Tips for keeping ideas safe!

I’ve been reading a lot of various craft blogs lately, and a few people mention writing down their ideas on pieces of paper. Well, I thought I would share how I record my ideas and inspirations!

Tumblr. (If you don’t have a tumblr account, it’s REALLY easy to set up) You can put a really simple ‘Share on Tumblr’ badge in your bookmarks, and that way any time you come across a pretty thing you want to make, you can click on that, select ‘photo’ choose the picture you want to save (it loads all the photos on the webpage), and it’ll automatically put in a link to the page you’re on!

Here’s how:

Once you’ve signed up for an account, click Goodies.

The first option is to add a Bookmarklet.

You’ll need to drag that ‘Share on Tumblr’ bookmarklet into your bookmarks toolbar. It should apear then like this (second from the right):

Once it’s there, you can go to to a page that displays a tutorial, or craft you want to save, and post to your tumblr, and click on the bookmarklet. When you do this, a new window will open where you can select if you want to post a link, text, quote, picture etc. I usually choose picture so that I can easily see what crafts I have saved.

It will automatically put a link in the text to the site you’re on (if you’re linking to a particular blog post, make sure you are on the post page, not the homepage (http://taliacarbis.com/2009/04/28/tips-for-keeping-ideas-safe as opposed to http://taliacarbis.com), and you can select the photo you want to post (it will collect all the photos that are displayed on the page).

All you need to do then is select ‘creat post’ and Hey Presto! It’s done!

I find this a really effective way of keeping together all my ideas and tutorials that I find online in one place- and a great thing about it is if I loose a pattern, I can just go through my history on tumblr and find it again!

You are welcome to check our my tumblr here: http://sunshinetalia.tumblr.com and follow me. Let me know if you decide to make one too so I can follow you!

Tags: howto, ideas, inspiration, photos, sunshinetalia, tumblr, tutorial, web2.0, website

How to Make Teacup Candles

Saturday was ANZAC day. I had great plans of going to Spotlight, but silly me, forgot that they are CLOSED on public holidays! So I trundled back from my trip to Kawana and was sitting at home thinking, ‘What can I make today?’ I remember that the other week my candle making kit had been delivered (I bought it on ebay) so I decided to try my hand at some candle making! Below are instructions and pictures. I would LOVE to know what you think of it, and would love to know if you give candle making a try!

Check out the colours compared to when I was making it in the slideshow!

Now, the wax I’ve used is soy wax, which apparently burns 30-50% longer then regular wax (paraffin), it’s water soluable, and biodegradable. Also, there’s not much soot from them, they’re non-toxic, so they’re great if you have little ones around!

Step 1: Organise your area- I made sure that I had all the bits and pieces I would need, as well setting it out on the dining room table in a logical manner- so spaced out well. I also set up a chopping board, which I used to sort of ‘protect’ my table.

I need the following equipment: Scales, Chopping board, sharp knife (steak knife will do), pyrex jug (or a microwavable jug), as well as the wax, my dyes, and the oils.

I also set up my teacups here. Obviously you don’t have to use teacups (but they are so adorable!), you can use tealight containers, or anything you want! My mum has a glass handbag that she wants me to fill up as a candle! You’ll need to set up the wicks in whatever it is you’re using, and make sure they’re clean. I used ready made wicks, with little stands on the bottom, and just applied a double sided sticker to the bottom so they stayed in the cup. But I did run out of them, so I had to just cut up a long wick, and use blu tak on the end. This works fine.

Step 2: Measure out how much wax to use. The instructions I got with my kit said to fill the container I was going to use up with water, and then put it into the jug, so that I could see how big it was. So if I ended up with 90ml of water, I would need to measure 90g of wax. I ended us using more then that, and it’s better to have too much then not enough. Of course, mine are in two colours, so if you want different colours you need to just measure out what you want for that particular colour.

Step 3: Once you’ve put the wax into the jug (obviously with no water in it), then you need to melt it in the microwave. I did short bursts of 20-30 seconds. It’s a bit time consuming to have to stand there near it, but really only takes like 2 minutes to melt. The jug will get REALLY hot, so make sure you use oven mits (btw- look out for a tutorial soon on how to make your own!). You can let this cool on the chopping board now.

Step 4: Organise your colours and smells. Both of these are a bit of a ‘guessing game’. I just shaved off bits of colour and then put it into the wax. It was pretty cool to watch it melt! Remember that the colour you make it here is a LOT darker then what it will actually turn out as. As far as the oils go- put some in, about 3-5ml for a 100g candle. But you can just smell for it to see if it’s okay. The frangapani oil I used the second time was a LOT stronger then the rose one I used first, so make sure you take that into consideration.

Step 5: Depending on how long it took you to decide on your colour etc you may need to let your wax rest a little longer! Apparently if it’s too hot the candle might look a little rough on the top. I found that mine weren’t rough, and I sort of just did one thing after the other. So now you can poor the wax into the teacups.

Step 6: You can trim your wicks now. It’s best to leave about 1/2 cm in height for the first burn. You’ll need to wait about 48 hours before you can use them though- they need to set and ‘cure’. The longer you leave them the better the scent will be. Note: the soy wax will hold the colour, and the scent better then parafin wax anyway.

Tags: candles, Craft, crafty, frangapani, frangrance, howto, make, pink purple, presents, rose, tea, teacup