It Must Be Christmas!

A few Christmas cards have been dropping through our letterbox

so it must be Christmas now!

I thought I'd better get a move on and make a few myself.

I used the Tim Holtz/Alterations  'Ice Skates' Bigz Die from Sizzix.

I made a few with a background of old sheet music, aged and distressed a little and a Christmassy rub on.  The sentiment is rubber stamped onto

a Spellbinder's Nestabilitie die cut shape.

 

I then turned to my box of scraps and used some scrapbook paper

which wasn't at all Christmassy, but I think it still works.

The little sprigs of holly are plastic and came from some of last year's

Christmas Crackers!

 

I die cut the skates from card and leather.

Although the leather does have a nice texture, I think I prefer

to work with the card as it takes the distress ink better. 

Next on my list is to try making some Christmas Crackers -

 I've almost got enough toilet / kitchen paper roll inners!!

Thanks for looking and I hope your

Christmas preparations are going to plan :)

Ice Skates!

My latest favourite Bigz Die by Sizzix

 Alterations/Tim Holtz

is the Ice Skates

I bought it with the intention of making Christmas cards,

but today made a birthday card.

 It has a simple background of a doily and

K & Co Scrapbooking paper edged with a little

Old Paper Distress Ink.

I cut the skates from white mountboard

and painted them with Folk Art Acrylic

'Seamist' colour.

The boot laces are embroidery thread.

The heels and blades were coloured

with Distress Markers.  I tried to make

blades shiny by covering them with a layer

of Mod Podge Lustre.

To go with the card, I made a simple

stretch bracelet.

  

It's made up of Shell and Howlite chips

and a little gold coloured charm.

Hope the recipient will like them.

Thank you for looking :)

 

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Hello & Etsy!

Hello Blog mates!

It's been that long since I last blogged, I'd 

almost forgotton how to do it!

Hope this finds you all well and happy.

I haven't been doing much craft-wise apart from the

obligatory family and friends' greeting cards.

I did buy some fabric a few months ago though

from the Tim Holtz Eclectic Elements range

 

I bought the 'charm pack' 5" x 5" little squares

and it's totally lush.

Then I couldn't decide what to do with it and it

sat on my desk for ages and ages.

I finally decided it'd make great little outfits

for paper dolls - what else would it be for me!!

So I busily got to work and made

 ten lovely mixed media dolls.

I'd often thought about opening an Etsy shop but never did -

these little dolls I made gave me the push to go ahead.

I'm useless at self promoting as it feels so un-natural to me.

However, the deed has been done so here's the link

 If the link doesn't work (when you click on the pic)

there's a link near the top of my side bar.

I've called the shop 'GemstonePaperDolls'

because as well as loving making paper dolls,

I've also been buying a lot of genuine gemstones recently to

be made up into jewellery - although I don't know how

long that's going to take me to get around to! 

Got to start somewhere though I suppose.

I'll leave you with one of the dolls - she is actually

wearing a tiny little coral gemstone around her neck.

Her boots are real leather -

an upcycled old purse of mine.

Thanks for looking - 

I'll try not to leave it so long next time xx

Some 'Exquisite' Fun

Do you remember playing something like this when you were younger -

take a piece of paper, draw a head, fold the paper over, pass it on,

the second person draws the next bit and so on and then you

open it all up and laugh at the funny person you've created?

Well, it's still going on in adulthood in Blogland, but now it's called

'The Exquisite Corpse Project' oooo-eeer!!!.

Over on the Collabor-ART blog I belong to, we were put

into groups of four people and had to decide our own theme.

The photo above shows mine - 'Denim Girl'.

This is how I started off her head

(Don't look at the 'nose', I can't do noses - lol)

I gave her some real Denim hair

She was then sealed up in an envelope and passed

on to the next person who did their bit, sealed it up

and passed theirs on - you get the idea.

 

When all the sealed envelopes came back, I had

the pleasure of opening them and putting

 Denim Girl together.

 

 

Her little bag is real denim and her curly toed shoes 

are leather.  I think I will fix the four sections

together properly and may do something with the background too.

I have so far done my bit on two of the other 'corpses'

and can't wait to see how they turn out too.

Such fun!!!!! 

Spring Charm Swap

Anyone for Su Doku?

No, not me, I don't like number games,

scrabble and other words games yes, but nothing with numbers!

 

When I saw this set of Su Doku in a charity shop

a few years ago, I had no intention of ever playing a game with them,

but just knew they'd come in handy one day.

 

Cue - The Altered Dominos & Other Altered Game Pieces

group on Flickr.

The current swap on there is to 

" Create up to ten charms and receive ten. They have to be made using a game piece

 and have something on it that makes you think of Spring"

 

I wanted to use wire and the 'gizmo' wire coiling tool

to create some flowers with a gemstone in their centre. 

 

 

Although it's an easy tool to use (in theory!),

I think I need more practice.  However I was reasonably

pleased with how the flowers turned out.

 

 

First though, I painted one side of the Su Doku counters

white (to hide the numbers)

 and then attached book text with Liquitex.

 

   

The flowers (or maybe butterflies!) were then

stuck onto the counters with E6000 adhesive.

 

 

The gemstones I used are Carnelian,

except the blue one in the middle of the photo

which is Blue Chalcedony

 (no, I'd never heard of them before either!)

 

 

  

Flower or butterfly?

You decide!

 

Can't wait to see what charms I get back in return now!

 

Thanks for looking and I promise to try and get

round to see some of my blogging friends' blogs soon!    

Easter Crafting Activites with Chloe and Aaron

Over the Easter holiday my niece and nephew visited us

 and as usual we ended up playing in my craft room.

One day we made clocks from old CDs.

My husband had already bought some clock mechanisms in

and they chose how they wanted to decorate

the CDs - they looked great when they were finished -

and much to everyones amazement, they even worked!

Here's Aaron with his one.

Another day Chloe and I made some gem heavy rings.

We made the structure of the rings with some wire.

 

 Selected which stones we wanted.

We both chose Mookite -

Chloe the plain rounds and rectangles

for me.

Chloe only agreed to letting me put her photo

on here if I put one of me on too!

Here she is ....

.... and here's our finished rings

Chloe's

Mine

 .... and that's it ....

oh, all right, if I must

(Photo deleted .... sorry Chloe!!!)

We always have such a laugh together and I

can't wait for the next time they're here!

Thanks for looking :)

Another Desert Island Disc Page

I can hardly believe that I've now completed 7 of the 10

pages for this circle journal - Desert Island Discs.

This page is for Nigel.

As I was the seventh person to get his journal

I only had the choice of 3 songs - gulp!

As you can see from the photo above I chose

'The Lark Ascending' by Vaughan Williams.

Beautiful music, but no lyrics to work with - yikes!

Luckily though, Nigel had supplied a little bit about

why he'd chosen his songs so with that in mind

I got to work.

For the cover (above), I kept it simple and tried to create

a stormy sky scene with - guess what -

a single lark ascending from the clouds!

I based the inside on Nigel's story.

This is meant to represent an abandoned airfield

with lots of wild flowers.

I used Pan Pastels and rubber stamps and although

it looks more like a cultivated field, I am pleased

with how it turned out in the end.

Seven down, three to go - even less song choices to come -

lucky I like a challenge!

Thanks for looking :)

Desert Island Discs - Circle Journal - another page

Following on from my previous post earlier today,

this is the latest page I've completed - for Karen.

Of her song list, I chose 'C'est La Vie' by

Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

It isn't a song I'd ever heard before, but I took inspiration

from the words of the first verse ...

"Have your leaves all turned to brown

Will you scatter them around you".

Karen's page was a square of mountboard,

and I started off by sticking on old book pages around the edge,

then one layer of paint.

 

I thought I'd have a play with the small Gelli Plate I got

for Christmas and watched the video tutorial 

'Printing with Gelli: Monoprinting in Layers'  

I wasn't too keen on the next layer

Even less keen on the next layer!

So I brayered on a lighter shade of green

I added a few lines of paint, but still wasn't satisfied with it -

I carried on thinking in future 'less is more'!

I wanted some leaves on the page and remembered a great tutorial on

Ink Stained Roni's blog.

It's basically using brown paper, distress ink, glossy accents

and a leaf punch.

I love these little leaves, they're so realistic.

I also added onto the page a little card which opens up.

 This covered up quite a bit of the background (yay!!).

I scattered and stuck on some leaves, added a macrame, beaded

thingy I'd had pinned on my noticeboard (made a few weeks

earlier), a button from Hobbycraft which had the perfect

colour match flowers on, and added the title of the song

with some wooden letters.

 

 Now it didn't look so bad, in fact I was even pleased with it!

I hope that Karen will like it too.

Desert Island Discs - Circle Journal catch up

Towards the end of last year I joined up to a

round robin / circle journal with the theme

of Deserts Island Discs.

My original blog post has all the details in it. 

I've just finished my latest page, but before I blog it

thought I'd post here the earlier pages I did.

As it was a while back I can't remember all the details,

so will just show the photos.

This is the page I did for Virginia

for one of her chosen songs

'Dude Looks Like A Lady'

 

Front

 Back

Next is the page I did for Pat

for her song 'Isn't She Lovely'

Finally, here's the page for Sian

for the song 'Cut'.

 

 I was really pleased with the 'stencilled' couple

which was an image I printed off from Google, 

cut out and stencilled ink through.

I'll blog the page I finished yesterday next

which I can remember what I did with - only because

I took a lot of step by step photos along the way!