Play date cafe 17

This weeks colours for the Play Date Cafe challenge were great I thought, until I tried to use them and found that nothing I did turned out right!


Meanwhile I had been making tags to cover art journals with, (see previous post if you would like to have a look at them) so I thought I might try one of those as they seemed to be coming together well, so here it is, mounted onto a card decorated with a Martha Stewart punch. BTW I met some people last week who did not know she had been to jail - how did they miss it?



I love putting little bits of things inside those Tim Holtz book plates and filling them with Glossy Accents to seal it all in.

Art Journals

Lately I have been looking at my Art Journals and thinking that the covers were very dull, so I decided to bling them up a bit!

This first one is about 8" square, and is about half filled. A few pages have birds or other natural images on them so I wanted to follow on with that, without making the cover another journal page as such. I love adding 3D elements to artwork, but you can't do that too much inside the journal as the pages won't close if you do, so I contented myself with putting them on the cover. The tag was made a few weeks ago using one of TH's Distress Ink / Perfect Pearls techniques, also recently demo'd on C & C. Several bits move or dangle. You can see I am a fan of T. Holtz ideologies!



By contrast this one is very small, 4" approx, and I have kept the decoration very simple. I shall use this one for lettering. I love the beaded trim, (more movement) and the leaves were stencilled through a Stewart Gill stencil with Viva 3D Glitter Gel in Haematite.



I think this next one is my favourite! The journal is about DL size, and I have started using it. I stencilled a design on it with Brilliance Platinum then added some German Scrap. I Glimmer misted the tag, which was black, added a strip of GM'd text from a book in Polish (or it may be Czech I'm not sure as I don't know either language). Then I added a flower made from parts of several other flowers and various metal embellishments including part of an old earring and stuck it on. I stuck a few tiny bits together to make the 3 small pieces across the bottom. Again, a couple of the items move around as you handle the journal.



This last item is for "Stash Lists" as you can see from the front - this has lists of which colours I have in each kind of pad, Alcohol Inks, CB folders and dies I already have etc - with any luck, if I remember to take it with, I shall avoid duplications in future when I go craft shopping!! The book is about A6 size and was shocking pink so I toned it down with white acrylic paint, wrote out the title and added it along with some black lacy braid down the sides. Then I made a tag, using some more of the Polish text. I stuck on some black wired beads from a wedding shop, some T Holtz film strip, a couple of stamped images and some more moveable TH ideologies. And gems. Phew!



When I have finished using the books I shall add ribbons, beads, mini tags etc to the bindings, but it would make them too difficult to use if I did it at this stage!
Hope you like them.

Very big welcome to my new followers - It is very gratifying when people want to see my stuff, thank you so much! Please leave me comments or questions if you have time, I love to know people have been calling in.

Suze Weinberg Workshop

Here are some pictures of a workshop I went to at Craftrange in Burnley recently, given by the world famous Suze Weinberg. It was all about melt art, naturally. Suze was very friendly and down to earth, seemed to be enjoying her trip to the UK. We started off by making wax collages, which unfortunately I don't have a decent photo of - I was not too happy with mine. I shall try and post one another time when I do a better one (if!!) Then we went on to work with UTEE which was great, and we made a lot of small items which are very pretty. Again, I shall post some photos another time. There are some good pics on Suze's blog : http://suzeweinberg.typepad.com/suzeblogz/2010/02/life-is-goooooood.html
except there is a dreadful one of me.

This is my mate Carol with Suze - Debbie, who owns the shop with her husband Michael is looking on:


Here is Suze mid-demo:


And for those of you with perpetually messy desks like me, here is Suze's - just as bad!!

Play Date Cafe 16

I can't believe the is 16 weeks old! The colours this week are not often seen together - a very unusual and funky combination of red, lavender and silver -

and what a super photograph again! I'd love to be able to take pictures as well as that.
I sometimes find "lavender" a bit vague - is it pale blue or pale purple? - so having the photo helps. Anyway, I had got my hands on some new Martha Stewart border/corner punches this week, which chomped through the silver paper beautifully, and also had a play date with friend of mine who wanted to make some bookmarks as gifts. In a search for suitable (tall thin) stamps I found some lovely Elusive Images DL sets that hadn't seen ink for a while at the back of the box. They are now promoted to the front as they are so pretty. Having said that, I don't normally do "pretty" so this card is a bit outside the box for me, with bling, sparkle, silver, flowers and a fairly conventional design. I hope you like it. (After I said I wouldn't enter a card as well!)

Another Altered Box!

Though not really altered as it's still a box. Never been too sure - to qualify as "altered art" does it have to change its function or only its appearance?


Anyway, this started off when my mate Carol and I got together at my house, me being post-operative and slightly delicate, for a play day. We decided to have a go at a box - I have done lots before but Carol hadn't ever done one. So we set to on the kitchen table with empty boxes which we checked over for rough bits. We selected some pretty paper, each picking a set to stick to so that they would blend well. We measured and cut the pieces we would need, saving the left-over bits. We stuck them on, wrapping a little on the front edges (with hindsight, I forgot that it's best also to wrap the sides slightly as well, so we didn't do that!)

Once dry we gave them a light coat of gesso, cheap variety! Not going for full coverage, I wanted the patterned paper to show through. While the gesso dried we stamped some images onto the scraps of patterned paper we had saved. When it was dry we stuck these on to our boxes. I also stamped direct onto the box here and there to "fill" and I outlined the stuck on bits with charcoal pencils and a blending stump to make them pop out a bit. You could also use Promarkers or similar and blend them in. I cut some small strips to cover my edges (should have done it earlier!) then I went over it all with rub-on wax, especially round all the edges to "distress" it. If it is likely to get handled a lot, sealing with a varnish (I prefer matte) would be a good idea. The handle can be anything you can get hold of easily - mine is a large glass bead which happened to match the colours - I fed some cord through and tied it to a smaller plain bead inside to keep it secure.

You can also paint the insides or line them with pretty paper or fabric, depending what you want to use it for.

Play Date Cafe No 15

I love this week's Play Date Cafe challenge colours! and the image of the feathers is lovely - where can we get feathers on a roll in the UK? Anybody?
Anyway, one of the reasons I love these colours is that they can be either subtle or bright, depending on your mood, or a combination I guess!
I normally stamp stuff, but this time I used some images by Mary Engelbert to decorate a very small tag book - I was looking for something else and found this little pad of images that I had forgotten I had. They remind me of my favourite artist when I was a child - Mabel Lucie Atwell (though Mabel's little girls were never so stroppy as this lot!)

(Edit - photos changed for ones that are more in focus!)(I hope)




I don't know where I got the tag book, it's chipboard and about atc size. The paints were mostly match pots to start, overlaid with Distress Crackles, Precious Metal paints and Ferro, and the bits and pieces are from my embellishments drawer (yes I'm so sad, I have a whole drawer!)
Hope you like it!