Crafty Kit Review: Decorative Tile Art

Late summer days are the perfect days for making stuff outside, I think. One of my favorite things about our house is our backyard deck, shaded by a giant maple, with plenty of room to fit a nice, big table and still sprawl about the deck chairs and admire the couple of potted plants that the chickens haven't destroyed.

It was, happily, another lovely late summer day when the kids and I spent our art time playing with this kit sent to us by a publicist for review:

Decorative Tile Art has a book of instructions for doing cool stuff to ceramic tiles using permanent markers and rubbing alcohol. Along with the instructions, you get some tiles, markers, coaster pads, a brush and an eye dropper, and glaze. I added the rest of our Sharpies, even more ceramic tiles from my garage stash, and, just for fun and experimentation, some rocks leftover from Syd's rock painting project, and some small mirrors to also draw on:

The instruction book teaches you ways to draw on the tiles, and other ways to add rubbing alcohol for interesting effects:

Will got her tile quite saturated with different colors--

--and then ended up trying out a few different techniques. We really liked the results!

Syd liked the look of this tile when she misted on rubbing alcohol, then blotted it off with a tissue:

I am always a fan of process-oriented art, and I loved the fact that you don't exactly know what's going to happen when you add the rubbing alcohol to your tile. This is what it looks like when I drew circles in different colors and then used an eye dropper to drip rubbing alcohol onto them. Weird and cool, right?



Syd tried the same thing:

But it looks like she might have felt a little differently about her own unexpected results...

Will and I kept moving through materials and techniques, interested in seeing all that we could do with markers and rubbing alcohol:

Syd, though, when she got a tile that she really liked, cleverly used the abstract design as the background to a whole new illustration:

Look how lovely it turned out!

You can do anything with these tiles that you'd do with a regular tile, although you want to seal them, of course, if you're going to subject them to any wear and tear. I sealed our tiles very well, because they're our new coasters!

I received a free copy of Decorative Tile Art, because I can't review a kit unless I've used it to spend an afternoon outside, coloring happily and chasing the chickens away from the rubbing alcohol!

We Made Pressed Flower Bookmarks!

I am absolutely enchanted by this nine-year-old tutorial for making pressed wildflower bookmarks, even more so because the author states that the tutorial was originally found in a 1950s Boy Scout manual.

And now here's me interlibrary loaning a bunch of old Boy Scout manuals from our university library (You know I already interlibrary loaned all the old Girl Scout manuals and read them years ago)...

The kids are working on earning the Wildflowers of Ohio fun patch--each of them has just one more activity left!--and one of the steps asks girls to "make something" with wildflowers.

Obviously, that's my favorite step!

I gave the girls some options, including inventing their own wildflower craft or looking through Pinterest to find something that appealed to them, but I also showed them this particular craft that I've been wanting to do for a while, and I asked if they might want to try it with me.

They did, and so we did. And it turned out amazing!

Our first step was to spend an afternoon collecting and drying a bunch of flowers, some from a neighborhood wildflower walk, and some from my garden:

Fun fact: if you're not drying your flowers in the microwave, you should be!

We completed the tutorial pretty much as instructed, except that I collected several templates--playing card, bookmark, business card, 8x10 cardstock--and we traced the template that we wanted onto the wax paper first, so that we could arrange the dried flowers prettily in the space. Syd make bookmarks, and Will got quite invested in one 8x10 piece that she can use to embellish a journal cover:

I actually really like painting the single ply of tissue over the flowers. It's fussy and it takes a while, but it's easy and you can listen to music. Here, we listened to the Hadestown Broadway soundtrack and I interrupted it every six seconds to expand on the theming, wax rhapsodic about the choreography, add context, and basically blather on endless annoying interjections.

Just as the tutorial states, we then let them dry for a day, backed them with watercolor paper and sewed the fronts and backs together, and dabbed on matte medium. We let them dry for another day, and then they were absolutely perfect.

Here's my bookmark!

And here are some pieces the size of playing cards that I made:

I'd originally intended them to be handmade business cards, because I am ALWAYS in need of more handmade business cards, but now that I've made them I might love them too much to simply toss them in someone's Pumpkin+Bear order (unless you ask me to--then I happily will!).

Instead, I'm kind of wondering if I could use them as permanent, reusable gift tags for our family holidays. If I got Matt to write a recipient's name on the back very prettily, and we were quite careful, couldn't we use the same tag for a gift to that person on every holiday?

Of course, I'd need lots more if I wanted to cover, say, an entire Christmas worth of gifts to every person, but over the course of several years it would surely be a more eco-friendly option than gift tags that are used and tossed every year, especially if I also found a reusable gift wrap solution.

Any excuse to make more of these dried flower cards, I suppose!

DIY Rorschach-Style Ink Blots

The older kid recently studied the Rorschach test as part of her AP Psychology curriculum, and revealed to me that it's not actually WHAT you identify in the ink blot that is analyzed, but HOW you come to that identification. Apparently, psychologists are more interested in your thought process, perceptions, decision making, and communication than whether or not you think everything is a guitar or two dogs playing poker or whatever.

Which is all really cool, but while Will was telling me all this, I was mostly thinking, "OOH, we should make ink blots again!"

The younger kid went through a major symmetry obsession back when she was five or six, so in those days we spent a LOT of time making ink blots together.


It's only fitting, then, that I dug out the remainder of those seven-year-old BioColor paints on a recent lovely afternoon so that the kids and I could revisit this long-ago beloved craft.

Can you believe that Syd didn't even remember that we'd done this before?!? How the passage of time can fade the memories of that which we once loved...

In order to avoid having that crease in the middle of the prints, we tried out a different technique this time. I'll once again let Syd demonstrate:

1. Cut a piece of aluminum foil or wax paper to size, then crease vertically. Add paint.

2. Fold the foil or wax paper along the crease:

3. Open it up to reveal the symmetrical image!

4. Lay a piece of heavyweight paper on top of the paint. We used this watercolor paper:

5. Use a brayer (or rolling pin meant for play dough) to smooth the paper, making sure it has good contact with the paint:

6. Carefully lift the paper straight up and admire (or be disappointed in) your art!

It was a quite relaxing, and rather fun way to spend part of a nice afternoon!

Although honestly, I don't think that the end result of a page with no vertical crease was worth the extra time and materials involved in making the aluminum foil print first:

A traditional set of ink blots has some that are black ink on white paper, some that are red and black ink on white paper--

--and some that are multi-colored. The kids were mostly interested in making the multi-colored blots:

It would be fun to make a correct set of these and then have a go at analyzing each other!

If you're interested in Rorschach and his ink blot test, here are a couple of other resources:





Surprisingly, there aren't many good ones, and no living books for children, although if you were super into it, you could definitely access the official test materials to play with.

And what this really tells you is that if you're an aspiring children's book author, there's plenty of room in the market to start with a picture book bio of Rorschach!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

DIY: Rainbow-Painted Pegboard To Organize a Teen Crafting Space

Will can occasionally muscle a puzzle onto the kids' shared playroom table, but mostly it's Syd's domain, held by the simple means of attrition. How can a kid stretch out a 1,000-piece puzzle or a coloring book and her pencils when another kid already has the entire table covered in fourteen different slime recipes, all halfway done and half-spilled across each other? And the one bit that doesn't have slime has Perler beads and polymer clay AND a bunch of paint tubes and a wet canvas?

It's madness, and hugely messy, but Syd adores her space, and spends much of each day at that table, listening to audiobooks or YouTube video tutorials of even more weird crafts, crafting her heart out and happy as a clam.

Last summer, in an attempt to contain at least some of the mess (and, more importantly, to keep Syd off of MY work table as much as possible!), I created a couple of giant pegboard organizers for the walls adjacent to that table.

I bought a small and a large pegboard, and taped them into seven sections--the best thing about pegboard is that you can just count holes to make your measurements. The green stripe is going to be slightly narrower than the others, though. That is never not going to bother me.

If I had this project to do over again, I think that I would have bought real paint. They have these "sample" sizes of paint that you can buy that are like just a cup's worth; those and small paint rollers would have been soooo much easier to use, and I wouldn't have had to do so much taping off.

Oh, well. With the spray paint that I used, I had to tape off the area that I wasn't painting, for every single stripe, and it was terribly tedious:

And it got spray paint overspray all over the driveway, but y'all know that has NEVER been something that I've been concerned about.

I think it turned out quite lovely, even if my poor photography skills mean that you can't see how nice the purple stripe looks. Bossy blue washes out shrinking violet!

Matt mounted the pegboards for me, and the next step of the process involved more purchases than I prefer, and the revelation that there exist in the world TWO DIFFERENT SIZES OF PEGBOARD HOLES. So there we went, returning half our purchases and trading them in for a slightly different size.

We've actually had this setup in place for almost a year now, and while it doesn't look as tidy as I'd dreamed, it does contain the mess and chaos and nonsense and keep it off the table and the floor... mostly:

She's organizing her glitter stash in rainbow order, obviously.

That right there is everything that you need to make slime or polymer clay creations, or repaint Monster High dolls or squishies.

Next up: wouldn't it be nice to organize and contain all of the American Girl doll mess and chaos and nonsense?

Trashion/Refashion Show 2019: Gibbon Girl

It's fun to see how Syd has grown in the nine years that she's participated in our town's Trashion/Refashion Show:

2011: Fairy Princess

2012: Rainbow Fairy

2013: Rose Dress

2014: Upside-Down Orange

2015: The Awesomes (with WILL!!!)

2016: The Phoenix (which I sewed while sick with the flu)

2017: Supergirl of the Night (the last design that I helped Syd sew)

2018: Medieval Maiden (the first garment that Syd constructed completely independently)

And that brings us to 2019: The Year of the Gibbon!

These are Syd's application pictures, and every year they suck, because February is rarely well-lit. Oh, well. You can still see that Syd's vision is a caped black tunic and leggings (upcycled from a few black tops and sweaters that we thrifted). The highlight of the garment is a pair of sleeves that Syd can make look ruched, but can also make look like this:

She used a pair of pants for those sleeves, and later altered it so that she could have a secret pass-through for her hands when they're in their super-long formation.

Syd really, really liked the idea of sleeves that drape like a bridal train, but she also intended from the beginning that they could be fully weaponized, like so:

I love seeing her have so much fun with her design. From the very beginning, Syd's garments have always been playful, and most of them embrace big, powerful movement.

Her garments are never something that you simply wear; they're something that you DO:

 Our town's Trashion/Refashion Show is happily well-situated within our busy spring every year--it's generally about a month after cookie season, and about a month before Syd's birthday party. It's nice, because as soon as we finish planning for one thing, we can move right into the next!

The day of the fashion show is the hair/makeup call, then the stage rehearsal, then cooling our heels in the house while the other acts rehearse--

--then the pizza party--

--then the fun time of squeezing into a few square inches in the overcrowded dressing rooms backstage--

--and then I go sit in the audience with the rest of the extended family, and Syd?

She shines.

Here are some cheater pics that I took during the dress rehearsal:

And here's the real show:



This year's official show photographer has been taking photos for four years now, and he also created the slideshow that played between the acts. Check out this awesome tribute that he made for all of the Trashion Kids--he made a whole slide for each kid that he'd seen come back every year, and here's Syd's!

Look at how she's grown. Syd actually HATES it when people tell her how much she's grown (it's Nutcracker-related trauma on account of they cast by height and they're always looking for the shortest kids and it sucks), but look at the kid in those photos. She has grown! Syd has always been an artist, but she's become such an able DIYer, too, confidently constructing her vision garment from top to bottom, shoes to hairstyle. Those leggings? She sewed them from a stretchy black sweater, sure, but she also did it WITHOUT A PATTERN. No template. She didn't even trace another pair of leggings! She just... started cutting, sewed them up, and boom. Perfect leggings.

Perfect leggings. Smoky eye shadow that she applied herself. A garment with sleeves fit for royalty and suitable as long-range weapons.

I absolutely can't wait to see what this kids does next.