Crafty Marie

Are you as hooked on cute fairy home designs as I am. I enjoy plenty of crafting on a fairy house theme and today I'm really excited to share with you a free printable flat notecard stationery set for the Fall season. The free Fall fairy home printables come with a red, polka dot unlined notecard, some matching little tags, decorative accent pieces and wide paper "ribbon" wraps. All of these items can be used to make up your own gift sets for personal use to gift for birthdays, Christmas and other occasions. You can use this free printable set for stationery but the decorative paper ribbons and the tags are also useful for embellishing handmade greeting cards, scrapbooks, gift wrapping and any other cool paper crafts.

Starting up a new craft can always be challenging, especially when selecting which tools and equipment that you will need to use. After all, you probably don't want to spend a fortune when you have no idea if this is something that you will enjoy for the long term. Crochet can be particularly confusing for a beginner because there are just so many different types of crochet hooks available. Which type you should choose will be made clearer in this comprehensive guide. I have (and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one) spent a small fortune personally testing out a wide variety of different hook types until I settled on my favorites to use. In this handy guide, I run through the main types available along with a detailed critique on the different choices you can get and what to look for that will suit the way you work.

I'll admit that just sometimes I can run a little short on getting inspiration and ideas when creating handmade greeting cards, and especially when making cards for men. That's where some of these simple but effective ideas are so very useful. In recent years, I've taken to the use of alphabet die cuts for cards. Large fonts and lettering (sometimes even letters cut out by hand instead of a machine cutter) to do most of the hard job for me. Use the ideas here to create some great looking paper projects very easily when you're running low on inspiration too. You can use a machine cutter with alphabet dies, buy pre-cut letters or even print out and cut large words from your own computer using a simple word processing program or notepad app.

The Monster Tail rubber band loom board is a small device, some people call it a mini loom for that reason, and it's designed for creating all kinds of really cool looking fishtail pattern bracelets and other fun items. This double fishtail loom band tutorial is a pretty easy, beginner design pattern. It is great to get started with if you've never make a stretchy band bracelet before. In fact, this is the one pattern that should have been included, but wasn't, in the instruction manual. This photo tutorial provides clear and step by step instructions on how you can make a really cool looking, alternating color rubber band bracelet on the Monster Tail. And, because it only uses just two pegs, you can also work this pattern on either your fingers or on another style of Rainbow Loom board.