Current Conditions
23°F - CLEAR
In the summer months you may find yourself wanting to experiment during your free time with new craft techniques or products. The Internet can yield great ideas to feed that crafting need.
Whenever I am at a loss for something to create, I turn the the World Wide Web for inspiration. Before the introduction of the Web, I would trek to the nearest bookstore and peruse its craft magazine and book section. Now with just a flip of the power button, I can cruise through crafting Web sites and have a wealth of information at my fingertips.
A quick glance through www.Etsy.com can provide a plethora of ideas to make you turn to that craft closet and get busy.
Sharing the sites that I have found to be helpful will help you to fill up the times you — or your children — may be bored or stir crazy this summer.
• Bath and Body Recipes — www.bathandbodyrecipes.com — contains hundreds of recipes for bath and body products. There is also a blog, and a glossary that will help with any questions that may arise while creating these recipes, and there are even pet care recipes.
A Top 10 list of recipes helps for those who have a hard time deciding which to use.
• Knitter's Review — www.knittersreview.com — is complete with how-tos, tools, reviews of yarns and shops, polls and projects. There are also forums in which you can post problems or your solutions to fellow knitters' problems.
• JH Pottery — www.jhpottery.com, go to the Tutorial page — has a complete tutorial of pottery techniques with pictures (which are more than helpful for the visual learner). Beginning potters will benefit from the different techniques illustrated on this site, which includes slab pots, thrown pots and pinch pots.
• Rings & Things — www.rings-things.com/projects — is a site for the bead lover in you. The site has hundreds of pages of instructions for bead projects, from glamorous earrings to novelty zipper pulls. The instructions and tips are displayed on easy-to-read pages, complete with material lists and steps for creating your beaded projects.• CraftBits — www.craftbits.com — is a full-service Web site that even links through to another favorite of mine, Craft Gossip (www.craftgossip.com). The diversity of the projects offered on this site is outstanding. There are videos, blogs and articles in which all crafting topics are tackled.
The only problem with this site is deciding which project to tackle first.
• scrapjazz — www.scrapjazz.com — offers tutorials, up-to-date scrapbooking product reviews, forums and, most importantly for the serious scrapbooker, a gallery of users' scrapbook layouts and themes.
The Scrap Tutor link allows you to take a scrapbook class at home, and there also are more than 1,000 scrapbooking articles on the site.
• Polymer Clay Central — www.polymerclaycentral.com — provides clay aficionados with a monthly clay challenge, hosts swaps and offers tutorials on clay projects. Just the gallery of past winners is motivation enough for those stuck creatively. This site makes you realize the potential of clay crafts.
• The Imagination Factory's Trash Matcher — www.kid-at-art.com, click on "Trash Matcher" — matches projects with waste materials. In the day where it's cool to be "green," check out this site before you throw anything out; there is sure to be a project for it.
E-mail: cesbenshade@lnpnews.com
