Polka Dot Cottage: Beginner Button Class - Making and Baking Your First Bu...

Posted February 7th, 2011 by Lisa Welcome to the Beginner Button Class! For this first lesson, we will discuss how to prepare polymer clay for use, how to make a 1/2-inch solid-color button, and how to properly bake it. Supplies + Tools 3 packages of Premo! Safety note: Any kitchen tool you repurpose for working with clay must then be dedicated to craft use, and not returned to the kitchen! Supply note: If you want to buy online, I recommend Polymer Clay Express for the clay and the blade (and for the lucite brayer or rod I will be recommending in a future lesson). Directions Premo comes in 2-oz blocks that are scored into four sections. Cut each of these three ¼ blocks into four smaller pieces. While your clay might feel soft and nice straight out of the package, it still needs to be conditioned. Conditioning clay prepares it for use in any project. Note: Failure to condition the clay may result in a weaker finished product after baking! The last step is to bake the buttons. Your turn

twisted chain stitch The plain tiger enjoys a celebrity status of being the first butterfly in the recorded history. It was depicted in a painting, with its distinct colors and patterns, in the tomb of Nebamun in Egypt, circa 1350 BCE – that’s more than 3300 years before! It’s a tiger not merely in its stripes and colors. It is a terror to potential predators too! Their bodies contain toxic alkaloids from plants, which they have devoured as a larvae. Birds and predators memorize and associate the unsavoriness of these butterfly species with their patterns and habits, and try to avoid them. The image above is of a male oriental plain tiger, and they have a pouch on the hindwing, which has scent scales to attract females! Research shows that the sex ratio of the broods alternate between an excess of females and males, according to the season. Continue Reading » 1 Comment »

How to Make Clothing Buttons from Shrink Plastic&8230; This tutorial is an old one of mine that’s too good not to share again. Since posting the first time, I’ve had lots of questions about these buttons which will hopefully be answered in this revised post. Equipment Some handy notes: 1. The buttons. single hole, hole punch (like this one here). 2. 3. Okay.. lets get started! Tracing tips: You can use either coloured pencils or permanent pens. Words must be writted backwards in order to be readable. Shrinking the buttons: To shrink the buttons, you can use an oven or a heat gun (the kind used for embellishing). After the buttons have twisted and twirled, and are LYING FLAT, it’s time to take them out. Note: If the skrinking is taking too long, you may need to turn your oven up. Here’s a short little stop-motion to make sure you’ve got the gist of how easy this is! Shrink Paper {here} Circle Punch {here} Hole punch {here} Pens {here} Update: I’ve made a video to show how to shrink the buttons using a craft embellishment heat gun. Kimanh

I Really Wish I Could Sew | Pioneer Woman Home & Garden | Ree Drummond - StumbleUpon A sweet friend of mine sent the girls and me a box of adorably adorable owl pillows this week. She doesn’t sell them, doesn’t have an Etsy shop…she just makes them. I think they might be the sweetest things I’ve ever seen, and I think they’ll be precious in the girls’ new room. I don’t know what it is about owl pillows. It must have something to do with the eyes. I love this vinyl detailing. Vinyl? Which brings me to my current fixation: I really wish I could sew. But when I see things like this, all I can think about is that I really wish I could sew. I’d love to be able to grab a pile of fabric scraps and turn them into…an owl. I love this one. Boo! It would take me approximately eighty years to make one of these pillows. That’s because I’d keep taking breaks to go cook. And eat. So maybe it’s best that I don’t know how to sew. If I did, I might be tempted to make things like this. And then nothing would ever get cooked in this house. Maybe even twenty pounds! Yep. Ahem.