Making the Most of Craftroom Mishaps

     Don’t you just hate that moment when you’re half way through a craft project and you make a mistake? Can’t count how many times that’s happened to me!

     It’s frustrating, yes, but you know, sometimes good things come from mistakes – it’s true!

     Like this sloth envelope I decorated:

     It came about because I wanted to test how a drawing I had done in photoshop would look on paper. I hit the print button on my laptop but completely forgot that I had left sticker paper in my printer! Well, that’s a waste of sticker paper, I thought at first, but I decided to cut it out anyway. So I had a giant sloth sticker, what do you do with that? On a whim I thought, put it on an envelope! It turned out to look pretty darn good on an envelope and it’s now something I plan on making more of!

      Or, take this card I made recently:

     My original plan was for a different card that was a bit more complicated and had the bunny and the fox on the inside. I started colouring them in with my copic markers and was quite happy with how they looked…then I flipped the card over and remembered that copics really do bleed through card! I forgot that I had meant to stamp the images on a separate piece of card, colour them in and then stick that on the inside! I didn’t want to cover the back of the card up with another piece of paper as I thought it would look messy but I also didn’t want to waste these coloured images, so I cut the piece out, stamped the word ‘hello’ and instead made a simple card front, salvaging it.

     These are only small things but I think there’s still something really satisfying about salving a mistake, don’t you think?

     With the cases above, I was able to put one craft towards another craft. That isn’t always the case but there’s still satisfaction to be had from doing something with a project that didn’t work out. Before Christmas, I had seen a lot of people making paper wreaths – getting strips of paper, getting the paper to curl and then pinning them to a styrofoam wreath. The ones I saw being made looked so good so I wanted to give it a go. I got a bunch of paper, cut it into strips and began the long process of curling it with my bone folder…

     I filled an entire basket!

     Well, with that done, it was time to start pinning them. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t actually found anywhere to buy those pins to use with wreaths (seriously, nowhere had them!). I tried using staples – that didn’t work – and didn’t relish the thought of hot gluing everything in place. So, that was a lot of time wasted, then! A waste of all that paper sitting in that hamper basket too…

     Looking at it all in the basket, I realised something – these paper curls really fill that basket up, if you were making a hamper, they’d be great for filling in the those gaps instead of using straw! My mom makes a hamper every year for her sister so I knew my paper curling wouldn’t be a complete waste as soon as I had that thought.

     It might not be as pretty as a paper wreath but there’s a lot to be said for practicality!

     Okay, this next project wasn’t a mistake at all – it actually worked out quite well and I was (and still am) happy with the result of it – it’s more so an unintended use of a project!

     The IKEA Lack table I decorated for my sitting room. Like I said, really happy with the result of it. The unintended use? Well, what I thought of as a novel use of yarn to decorate table legs is actually…four cat scratching posts that you just happen to be able to put things on.

     Yup. Scratching posts.

     I should have known really.

      They’re really good scratching posts though. I have bought actual scratching posts for the cats and they just wouldn’t even look at them – kept using the table instead! One of my cats loves rubbing against them so the table legs do need to get hoovered every now and again but they’re holding up surprisingly well for something I made!

      So really, the point of this somewhat long blog post is don’t be afraid of making mistakes, you never know what good might come of them. There’s often a way to salvage something and really, even if a craft does go to plan, you never know what uses it might take on outside of your vision!

     How do you feel about crafting mishaps? How do you deal with them when they come up? Is there a project you’ve made from another that went wrong that you’re particularly proud of?