Hi! I'm from Florida, and I'm a newbie crafter (not just to this site, but crafting in general). I've only recently gotten into what I like to think of as "scrap-crafting": you know, using bits and pieces of stuff you have laying around to make new stuff? I'm still learning to keep my hands still and all, but I like to think I'll get much, much better as time goes on.
Right now these are my current projects:
Rescuing some old broken balsa wood doll house miniatures I had tried to paint at one time; they've gotten damaged from stuff falling on them or from the cat attacking them or something, with like feet falling off and stuff. Basically, they're those cheap little made-in-China 99 cent doll house furniture stuff you find in the woodworking section at some mainstream craft stores (the ones where 80% of them end up with some asymetrical flaw or something). My hope is to tweak them so they don't look completely cheap or awful anymore, and redo them so they're pretty and, well, intact. (And not asymetrical, heh). Some of them I'm thinking of putting some actual glass in the windows and stuff (they're mostly cabinet/hutch/armoire type things).
I'm also turning used paper sleeves from Starbucks and the like into bracelets (mostly involves painting them with acrylic paint which I have a ton of since it's my favorite medium to do regular 2D art in; however, I'm thinking of doing something fun with cloth scraps or lace or beads, any advice on glues to use for this, by the way?). I'm also making some sculptures out of stuff, like you know that Japanese snack, Pocky? Well it comes in these really cool folding boxes, and I'm planning to make a 1-2 ft tall "giant robot" statue out of a few of them (w/ plastic coffee stirrers for adding support, I think). Also, I might try my hand at making some very simple stuffed animals or some miniatures out of some scraps of cloth I have (for the miniatures, I was thinking things like miniature cushions for chairs and stuff, or spines of miniature books).
Also making doll house miniatures from, well, other scraps of stuff. Like, I have a whole bunch of little tiny squares of cork that came off stuff we got in shipments (mirrors), that are stuck together and I'm currently painting with acrylic paint and gold ink to look like a miniature stack of books. I might make miniature cutting boards or books or other stuff out of some of the leftovers.
And I'm also am working on making miniature framed art for doll houses. This is going to be a fun challenge, because I actually work in a frame shop, so I have access to the real-life framing materials and to mounting materials. Basically what I'm doing is using an exacto knife to cut out pictures from art catalogs or magazines, and I'm planning to laminate them, then cut tiny mats, glass (which may end up just being spare bits of plastic; picture frame glass is VERY hard to cut to that tiny of a dimension without cracking it) and so on, and put it together with frames I'll either make myself (probably out of clay, maybe adding some metal leaf, or paint and the like), or make out of fillets (a fillet is a very tiny, sort of semi-flat moulding that's meant to go under the lip of another picture frame moulding or under mats, to add a sort of "frame within a frame" effect that's kind of neat. However, if you make your 45 degree angle cuts on the corners the opposite direction from normal, you can basically frame a flat object like a card or photo with it, by gluing it to the inside of the fillet and sticking a mat board on the back. My family's done that with Christmas cards to make some very pretty ornaments before). I'm essentially attempting to mostly actually FRAME them, just... in miniature.
Like I said: a fun challenge! I'll probably try to sell some of them off later, since my beloved little doll house at home does not have room for the number I plan to make, but that's obviously in the future, since I'm still working out the kinks of how to do it. I'll probably also try at some point to make some doll house mirrors this way, since I have some very tiny bits of mirror glass laying around.
I'm also wondering if anyone here has tried to decorate ceramics (the air-dry clay kind) with decorative tissue paper before - like when it's still wet, just laying it on? I'm thinking of trying it out to see if it looks cool.
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