Crafted By Corie's Minis Challenge/ S'More Camping Theme Crafts Made From Mostly DollarTree Items

Hello my crafty tribe, this is Artsy Maddie and let's get creative. So today I'm going to start off by showing you the crafts that we're going to be making just so that we don't get confused and they're all using the same paint. So all of the marshmallows are painted with the linen chalk white, sorry the rust-oleum linen white chalk paint and then all of the graham crackers will have the same paint. All of the chocolate will have the same paint and then this toasty brown color for the marshmallows that's all going to be the same as well. So just to kind of show you an overall picture of what we're making and then hopefully it won't get confusing as we're going through the projects. So I'll refer to the large marshmallows the ones with the faces as large marshmallows and then the medium and the small are the garlands. So here I'm just starting with the foam dice from Dollar Tree. These are the smaller ones that come in a package of four. I can't find the bigger ones that are already rounded that's what I was hoping for but I couldn't find those. So these are perfectly square and then I just sanded the edges so you just want some good quality sandpaper and just round off those edges a little bit. So for the other round large marshmallows I'm just using styrofoam balls and then just cutting them down so they have a flat top and a flat bottom. My styrofoam balls have seen better days. I think these were from a thrift store and a little beat up but I'm just going to make them work anyway. I'll just kind of have a little bit of lumpy bumpy marshmallows but that's okay. So this is Dollar Tree signs. Any Dollar Tree signs they're all roughly the same thickness just that compressed cardboard wood type material. I cut them all down into three inch by three inch squares and then I'm just laminating them to some EVA craft foam. So this is just a big sheet of white craft foam. I'm using the Aleene's tacky glue and just a really generous coat and I let this dry overnight. So I put some heavy paint cans on it and then just let it dry overnight and it laminated really well to the foam so this worked out well. I would definitely recommend this and then once that's dry this is the next day I just cut them all just roughly in between and then I will do a closer cut afterwards. So then I'm just cutting them a little bit closer to that edge. I knew that the foam was going to shrink a little so I wasn't too worried about it being perfect just roughly getting them cut down to that three inch by three inch shape. So for the large marshmallows the graham crackers are three inches by three inches. For the medium graham crackers they are going to be an inch and a half by an inch and a half. So this I'm just making myself a little template to make them look like graham crackers. So I cut a three inch by three inch piece of cardboard folded it in half and then I'm just using my hot tool to punch holes and make it into a stencil that I can use just to make this easy and make all of them all of them the same. So I just looked at a picture of a graham cracker and then just copied the pattern that was on it. So here I don't have my hot tool turned up very high so I'm going to kind of show you what works and doesn't work. So don't do this you can start off with your hot tool on quite a high setting so not the hottest but close to it like in that red zone if you have a hot tool like this you just kind of put it up to that last part but not quite to the end not quite as hot as it goes. So then I'm going to be doing like a stamping effect into the foam to give it texture. So I just crinkled up some foil and then I'm heating up the foam with my with my what do you call this the heat tool heating tool I guess and I'll show you I heated this foam up a little bit too much so don't do it too much it doesn't need that much heat just a little bit of it so you can see the foam got really melty a little bit too hot and then this foil was too rough so I'm going to show you what I did to fix that. So you don't need to put too much heat onto the foam if this happens if you get an effect you don't like if you heat it up it kind of goes back to the way it was just if that helps at all for you either if you make a mistake you can kind of heat it up and work with it again. So here I've turned the hot tool up a little bit hotter and you can see it just gives more of a definition to those dots to the pattern on the graham cracker and then what I did was cover the foil with just a plain sheet of foil so don't crinkle it but just lay it over top of the crinkled sheet and it kind of softens that texture and it worked out perfectly so you just crinkle up some foil but then lay a flat sheet over top of that and that'll give you a nice soft effect so this worked out really well I was really happy with this result it looks just like a graham cracker so then I just cut down the edges a little bit more just to get to get that three inch by three inch it didn't shrink as much as I thought it would so I just used my knife a little bit to just trim them down and get them to the right size you'll see here so you can just line it right up with the wood it works out pretty well so just a quick little heat with the hot tool heat gun that's what it's called sorry about that and then just give it a stamp with that foil and you'll get that nice texture that a graham cracker has so this is going to be this is the rest of that foam and I'm going to use this as the chocolate I was really wishing I had some brown glue sticks I think that would have been awesome but I don't have that I don't even know if there is such a thing but if you can find that I think that would be amazing chocolate but I don't have that so I'm using gloss mod podge and then I just mixed burnt umber with it to get that glossy shiny chocolate look and I just painted all that white foam so you see here I have the little the medium and the large marshmallow chocolate so I just did them all at once and we'll just be working on the large marshmallows first but then for the graham crackers I'm going to be using cashmere tan and cream mixed together and then I'm just turning it into chalk paint sort of thing like fake chalk paint with some baby powder that has talc in it so just putting a little bit of that in to give myself better coverage and I've been doing that a bit lately it works pretty good I'm pretty happy with it so just adding in a little bit more cream just to lighten it up so I just want that graham cracker color and you can see it has good thickness to it so I'll get good coverage with it and then you're going to see here these are the little tiny um tiny s'more pieces the medium s'more pieces and then the large graham crackers I gave them a lot more detail so they all have um the small and the medium ones have holes drilled in the middle of them for the garlands you'll see me do that in the garland part so I'm sorry things kind of overlap a little bit here but then I'm going to mix up the toasty color for the marshmallows so I am using again the cashmere tan and the cream but just adding in a little bit of vivid yellow just to get that toasty caramelized kind of color that you get when you and I added in some of the um matte mod podge just to make it a little bit transparent so that we can get a nice kind of depth to it and then this sponge is damp so I wrung all the water out of it so it's not wet just has that little bit of dampness to it just to blend a little bit better with that toasty color so you can see it has a little bit of transparency to it and then I just did the tops of them just like when you roast a marshmallow just whatever touched the fire or was close to the fire browns so just taking your time blend it with that sponge that sponge is from Dollar Tree as well and then I was inspired by these little s'mores these are actually from Dollar Tree they're in the learning section um I homeschool my kids so I like to pick up stuff like that and I just thought it was cute and that was actually what inspired this so I just thought I would kind of try and copy those faces so I'm just using an oil-based sharpie marker you could use paint or just whatever you have probably even just a regular sharpie would work too and then I just went in with a little pink pencil crayon just to give it some little rosy cheeks and then we're just going to glue these large marshmallows all together so I have the setting on my glue gun set to low to work with the foam so I don't want it too hot I don't want to melt all the foam that I've used for this chocolate and for the marshmallows so just putting them all together I got a little carried away with these projects I was having so much fun with them so this video is a little bit longer hopefully you guys will like them too and and watch the whole thing if not um the garlands are next and then the realistic sort marshmallows are at the end but here they are all finished and then just to let you guys know so today's video is part of the crafted by cori minis challenge so every third friday of the month she hosts this mini or tiered tray um challenge that we all participate in and it's just awesome it's such a fun one to be a part of and I just really love crafted by cori she's been such a encouragement and a great friend to me on youtube so I hopefully I hope you guys will check her out if you haven't I'm sure you already know her but if you don't definitely go check out her channel I'll have a link to her channel in my description box and then I'm just going to move on to the garlands so I'll show you guys I was trying to get creative what to use for the smaller marshmallows so I got very creative using things from Dollar Tree these are just some toys from their summer section and I just cut them up they even had the hole down the center now after I've gone through all this process I would recommend to you guys that you just find a way to use dowel in order to be strong enough to keep the paint on it and have it last a bit longer this worked and they look super cute but just for durability I think I would try and do a dowel and I might actually try and redo these at some point with dowel and then this is going to be the small marshmallow so this is something they sell at Dollar Tree as well in their summer toy section and then I just cut them down small to be little marshmallows however I don't think the paint is going to stand up too well on these over the years so definitely if you can do dowel and then you'll just have to find a way if you don't have a drill press that's what I was worried about was drilling down into the center of a dowel but as I was working with the drill I'm like you know what I think it wouldn't be that bad you could set up a little jig or a clamp to hold the dowel as you're doing it and then it wouldn't be so bad so here is the medium graham cracker pieces and I'm just drilling the holes in the middle and then this is the small graham cracker pieces and just drilling the hole in the middle so the small ones are one inch and the medium size is one and a half inch squares so if you're wanting to copy either of these so these are the one inch and then the medium size is one and a half inch and then you just cut down some foam to be a little bit smaller I just did a little bit less than a quarter inch smaller than the wooden pieces and then it just fits on like your little piece of chocolate so I painted all of those little foam marshmallow pieces white just with the rust-oleum linen white chalk paint and then this is just those little foam pieces just showing putting the holes in those as well so here I am just showing you the painting them again so the gloss mod podge mixed with the burnt umber to do that all the chocolate paint and they took two coats on everything and it just gives you that shiny chocolate look adding the gloss mod podge to it and then for the graham crackers again just showing you the cashmere tin and the cream a little bit of talc baby powder will give you good coverage on it and help it stick a little bit better too so it did give me pretty good coverage on these you could probably get away with one coat I did do two coats but you could probably get away with just the one so here I just mixed a little bit of water once I was done to that chocolate color and I'm going to be doing these beads with it so if you guys haven't seen these yet they're selling natural wooden beads at Dollar Tree it's like somebody at Dollar Tree listens to us I was pretty excited to see those so here I'm just putting them right into the paint and then out onto some parchment paper and then I just use these little coffee stir sticks just to let them dry on and it worked out pretty well and then just stuck them into some styrofoam just some scrap pieces of styrofoam that I had if you actually jab little holes in the styrofoam with a pair of scissors first then it's easier to stick the little coffee sticks into the foam I caught on to that after on these ones so these ones I just had to narrow down the tips of the coffee sticks just so that they would stick into these round beads so Dollar Tree is selling round beads and little squared square rounded beads so I just did the graham cracker color and the white color so I'm almost out of my rust-oleum paint there so I just added a little bit of water used up the last of it so then for the white ones the marshmallow ones I'm just adding that toasty caramelized color to those as well and just trying to figure out how to do that here with the sponge so I actually ended up putting a little bit of it onto the sponge and then just dabbing it onto the bead and that seemed to work the best so I would recommend just doing that and then those don't take too long to dry at all and then just going in these are the small marshmallows and so just doing those and then the medium ones as well and again just using that damp sponge so it's not wet I've wrung all the water out but it just has that little bit of dampness to it just to blend in that paint and so that is that toasty color that has the mod podge in it so it's a little bit transparent so these are some old macrame beads that I had actually gotten from an old neighbor when I was a teenager and I've used them on many projects there's lots of colors and shapes and they're just awesome and every time I use them I think of her so these were just some odds and ends kind of blue and blackish colors if you haven't seen my galaxy nighttime camping themed tiered tray video that's what this stuff is all going to coordinate with at the end so I'll have a link to that at the end if you haven't seen that video but it has a lot of this night sky camping at night feel to it so I just wanted to stick with that and kind of add that in as well so I'm just flicking some paint on some white paint with that toothbrush just giving it that kind of starry effect and then once I had it the way I liked it I just sprayed it with some sealer just to keep that white paint on there the little stars just keep them in place and then it's time to just put these together so I'm just using the glue again just on low temperature so I don't melt the foam and I thought it would be easiest if I put the chocolate onto the foam before I start stringing it onto the twine and it did it helped a little bit and then you might have to poke out some of the paint from the hole but it's not too bad so I just put a little bit of glue on the end of the twine a little bit of hot glue just to make it more like a needle like sharper that it would hold its shape and then I just started threading everything through so I started off with two of the small beads but then I'm just using the big beads and the medium marshmallows for this garland here so it goes a galaxy bead and then the graham cracker that has the chocolate and then the marshmallow and then a graham cracker that doesn't have chocolate and then another bead that's the order that it goes in and I was lucky enough to find all this recollection stuff at Dollar Tree I don't know if you guys have seen any of that but I was really excited to find some of that at Dollar Tree so I got these chalkboard tags and this chalkboard pencil it's kind of weird it feels like a wax crayon like a soft wax crayon but as you can see it worked pretty good it was easy to use and then again just using that little inspiration face to draw some little faces onto these little square ones so just a nice easy little face just a couple of dots with a little little rounded mouth nothing too complicated and then the pencil crayon worked good for doing in the little rosy cheeks and then just gluing those together so same thing just glue on low temperature so you don't melt your foam I think the chocolate worked out pretty good with that gloss mod podge just gave it that little bit of sheen and then just tying on the tags so these were wooden tags they were such such a great buy I was so excited to find that recollection stuff you guys will have to let me know did you find any of that recollection stuff I don't know if that was just like a clearance thing if they were just getting rid of stuff from because that's what Michael sells a lot of that recollection stuff so I wanted to put these square square large marshmallows on the end of each garland so I had to create a way to stick those on so I just cut a paper clip down to be like my little latch kind of thing to tie on to so I just used some of the tacky glue if you had crazy glue or something that works with metal that would probably be a good idea it's a little hard with foam and metal I don't know what works on both of those but this seems to hold okay and it was like a tight fit down into that little those little holes so then just tying it onto my garland I just thought they were so cute just a little happy camping garland I'm really enjoying these camping themes and hopefully you guys are too so that is the medium garland with the medium marshmallows and then I'll just show you guys the small one how we put that one together so these are the small beads from Dollar Tree and then just getting the twine all ready to start putting those on so I'd actually done this one the first time so I'm just figuring out how to make like a little glue hot glue end for it so that I can thread everything onto it so I didn't bother with this one gluing the chocolate to the graham cracker pieces I just threaded them all on loose and it seemed to work okay as well I don't think it matters too much I just thought with the bigger ones I didn't really want the chocolate turning so it does kind of do that on this smaller one the chocolate can kind of turn out of square with the graham cracker so if that bothers you then maybe I would glue it down before you thread them on but I just thought it'd be a little tricky because the pieces are so small so I just threaded them all on loose and the pieces do turn a little bit so you can see some of the chocolate isn't square with the graham crackers but it doesn't really bother me too much so I just left it and then just getting them all tied together I love their cute little faces and that's the small garland and then I'll just run you through the last project which is the more realistic marshmallows I just really wanted the marshmallows to have the rounded ends and be fairly sturdy so this was my original idea I used this strong cardboard tube that bracelets these glow-in-the-dark bracelets come in from Dollar Tree and then I just cut it up with my chop saw at an inch and a half long so all these little pieces here are just under an inch and a half and I'm just giving them a rough little sand and then I use these little yo-yos from Dollar Tree as well they're just in the like goodie bag section for making kids goodie bags for birthday parties and stuff and they fit perfectly onto this cardboard tube like they actually kind of fit just in just on the outer edge of the cardboard tube so it worked out pretty good they were nice and strong fit together really well but then it just leaves that little divot like the cardboard tube is just a little bit smaller than the yo-yo so this thin EVA foam they sell these little foam packs at Dollar Tree as well that was the perfect depth to fit so I just needed one one depth of this EVA foam wrapped around and that fills it in perfectly so I just measured the width and then just getting them all glued together so these are really sturdy like if you wanted to make things to sell or whatever these actually came together really well and they're really strong and they seem like it's such a perfect fit they seem like they're kind of manufactured almost at the end so I actually have two extra ones of because they're just so cute so I've been posting a lot on my Instagram if you guys don't follow me yet on Instagram I share extra pictures and close-ups of some of my projects so let me know to you if there is anything that you need to see close up I can take a photo and post it on Instagram for you so you can see here just that layer of foam just fits in perfectly into that little tube area in the middle and I just used that foam glue from Dollar Tree it works okay and then just the hot glue to hold it all while it's drying and then I just used a little tiny bit of spackle like polyfilla stuff in the seam just because I wanted these to look like marshmallows I just really wanted to see if we could get a nice strong smooth kind of marshmallow shape that was nice and strong and durable so this was it and then I just gave it a couple coats just with the pouncing action so painting it with like a little pounce to your brush to get that kind of soft texture and it helps too when you go to put on the toasty bit then it just hits those edges and looks just like it's caramelizing and then I just use my hot tool to put a hole in the bottom I actually just put like a branch into these that you'll see in a second here so I just needed a hole for that to go into that was really smelly I would suggest doing that outside nothing like the smell of burning plastic so again just using that toasty paint with the mod podge so it's a little bit transparent and then the damp sponge just to blend it all in and you just want to take your time and get it a nice blend to it make it look kind of natural and then I just went out to my front yard and found a couple of twigs they weren't as thick as I wanted I might look for some better ones down the road but these work for now so I just took the bark off the little top part to stick it down into that hole with some hot glue and there they are doesn't that look cute just like a real little toasted marshmallow on a stick so I can't wait to put this all in my tiered tray this video is too long to do that and I am going to do one more camping theme craft video so once I have that done at the end of that one I'll show you my tiered tray and stuff all together again if you haven't seen this video though definitely check it out I'll have the link in my description box and at the end of this video too to click on that but make sure you check out the playlist so there's going to be a playlist today with all the minis and all the tiered tray ideas I have lots of friends in this playlist so be sure to check it out they're really excited and up in their game and everyone's got such great stuff to share so be sure to check out the playlist and thank you guys so much for watching thanks to all who've subscribed oh my goodness I can't believe how fast my channel's growing and I'm so excited so thank you guys so much we'll see you soon