Kim Kesti
First off, I admit to having a love/hate relationship with glue dots. I love how they stick to anything, and I hate how they stick to anything. Right?
Are you with me?
Well, read on about my latest crafting blunder…
I have a delightful stack of plastic art bins filled with all kinds of goodies. They hold a lot of tiny, cute and useful things. One day I reached into the cupboard and pulled out my bin of eyelets. Much to my surprise the bin right under it came out also. The only problem was, I wasn’t holding that particular bin.
Yep, you can see it already…the entire contents spilled willy-nilly all over the floor. Murphy’s Law says that it was, indeed, the fullest bin; my brads. Sigh. I ran my hands over the bottom of the eyelet bin and lo and behold – a glue dot! One tiny glue dot had the sticking power to pull the whole bin of brads along with it. Wow.
A few hours later (with a little reluctant help from my kids) I had them all picked up and resorted.
Order has been restored (whew). I have to admit; they ended up being sorted better than before. In fact, I was so inspired by the fact that I own a brad of every shade of every color known to man, that I created this card:
All’s well that ends well.
Do you have a crafting blunder story? Tell me about it and I’ll pick three winners to win a fun assortment of American Crafts brads! All comments must be received by midnight (MDT) on Thursday, Aug. 12.
Kim Kesti,
Paper Crafts Go-to Gal
P.S. Feeling inspired by my crafting blunder? Paper Crafts launched their August Gallery Challenge last Monday, and it’s themed “Buttons, Brads & Ribbon”. Whether you want to submit a card with just brads (like mine) or a project with buttons, brads and ribbon, you have until midnight (MDT) on Monday, August 16. Click HERE
to upload your entries today!
I can totally relate. I remember one particular spill I had with a round eyelet container that swings open. I was showing off my cropadile to my mom, aunt, and cousin. I grabbed the eyelet container and didn’t realize that I had it upside down. So when I opened it, the eyelets released like papercrafting confetti on my lap. Glad it was only a small container!
On a long car trip, I was doing some crafting, and I spilled all of my brads all over the floor of the car…ugh!
My crafting blunder is when I am painting something I always am getting paint were it does not belong. I am always dropping my brushes on me, the desk or on the carpet in my craft room.
Eek! What a nightmare to have all of those brads spill everywhere! If that had happened in my craft room I’d be finding them for months afterwards because the berber carpet in the room has various colors in it and it makes it nearly impossible to find things like brads!
My crafting blunders are many but don’t usually involve spills like yours — mine are more related to my cards themselves. One that has happened several times to me (you’d think I would learn) has been stamping an image and not cleaning the stamp right away. After spending time getting a card all put together and very nearly completed, I have flipped it open to finish the inside and flopped the front right onto a stamp with ink on it! Of course, it smudged the front and then I had to do some “creative repair” work! Usually a new embellishment gets added to the card!
I have spilled eyelets everywhere too, why is you always pick up the container upside down? I seem to get finger prints on things… or don’t properly clean my table and then get annoyed when my precious white card has ink spots on it.
I guess one of my “favorite” blunders would be using Fun Flock and embossing powder under the ceiling fan. You’d think I would learn, but I have done this a couple times in the last couple weeks! Guess it could be worse!
Thanks for the chance to win!
Enjoyed your post
My blunder was, when I tried t open my brad container upside down n as soon as I heard the sound of something falling, my teenage daughter said: Mom dont you think, such things should be opend right side up…ha ha.
Lovely card, I like that. Thanks for giving a chance to win.
I wish I could say that I learned from one of biggest crafting blunders, but, alas, I have done it more than once. I am mainly a card maker and I am embarrassed to say that I have attached an entire card front upside with the pretty sticky adhesive. Nothing like opening a card to find the front upside down! Or go to open a side fold to find it backwards! I have also been known to stamp on my envelope without checking to see if it was rightside up. LOL Thanks for a chance to win a prize, too.
I blundered on one of my layouts when adding a rub-on as a frame around a picture. I didn’t cut the part out I wanted. I layed the whole sheet of rub-ons on the picture. When I placed my hand on it to hold it in place, the rub-ons under my hand came off on the picture. Very sad. But, I was able to print another picture. Thanks for the chance to win the brads, I love brads more than anything.
OHHH I can TOTALLY relate! When my daughter was about 1, I had a similar sorting system like yours. I had a slight obsession with buttons. Ok, I will admit–button’a'holic. I had 3 containers full… all color sorted and in order by the rainbow (yes… OCD). One day, she bumped into the bakers rack they were on, and it looked like a button factory THREW UP in my bedroom! We are talking, thousands of buttons covering the carpet. If you wouldve glanced in the room you would’ve thought the carpet was speckled in rainbow colors! It took HOURS upon HOURS to pick up. I gave up and just dumped them all in a jar. HA! Now I have a rainbow colored jar of buttons!
I spent quite a long time putting together a layout about my daughter, then when I went to cut a circle from a photo (with the CM shape/blade), I must’ve lost my mind, because I left my layout under the photo, cutting a nice circle in the picture AND my layout! I was sooo mad at myself!
But, in reading some of the other comments, I realize we all have our moments!
Enjoyed your story, I can just see you & your kids on hands & knees searching for all those brads. I recently placed a smaller divided box near the end of my ironing board(alias extra counter space). When I came back later it had fallen off.Thank goodness I store my brads & eyelets in tiny zip lock bags so my clean-up was not nearly as involved as yours. Like the card. Sometimes we don’t realize how many of something we have till we have to organize them.(ha ha)Thanks for the chance to win.
Yup…I have had a few blunders but the best and prettiest was when I was crafting with glitter, purple glitter to be exact…and I sneezed without thinking (I did cover my face) but somehow, I managed to blow glitter all over my desk AND my keyboard. That was a couple of years ago and I am still finding the odd bit of glitter!
Thank you for the give away!
My story sounds a lot like yours, except it was plastic confetti in little bins usually used for nuts and bolts. I thought it was such a great storage solution until the whole case fell over, the 30 bins opened up and more than half of each of the contents spilled out on a cat-hair-coated carpeted floor. The pieces of confetti were far too small to clean off and it was a total loss. I bought cases like the ones you pictured and ended up with better storage, but oh, the waste!
At least you have yours in bins… You’d think I’d learn since EVERY TIME I pull my memory makers eyelets that come in those cute little round dealies (that the middle swings open on) at least one of them falls open on its own & eyelets everywhere! Maybe someday I’ll learn!
I’ve had many like sewing my card closed for one. My worst blunder I actually repeated twice…slow learner here I guess. I squeezed a bottle of Scotch liquid adhesive to unplug it and the top blew off in my face. Glue in my face, eyes and hair. Nice.
Crafting blunders?? They abound in my craft room. Most recent–using my Crop-A-Dile to attach some large eyelets to my card and when I punched the holes, I found that I’d accidentally punched through both layers of my card. Oops!! So, I got creative and added some chipboard decorations on the *inside* of my card to cover the gaping holes. I make it a point to check that my card is *open* now before I squeeze the handles of my Crop-A-Dile!!
My most recent blunder was entering an on line challenge for a particular stamp company and putting the wrong link in Mr. Linky. The link I did use was for a card made using another stamp company’s product. I didn’t discover it until after I received some very nice comments on my creation in spite of the fact that it was the wrong thing! Embarassing!
Carol B
My biggest crafty blunder has been to buy more stuff than our tiny apartment in San Francisco can hold and subject my husband to stepping over piles of papers and bins of buttons in the office because they’ve spilled over from their home in the pantry. I want him to continue to support my hobby and not end up frustrated by it!
How about trimming your fingers instead of unmounted stamps?
i have a bit of a blunder, too. to clean my clear acrylic unmounted stamps, i usually take them to the kitchen sink. this past time i lost 3 1″ square stamps (out of
on linoleum that is brown-patterned, dirty-looking and fur-flying. it’s been about a week, and they haven’t shown up. at another time, i was playing with some small red rubber stamps that i mounted onto wood myself. i mean, these were tiny! about the size of a regular brad! it was the letter that went with an american sign language hand sign. well…one of the letters popped off and onto aforementioned floor. i knew it was gone for good. after about 2 months, i found it without even searching. i kind of wonder if it was in front of my eyes the whole time…or did the cats finally bring it to me? who knows.
I know the feeling!!! It’s happened to me MORE than once! More than twice! I can’t even remember how many times! But worse yet: I used to have baby sleeping in the crib in my scraproom… and yes, you can guess, one day he learned to get out! He dug out a bin of ink pads, distroyed all 7 of them, mostly cat-eyes but one being a non-smear kind (black!) that wouldn’t come off anything… yes, he got ink all over! On the floor of course, on the desk, on the wall, on his crib and some other furniture, on my white ikea cardboard boxes that i organize my supplies in… and on the brand new freezer i had bought only a week before that!!! x)
Thunderation! If it weren’t for blunders, aka creative opportunities, I’d probably never get anything done. Crimping paper crooked is an always and forever blun, I mean op, for me.
Oh my…picking up all those tiny brads!!! I have too many crafting blunders…my latest one: I tried making my own glimmer mist with distress inks, perfect pearls and water. After 2 hours of tinkering I finally got the shade just right. So I turn around to grab some cardstock and as I was turning back I knocked the whole thing over with my arm. Pretty, sparkly water EVERYWHERE and all over my pictures I just printed ..UGH!
Thanks for the chance to win =)
I always seem to get ink somewhere on my hand and smear it on the card when it’s finished! Thank God for buttons and….glue dots to cover some mistakes
Sorry to hear about your brad re-organization project! I guess my biggest blunder would have been the day I was trimming away, fussy cutting on an image that I had embossed on vellum, and colored on all day. You know how this ends, I nearly finished trimming, and trimmed right through my hand, of course, bleeding very well all over my beautiful project! I got to do it again, and was much more careful the 2nd time around! Thanks for the chance to win!!!
My favorite blunder was creating a whole only to find out it was backwards. I put it in my box to tear it down later & created a new one that turned out even better.
I have a million glue dot stories. I now use very few glue dots and they are put well out of the way because of that!!! Plus a million other blunders but I always say, “It’s not a mistake, it’s an opportunity!”
Buttons cause most of my blunders I like you have them sorted into plastic boxes but unlike you I have them sorted by themes. Anyway one day I was trying to get a small button out of one of those little compartments and I bumped the whole box and buttons went everywhere. If I’d had kids at home I would have paid them to help me get them back into the box. Thanks for sharing and for the chance to win.
My blunder was a nightmare…just this past month I started making a scrapbook album for my sister-in-law. I spent a whole day on this one layout (ballerina recital) made a tutu dress from scratch, had a chipboard title inked all fancy, rhinestones strategically placed etc, etc. Decided to bring it to work to show my mom afterward, left it on the front seat of my car, sunroof tilted open…beautiful sunny day…can you see where this is going…freak rainstorm in the afternoon, totally soaked everything. Pictures were spotted, ink had run, etc. etc. There was a silver lining though, the layout dried out perfectly except for an area where I had wrote on and the chipboard title turned out 100% better. The raindrops had swirled the ink enough to make a mottled effect on them
I have totally done that – tried to open a container of eyelets and spilled the whole thing. Ugh!
I seem to always make a mess. I have spilled containers of eyelets and brads, glued an image onto a card sideways and couldn’t remove it, it was a bunch of flowers, it didn’t look too bad if you didn’t look hard enough, lol. I have ruined almost finished cards by dropping an open ink pad on them, spilled odorless mineral spirits on my card and all over the table. So glad not alone.
Back when I first started scrapping, I was soooo frugal! I would use solid white cardstock as my base and just add photos and stickers. This way I could use the other side of the base too…with more stickers. This made it so easy to fit into a page protector too. So after adding a million stickers to one side, I flipped it over, added a million more. When I went to put the page into a protector, I realized that one side was of course, upside down. And this was waaayyy back before UNDU was available. I kept it in the book like that…it makes a great conversation piece….lol
mine was eyelets. The little ones and I have thousands. thankfully no one else was around. but that just meant that I had to pick the all up and sort them rofl.
Hmmm, seems I have lots of these blunders too. But my favorite ‘happy accident’ as I now call it, occurred when nearly finished with a layout of one of my cute pups, I accidentally pressed the side of an ink pad just along the outside edge of the main photo. I was sooooooo upset, at first! But then got the idea to frame the whole thing with a line of ink! It turned out to be the perfect touch! To date, it’s one of my favorite layouts, ever!
Glue, glue, glue everywhere!
i’ve made a card that opened up the wrong side. i held up a finished card to admire it only to see that i have left my inky fingers on the front.
Hi, I really feel sorry for all of you with the spilled brads and tiny things that will be be lost and found for monthes to come…I too, had just purchased a new kit container full of brads and i couldnt figure out how it opened and i started pulling and pushing everyway and it would not budge, then i realized, the day i came home with it, i was bragging to a friend and invited her over to see what i had purchased, well, i am also a nail technician…how embarrassing this was, i opened my nail kit to repair one of my nails and the bottle of resin exploded in my hand, glued my fingers together, the brad containers, my eyes, my hair to my face….i had a huge gigantic mess….i had to use acetone to relkease everything…then after my eyes were opened, i got up to wash my face and spilled the acetone dish all over my table and the acetone melted the plastic dish and glued it to the table and when i went to pick it up it would not move then when i pulled it, the lid broke off, brads everywhere…table warped and striped….and 2 weeks later i am still picking glue out of everything…what a night!
Well, I have had a couple of blunders with my paper trimmer…let’s just say more than a few bandaids had to be put to use (ouch!). What’s a little blood when you’re creating a scrapping masterpiece, right?
Many years ago when I was new at being a stamp company demonstrator, I was doing a workshop at a gal’s house and thought I was stamping on vellum when indeed I had moved the vellum and stamped all over her beautiful table cloth with bright purple ink. I was so embarrassed!
Great stories everyone! It’s nice to know I’m not the only one with the occasional case of clumsy fingers.
The first time I used a pen knife, I was so excited. It turned out to be a lot sharper than I thought! I sliced through the card stock, the thin cardboard sheet beneath and right through the blanket I had laid on the floor for stabilization. It was one of my mom’s really nice blankets from South Korea, too! Luckily the cut was only a couple of inches across. I don’t think she’s noticed it even to this day.
So, my bin of scrap paper committed suicide today. I was in the closet for something else, left the door open, and about 30 minutes later, I hear from the other room a crash. The bin and a thousand little pieces of paper were on the floor. weird!
I have all of my embellishments stored in round stacking containers; each screws into the one below it. Buttons, snaps, eyelets, brads, rhinestones, all of the tiniest bellies. I have them stacked way higher than the way each set is sold, 5 high. Mine is 25 high. I have thousands of bellies in there. Kicked it over once. You know the rest of the story…
I had a box of buttons, you know – the baby sized ones, the bugs, the ants – well – - they were on top of a container and I needed to move them, so what did I do??? NOT KNOWING the lid wasn’t tight – - I grabbed the button box and flung buttons from here to there – - they were ALL over! I have porcelain tile in my studio, but lots of places for them to roll under – - I am so thankful that I had vacuumed the floors that morning – because I just used a little hand broom and dust pan, and I got them sorted better than ever!!! Maybe it was meant to be – but – - what a jaw dropper for a while! LOL!!! Not something I want to repeat – - EVER!!!
I had a blunder with a heat gun. I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom (which has carpet) and making a large batch of Christmas cards which had some powder embossed elements. I lowered the tool to look at the card I was currently working on and stupidly didn’t realize I was holding the heat gun pointed down and too close to the carpet. Yep, I burnt the carpet. I still shake my head every time I vacuum that spot in my room.
I’ve spilled many embellishment jars over the years… Also dropped things with adhesive on them where they didn’t belong, or photos into ink pads.
I was teaching a group of women how to make beaded spiders one evening. I was sitting next to a basket of cookies that I ended up taking to my husband at the end of the night. He bit into one and there was a horrible crunching noise. It turned out that one of the glass beads had slipped away and landed in the cookies and he managed to bite into the cookie it had stuck to. Luckily, no teeth were broken but he’s much more cautious about eating what I bring home after craft nights and I try to be MUCH more careful about where the beads bounce off to.
yeah, the time I got my hair wrapped in my dremel when I was sanding down some chipboard – not fun at all – my hair was burning and I was screaming!!
Not thinking of any wow story right now, but i have been known to make cards more than once opening on the wrong side… best i can do – am sooo tired right now need to go to bed
we did a college visit today and walked and walked and walked and traveled through 3 thunderstorms there and back! Good but exhausitng!
Not so much a crafting disaster as an invader. I was gone for a few days and when I came back there was “evidence” that a mouse had been traveling across my table! Icky!