WOYWW 498–Mystery Project Revealed

Writing this on Tuesday afternoon.

Three little hanging heart ornaments for friends, from this:

to this:

Here are some closer details.

Can you guess what I made the little terracotta pots from? Bet you can’t… Details in an earlier post.

The purple heart was for one friend’s birthday, so I also made her a card.

I have uploaded all the posts about the making of these hearts and the card and you can scroll down to see them if you are interested.

Some Fun with Photo Manipulation

The other day I was preparing some fruit for my normal “diet day” platter and cut a peeled clementine in half. I thought it made such a beautiful shape.

I thought I would have some fun manipulating this photo, as I did once before with a rather artistic piece of orange peel.

Clockwise from top left, adding effects cumulatively: black background, brightened colour; posterise; paper cut-out; polar co-ordinates. Quite fun, eh? I could have done loads more with it, and spent (wasted?) all day at it. (I know, I should get out more…) Oh, by the way, it tasted good!

Sourdough

I didn’t make sourdough again this week but made some more sourdough crackers and fed Esmeralda and put her back in the fridge to cogitate for another week.

She’s quite happy as long as she gets a weekly feed and a clean bed for the week!

Other Cooking

Overnight I made some more bread in the bread maker, with lots of seeds – sunflower, pumpkin, sesame and brown flax. Gorgeous and crunchy with a good nutty flavour!

I also made a salmon and broccoli bake for our supper. Here it is, ready to go in the oven.

Computer Update

Most things are now working OK, but the computer shop have told me that both hard drives that I took in have failed. The caddies are OK though. One of them I was pretty sure was dud (very old) but the other one is pretty new and still in guarantee so I’m hoping to get my money back on that one. Some things on the computer still aren’t working properly and I need to spend time resolving these issues but I’m too busy with other stuff at the moment.

Kitties

Ruby is still grounded because my hubby has been out a lot and the weather has been too awful so he hasn’t been able to spend any time in the garden. Neither of them has been hankering to go out that much (which isn’t surprising given that it’s raining all the time) but they are obviously needing to blow off steam more than usual!

Health Update

I had a very fruitful appointment with my surgeon last Thursday, and I’ve blogged full details here so I won’t go into it all now, but suffice it to say we discussed risks and advantages of further surgery or leaving it alone, and he is going to consult a colleague in Exeter to discuss the best way forward. I came away much better informed about why things had gone wrong in the spring, and the reason for my post-operative infection, and as a result, I am no longer quite so resistant to further surgery if that is what they conclude will be the right thing to do.

This situation is pants…

The pants saga continues, not having heard anything since my last conversation with them on 19th November, when I emailed the GP and requested a further prescription, and they promised they’d deal with it straight away. I phoned the rep last Wednesday and she didn’t return my call. I managed to speak to her today and she said she’d been waiting for news before calling me, and I said I would have appreciated a call to let me know at least what was happening, even if it was nothing!! This afternoon they called me back and said they were requesting another prescription as a matter of urgency, and I said I was so fed up with this and wanted the pants by Christmas. Ha ha. Tomorrow is the last dispatch day till the New Year. I was practically screaming by this point. I said that would mean they wouldn’t even be able to start making them till then, and she agreed that they usually took about 4 weeks, which would take us into February!! I said I could just about manage with two pairs (one on, one in the wash) but if I had an accident I’d be sunk. She said they’d mark the order as top priority. Again, she kept saying, as they all do, “I completely understand, I really do…” but it’s just words, words, words…

As I say, the whole thing is pants. Grrrr grrrrr grrrrr x 3,000,000. I could add a few choice words too, but I don’t want to break my laptop after all the trouble I’ve had with it recently.

Have a great time over Christmas everybody. I probably won’t be posting next WOYWW because it’s Boxing Day and we are out.

Altered Pizza Box

Edited – now with video.

A mixed media project. I am giving away one of my flower painted Ikea mirrors as a house-warming present, and recently discovered that it fits exactly inside a 10-inch pizza box. I thought the box needed a bit of decoration to make it a slightly more acceptable wrapping, and I ended up making a full mixed media project out of it!

I got a bit carried away and forgot to take any photos during the making, but I did video the whole process.

I started by covering the whole of the outside of the box with gesso, and then had a rummage in my Tim Holtz papers – they’ve all got a bit muddled up and I’m not sure which stack they come from – either Crowded Attic or Lost and Found, but it doesn’t really matter – they’re all nice and vintage. I found some nice faces and tore them out and distressed the edges with my distressing tool, and stuck them down onto the box with PVA adhesive.

I also stuck down some ripped up corrugated cardboard with some of the surface paper torn away, which gives a gorgeous texture. Once the PVA was dry, I painted these pieces with gesso, and then began painting the whole surface with acrylics.

I chose a blue and green palette, and did some dry brushing with white acrylic, and once I’d got the effect I wanted, I added some iridescent gel medium which gives a gorgeous shimmery surface, and then some pearlised acrylic ink, concentrating on the textured corrugated parts. The whole thing was extremely shimmery by this time.

I created some text, “Home is where the heart is” by cutting out some words and letters from scrap printed paper in my stash, and stuck these down onto a further piece of scrap paper with regular matt gel medium, which I also used to stick the pieces down onto the surface. Before this I coloured them with Victorian Velvet Distress Ink.

Once they were laid down, I took an old credit card and added some crimson acrylic paint with the edge of the card dipped in the paint, creating frames around the words and around the face pictures. I then added some more lines using my white marker pen.

To form a border, I used more of the crimson acrylic paint, and also some dark blue, and once the border design was laid down, I went round the edges and embellished the border with the white marker pen, and finally added some shadows with a mixture of Payne’s Grey and white acrylic paint.

The final touch was to add some Treasure Gold gilding wax to the raised texture. A really shiny, shimmery effect!

Once the outside was dry, I painted the whole of the inside roughly with gesso. This will be fine once there is tissue paper inside the box, wrapping the mirror.

Here is the finished box, propped up with the edges of the lid showing. I painted these with a mixture of green acrylics.

The box closed:

The sides of the lid go inside the box, and I painted the sides of the base with rich blue acrylic paint.

Now for some details. This is the bottom left corner. You can see one of the pictures I laid down, and also some of the corrugated cardboard. I love the effect of the top surface layer of paper being partially ripped away.

One of the face pictures. They are pretty subtle with the iridescent gel medium, and they also reflect the light so it’s a bit difficult to see them in the photos.

Finally a detailed shot of the text.

I think you can see how shiny and shimmery the surface is in this photo.

A fun project to do, and I completed it in an afternoon. One day I would like to paint and embellish the rest of my pizza boxes, which are used to store various materials in my ARTHaven.

Card from Recycled Medication Sachets

Those who follow or visit my blog will know that I’m in Full Recycling Mode at the moment, and lots of things I would normally throw away are prompting the question, “Could I make art out of this?”

For my ulcerative colitis, I take medication in the form of granules, which come in individual plastic foil sachets. Taking two of these a day, I realised I was throwing quite a lot of the empty sachets away, and asked myself if they could be recycled in some form. I asked my hubby, “Could I make art out of these?” He pulled a face and replied emphatically, “NO!!” I think he thinks I’m completely off my head at the moment with my obsession with used teabags and empty food boxes… but he should be used to me by now, after 28 years of marriage!!

Anyway, I decided to give it a try. The project turned out a lot more difficult than I’d anticipated as these sachets are made of the most unresponsive material ever!! However, I was determined to make my hubby a card for his birthday today – one in the eye for someone who so doubted my abilities to make art out of such things!

I have made a video of most of the process – disasters and successes – but unfortunately I got so carried away that towards the end I didn’t notice that the camera’s memory was full, so I didn’t manage to complete the whole thing. I also forgot to take very many photos. (Actually, altogether, this project seemed fraught with problems from beginning to end!)

Empty sachets cut open, with some “spills” made from them. The scissors are to stop the beastly things from curling up again!

Epic Fail! My first attempt at creating the background for my project.

I tried to stick the flattened out sachets onto a piece of card using gel medium. They kept curling up and not sticking, so I left it to dry under a pile of books. The result was anything but successful, with a very messy and lumpy surface.

I tried sticking the sachets with Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive (my favourite wet glue) but it didn’t work, probably because the surface was so slick, and not porous. For paper and card, that glue is second to none, but not for this, unfortunately. I was at my wits’ end, trying to think of a way of sticking them, when my hubby phoned, so I picked his brains without giving him any details about the project, and he suggested double sided tape. I was sceptical, but decided I had nothing to lose by trying, and lo and behold, it worked a treat.

I covered a fresh piece of card with strips of double sided tape, and laid down the opened-up sachets onto this, centring the first one and cutting the excess off the sides of the outer ones. It was really, really hard lining these up, because the surface was soooo sticky, and stuck on contact, and the sachets kept curling up. I managed some degree of success in the end, and once it was done, I embossed it with the Cuttlebug, using the folder “Diamond Plate,” which I thought would give the card a more manly air!

I thought the stuff might melt in an interesting way, and produce some nice wrinkled surfaces like Tyvek, but it was very stubborn and only rolled up on itself, but with further heating, it got quite tacky, and I was able to scrunch it up and make it stick to itself. I made six scrunched up ones and laid the three smaller ones on top of the larger ones, hoping they wouldn’t end up simply looking like scrunched up tin foil! I stuck them together with double sided tape and secured them to the embossed card with small jewelled brads. This piece was then layered onto a piece of black card, which in turn was stuck to a white card base.

I had a terrible job rolling the sachets to form the spills which I wanted to use for flower stems – the stuff was so darned slippery and it was very hard to get them to roll tightly enough, but after experimenting, I discovered the best way was to start them off around a wooden barbecue stick, and after a few turns, to withdraw the stick, and pull back on the roll to tighten it, before applying exactly the right amount of pressure (learnt by trial and error) to complete the roll. A line of ATG double sided tape secured the roll.

I stuck down three stems made from the spills, using narrow double sided tape, and then heat-embossed in silver the Happy Birthday sentiment at the top.

Here is the finished card:

and a detailed shot of the flowers.

I used the reverse side of the sachets for the background, being unprinted, and a slightly duller silver than the front surface, which I used for the 3-D pieces. I have got some dull silver card which would have been a lot easier to handle for the embossed background, and I would have ended up without all those joins, too, but I wanted to prove that I could make something out of the sachets!

I gave my hubby the card this morning and he loved it. When he opened it, he saw that I had stuck a sachet onto the inside of the card, with the message, “Who said I couldn’t make art out of these?!!”

Honour is satisfied! However, this was such awful stuff to work with – very unforgiving, and very unresponsive, and the whole project involved a huge amount of very frustrating work. The result wasn’t over-impressive after all that, so I don’t think I shall be continuing with this material. Some things are better for recycling than others! If anyone can come up with some other ways it might be used, I’d be glad to hear it, but from now on the empty sachets will be going into the bin again, I’m afraid. The only part that I think may have potential for the future is the rolled “spills” which could be quite effective en-masse, but it’s a lot of work! Is it worth it, I wonder?

Recycled Mini-Album–Binding and Painting the Signatures

I have now bound the signatures into the cover, and also worked on the end papers. In keeping with this being a recycled project, I thought it would be fun to make the end papers from recycled papers. For some time I have been saving commercial envelopes with printed designs inside them – these designs are supposed to make it impossible to read the contents of the envelope. Some of them are really quite attractive, and if you unfold the envelopes you can salvage some quite decent sized pieces.

There was only one design that I had enough of to do this project, a kind of herringbone pattern resembling a twill weave, in a brownish colour which suits the style of the book quite well.

It was a bit dull on its own, so after cutting them to size, I stamped them with an Artistic Stampers music background stamp, using Pumice Stone Distress Ink. I then inked the paper with more Pumice Stone, and then distressed the edges further with Walnut Stain Distress Ink. This is the result.

Unfortunately, as is my wont, I didn’t think far enough ahead, and the end paper which will be stuck to the first and last pages will have to be trimmed to fit, which means that the music on that side will no longer be in the centre… Ah well, you can’t expect perfection all of the time!

Before the end papers are put in, I have to attach the embellishments on the cover so that the brad backs will be concealed behind the end papers. I have decided to leave this until I’ve completed the construction of the inside of the book.

I painted the spine with black acrylic paint in case any of it shows once it is covered when the book is completed.

Stitching the signatures and binding them into the cover, I had to decide whether or not to create a decorative spine using the excess thread from stitching each signature. Jennibellie does this to great effect, stringing beads etc. onto the threads. However, I decided I wanted this little book to have a traditional, vintage look, and to be more masculine, so I decided to create a plain binding. To do this, you have to begin with the thread on the inside, working in figure-of-eight style through the prepared holes in the signatures and in the binding, and finally tying the ends together tightly, cutting off the excess, and to be sure that it won’t come undone, adding a small blob of glue onto the knot. This leaves a very clean and neat finish on the outside of the spine.

It was quite difficult when returning through the centre hole, not to catch the previous thread with the needle – if this happens, it is impossible to pull up the threads tightly, prior to tying.

I used waxed linen thread which is nice and strong.  In the above photo, the stitching is complete, but the ends of the threads have yet to be cut off. This is what the spine looks like at this stage:

For an album this size, three holes per signature are sufficient. To finish this off nicely, I painted the spine again with black acrylic paint.

The inside of the front cover looks like this, with the faux leather folded around and glued.

The first signature is on the right. As with all of them, the outermost page is the largest recycled Christmas card. Here it is weighted down with my heat gun – the signatures initially proved very springy and unwilling to lie flat, but they soon settled down. Also, I the book will look better once it has something on the pages to bulk them up a bit.

I painted the red Christmas card with white gesso, and then added some burnt umber acrylic paint around the edges, and also into the corners of the folded faux leather, so that no white would show once the end papers were glued in place.

In the next picture, you can see the different sized cards forming the pages in each signature. I think this will make for an interesting appearance once I paint the borders on the pages.

Because the colour scheme of the finished book is going to be fairly dark, I decided to paint the pages with black gesso rather than white.

I had awful problems with the pages sticking together. To start with, I dried each one vigorously with the heat gun in an attempt to speed up the process, but it only seemed to make it worse – I was probably melting the acrylic in the gesso! When I returned to the book later, this is the sort of thing I found on each double page spread, even happening where there is a gap between the signatures, as in this case:

Horrible, isn’t it. Opening the book, you could hear an awful cracking, crunching sound as the pages popped apart, causing damage each time.

I tried going through the whole book, repainting each page, and this time leaving them to dry naturally for several hours or overnight, and the result was certainly better, but the problem remained. It occurred to me that other people might have experienced the same difficulties, and a Google search showed this to be the case. There were quite a few helpful suggestions as to how to deal with the problem, but most involved inserting an extra page between the art pages, made of either waxed paper or baking parchment. I did not want to do this as it would spoil the overall effect of the book. The best solution I could find was to add a protective layer to each page – some people suggested watered down gel medium but I think the problem would have remained. The addition of a fine dry powder such as talcum powder or cornflour seemed to be the best solution, and this is what I have done.

Tipping a small amount of baby powder into a bowl, I used a very large, soft brush to apply a very small quantity to the pages. So far, so good!

Recycled Mini-Album

Unfortunately I am unable to get started with my new sewing machine because I have a bit of a deadline for a new project, which I must at least make a good start on before I do anything else.

Being inspired as always by Jennibellie, I have started making a mini-album entirely from recycled and junk materials. I am really enjoying being in Frugal Mode, and am amazed how good it feels, making art from things that normally find their way into the bin! My ARTHaven is cluttered up with empty cereal boxes and other food packaging and it’s fun to repurpose and upcycle it. Cereal packet cardboard is very good quality and can be used to make all sorts of things.

The foundation for this album is a dried milk box which I cut down to be less tall and more square, to fit the square shaped Christmas cards which were going to be thrown away. Funny how last year, the majority of the cards we received were square rather than rectangular…

To make a book cover from a cereal box or other similar packaging, you need first to take the book apart and lay it flat. You can fold in the flaps and glue them down to make the cover more rigid. The narrow edge of the box opposite where you opened it forms the spine of the book. The box can be cut down to whatever size you want.

To make the signatures (bundles of pages) I selected several of the larger square cards and cut them all to the same size. To each one I added several smaller ones, cut down so that there is a quarter-inch difference in size all round – when painted, these pages will have borders which will be visible outside the smaller pages, which should produce multiple borders by the time you reach the centre-fold of each signature.

I only had enough cards to make five signatures, and these are pretty loose between the covers of the album, but once they have been covered with decorative papers, painted, had photos, journaling and embellishments added to them, they should fit nicely. In my opinion there is nothing worse than an album that is bursting at the seams with too small a spine so that it will not close!

The theme will be steampunk, and I needed more or less to complete the cover before adding the signatures, as it will be much more difficult to do so once the book is assembled. Any embellishments that require brads to attach them have to be attached to the cover before the end-papers are added, as these will conceal the backs of the fastenings.

Jennibellie has made a number of journals where the threads attaching the signatures to the binding become a feature – something to which to attach beads etc. to make a highly decorative spine. However, for this album I don’t want to do this, but to keep to a traditional, old-fashioned book appearance, with the stitching concealed.

I have covered the front and back boards of the cover with faux leather, according to Sheena Douglass’ excellent tutorial on the subject. She uses craft card which is quite substantial and is strong enough to stand alone as a soft “leather” cover for her notebooks, but since I wanted to use the faux leather to cover existing boards, its inherent strength wasn’t an issue, and anyway I didn’t want to use new materials for this. Instead, I had a good rummage amongst my odd bits and pieces of paper and card, and came across some ordinary computer/office card which I had printed some Christmas service sheets on for church many years ago – they were printed on both sides, so I’m not sure why I kept them. I knew this wasn’t terribly good quality card and it might not stand up very well to getting wet, but I had nothing to lose by trying!

After spraying on the glycerine/water mixture, I had to be careful when “massaging” it into the surface of the card because I could feel very quickly that the surface was beginning to break down, so I patted it gently to encourage the liquid to penetrate the fibres of the card, turning it over frequently and working on it gently. I used three applications of the liquid in the end, scrunching it up between each one. I was able to avoid tearing it by taking great care when teasing it apart after it had been scrunched.

Using craft card, of course, Sheena was off to a head start with an existing brown substrate, but being white, mine had to be painted. I used slightly watered down Raw Umber acrylic paint for the first coat – I didn’t want to apply anything too thick because I thought it might cause the card to tear. A second coat of less watered-down paint achieved the result I was looking for, covering up all the white. It immediately took on the appearance of leather, and when dry, even felt like leather! To add a little dimension, I dry-brushed a mixture of Burnt Umber and Yellow Ochre acrylic paint onto the raised surface of the card, taking great care to use a gentle touch and not overdo the effect. I decided against embossing the card because a) I didn’t have an embossing folder large enough, and b) I really liked the effect of the faux leather as it was.

I painted the spine of the cover inside and out, first with a coat of black gesso, and then with a single coat of black acrylic paint. I cut the two pieces of faux leather down to size and used them to cover the front and back boards of the cover, taking it right up to the edge of the spine, and folding the excess around the boards, mitring the corners.

I chose a name plate from my stash of Tim Holtz hardware and created the title of the book, cutting a small piece of dried milk box to fit the name plate, and stamping on the reverse side with my alphabet stamp set, lining up the letters with my stamp positioner tool – this is actually harder than it looks, and each time I use it, I have to look up the instructions! Of course, I don’t do a lot of stamping, which probably explains it!!

I used my sepia archival ink pad to stamp the letters, and then took one of my home-made inking pads made from cut-and-dry foam adhered to old wooden blocks left over from when I unmounted my original stamps, and distressed the edges using Walnut Stain Distress Ink. I gave it a quick spray with fixative to preserve it, and with a tiny bead of Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive inside the frame, stuck it into the name plate, ready for attaching to the centre of the front board of the cover. I also selected some metal corners from my Tim Holtz stash, and a Friendly Plastic gearwheel which I cast some time ago, which I may use to form the album closure.

The signatures were all marked and pierced ready for the waxed linen thread to stitch them together and to the binding. I marked with pencil where to pierce the holes for the stitching.

For the end papers, I found a couple of interesting sheets from my folder of decorative papers which once formed the linings of commercial envelopes – these designs were printed on to prevent people being able to see through the envelopes and read the contents. Most of them seem to be blue, but I had a few sheets of brown, and some of these will be used for the end papers, with the addition of some Distress Ink.

This is as far as I have got to date. I am making videos of the process, and I hope you will be encouraged to make art from waste materials too – it makes one think of things differently, and makes one more observant too, as one considers the most mundane things and wonders how one can use them.