky card in a flash.  Here's the 411:

Materials
Red Cardstock
Tulip Fashion Graffiti Chain Link Fence Stencil
Tulip Fashion Graffiti Love Stencil
Tulip Fashion Graffiti Drippy Text Stencil
Tulip Fashion Graffiti Dimensional Fabric Paint Taggers Black, White and Silver
Tulip Slick Dimensional Fabric Paint White
Aleene's Quick Dry Tacky Glue
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me Font (dafont.com)


Tools
Bone Folder
Paper Cutter or Ruler and Scissors
Sea Sponge

1.  Cut cardstock on a paper cutter to a 5.75"x11.5" rectangle.

2.  Fold long section of paper on the center to form a card.  Use a bone folder to score the card edge.

3.  Place "LOVE" stencil across card from top right to bottom left.  Squeeze black paint tagger on a disposable surface.  Use sea sponge to dab paint on stencil.  Carefully remove and allow to dry.

4.  Use chain link stencil to cover entire front of card, you'll have to place it on each quadrant to get full coverage.  Repeat process with sea sponge using silver paint.  Allow to dry.

5.  Use letters to spell "S T I N K S" with white paint and sea sponge.  While still wet, add dimension and drips to the letters using a Tulip Slick Dimensional Fabric Paint in white.  Allow to dry.

6.  Use all three colors and sea sponge to stipple around the edges of the card.  Allow to dry.

7.  Use word processing software and the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me font in 36pt to write:

Love may stink...
but friendship doesn't.
BFFs 4-ever.
xoxo,

Print it out and cut with a paper cutter to 5.5 wide by 4" tall.

8.  Place a thin layer of glue along the edges and adhere to the top center of the inside of your card.  Allow to dry.

9. Spread a thin layer of glue along the edge of your cut paper and adhere to top center of inside of card.