Ideas, Tips & Tricks for Crafty Crafters #2

Last summer I put together a list of 10 crafty tips to help you out in your DIY adventures. Well guess what? Here are 10 more little bits and bobs of advice I have compiled and I'm sharing them today!

Basically I carry a notebook with me at all times and it sits next to me when I craft. Every time I used a little tip that I thought could be helpful, I'd write it down because it all kind of runs together inside of my head. If you have any ideas, tips or tricks, feel free to share them in the comments!

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Make Cut Files Out of GIF & JPEG Files in Silhouette Studio

When I found out that a plain ol' every day shamrock was $0.99 in the Silhouette online store I scoffed at the price. A buck for a simple shape? I could get some insanely creative cut files for that buck.

So instead of handing over my dollar I decided to spend a few hours trying to make my own. (Did I mention this was my second ever project with my Christmas Cameo?)

Since I work with Adobe software almost daily, I figured it would be a snap and I'd just get it done and move on. I had hand drawn my shamrock shape and scanned it in and tried to trace on top of my scanned image in Silhouette Studio. Disaster. Total. Freakin'. Nightmare. I still have no clue how to draw with that silly thing .

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Glue Guide - Use the Right Glue for the Job

Updated on Tuesday, February 12, 2013 by Allison Murray

If you ask somebody who isn't crafty how many types of glues there are they will probably give you a pretty low number. When I asked around the number was normally around 5. If only they knew. A trip down the adhesives aisle at a craft store will set them straight.

In fact, looking at all of those glues can be pretty darn daunting. Plus they can be expensive and they can dry up before you have the opportunity to use it all up. So what do you do when you don't know what kind of glue you need?

In the past when trying to locate what will work and what dries clear and what is permanent I got frustrated. That wondrous adhesive aisle can be pretty infuriating when you're reading 10 different tubes and bottles and still not finding what you need. My searches often went online where I felt as though I got the runaround. Plus, a decent comprehensive reference couldn't be found - and if I did find one the link would be broken.

I've made the following chart that I use as a quick reference and I'd like to share it with you. Just click on the image below to open the PDF file that will print nice and clearly for you. Keep it at your desk, toss one in your glue box... I spent lots of time online searching different resources and compiling what I found and trying to make it easily accessible. Most of the time I kept it generic, but sometimes I have gone brand specific.

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How to Perfectly Acrylic Cut Felt - Tutorial

Cutting nice smooth shapes out of felt can sometimes prove difficult. Smaller bits are often even more difficult to work with than larger shapes. Either way it can be all around frustrating. I mean felt is cheap and all, but who wants to waste time and money cutting out sub par shapes that get thrown in the garbage bin in the end?

Well, you don't have to worry about that anymore at all. I was once asked "really? All of this to cut out a felt letter?" Why yes - please go back to minding your own business.

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How to Ball Your Yarn

When I wanted to learn how to ball my yarn some years back I had a really hard time finding a resource online showing me how to do it. I had asked my grandmother, my sensi of crochet and she didn't have a clue. In the end, I wound up getting a book from the library. For real...

It's not a huge deal and some don't even like working with balled yarn, but I sure do. It's a lot of work up front, but in the end it is so, so amazing becaue you never, ever run into a nasty knot in the middle of a piece. Any knots you encounter, you'll get taken care of while balling the yarn.

I don't always ball my yarn. On some occasions I get home really excited with my new yarn, color, etc. and, more often than not, I wind up having a mess of yarn at the end that is essentially unusable. Once it breaks the skein shape, with my moving it around and cats diving at the pile it's a bad situation that only gets worse and worse.

Luckily, balling yarn is quick and easy. My assistant Max a.k.a. Dummy and I will show you how it's done:

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Easiest Way to Clean a Dirty Iron

Today's post isn't crafty in the least. However, it can help you recover from mistakes made in the heat of the crafty moment. You see, I more often than not, tend to have a nasty iron. I accidentally set my iron on top of stitch witchery or the wrong side of freezer paper... Whatever the case may be I jack up my iron on the regular.

It was kind of difficult, but I actually allowed my mistakes to accumulate until I had the nastiest iron ever. Really. I couldn't iron directly onto fabric or I would get brown smudges on it but this was all in the name of a good post.

Please take a moment to check out my incredibly nasty, a couple of weeks worth, dirty iron.

Isn't that gross? Just. Plain. Gross. Ew. 

I've heard lots of ways to clean irons and have tried a few. One is to basically steam a wet wash cloth to death to loosen up the crud. It is a slow process but it does work. On the downside, your cloth becomes ridiculously hot. Being as accident prone as I am, that means lots of really nasty burns on my hands.

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