Upcycled sundress for my adorable niece and iron on tag tutorial

My mother in law gave me the bedspread that she had as a young girl (with permission to chop it up for crafty cuteness.)  It was adorable!  And it had the cutest little ruffled bottom.  I don't have any little girls but I am seeing my niece in a few weeks so I decided to make her a sundress with the ruffles at the bottom.  I used the pattern at SnazzleCraft (it required a bit of playing with to get it to print right.)  As I don't have a little girl (and my favorite color is blue,) I don't have any pink ribbon or thread, but the green matched all of the flower stems so it worked out.  I used snaps instead of buttons, and placed them in the back, so that my niece won't be able to undress herself.

I love making cute things, and I like to put tags in them.  Why?  I don't know.  But I do.  :0)  So here's how I did it, just in case you want to make some too.



You will need the following supplies:

• small amount of screen printing ink/paint or soft fabric paint (not the tulip puffy kind)


• alphabet stamps (I got these out of the dollar bin at Michael's last year) or custom stamp


• freezer paper


• scrap of paper to use as spread


• ribbon or fabric scraps


• iron and cloth


• heat n bond scraps

• Squirt a small amount of ink onto your freezer paper.


• Spread the ink out into a thin layer using your scrap paper (I doubled my scrap for a sturdier spreader.)


• Use the ink like an ink pad, working quickly since the screen printing ink dries quickly.  Respread the ink as needed.


• Let the ink dry and set as per package directions.  I let it dry overnight and ironed the next morning to set the ink.

• Cut a small strip of heat n bond and iron onto the back of your ribbon.  I like to trim the stragglers off after applying the heat and bond, so that it seals the ends.


• Peel off the paper backing and iron onto your items.

You could also sew the tags in, or have them stick out the sides like a flag.  You can use acrylic paint to make tags that won't be laundered often, I prefer to use a fabric paint myself.  This is a good use for scraps of ribbon, and small bits of heat and bond.  (It is also why I never throw anything away and have piles of junk filling up my bedroom...maybe you shouldn't save those little scraps after all.)

Recycled book cover glitter numbers (cake topper)

Here is an example of a project that I thought would be simple, but turned into something much more complicated and time consuming than I would have imagined.  But it is an adorable cake topper, isn't it?

To start with, I purchased a 'get rich quick' book from the second hand store for a whopping $0.25.  It had a dust cover, and looked brand new.  I removed the dust cover to find a beautiful green hard cover made of heavy chipboard.  This is why I purchased the book.  My inner bookworm did cringe at the thought of chopping up a book, but there is no way I could buy two nice pieces of chipboard and a 325 page pad of scrap paper for the same price.  And since the book was obviously trash anyways, it wasn't so bad to chop it up.

To start with I cut the numbers out of black paper to see how they looked.  I used my Cricut machine with the Sure Cuts A Lot program, and the Curlz font.  It took me all of 3 minutes to complete.   Easy.  Next I traced the numbers onto my book cover.  This took under two minutes.  My project seemed to be going so well.

I spent about 15 minutes trying to cut through the chipboard with an exact-o knife - it didn't happen.  If I had a band saw this would have been so easy to cut out.  I did have my dremel handy, so at first I tried cutting it out with a drill bit.  Is anyone surprised to hear that didn't work?  I finally tried out the cutting wheel, and spent the better part of an hour cutting my shape out with the dremel thick cutting wheel.  (The dremel was off when I posed for the photo.  If you try this bits of dust and scrap will fly up into your face - I recommend goggles and possibly a dust mask, or at least a t-shirt pulled over your nose and mouth.)



There were some places that the dremel wheel couldn't fit into without cutting off something else.  For these areas I pulled out a hacksaw blade and used it to hand saw out the inner areas.  When I finished with that I trimmed it further into shape using my exact-o knife.  I then sanded down the rough spots and rounded the edges.  The book cover looked lovely at this point, and would be nice for other applications.  (In fact, I plan on making some jewelry from the scraps.)

I covered up the beautiful cover with some black paint.  I let the paint dry for about an hour before moving on to the glitter glue.  I wish I could have left the cover alone though, with maybe a coat of clear sealer to protect the raw edges.

The last step is to spread the numbers with glue, and apply the glitter.  I actually had a bottle of glitter glue sitting in my stash (it came with something else I bought.)  I sprinkled a thick amount of glitter onto the glue and left it to dry several hours.  I then applied the glitter and glue to the back.

Since this was intended as a cake topper, and the glitter isn't edible, I sprayed a light coat of clear spray paint onto it.  If it would have been up to me, I would have used several coats of the clear paint to help seal the glitter.  Beautiful glitter numbers!  I think a little girl would love to see her name hanging on the wall in pretty pink and purple glitter letters, don't you?