Beads, Pearls & Charms: Cultured & Freshwater Pearls

I am an avid scrap-booker and love creating homemade crafts, so I know that buying supplies from art supply retail stores can be quite expensive. Therefore, I’ll give here a list of my tricks for saving money on supplies while creating unique and artistic items.

A: Now that big stash of periodicals that has been accumulating under your bed-frame can be put to quite a number of uses. A technique I love is to cut out different sized and colored letters and make sayings or quotes. For a nifty, retro feel, use a magazine, including the cover, article titles and advertisements, as a source for letters and words in different sizes, fonts and colors.

If you have any old magazines laying around you may find ideas or pictures and graphic designs to make a collage or scrapbook. I have developed the habit of decorating my scrapbooks with pages from fashion spreads to serve as the background. They are always really themed and have little to no writing on them. In case they happen to have some writing to show, the same can always be wrapped up in the garb of either a depiction or drawing pattern.

2. Use Search Engines to find Graphics: This is a really good idea when scrap-booking. For example, when I started my daughter’s scrapbook, I searched Google images for terms like "baby girl", "it’s a girl", and etc. By using alternative sources, I found a good many appropriate things and saved money as well.

Using a search engine’s images page can help you find terms that you need for a project that you are working on. You can get plenty of ideas and materials to use if you print them out. Because some graphics may be copyrighted, it’s a good idea to use anything that you find for personal purposes only. This should not be an issue at all if they are employed only for your own personal crafts.

Your local library can be a good, low cost way to print these out if you don’t have a printer of your own at home. It’s still much cheaper than buying stickers and designs from art supply stores.

C: Don’t worry if you don’t have any glue on hand you can always make some. Regardless of the amount of glue you need, mix equal parts flour and water to get the proper consistency. Combine the ingredients until it is a paste consistency.

This type of homemade glue should be used immediately after mixing, otherwise it will become moldy if left out. It’s good for paper projects and should be left out to dry completely after it’s used.

You can always add glitter to glue and then apply it like paint to decorate things.

D: There are a lot of cool crafts out there which call for some type of modeling clay. The ingredients that you’ve probably already got can make it right in your kitchen instead of splurging on the stuff at the store. Now, combine 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of salt, 2 tablespoons of cream of tarter, 1 tablespoon of oil, and 1 cup of water. Mix all the ingredients in a large pan and cook gently for around 3 minutes. Until you plan to use it, let it cool in the airtight container in the refrigerator. If the container is not an air tight container you may lose your clay because it will dry up.

Explore - You’ll find materials everywhere! Everything has a use, and you can make masks with scissors and crayons or markers or use a large pizza box for a collage, decorating it with dried, painted pieces of pasta you glue on.

You can find many crafting ideas around your house if you look with your imagination.

Here are a few nice discounts on barely used and new Beads, Pearls & Charms: Cultured & Freshwater Pearls: