Sadler House

Sadler House

Rockland, Maine

craft

All of the posts under the "craft" tag.

Tic Tac Toe Keepsake

In order to give guests the optimal experience at your vacation rental, it’s important to pay attention to those little extras. Years ago, before we had our own place, we stayed at a vacation rental in the area of Luray, Virginia. When we arrived, the owner had left us a basket of goodies, including a pound cake she had baked, herself. Between that and the generous stack of white towels, we were immediately predisposed to enjoy our stay. We felt very welcome.Tic Tac Toe Keepsake - DIY

Now that we are sharing Sadler House with guests, we try to carry on our own gift basket tradition. We aren’t living next door, so we can’t bake each guest a fresh pound cake. Instead, I’ve tried to come up with fun little crafts that our guests will find both charming and useful. We hope that these little touches and a welcome card will make show our guests how thankful we are to be hosting them.

Recently, I was scrolling through Pinterest and I came to a stop at this craft by Megan at the blog Balancing Home. The product was an adorable little tic tac toe set that was made from rocks and carried in a teeny burlap bag.

While I was reading the post, I started pondering how I might incorporate this craft into my gift baskets. I resolved to find some sort of rocks and burlap bags on my next trip to the craft store and give it a go.

Well, we all know you rarely find exactly what you’re looking for, right? Instead of the natural burlap bags, I happened upon a stack of sea foam green ones on clearance in the cake decorating aisle, of all places. I got a bunch of them for 50 cents each. The color reminded me a bit of a Tiffany box, and I hatched a plan to make my tic tac toe kit a little fancier. Here’s what I did, and I hope you love the results as much as I do! Read more →

Making Custom Coasters

stone coaster

When you’re spending a lot of time making tables for your vacation  house, you can’t help but think about providing lots and lots of coasters. You know…in case people are open to avoiding rings on those tables.

Shopping around for coasters, you quickly realize that even the stupidest coasters seem to cost a lot of money. Also, the most affordable ones always seem to be those cheap ones that stick to the bottom of your glass when your glass is sweating and then drop water into your lap.

I wanted heavy, natural stone coasters, but they were all so expensive! I started looking around on Pinterest to see if there was a way I could make my own natural stone coasters, preferably with a custom imprint that would suit our house. Well, of course, there are a million tutorials out there about transferring images to any number of different surfaces. However, all the ones that exist for coasters seem to date back to a time when color copies were created with toner. Since inkjet is the norm now, the mod podge and nail polish crafts I encountered no longer worked with pictures I could produce easily at home. After ruining several coasters, I gave up on transferring a copied photo and went searching for another method.

In the end, my dreams of custom coasters were made possible by this helpful video via Caroline and allfreechristmascrafts.com which demonstrates using permanent ink and a stamp, and then baking the tiles in the oven to set them. Switching gears, I went to my local craft store and easily found the StazOn ink for about $9 and the perfect compass stamp for about $15. With  coupons, I got discounts on both. In the end, my craft store trip cost me about $14.

Read more →

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