WOYWW 156–Altered Boxes, Zentangle Art and a Birthday Card

Time for the world’s most famous nosey fest again – courtesy of our lovely Julia who tries to keep us all under control – click on the link in my sidebar to take you to her blog to find out what it’s all about, and join in if you dare like!

Today is my birthday, and we are going out, and I’m already running pretty well on empty so I can’t guarantee how active a participant in WOYWW I shall be this week. This is my desk as of yesterday.

I’ve been working on a birthday present for a friend. It’s her birthday today too and as usual I’ve been working at the last minute. We’ve been too busy for comfort recently and what with all the extra activity and also the hot weather, I’ve not been very well and haven’t had any reserves for being in my ARTHaven but it’s been a bit cooler these past couple of days, and I’ve been working hard, trying to finish the project in time. I bought some little plain boxes for altering at a craft show a while back, and I’m giving my friend one of these. I thought I’d work on two others at the same time. They are being covered with different coloured scraps of tissue paper, stuck down with regular matt gel medium and then embellished. I’ve got on quite a bit further since this photo was taken, and my friend’s box is now finished apart from drying time. I shall be doing a separate blog post about the whole project so won’t go into a lot of detail here, but if you’re interested to see how the boxes turn out, watch this space!

On the desk you can see bits of the tissue paper, my gesso and gel medium, some acrylic paints to paint the small embellishments (a starfish and a shell, and a few of my air dry clay pebbles made for my on-going Choc-a-Bloc project – no, Julia, they really are NOT Imperial Mints lol!!). I’ve added some yarn to the first box as well, to make a wave/ripple texture. Also on the desk is my palette with a piece of damp kitchen roll draped over it in an attempt to keep some acrylic paint from drying out! Looks pretty manky, doesn’t it.

For the benefit of those of you who only visit my blog for WOYWW, I thought I’d show you my latest zentangle art which I did this week, which I have propped up at the back of the desk. Here’s a larger version. She is called “La Bella” – “The Beauty” – and I hope she lives up to her name! (The link will take you to the post about this, which also includes some sketches from my zentangle journal.)

Last night I made a card for my friend to go with her present – when I made my hubby’s card for our anniversary, I made two almost identical backgrounds and used the second of these, and I deliberately made the box to co-ordinate with it. It’s a relatively simple card, with a stamped heat-embossed sentiment, and some flowers cut with my old Cricut cutting machine a while back, which I had in my stash of flat white flower cut-outs which I can then colour and embellish as required. In this case they were coloured with Distress Stains (Faded Jeans, Broken China, Peeled Paint, Pine Needles and Picket Fence) and hand embossed, and the veins being painted in with Pumice Stone Distress Ink, and layered and applied with Pinflair glue. The centres of the flowers were done with Stickles. The whole thing is matted onto some plain white card which I have distressed using Broken China Distress Ink.

Sorry to be so hopeless at visiting everyone last week – given how busy I’m going to be this week too (and no doubt having to recover afterwards) I can’t guarantee I’ll do a lot better this week. Thanks to everyone who visited last week – I really appreciate all your lovely comments, and those who have decided to follow me.

Happy WOYWW, and have a great week, everyone, with lots of opportunity for creativity.