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Sunday, May 13, 2012

My homemade distress ink blending tools and how to made them!

Well I decided that I wanted to have a blending tool for all 45 of my distress ink colors (plus the hopefully 3 more seasonal inks and 12 more regular colors that come out) and as you know at $4.99 each this could get very expensive very fast. So I decided to check out you tube and the internet and see what everyone else was doing about this problem. I found that people were making their own from blocks!

I was storing all of my pads in the baseball card page protectors labeled with my label maker and this storage worked fine but when you keep switching the pads on the blending tool they tend to wear out way faster. You can see where I tore the corner of my worm lipstick pad trying to pull it off for the twentieth time lol



So I went on ebay and found a store called quality_lumber, Greg who runs the store is awesome, I just went on one of his auctions, clicked on ask seller a question, and asked him if he could make me a custom size (1 1/2" wide x 2" long x 1/2" thick) and he said yes! So I got 60 of them with shipping for like $17 you can't beat that deal! I do also have his email that he said I could share with you if you would like it just let me know and I will send it to you privately. Once they arrived (which was within days!) I just did a minium amount of sanding on the ends (that's all they really needed) I ordered this size because I wanted them to fit on the same shelf as they ink that they match in my napa valley cassette tape holder. Which they do not fit so my next post I will share the ink pad shelf that I am making to hold of my inks and blocks :)


Once the ends were all sanded I began adding the Velcro. I ordered 5 yards of 1" wide Self Adhesive Velcro on eBay for $8.90 with shipping which puts me at a cost of $25.90 for 60 blending tools which sounds pretty good to me at .43 cents each :) 
Now I was going to just put one strip in the middle like this ...


I am so glad that I tried this out before doing all 60 blocks lol because the Velcro didn't cover all of the blending foam doing it this way, when I went to rub the block around, the foam that didn't have any Velcro under it tended to curl under. Now note that I am only putting the hook (hard) side of the Velcro on the blocks. 
So I decided to put the Velcro strips in the other direction and add two of them which works perfectly!

(I gave the soft side to my hubby to play with lol and he was all excited until he saw I only gave him the soft side hehehe)



Then just add your foam!



Now because I usually have more than one color out at a time I wanted to label the tops of them so I would know what color they were when they were all mixed up. I just went into Word and made a table with lines so it was easier to cut them, added the names to the top of each square and left myself enough room to stamp a small flourish in the color of that particular block. You don't really need the stamped image if you don't want it, I just thought it made my label prettier :) 
I do also have these files (there are two of them) that I am more than happy to share with you so all you have to do is open and print. Of course I don't know how to share them here so just ask and I will happily send them to you :)



After I got all my labels stamped and cut I just put them on my blocks with the wide roll of packaging tape, the tap was the perfect size to cover the top of my block so I could attach my labels with just one piece over the top :)


and of course most of my labels went on straight and perfect but I happened to take a picture of one of the crooked ones lol but there you have it ink blending tools for .43 cents each and an hour or two of crafty fun putting them together :)

On a somewhat related note here is a tip I got directly from Tim Holtz in case you ever run into this problem......When I opened up my new squeezed lemonade distress ink pad, the pad wasn't glued to the base so I emailed Tim to find out what glue he recommended using that would actually stick to the pad and make the pad stick to the base and this is what he told me!
"you can adhere it with super glue.  just apply it to the inside base of the case and set the pad into the glue.  let it sit for about 10-15 minutes and it should be good to go."
as I told Tim I didn't even wait the 10-15 minutes lol I probably waited about 5 if that and it worked perfectly! Nope no patience here :P
So that wraps up this post and I hope it helps someone out :) I am hoping to put my ink shelf together today as hubby just left to go get more spray paint as I am typing this sentence lol He is spray painting the core board for me because he spray paints better than I do and it's mother's day so he is being extra nice to me :D since he really should be working on his truck lol

Hoping you all have a wonderful Mother's day!!