Recycled Mini-Album Pages–Professional Life

Having just heard that my sister and my niece are coming down in December, I thought I would really press ahead and try and get the mini-album finished in time for that, so I can give it to my niece. I am making very good progress so far, and have now completed some more sets of pages. Today I am showing you the Professional Life pages.

This is the completed title page of the section. This section is largely monochrome, with heavy use of the white pen (I am now on my third white pen for this project!) and trying to keep the pages as thin as possible as I am getting rather concerned at how thick the book is becoming, and there may be further thick pages to come. The text was printed on the computer, cut out and applied, along with the pictures, with regular matt gel medium.

The second page, before I did the border. This page deals with my dad’s work at the hospital, taking the initiative at his own expense and in his own time, to give his junior staff extra tuition, better to equip them for their professional lives ahead. I have also added a piece about the professional conferences he attended. The two photos on this page are of artefacts now in my possession. To create the background, I used a larger version of the picture of the hospital, stuck down with regular matt gel medium, and painted over with a grey acrylic glaze. The text was hand-written with the white pen.

Here is the page with the border.

I created the background for the third page using a mixture of titanium white and black acrylic paint, dabbing it on randomly.

It was a little bit too strong so I went over it with white pan pastel with a little black for good measure. I prefer the softer effect. The next photo shows the page after sealing the surface and adhering the photos with regular matt gel medium as before, and again, the artefact is now in my possession.

The border was done with white acrylic paint and black and white pens, and the journaling in white pen, outlined in black where it was against the light background. The picture shows my dad wearing his badge of office when he was president of his local medical society.

There was a special event in his professional life that was so unusual that I have devoted a separate section to it, which I will cover in the next post.

Tattered Time Mini-Album Part 1–Planning

Yesterday evening I started a very exciting new project – my very first mini-album! This is something I have been planning for such a long time, and although I am in the middle of the Card Factory (which is actually more of a chore than a delight…) I really felt the time had come to make a start. I shall be slotting other things in between, so this will be an ongoing project, like my Fine Art Album and my art journal, and other things that I pick up as the mood takes me.

Let me backtrack to the beginning. It was in September 2011, over a year ago, at the Creative Stitches and Hobbycrafts Exhibition, that I saw, and fell in love with, the DCWV “Tattered Time” paper stack and just had to buy it. Ever since then, I have wanted to use it for something but was terrified of messing it up, and every now and then I would get it out and go through it, and stroke it, and put it back on the shelf again! I also did a bit of Youtube research to see what other people did with it, and so the germ of an idea began, to make a mini-album with it, but this has been very much on the back burner since then.

More recently, and particularly since my dad has been deteriorating, I have been thinking about his life, and all the things he did and loved, and looking at the Tattered Time papers again, realised that they expressed so much about him. He has always had a passion for clocks, and has collected and repaired them most of his life. He and I have always been very close, and have shared so much fun over his various interests, and I used to “help” him in the workshop when I was small, watching him work, holding things for him, and learning so much. We shared an interest in typewriters when I began my secretarial course – there are pages relating to this – and of course his major passion for music, which is also represented. These are just a few of the things which will be included in the album.

Since I bought the Tattered Time papers, I have also acquired the Tim Holtz “Lost and Found” and “Crowded Attic” stacks – I have used a few small elements from these, but for the most part, they are intact. There are some elements in these collections which will mix and match quite nicely with the Tattered Time papers.

As I have thought about this, the ideas have been coming in leaps and bounds. Just recently, going through lots of old family photos, I’ve come across so many of Dad in his young days etc. My plan is to make a paper bag album, and to add lots of photos and journaling, and also to make some “mechanical” interactive elements to reflect his love of engineering and all things mechanical.

It’s just my personal opinion, but I have never been a great lover of scrapbooking layouts which incorporate photos and papercrafting – somehow to me the elements don’t mix that well, and if one isn’t careful, it can end up looking rather bitty and messy – there are glorious exceptions, of course, but for the most part it leaves me cold. The Tattered Time papers are so glorious that I really don’t want to cover them up with photos, so my plan is to celebrate the papers, and showcase them to the best of my ability, and to hide the photos and journaling on tags and inserts etc., and make it an interactive experience to look at them.

Over the past few days I’ve been doing some intensive research on Youtube into how to construct these albums, and there are some superb tutorials – also on bindings and closures, and I have now more or less decided on what I want to do. Unfortunately most of these tutorials come from the USA, where they have access to a lot of stuff we just can’t get here in the UK – in particular the bags. I have managed to source some, but of course they are a different size, so I cannot follow the tutorials exactly, as regards measurements, and will have to improvise, but this will make the project that much more my own.

Last year, I made some bag skirts for Christmas gift bags. I ordered several sizes of these bags from Ebay, and the seller made a mistake and sent me far too many. When I contacted him about it, he said it would be more hassle if I sent them back, and told me to keep them, and I have often wondered what I was going to do with them. This evening I decided to use some of the medium sized ones to make this album.

These bags are fairly thick, so I hope they are going to work OK for the album. I had to remove the handles, which are made of twisted paper, and quite attractive, so I thought I would save them, maybe to use as embellishments in other projects.

(They are lying on my new scratch paper – not much on it yet so it looks a bit strange!)

I am not going to give a tutorial on how to make up these bags into an album, because it has already been done very adequately on Youtube. I have decided to follow Kathy Orta’s first-class multi-part Youtube tutorial which she made, using the Tim Holtz “Lost and Found” stack, as she makes full use of the bags and their gussets for an album full of pockets for tags. The first part shows how to deconstruct the bags for the album.

Here are my bags with the gussets prepared:

and showing how the gussets fold up to form pockets.

Most paper bags come with a serrated top edge. In this picture, I am trimming this off, so that the bag measures 11 1/4 in from the bottom, with the gusset folded up. This means the finished dimension of each page will be 11 1/4 in wide and 10 3/16 in high.

I have prepared six bags in this way, which should be sufficient to complete my album.

Watch this space to see how this project progresses. Depending on what else I have to do, and how I am feeling, it may not progress very fast! However, once I get going, there may be no stopping me…

Bag Skirts–Part 2

The second bag skirt design is based on one of Penny Duncan’s “scallop” designs, with the slits cut for ribbon to be woven through. This one is using cutting only, and no drawing, on the machine. I took my colour scheme and design from Tim Holtz’s Christmas Tag No. 1 for this year – I love the subtle background of this one. I haven’t got any snowflake stamps or dies, but I used a swirl stamp all over to give a bit of texture.
I started by putting quite a bit of Picket Fence Distress Stain onto the centre of my non-stick craft sheet, and then added some Faded Jeans (more) and Chipped Sapphire (less) around the outside, so as not to contaminate the sponge dauber of the Picket Fence one with other colours. After spritzing the cardstock well with water, I smooshed it in this mixture till I was happy with the mottled, blended background. (That Picket Fence Distress Stain is awesome stuff! It will lighten any colour, and give a gorgeous faded chalky effect.)
After drying the inked paper with my heat gun, I proceeded to ink up my swirl stamp with Picket Fence Distress Stain and stamp all over the sheet, randomly. This distress stain tends to disappear, but not completely – the pattern is very subtle, as you can see from this picture (I do love to be able to stamp in white!):

After this, I spritzed a bit of water into my hand and flicked it all over the sheet, and then dried it again with the heat gun. this gives nice mottly spots as the water droplets wet the ink on the surface of the card and draw it into themselves.
I did another one I wasn’t quite so happy with:

- it was a bit too dark, with not enough Chipped Sapphire. I made another which was better, which I used to make the second bag skirt, and decided to reserve this one to make the tags for these bags, and for other purposes.
At this stage I had to iron the sheets because they’d gone a bit ripply and I didn’t think Jiminy Cricut would appreciate that. (He’s not behaving very well at the moment – he can see Sheba’s box across the room and he knows his days are numbered!!!) Even so, they were still a bit wrinkled, so I taped them down onto Jiminy’s mat with some masking tape just to make sure.
Here’s the first front piece I cut – I distressed the edges with my lovely new Distress Ink in the seasonal set – it’s Iced Spruce (what a gorgeous name!) – the colour is fabulous, really subtle. Unfortunately it doesn’t show up very well in the photo, but in reality there’s a lovely soft green around the edges.

I’m really annoyed with Jiminy. He is sooo inaccurate! My second piece didn’t cut right – the mat loaded further to the right than on my original piece, so that he cut off all the scallops along the bottom of the piece!!

I have cut around each shape with scissors, and I think it looks more or less OK, as long as you don’t look too closely, and as long as it isn’t up against the first piece!!

Also, if you look closely, the holes along the edge are slightly skewed off centre – they are NOT like this in my drawing! (Can’t WAIT to get Sheba up and running…)

In my drawing, all the holes are perfectly symmetrical:

Because it’s very hard to get two identical backgrounds made by the smooshing method, I decided to make the backs of these bag skirts from plain blue cardstock distressed with Iced Spruce Distress Ink –  it’s quite acceptable to have the backs plain, I think. Penny makes her bag skirts all in one piece – it’s not clear from her pictures how big they are, but to make one for a 12 inch-width bag, you can’t cut a big enough piece of card (at least, I can’t – I’ve only got 12 x 12 and a 12 inch cutter). I have redrawn the piece so that there is a front and a back piece, with an overlap on the back. Because I didn’t have any 12 x 12 white card, I used A4 for the front, which is only just big enough, hence the critical placing of the mat to ensure the whole thing is cut properly. (Why isn’t anything ever straightforward?)
Here are the two bag skirt pieces completed, waiting for their embellishments.

You can see the slit for the bag handles. The Iced Spruce Distress Ink around the edges doesn’t show up very well in this photo, and the lower one is actually darker in colour and less white-looking, but the swirls on the top one show up very nicely!
I drew some foliage pieces and pine cone spiral shapes (adapted from flower spirals) based on Tim Holtz’s shapes, and as a dummy run, cut them in plain white card. I wanted to practise making the pine cones as I had not done this before – on his video, Tim shows how to do this with hot glue around a cocktail stick. My first attempt was a disaster and went straight in the bin, but then I thought you might like a good laugh so I rescued it and photographed it.

Horrible, isn’t it.
However, with a bit of practice, I got it right. I’m very pleased with the pine cones. If you do them in any colour not brown, they start to look like flowers (like other spiral-constructed flowers). Here’s the mock-up with the pine cones and all the foliage pieces cut in white card.

It shows up a lot better with different shades of green and brown, and also when the leaf pieces are manipulated a bit to make them more three-dimensional.
As a little aside, in the past, when I was well enough to cook, I have made spiral “roses” out of the skin of tomatoes peeled off in a continuous spiral with a very sharp paring knife, and then rolling them, as a garnish – they always got a very positive reaction! This technique works so well!

Note also the little fish on the smoked salmon timbale, cut from slices of cucumber, each with an eye created from a tiny piece of ground black peppercorn! I used the same spiral technique for the gold ribbon rose on the napkin design – I pulled up the wire along one edge which ruched the ribbon, and then rolled it up to form the rose.
However, I digress… (my friends tell me I’m good at that!!)
I designed a sentiment in Serif DrawPlus, “With Love” on a curving swirl, using Wedding Text font, which I am quite pleased with. I cut this in white card and then added a nice thick spreading of PVA glue and some glitter. I’ve uploaded this cut file to my SkyDrive (link in my sidebar – all free downloads). After it was dry, some of the glitter did come off; PVA may not be the best glue. Could someone who uses glitter a lot please tell me the correct glue for glitter?

I had originally intended simply scaling the whole bag skirt in this design down to fit smaller bags, but Jiminy Cricut struggles to do intricate cuts, so until I’ve got Sheba up and running, I’ve decided to do them all the same size, and simply cut down the sides to fit.
This the ribbon I used to thread through the bag skirt –  just a few scrap lengths I’ve had in my box for ages. It’s got wired edges.

These are the  the swirls and pine cones cut from the Kraft-Core paper (No. 21, a nice rich dark brown).

Here are the completed pine cones before I cut the cocktail sticks off.

Inking them with a bit of Vintage Photo Distress Ink to make a bit of shadow, and then adding some Snow Cap Acrylic Dabber, the white paint immediately went yellow! So much for snow. It did get a bit whiter when it dried, though. I think the answer would be to seal the surface first with a spray varnish before adding the white paint. I also added some Rock Candy Distress Stickles for a bit of “frost.” I love these pine cones! They even make the right sound when you handle them – that sort of hollow crisp rustling that real ones make! I almost expected them to shed seeds all over my work surface!
Here is one of the bag skirts with the swirls and sentiment added. These were stuck down with Crafter’s Companion Stick & Stay – I like spray adhesives for sticking down intricate shapes as it saves a lot of hassle, you get good adhesion and no mess. I have pretty well finished my spray photo-mount and prefer the Stick & Stay as it doesn’t have that awful smell. When it was dry, however, I did find that the pieces were starting to lift – I think I need to spray it on more thickly than my original photo-mount spray adhesive.

Next step was to cut the foliage. In his instructions, Tim advises sanding the pieces before removing them from the die, so after I had cut my pieces (I did the same for the swirls and pine cones) I sanded them before removing them from the Cricut mat – this made it much easier to distress the intricate pieces as they were supported, and also, you get a tiny raised edge where the cut has been made, and this sands really nicely, giving the pieces added definition. Here they are after I had hand embossed them onto a piece of fun foam.

For the two different kinds of coniferous leaves and the holly, I used three different shades of Kraft-Core: Nos. 10 and 12 for the coniferous leaves and No. 11 for the holly. I darkened the latter with some Forest Moss Distress Ink and picked out the veins with a marker pen. Some variegation was added when I sanded the pieces, and I’ve also added some Snow Cap Paint Dabber on the the coniferous leaves. The leaves were manipulated a bit to give them a little dimension and make them look more realistic.

Arranging the various bits and pieces over the swirls, I attached them using hot glue. I hope I’ve achieved a nice wintery effect with this bag skirt! The brown of the swirls and pine cones echoes the colour of the bag.

Here are some detail photos of the various elements on the completed bag skirt.


(This photo unfortunately shows up all the hot glue strings that I failed to remove from the pine cones!!)


This final photo shows the back of the bag skirt, complete with its tag cut from the background sheet that I created and wasn’t so pleased with; I wrote the names with a glitter gel pen on the Cricut using Wedding Text font, and then cut the tag on the Cricut, as I did for the drawing and text on the poinsettias bag skirts.

This is the video I have made about the bag skirts

Final notes on the bag skirts:
I chose the plain brown bags for my bag skirts because I thought the colours I was using would co-ordinate well with them; I decided to leave them plain, but they could be decorated with rubber stamping, Distress Inks blended with Ink Dusters or foam pads, or even sprayed with paint or glitter spray, with or without stencils or masks. You could also cut out different shapes and glue them on – any embellishment would do, as long as it didn’t compete too much with your bag skirt.
I felt that the plain white bags were too stark, and would definitely need some treatment to tone them down a bit.
On somebody’s blog (if you are reading this, I apologise that I can’t remember who you are!!) she had wrapped the handles of a bag with 2 contrasting shades of ribbon which looked very effective. Any colour that co-ordinated with your bag skirt would do.
I’m very grateful to Penny Duncan for her lovely designs and free cut files – OK, I’ve redrawn them for my purposes, but the original design is hers. I’m grateful too to Tim Holtz for the inspiration to draw and cut the winter foliage, pine cones and swirls, and for his instructions for making the pine cones. I have not uploaded these cut files to my SkyDrive as they are too close to Penny and Tim’s originals and I would not claim them as my own.
I hope everyone is now fully enlightened as to what bag skirts are, and that you have enjoyed walking through this project with me!
The bags all packed up with Christmas presents and ready to go.

Bag Skirts Part 1

So – I’m finally putting you all out of your misery and revealing the answer to the question that so many of you have been asking, “What on earth’s a bag skirt??” It’s an idea I got from Penny Duncan – you can see her mouthwateringly gorgeous bag skirts on her skydrive here.

A bag skirt is basically a rectangle of card folded in half, with a slit in the fold which fits over the handles of a paper carrier bag. It holds the top of the bag closed, and the edges can be cut to whatever shape you like, and of course you can embellish it however you want.

Many of us take several presents with us when we visit family or friends over Christmas, and what better way to present them than in a pretty bag that you have decorated yourself? Gone are the days when I turn up with a grotty cardboard box or a Tesco bag!! If you don’t put the person’s name on it, they can keep it and recycle it next year.

These are the plain brown bags I used:

I got them from Unipack-Worldwide on Ebay, which supplies all sorts of cool packaging stuff, and is post free too! Unfortunately they didn’t come in time for me to use one for the presents for my aunt and cousins which I took up with me to the funeral – I did have one in my stash though, which did well enough, although it wasn’t quite as strong as these. This supplier also does them in plain white, and (I think) one or two other colours like pink, and stripes. You could decorate the bag as well, if you wanted, with some rubber stamping or distress inks. I have decided to leave mine plain, and have chosen colours for my bag skirts which will co-ordinate nicely.

In this “Part 1” post I am dealing with the first ones I did, based on Penny’s “baroque” design – I took her holly border design and amended it to fit what I wanted to do. I think Penny’s designs may be for quite small bags - she has designed the cut file all in one piece. I didn’t have any paper large enough to cut on the cutting machine for this, so I redrew her shapes to make a front and a back piece with an overlap for gluing, and created three different sizes of each one, to fit the different sizes of bag that I’ve got.

The first one is the bag I made for my aunt, and then (since we got back from the funeral) I have made two more – another large one and a medium one. This is my aunt’s one:

You can see that the handles aren’t quite so nice on this bag, and the paper is a lot thinner, too.

Penny’s design comes complete with poinsettias in the cut file, so I’ve used those, although I prefer her other poinsettia design (she’s done two). This bag skirt uses a combination of drawing and cutting on the cutting machine.

On my aunt’s (Version 1) I drew the design of the holly border using the Cricut pens in the pen holder instead of the blade; I filled the design in quite heavily with marker pens afterwards; here’s a detailed photo.

The holly leaves are actually green, and the berries red, although they look black on the photo. I also added some clear embossing powder to the leaves and berries, which I did not do on Version 2 of the bag skirt.

Here’s a detail of the front panel.

On this photo you can see the detail of the background paper I used for the text frame. This was a background I created from some scans of the ancient parish records from our church which you can read about here and here.

The main paper is some 12 x 12 scrapbooking paper I’ve got in my stash. I’ve inked all the edges of the papers with Vintage Photo Distress Ink.

This is the back of the bag skirt. In this case I’ve redrawn Penny’s holly motif to form a rectangular border to fit my bag skirt, and repeated the framed text, slightly smaller, and without the poinsettias.

You can see the overlap where I joined the two pieces together. On subsequent bag skirts, I’ve overlapped the back piece on top of the flap of the front piece so that the join doesn’t show as much. On this photo you can see the metallic gel pens I used to colour in the design of the border, catching the light.

These are the poinsettias that I made for these bag skirts:

They are very simple and quick to make, and are stuck together and to the bag skirt with hot glue. The centres are yellow Stickles – Penny has created an element in her cut file for the flower centres but I don’t get on very well with these – possibly because the Cricut doesn’t cut them very well. I think the Stickles work really well!

Here’s Version 2 of this bag skirt, complete with one of the new bags.

As you can see, the handles are a lot nicer than the bag I used for Version 1, and I have also used different papers this time. The holly border is different, too – less heavily coloured in, which I prefer. I did the outline drawing on the Cricut with a gold metallic gel pen and then just added the red and green with marker pens afterwards.

Again, the papers are inked around the edges with Vintage Photo Distress Ink.

This is the back of Version 2.

You can see I’ve made a matching tag. I punched a small hole in the back piece through the slit for the handles – I’d originally thought of simply tying the tag onto the handles, but then I thought it would be difficult to remove the bag skirt; this way, the tag and bag skirt come off together, and the tag can be easily removed if the recipient wants to recycle the bag skirt next year.

Here’s a detail of the holly border on Version 2. I think you’ll agree it’s better than Version 1.

Perhaps it would have had more impact with some clear embossing on the leaves and berries as before, but I forgot to do it, and then thought it looked OK without.

Finally, here is a detail of the text on the front of Version 2.

I did the outline with the Cricut, using a black glitter glue pen (this doesn’t show up as metallic or glittery on the photo – just black!) and then filled it in with a red marker pen. If you look closely, you can see a distinct “wiggle” in the drawn line – I think Jiminy Cricut must have Parkinson’s Disease! Apparently the Cougar doesn’t have this problem and will draw nice clean lines. From a distance it’s not too bad, though.

See Part 2 for the other design, and the video.

Sheba has Arrived!

On our way home from my uncle’s funeral, we took a detour to Derby, to collect Sheba, my new Black Cat Cougar cutting machine. We had arranged this beforehand with the wonderful Dawn, who with her business partner Colin, has designed these amazing machines – collecting it in person saved me the carriage and insurance fees even if it did cost us a bit more in petrol. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to meet Dawn in person as she was busy, but we met her husband who had everything arranged ready for us.

I have joined the Black Cat Forum which is full of lovely people who are so friendly and helpful and always encouraging the Cubs (as we newbies are called!) to ask any questions we like. Now that I’ve got the machine I have been able to access the user manual which I am going to print out, as it will make good bed-time reading!

When we got home, my hubby carried Sheba upstairs to my ARTHaven and put her big box on the floor.

Opening up the box, I found her nesting all safe and secure:

where she’s unfortunately got to stay until after Christmas! I’ve got far too much to do to be able to play with her for a while – it’s going to be a steep learning curve discovering all her tricks, and I don’t want to rush it, or fall into the trap of thinking I can complete my Christmas projects using her, because this would only lead to frustration if I don’t know what I’m doing.

I am determined to take it slowly, learning each stage step by step before advancing to the next level, and taking the advice of others on the forum, such as keeping a record of every cut I make initially, so that it will be easy to decide what settings I need for each individual project.

Watch this space over the next few months! Although of course I want to be able to cut paper and card with Sheba, she is capable of so much more. I want to emboss and cut metal, and make 3-D objects such as jewellery and hair ornaments, and some new decorations for my wheelchair! I also want to work with leather – I’ve got a big box of scraps of fine soft leather in lots of colours, which I bought as a cheap job lot at the end of a craft show many years ago from a glove-making stand – I’ve only used a very small amount of this and there’s lots I can do now I can cut different shapes more easily.

You can also draw with any pen, but a special pen holder is needed for this. I was not able to get all the accessories I shall eventually want (such as the engraving tool), and anyway, there’s plenty to learn and get to grips with in the meantime, until finances allow me to get the rest. So far, in addition to the basic kit which consists of the normal mat and standard blade, I’ve got a “click” blade housing (something like the one on the Cricut), a blade for cutting thicker media, and the embossing tools and mat, so lots to play with! Also included is a small pen holder which allows you to use a ball-point refill – I think my gel pens should work fine with this for the moment.

I just hope this sleek black kitty will be content to remain in her box for a while and not get jealous of Jiminy Cricut as I continue to use him to complete my Christmas projects!! (He has been told that his days are numbered.)

This is a new adventure for 2012. I’m really excited!!

When we arrived home, I found a parcel of goodies that I’d ordered had arrived:

I decided after all to get the Tim Holtz seasonal distress inks as I need them for the bag skirts I’m making, and I also ordered a couple of distress stains that I was missing. At the bottom of the box is a stack of distress core’dinations papers which are just gorgeous, and then some Tack’n Peel which is a sort of sticky film that you can put on an acrylic block and then use it either to adhere unmounted rubber stamps or anything else you want to stamp with. Finally, the box on top was a free gift, a Martha Stewart embossing kit. There are a couple of small pots of embossing powder, an embossing ink pad (I now have 3… I wonder if I can manage to keep this one clean???) a very nice acrylic block and a sheet of clear stamps, several of which I think will be quite useful.

I’m hoping to be able to make my next bag skirt tomorrow and will be able to use some of these materials. Today I’ve felt pretty wiped out after all our adventures, but this evening I’ve designed the next bag skirt using some ideas of Penny Duncan’s, and also some Tim-inspired shapes! Hopefully once I get going it won’t take too long.

Then it’s present wrapping time again… Is anyone else as far behind as I am??