Usefull things

みなさん、こんにちは！

Minasan, kon'nichiwa!

("Hello everyone!") *

It's Sunday today so I decided to have a quiet, peaceful and spiritual day :) I think I need to think about everything and organize myself physically and mentally ^_^ Therefore I haven't got anything to show you today, maybe tomorrow. Yeah definitely tomorrow :D

Instead I would like to share with you some of my ideas on what to use in your craft projects. I must say that I haven't use all the things I showed you below, but I will in the future ( I mean i bought them so I want to use them right? :) . Some of you probably found these ideas before, but I'm sure that there still are "lost crafty souls" :) Please don't expect some mega discoveries here, they are more my little tips, which you might find useful like I did. 

First I'd like to tell you about small plastic wine glasses I found in UK party store "Peaks". I wanted to buy some glasses but the only ones I found on Internet were glass ones and they were quite expensive. I found them randomly on the cake toppers section and they were only 40p each! I think it's around 60 cents  in USD :P I know that these are not the smallest ones, but they could make great (bigger) phone or bag charm.

Next thing I found were tiny moulds. Most of you may have seen them on craft or deco websites. The reason I'm telling you about it is that you can buy them much, much cheaper if you search for them on eBay as "a 3D nail art moulds" I think I bought one for around 2.5 dollars each :) Almost three times cheaper that on the other websites! :D

This is a thing that every one of us is using. Fake sugar. I know you can find it everywhere. But what about different colours? And price? :) On Altered Element UK website you can buy different colours for just a 1.95£ (plus postage off course! :) per 40g pot which is really a lot!

I haven't found any other websites selling this,but maybe they do in Germany, looking at the brand of this sugar (http://www.efco.de/) .

This one will be short as I assume most of you is probably familiar with it. You don't need to use only toothbrush for making a texture on your biscuits or cookies. You can also use  a cleaning brush, which have much stronger bristles than even a toothbrush for smokers :) (I remember how embarrass I was buying this toothbrush in a pharmacy because I don't smoke! :D ) You can also use the tougher side of a clean washing up sponge. I haven't tried this yet but I saw it on Japanese blog and the results were amazing (she was using air dry clay).

For any of you that cant be bothered making clay flowers I have this: flowers for cake decorating. You can probably buy them in any sugar craft shop or Internet. Mine are about 1cm wide so they are perfect for cupcakes or not so tiny projects. They come on the thin wire and you can just cut them to the desired lenght :) They also might look quite good on deco  projects I think. Something a bit different than plastic flowers :D

The last thing I want to show you are metallic markers and contour lining paint for painting on glass. I'm planning to make little individual chocolates and I didn't know how to create gold transfers on the chocolate decorations. I found something like this on the Japanese blogs and I was wondering how they've created this effect. You can buy normal chocolate transfer sheets quite cheap but the patterns are not small enough for clay projects, I think. So in the future I will just bake little piece of chocolate clay and then just paint a pattern with colour I want and then varnish it :) Sound simple, we'll see how it work. 

The contour pastel I think would make quite nice tiny 3D dots, like gold chocolate decorations or patterns, as the 3D paints tips are not fine enough for me. But as I said, it's an idea so far but worth of trying :)

Wow this was a long post, didn't plan to make it so long, hope it wasn't boring :P

I would like to hear from any of you who would like to try these things out and see if they work for you too. Maybe you have other ideas I haven't think  of? Someone told me that I'm telling you my little secrets but I think that we all should stick together in the sweets making world :D So if I know some tricks that would make your life easier, why not sharing it? ^_^'

また、明日

Mata ashita! (^_^)'

"See you tomorrow!"