Hello friends,

Here today with my first post in the weekend community! @cmplxty has told me of the cool things that go on here during the weekend so I wanted to partake! Thank you Galen and others who made this cool concept possible! I don’t know you well but my husband does and is here often so he tells me that it’s great!

Tile Crafting

One of the things that has been taking off recently is our little online small business. It’s consumed the most of my time lately which is why I haven’t been able to get onto hive much. Good problems to have for sure but time consuming! It’s nice when efforts pay off, hopefully we can keep it up.

One of the things that I wanted to share is one of the little things we are trying to expand into, online crafting sales. Crafting and making cool decorations for people to buy seems to be really taking off, before this whole scenario happened. The businesses online can make a fair amount of money if you already like crafting and have the supplies. I’ve been into scrap booking and crafting for a long time, way before I met my husband so it’s always been a passion of mine.

One of the things we have is a great laser printer for our actual business and we have plenty of supplies we bought for other things so we figured let’s try to make some tile crafts. These can be versatile; used as coasters, ornaments or hung on a wall or something but they look pretty cool!

The things we needed for the quick project:

water slide paper
square tile, preferably white
mod podge
cup of water
paint brush
decal
scissors
Cricut cutter and app

One of the fun things is the children can help too since it’s pretty easy to do and mostly mess free.

The first thing to do is print the decal on the laser printer using the Cricut app, if you aren’t sure what a Cricut is, it’s a staple and very versatile machine for anyone doing all types of crafts! Ours was one of the best purchases we made, we love it. If you have an inkjet paper the process is more involved but I can explain that if needed. Once you have the decal printed to fit on the paper, cut them and leave some room on the sides, it doesn’t have to be exact. Once you have it cut, you are going to stick it in the water for about 15-20 seconds to separate the decal from the paper.

While it’s sitting in the water, it’s pretty easy to get the mod podge going on the tile. You want to squirt a bit of it in the center of the tile because we are going to spread it out on it.

Once it’s on the tile, use the paint brush to just roughly spread it out. It doesn’t have to be perfect since the decal is going on top of it.

Now that that is taken care of, it’s time to take the decal out of the water and remove it from the paper. This was something that I wasn’t sure about at first but then it makes sense once you see it! The decal is delicate so you have to be careful not to let it bend or fold into itself otherwise the ink will get messed up. If you’re a perfectionist like me, you can’t have that so we might be scrapping some. The first few will definitely be something we keep ourselves and not give away so it’s not a big deal. Practice makes perfect!

So now you can see that you have to hold it a certain way. This one wasn’t easy because I was also trying to take a picture so it folded and ended up coming out poorly. That’s okay, I won’t be taking pictures of these ones to sell, unless someone wants to buy them lol.

Once the podge is there and the decal is on it, it’s now time to smooth it out and get it sealed up. There are technical things you could use but we didn’t have that handy so we used a piece of cardboard lol. You could use a credit card, or even better a silicone edge tool. We found one about an hour later so once we make more we will use that, it’s far better. The cardboard didn’t work so well but that’s okay.

Now that each one of them were made it’s time to dry them. It takes about 15-20 minutes or so for the stuff to dry so we went and did something else while we waited. They didn’t come out perfect which is a little tough since the water slide paper is pretty expensive but that’s okay, we will get better with time. The bottom left and to right ones came out the best I think but we will keep those other two for ourselves or donate them somewhere.