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I’m hoping this shows up in The Spastic Crafters Feed :)

Post since moving spastic crafter code from feedburner into wordpress blog.

Posted on WOM wordpress, hoping it’ll show up on Spastic Crafter’s feed.

This is a new post on WOM WordPress after I’ve moved the Spastic Crafters feed to WOM WordPress.

[I added "- HowTo" at the end of the title after publishing.]

Woah. I stepped away from my computer for a couple of days and, I guess, just forgot to come back. How’ve you all been?

I can’t even say that I’ve been busy with interesting craftiness, mostly just end of summer chaos.

In fact, the only thing remotely creative that I’ve managed is a set of produce stamps. For this project, the hardest part was drawing the originals; carving them was a cinch. Seriously, stamps are such a satisfying project.

Because I was going off of Stefanie’s great idea and stamping on my homemade produce bags, I had to do a bit of research about how to keep the designs colorfast. I found that the ColorBox brand is permanent if you iron it (I used the medium setting for 10 seconds).

Another good thing about this brand is that it doesn’t bleed like some of the cheaper ink pads do.

And the best thing about ColorBox… they’re just so purty.

I bought mine on sale at Michael’s for 40% off and considering all the colors that it comes with, I’m super happy with the purchase. Now I’m thinking that I need to head back and pick up the earth tone set.

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Related Posts
Personalized Bookplate Stamps (this has links to stamping supplies)
Cheap & Easy Produce Bags

Recently, Jaden‘s favorite movie to watch is The Triplets of Belleville. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as a kids’ movie, though. It’s really dark and weird and well, yah, you’ll have to watch it yourself (plenty of it on youtube). But, what can I say. All of our kids love it too.

So, of course, she chose that as the theme for her birthday. For the cake, Aurora decided to cover a sheet cake with frog pieces. Once again, hard to explain if you haven’t seen the movie. (Though if you watch from about 4:05 on this link, you’ll get the gist.)

We all sat down to sculpt them out of gumpaste, but Jenny was the only one who was able to make anything presentable. My frogs were so ugly that I squashed all of them and made tadpoles instead. And even those managed to look more like sperm than tadpoles. Aurora’s attempts were a bit better, but still, Jenny kicked our butts on the frog sculpting front. Then again, she’s awesome like that (in a very ‘perfectionist, keep going til it works’ way, while my personal style is more along the lines of ‘meh, good enough’).

And guess what, I’ve got a Don’t Do What Donnie Don’t Does for you. Don’t leave a bunch of gumpaste figures out in the garage during a rainstorm without first double, no, triple checking that your roof doesn’t leak. Because ours leaks. And I had no idea that it did. And I actually cried when I saw this.

(And for those of you who are wondering why I would put these in the garage… here’s my reasoning. We have a naughty cat and I didn’t trust her to not eat these. I thought of putting them in the oven for safe keeping, but I was sure that someone would turn it on without realizing they were in there. Most likely me. No one goes in the garage, so I figured they’d be safe out there.)

So my wonderful sister came over the next day and re-sculpted a cake full of frogs. Isn’t she sweet? And I think the second batch turned out even better than the first.

And while she was re-making them, Kam was nice enough to give a tutorial for just how to make this frog. We used cocoa to keep them from sticking and also to give them a nice “fresh from the swamp” color. It totally worked.

Aurora whipped up a sheet cake with some brown/pink cream cheese frosting and we just plunked the frogs down on it.

And this last picture… technically that is one leg and one arm, but I stuck them in there like they were a pair of legs.

Don’t tell Jenny.

Note- I’m closing the comments on this post because I’ve been getting a ton of spam on it for some reason. It’s all been in Japanese, which I find pretty amusing. But well, I’ve got zero tolerance for spam. If you’re interested in commenting on this, feel free to email me.

Thanks.