WOYWW 357–A Brief Update

Yet again my desk has nothing to show for WOYWW this week. I had fully intended to do some art, but again, busyness got in the way, and I haven’t done anything in the studio. I’m writing this late Tuesday evening.

I have various ideas in the pipeline, and I shall shortly be posting about the redecoration of our sitting room which is nearly complete – this is the major project at the moment – in the meantime I can show you the stencil I cut:

and this is what the stencilling looked like on the first bit of wall (as of Monday night):

Gary has now completed it all, bar half the long wall opposite the fireplace. With the white walls replacing the dull cream, the room is already looking a lot brighter, and once we get the new chandelier and everything is back in place, I think the room is going to be a lot nicer in every way, less cluttered, brighter, and more inviting. We are quite enjoying using Mum’s sitting room while all this is going on, as it is at the back of the house and gets the afternoon sun, and has direct access to the garden, and I think we may be using it more in the summer. I am planning to put some excess furniture in there from our sitting room to reduce the clutter – we’ve already moved one large armchair through and it’s made a big improvement.

I haven’t photographed today’s decorating progress because I’ve been poorly all day – I woke up this morning with a headache and a feeling that the bed was turning over and over – this vertigo did not improve for the rest of the day but is better now, I think – as long as I sit still and don’t move my head too much, and walking around is a pretty hazardous business – thank goodness for my mobility aids!!

I got up after lying in bed for a while, and felt very nauseous, and during the morning I was sick twice. Fortunately the headache pills I took first thing had had a chance to work. Once Gary arrived and got stuck in to the decorating, I took myself off back to bed again and stayed till mid-afternoon, and slept quite a bit of the time. When I got up I was feeling hungry and have eaten normally for the rest of the day – my dear hubby went and got us a nice ready meal from Marks & Spencer’s to save me cooking, and some delicious ice cream as a treat. I am sure I shall be fine in the morning.

I have no idea what this was – maybe a mild inner ear infection, although I have had no earache or tinnitus – just one of those weird things. My hubby has got a cold at the moment and I’ve been doing my best to avoid catching it, but maybe I picked up something from him, I don’t know.

Every time I intend to get back to making art, something seems to get in the way and prevent it. I have been far too busy lately and got very tired and spent as much time as I was at home over the weekend, resting and sleeping and trying to catch up, and was starting to feel better until today.

Ah well, these things are sent to try us, I suppose.

Phoebe, our younger cat, had another epileptic seizure a week ago on Saturday (the day before Easter Sunday) and the vet said if she had another within the following month she would have to consider increasing her medication. She had another one this evening, so we shall be phoning tomorrow to let them know. The poor little thing is so distressed and disoriented by it and I just cuddle her afterwards and try to reassure her and I can feel her little heart pounding. It’s very distressing to watch.

Wishing everyone a happy WOYWW and lots of lovely creativity in the week ahead, and let’s hope Shoshi actually manages to do some art this week!!!

Florabunda Printouts

The other day, my hubby tried unsuccessfully to print out my pdfs of the Florabunda drawings I did recently, and my friend Lucy offered to print them for me – they have to be done on a laser printer whose ink will not run if you wet it. She dropped them off this afternoon and the results are absolutely great – I gave her two different sorts of card to experiment with, and the best results were definitely from the smooth card (Oce Top Colour Satinated printer card). The lines came out lovely and fine, unlike the somewhat smudgy dark lines on the rougher, more absorbent card (regular inkjet printer card). The Top Colour card is the one I like to use for Zentangle drawing as it has a lovely smooth surface that the pens flow over nicely, and it seems to take colour well, at least from the Inktense pencils – I am going to have to experiment with other media, which is one reason why I wanted several copies of each design. If this is successful, I shall ask Lucy to print out some more for me.

My hubby’s laser printer is not working very well and may be on the way out – he’s had it for quite a number of years now, and maybe the time has come to invest in one myself. He doesn’t use it much since he retired and I can always print out anything he needs done on a laser printer. Not that I am particularly keen to shell out the cash for another printer just now…

Anyway, here are examples of the sheets she did for me.

If you look carefully you can see some small black lines in the margins of each sheet. These are part of the grid templates I have created on my desktop publisher in various sizes for different purposes, and indicate where the card should be cut. The card with the larger motifs on it has four 2 1/2 inch squares down the right hand side, which I shall cut and do further alphabet letters on. The borders were just arranged as many as I could get onto an A4 sheet, without creating a grid template for them – they were just drawn on offcut strips and I’m not so fussy about them being an exact size, but for the other pieces it’s good to have an accurate measurement for matting and layering purposes when card making.

Then came the big surprise! Lucy persuaded me to look again at the stack of copies, and at the bottom were two sheets that she had foiled!! I was stunned at how absolutely gorgeous they were, and could scarcely believe that I had drawn these – with this treatment, they looked like professionally printed designs!! On the cutting machines forum recently we’d had a discussion about different methods of foiling, and Lucy, and several of the other members, have foiling machines that they use in conjunction with their laser printers – you need a laser printer because the toner will re-melt in the foiling machine and fuse the foil onto the card just where the black toner is, and nowhere else. The detail is astonishing. (Oh dear… not only do I now want a laser printer, but also a foiling machine!!!)

As usual, shiny and reflective surfaces are notoriously difficult to photograph, but here goes with my best effort. The top image on the right-hand sheet is foiled in purple but it isn’t catching the light.

I hope this gives an indication of what fabulous results you can get from foiling! Lucy said that she did the whole sheet of the letter B, laying strips of different coloured foil for each row, so that I could experiment with adding inks and other forms of colour – she thinks that the foil should stay put and not lift up if it gets wet. The foil should also act as a resist to any water-based media. It will be interesting to experiment. I shall probably leave the two larger ones as they are, and make cards from them.

Not having felt too well over the past few days, I have made no further progress with drawing and colouring.

My First Florabunda Drawings

The third of three posts for today.

After I won the lovely Florabunda book from Neil’s blog giveaway, I started experimenting. I cut some pieces of plain white card and also found some narrow offcut strips to make borders with, and got my Zentangle drawing pens out and started to have fun!

These are the little border pieces I did. They are 5 1/2 inches long.

With the book, Neil sent me a lovely little Zentangle card with my initial on it, so I decided to start making a set of alphabet letters in the Florabunda style. So far I’ve got to E. Each one measures 2 3/4 inches square.

A couple of circular designs.

In the book, I love Suzanne McNeill’s use of pods and gone-over flowers as well as all the pretty petals. Here’s my first take on this. They look a bit half-dead, with some of the leaves drooping and dropping off!

Some stylised leaves on a curve.

All these last ones are 4 3/4 inches square.

My plan is to draw a good collection of these Florabunda designs, and then scan and print them. I can then make up a collection of cards quite quickly, and colour them how I want, in a variety of ways, giving different interpretations to the same designs and seeing which I prefer. I am keen to try adding colours with my new Brusho paints in an uncontrolled way so that the detailed drawing sits on a suitably-coloured background, giving contrast between fine detail and random colour. The shapes can also be coloured with markers, watercolours, coloured pencils… As with the adult drawing pages, the possibilities are endless. These drawings also stand alone with no colour. So many different variations and so much possibility to have fun! For me at the moment one of the great advantages is that I can do them while relaxing on the recliner.

Chemo and Rapunzel

Today I went in for my seventh, and penultimate chemo treatment. Yesterday I saw Dr. Lo, the oncologist, and as usual she was particularly concerned about the peripheral neuropathy – if one is not careful this side effect can become permanent, and the only way to reduce that risk is to reduce the dose of the chemo. I have already had two reductions of 10 percent each, and thought she might suggest this, but she said that as I was so near the end of the course, she could reduce it to half the original amount for the final two sessions! I was very surprised (and delighted) at this, and asked whether it might not compromise the effectiveness of the treatment. She replied that some research has been done on patients receiving chemo after the removal of their cancers by surgery, and it has been suggested that those whose dose is reduced, or whose treatment is shortened, do just as well as those who have the full dose for the full six months, so she was confident that I would be OK. I am looking forward to seeing if this affects how I feel over the coming fortnight – I should notice a huge difference!

The Ricky Grant Day Unit phoned this morning while I was still in bed, to ask if I would come in earlier than my 1.15 p.m. appointment. I was half expecting this, because it happened before when they’d made me rather a late appointment. Because the treatment takes four hours, they are anxious to finish before the unit closes for the day. Why they can’t think of this when they make the initial appointment is beyond me! Last time I had to rush around and was still late, but at least this time they asked me to come in at 12 noon, so I still had time to get up and do everything that was necessary, and have a bit of time to myself in the morning before setting off.

All went off OK, except that the place was absolutely heaving with people today! For the first couple of hours there wasn’t a recliner chair available for me, even though I specifically requested it because I find it uncomfortable to sit in a normal chair without having my feet up for any length of time. The chair they offered me was the same as the one I’d had on the ward after my operation and it was very uncomfortable! After a short while I transferred back to my wheelchair which was at least more comfortable and supported me in all the right places, but I really did want to get my feet up. It was rather annoying that the man sitting opposite me was sitting on a recliner but in its upright position, so he would have been just as comfortable on a normal chair, freeing up the recliner for the likes of yours truly!! Eventually, though, this recliner became available when the man left, and I sat next to a delightful couple (husband having treatment) and we had a nice chat.

As usual, I took a bag of things in to do, but ended up not touching most of it, because I had printed out some free downloads of adult colouring pages, and decided to work on one of these. The nurses were very interested and loved what I had done, and enjoyed seeing it progressing. They are all so friendly and lovely.

This is the finished drawing. After using my Sharpies for the Koi Carp drawing I did before, this time I decided to go for a more subtle effect using my coloured pencils, which blend beautifully for shading.

Here is the original printed drawing.

My c9lored pencils, which fit very nicely in one of Dad’s old cigar boxes! Beside it are the other bits and pieces I thought I might need – pencil sharpener, paper stump for blending, pencil-shaped eraser, Zig Millennium archival pen, soluble graphite pencil, water brush. In the end I didn’t use the pencil sharpener, the graphite pencil or the water brush,  but everything else came in handy.

Now for some detail shots. Here is a detail of the hair. I had fun shading this!

Detail of the prince. Note the shading on his hat.

Detail of the trees and towers. I like the roofs on part of the castle, that I decided to colour to look like terracotta tiles.

Detail of the top border. The lattice didn’t look like a wooden one to me, with its cross-shaped pieces connecting the bars – it looked more like metal, so I coloured it as such. This suggested to me the fact that Rapunzel was imprisoned in her tower. The top border has a slightly art nouveau flavour to it.

Detail of Rapunzel’s face. You can’t see it very well in the photo but she has a delicate blush of pink on her cheeks, and blue eyeshadow. Note the shading under her arm.

Lastly, a detail shot of the bottom of the picture. I love how the hair spills out beyond the frame of the picture. The whole picture has a lovely fluid feel to it.

A final glimpse of the finished picture again. You will notice that I added a drop shadow which gives the picture a bit of dimension. I hope you enjoyed it!

Edit: You might be interested to visit http://www.coloring-pages-adults.com/ where I downloaded this drawing – they have got literally hundreds of amazing adult colouring pages for free download, arranged in categories. More than enough for a lifetime of happy colouring, I should think! Have fun.

Misc Christmas Soaps Pt 2

Here are the remaining photos of the soaps I’ve made for Christmas presents.

Turned out of the moulds. You can see the brown cameo to the right of the lavender soap.

I was wondering how to highlight the cameo a bit, and then remembered I’d ordered some cosmetic-grade mica powders for my soap making, and used some of the white. I put the cameo onto the top of the soap and drew round it with a scriber, and then with a modelling tool I gouged out some of the soap. I filled the cavity with the melted soap base, scored the base of the cameo, spritzed both surfaces with rubbing alcohol and popped the cameo in place. There was a bit of leakage of the melted soap base but I was able to get most of this off. Unfortunately I lost the pristine shiny surface of the soap straight from the mould but once wrapped, this didn’t matter quite so much. I did a bit more touching up with the mica powder once the cameo was in place.

Here it is, wrapped.

I made a label for the base. All the labels were written with my sepia Faber Castell Pitt Artist pen and embellished with distress inks. In the case of the lavender soap I used Milled Lavender and a touch of Dusty Concord on the lavender flower paintings, and the leaves were painted with Mowed Lawn.

Here are the rest of the soaps, all wrapped in cellophane and labelled. For the gardener’s soaps, I put the main label on the top, and added a small label giving the ingredients on the bottom, as this was a more complicated soap, and I thought the recipients might be interested to know what went into it, making it so suitable for garden and workshop use. The lemon soaps just had the label on the bottom, with the information about how this soap removes onion smells from one’s hands. The gardener’s soap labels were coloured with Spiced Marmalade distress ink, and the lemon soaps with Wild Honey distress ink.

The gardener’s soaps. The orange Stickles glitter glue doesn’t show up on the photos at all, but it is a nice echo of the speckled orange rind on the surface of the soaps, as is the label border.

Single gardener’s soap.

Label on base of gardener’s soap.

A pair of gardener’s soaps, tied with an orange ribbon.

Lemon soaps.

Lemon soap label.

The three teddy soaps, tied with ribbon, with applied decorative bow. Each soap is individually wrapped. They are definitely too small for everyday use, and I shall be sourcing a larger teddy soap mould online.

Three teddy soaps, side view. I had to put the middle one face down because they are not uniformly thick.

All that remains now is to finish packaging the honey soaps I made before. I want to make tags for these, using honeycomb-embossed card and my large bee stamp. I am a bit annoyed that the medium bee stamp is still out of stock, and I have been waiting for some time for an email notifying me that they have arrived – the large stamp is a bit too big for this but I can make something of it, no doubt.

After Christmas being a total non-event this year, everybody will have to put up with their presents being late! This week, I also have to make a bee birthday card to go with some of the honey soaps, and hope I shall retain enough energy to get that done, or it will be another late arrival.

Recycled Mini-Album–Finished at Last!

Saturday was the first anniversary of my father’s death. It seems appropriate that I completed the album that celebrates his life on that very day.

I have two photos to end the book. The first is of my dad with his newborn granddaughter, who will be the recipient of this book. The other is the very last photo that was ever taken of him, on his 90th birthday at the residential home. They put a candle on his pudding, and you can see how happy he looks. I am so glad that despite his confusion with the dementia at the end of his life, he spent his last days content and at peace, in a beautiful care home, with his family visiting when we could.

Here is the page spread with the background and borders. To create the background I stamped with a Stamp Barn swirl stamp (FLR 0211), using Versamark, and then brushing on randomly three different Perfect Pearls, in Turquoise, Forever Green and Forever Violet. You can see the semi-circular hole for the tag on the left.

The page complete. You can see the tag in place on the left, with its tag puller with the embossed flower. The reverse of this tag is the clocks tag on the previous page.

The last few pages of the book are taken up with details of its construction and embellishment, and some blank pages for my niece to add her own reminiscences and photos.

After completing the second page, I realised I’d left out several of the materials, for instance alcohol inks and inked kitchen paper. Ah well. No room for any more!

For the final “Notes” pages I cut sheets of plain white paper to shape, and distressed the edges with Black Soot distress ink, and stuck them down onto each page using soft matt gel medium. I was careful to apply this only to the back of the sheets and the surface of the actual page, and around the edges of the top surface of the sheets only, and not over the whole top surface, so that there would be a plain paper surface for my niece to write on with any pen or pencil of her choice.

The next step was to work on the borders, and I created a different one for each of the three pages, using white acrylic paint, and tidying up the edges with a waterproof black pen once the paint was dry.

The final step was to add the little cartoon that one of my dad’s medical student friends drew of him – I also used this picture in his funeral service sheet. My sister has the original.

I stuck the picture down onto the end paper at the back of the book and added some embellishment with a sepia archival pen, along with my blog address at the bottom of the page.

The end of the book! A good brush up to get rid of any traces of gel medium that had got embedded in the binding, and a final coat of acrylic wax, well buffed up, to give a nice vintage leather effect. I am particularly pleased that despite getting a bit carried away with lots of texture which added a huge amount of thickness to many of the pages, when closed, the book covers are exactly parallel – just as they should be!

Just a reminder of what the front looks like.

This has been an amazing project to work on. Every page was full of special memories of me, and I am sure that getting them all down on paper has helped my grieving process in the year following my wonderful dad’s death. Also, I have been thinking constantly about my niece who is to receive the book, and hoping that it will be a real treasure for her to keep for her lifetime, a little memorial of her grandfather. This has truly been a labour of love. Finally, it has been an adventure and exploration into the world of mixed media, and throughout, I have been learning new techniques, and stretching my skills and thinking outside the box, using all kinds of different materials. This adventure has been so much fun!

The final step will be to make a video slideshow of all the photos I took on Saturday night, of each completed page, with perhaps the addition of some work-in-progress pages. I want to keep as comprehensive a record as possible for my own benefit, as I shall feel another bereavement once this book goes to my niece – it has been such an important part of my life for the last eight months!

Before starting this book, I was working on a larger album about Dad, for my hubby and me to keep, based on the “Tattered Time” paper stack from DCWV, which had to be set aside in favour of this album. This is another project to be taken up again in the New Year and worked on as time permits – no deadline on this, and it will be fun to work on.

I hope you have enjoyed the journey.