Monday, January 16, 2012

Money-Saver Monday

One thing that I have been pretty good about in the past is sharing ideas for saving money on your paper crafting adventures. . . I have decided to save up these ideas and share them on Mondays when I get good ones. . . thus, please allow me to introduce Moneysaver Monday - Baker's Twine!

That cute striped baker's twine is everywhere these days. . . I keep looking for it in stores, but haven't found any yet. That leaves me with online options. . . I have found a few sets, but they are pretty proud of them. One site was selling strings of three colors for around $20. Another sold them individually for around $3-5 but you only get a few yards of each color.

Last night I heard of an idea, and today, I decided to give it a try. As usual, it is impossible to credit the original thinker-upper of the idea, because now I have "Googled" it and found more than a few people. There are also a few ideas of how to get this done, but here is my tried-and-true method (I just tried it, and it's true!) for making colored, striped bakers' twine.

For this project you will need a roll of "10 size" crochet thread (I got 400 yards of the stuff for $3.00)
A small wooden dowel or chopstick (free, if you go eat some Chinese food, yum!)
A marker (I have tried a Copic, a sharpie, and a Bic Mark-It, they all work great.)
A Diet Pepsi  (optional)
Seriously, why did I leave my soda in the photo?

I began by taping the end of the thread to the dowel so that it would stay. Then I just started twisting, to get a single layer of thread to wrap around the dowel. Hold the tension equally so that it is not wrapped too loose or tight in any spot. Stop whenever you think you have enough twine for your project.

Use a marker to color the thread on just one side of the dowel. Make your "stripe" as wide or narrow as you like. Be geneous with the ink and try to color the thread equally, so that there are not any light areas. Don't worry - the ink does spread all the way through the thread and it does color the dowel a little bit. I don't care about this, I have about a million dowels. I also just thought, that you could use a pencil if you wanted to try that. Whatever you use, be warned, it will be inked.

I decided that it would be a good idea to use my heat tool (for heat embossing) to help the ink dry. I used it on the thread for a minute or two - being careful not to hold it too closely so that the thread would not burn or discolor. That was nice... it is pretty cold today. Got my hands warm. :)
Voila... I now have the means to make 400 yards of any color striped bakers' twine in any color that I want. . . and warm hands too. Bonus! Let me know if you try this, and what you think. I am super excited, and can't wait to make cards with twine on them. :)
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8 comments:

Jen M said...

Fab idea, love that you could custom create colors! Lol at your soda. ;)

Kathryn said...

I love that you can get custom colors with this technique!

I read elsewhere (sorry I don't remember where) that you can accomplish the same thing by wrapping the twine around cardboard and then just making stripes perpendicular to how you wrapped the thread. It seems to me it might be easier to wrap around a small square of cardboard than something round, if you want to give that a try.

Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to more money saving tips!

Linda said...

Super fantubulous idea!!! The would make a great tutorial for OWH! I def will try this! Thanks again!

Lee Ann Barrett said...

Thanks for this great tutorial! I will have to give this a try! No matter how much twine, ribbon, etc that I buy, I never seem to have the right color on hand??

Margaret said...

What a great idea. Thanks for sharing. At the cost of the twine, this is a great savings.

JoAnn Ross said...

What a great idea!! I've been having twine envy, but I KNOW that just like ribbon, I'd never have the color I needed, so I've been trying to exercise a bit of self discipline and not going down the twine road.

But you just solved that problem! I will definitely be trying this!

Anonymous said...

Great tutorial! I'll just make one change, however - - a diet Dew for the diet Pepsi ;)
Mary, Wausau WI

Diana Evensen said...

Thank you for the great tip! (FYI - I found you via the OWH Memorial weekend blog hop.)