The Cup that Cheers

Woooohoooo! Today I made some ART!!! I think Mr. Mojo and Mrs. Muse have really returned at last! I have felt some creative stirrings over the past few days but other activities and fatigue have prevented me getting into the studio.

I haven’t finished tidying in there – the textile area is still a dumping ground, but since the main work zone is clear, I can get started. I didn’t spend long up there because I had to make tea, but an hour was enough to get me going.

I decided to work on an art journal page I started ages ago, in my small leather art journal.

This is a little book with hand-made paper pages that my hubby bought for me, and I’ve done a few pages in it, over a long period of time. This year I am planning to do more in it. The pages are a bit small, but none the worse for that. I had painted a background with different shades of brown acrylics in preparation for some sort of teabag art but hadn’t really decided on what to do.

Around about the same time, I made a sheet of acrylic film from liquid acrylic polymer with some tea from the teabags embedded in it, and I thought I’d use some of this for this project.

A page is now developing! It is entitled “The Cup that Cheers.” It will be embellished with teabags and real tea!

What a lot of teabags!

These are only some of the huge stash of teabags that I now have. All through the year before last, I got them to save them for me at church, after each service when we would gather for refreshments, and I usually got a dozen each time! This was in addition to all the ones I saved at home. These teabags have yet to be emptied of tea.

This is the collection of elements I am proposing to use for this project.

On the left of the journal is a small piece of paper with some ink and glimmer mist on it that I might use to stamp and cut out some text. On the left in front of the journal is the acrylic sheet with the tea embedded in it. To the right of that are some teabags – round and square, emptied of tea. On the right are some bags still with tea in them, which probably won’t be used.

The next photo shows a possible layout. The overlapping square bags on the left will be decorated in some way, and text added over and around them.

The round teabag on the right will form a tea cup. In the following photo you can see that I have stuck it down using regular matt gel medium, and I have tucked the bottom underneath to make it flat. In front of that is a teabag that I have trimmed and opened up.

I covered the surface of this cut teabag with gel medium and began to roll it up, to form the handle of the cup.

Here is the cup with the handle attached.

To form some steam coming from the cup, I have chosen one of my swirl stamps (The Stamp Barn CFLR 021 I) and used Versamark and sticky embossing powder to stamp onto the page. The white sheet underneath the stamp in the photo has been cut along the top edge to form a mask to cover the round teabag.

Here is the swirl of steam with the sticky embossing powder on it, prior to heating with the heat gun.

After melting the embossing powder, I added gold glitter. I took the following photo using the flash, but even so, the glitteriness of the glitter really doesn’t show up very well.

I added a couple of runs of water, using one of my new Ryn stamps, stamping with black archival ink. I outlined the top of the cup with a black Sharpie marker and added a little shading with a grey one, smudging it with my finger while it was still wet, but I’m not very happy with that so I shall most probably go over it with some acrylic paint.

I used another Ryn stamp – my original water droplets one, to add some water droplets to the bottom of the page, inking up only the bottom part of the stamp and letting the image fade at the top. I will add some definition to all these water runs and droplets with a white marker pen.

Here’s a mock-up of the page so far. At the bottom of the right hand page, under the tea cup, you can see a piece of my chicken packaging, which will be stuck down with gel medium. I may paint it first. Afterwards it will be highlighted with some gilding wax (seen top right in the photo).

Watch this space for the continuation of this page.