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.

Waves Mechanical Pop-up Card

I haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been terribly busy with all my projects, but I can now report on a big project that’s taken all my time recently.

It’s been on my mind for some time to make a mechanical card, with a lever to make a mechanism work, which causes movement in the card. I was never very good at physics at school and used to find it hard to grasp the principle of levers and gears, but was determined to give it a try!

I am grateful to Carol of the Extreme Cards and Papercrafting blog: http://extremecards.blogspot.com/ for all the help she gave me when I first started thinking about this card, and contacted her for advice. She is very experienced with all sorts of pop-ups, and 3-D projects etc. and her brain works a lot better than mine when it comes to working out how to actually do it!

It may be the first mechanical card I’ve done, but not the first pop-up.

Last year, much to the consternation of his whole family, my hubby was foolish enough to go out on the River Dart on his own in his little boat – this river has a reputation for being treacherous – it’s fast flowing with dangerous currents, and most years somebody comes to grief in it. While out on his own, he fell in, and he was fortunate that he was able to get out before he was swept away. I was very, very glad to get my soggy and extremely cold hubby back that day – we were off to get my new wheelchair and it took a pint of beer and a sizzling steak in a pub on our way to Exeter to put the roses back into his cheeks and warm him up! He was very fed up because he lost one of his wellies in the river and we have subsequently joked that it’s probably half way to America by now! (My mum and dad gave him a new pair for Christmas!)

I had it in mind to make a card to commemorate this momentous event, and this is the result.

The front of the card has two static waves and two moving ones. These moving waves, and the boat, are attached to a disc concealed underneath, and the disc has a tab which projects through a slit at the side of the card, which when moved up and down, rotates the disc, moving the arms attached to the waves and the boat, causing them to rise and fall.

I drew the shapes in Serif DrawPlus and converted them to svg files in order to cut them on my Cricut machine using Make The Cut software. These have now all been uploaded to my Microsoft OneDrive (see details on the left-hand side of my blog) and can be freely downloaded if anyone wants to give this project a try. Here are the images of the cut files I created:

This is the back piece of the mechanism, which incorporates the back static wave.

This is the front piece, the front static wave, and also the part where I printed the text and the fish images. There’s a tab on the left hand side which folds round the back of the mechanism.

This is the upper moving wave, incorporating the arm which attaches to the disc and makes the wave move as you work the tab at the side of the card.

This is the lower moving wave, complete with its arm. You will notice that the second wave from the left is different from the rest. This is because on the mock-up, with all the waves the same, this one tended to catch on the boat when the mechanism was working.

This is the boat piece, complete with its arm for attaching to the disc.

The text, and the shapes of the fish on the front of the card, were printed on the computer, and then I did a considerable amount of inking using Tim Holtz Distress Inks, mostly in Faded Jeans, and the darker parts in Chipped Sapphire.

I recently acquired some Ink Dusters from Inkylicious – these are like old-fashioned shaving brushes on sticks, with a brush on each end. You get 3 in the set, so you end up with 6 brushes, and you can use a different one for each colour, i.e. one brush for the blues, one for yellows, etc. etc. I am very, very impressed with them. Holding the brush like a pen or paintbrush is a lot more natural than holding a foam applicator, and it’s a lot less tiring. Also, because the brushes are so gentle, you can build up the colour in a very controlled way, and you can ink the edges of quite thin paper without the danger of it snagging, as so often happens with foam applicators.

Looking on Youtube, I couldn’t find any videos about them, so as soon as I get time, I intend to do one, to show how lovely they are for masking, stencils, working with resists, colour blending etc. etc.

After inking, I accented the waves, and the ripples surrounding the pop-up, with silver stickles.

There’s also quite a bit of painting on this card, but you could cut out the shapes of the hills, sun and clouds if you wanted. The paint I used was the fluid acrylic paint I bought when I was painting Wonderwoman’s poppies mirror – they go on beautifully smoothly and are a real pleasure to use.

This detail of the waves shows the painting on the boat and its occupant, and a touch of white acrylic paint and silver Stickles highlighting the surface of each wave, and also the hills in the background. You will see the colour variation in the painting; this was done by loading either side of a flat brush with different shades, to achieve shading with a single stroke of the brush. These paints lend themselves particularly well to this technique. I used it on Wonderwoman’s poppies mirror too.

This is a detail of the sky. I painted the sun and the clouds with the same acrylic paint. I had considerable difficulty with the clouds, because the technique I usually use is a “wet on wet” technique which allows for very subtle blending, resulting in lovely fluffy clouds. In this case, I was painting onto very dry card which was also quite absorbent, and also the paint dried extremely quickly, so it was a while before I achieved results anywhere near satisfactory!

Moving on to the inside of the card: the pop-up took quite a lot of thought. Originally I thought of doing a V-shaped pop-up with the splash coming upwards, but I didn’t like the mock-up I did. I then thought of those flower pop-ups which open up as you open the card out flat, and thought I could probably adapt one of those.

I found an excellent lotus flower pop-up template online, designed by a Russian lady: http://ru-pop-up.livejournal.com/30649.html – it had been written up on an English language website: http://foldingtrees.com/2009/07/tutorial-review-lotus-blossom-card/ and I thought it would do nicely (as well as being a good one to try out in its original form).

Here is a picture of the svgs of the two pop-up pieces:

I printed out the pdf of the lotus template, and traced around the edges, adapting them to resemble splashing water rather than flower petals. I didn’t use the stamen pieces in the end, but had the wellie instead – cut from 2 pieces of black card from the cut file I made, and glued either side of a small strip of acetate which was threaded through one of the stamen holes in the base piece and glued behind once the pop-up was complete.

Inking the splash pieces gave them a dimensional feel. I also inked the concentric rings on the back piece that I’d printed on the computer, and finally added some silver Stickles for a bit of sparkle and a more realistic watery effect.

Like the text on the front of the card, the text over the pop-up was also done on Serif DrawPlus.

Constructing the card, because I’d made a few mistakes and had to make a frame, it came out quite a bit bigger than I’d intended, and I also wasted a fair bit of card. As a result, I was nearly at the end of my supply of pale blue cardstock, so I had to fudge the middle a bit, but I don’t think it matters too much.

The front of the card was many layers thick, with all the mechanism, and the layers of waves etc., and the back of the card was a single sheet, making it a bit front-heavy, so I designed and printed a back piece with a birthday greeting for my hubby, and glued it on, which added some stability.

This has been a quite ambitious project, but well worth all the effort – I’ve learned a lot, and also had a tremendous amount of fun! Before I started it, I finally managed to get the video camera set up on my marvellous new camera rig (hoping to do a video about that soon) so I have been able to film myself making the whole project. To keep the clips down to a reasonable length, it has ended up in seven parts. I hope you enjoy them.

Part 1: Introduction and Basic Construction, showing the first mock-ups.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBJFhZqRd7Q

Part 2: Inking and painting the waves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLA0SM9-5Ww

Part 3: Constructing the mechanism to make the waves and boat move.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LveEXdTe2QY

Part 4: Painting the boat and assembling the mechanism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaPm2-cne6g

Part 5: Painting the hills and the sky onto the background piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYOKzNEBZFM

Part 6: Beginning the pop-up inside the card. In this clip, I am inking the background piece, using the mock-up piece as a mask, cutting it smaller as I go, to give a dimensional effect to the ripples surrounding the water splash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WKU7oIaFJA

Part 7: The final part, in which I assemble and attach the water splash pop-up into the centre of the card.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SPxixcm_L8

It’s my hubby’s birthday on 19th May, so I’ll let you know what he thinks of my efforts!

My Mum’s 90th Birthday Present

I have been soooo busy recently that I’ve had very little time even to look at my blog, let alone post anything. I have a number of fairly tight deadlines to meet, with everyone seeming to have special birthdays, anniversaries etc. during the first half of this year.

Having pulled out all the stops for my mum’s card, I suddenly realised I hadn’t really thought about a special present for her – she said she didn’t want a fuss made about this birthday but I didn’t feel I could let it go without making a special effort, because even if she doesn’t think 90 is special, I think it’s a great achievement to reach such a great age, and in such good health as she enjoys, and I wanted to make it special to let her know how much we appreciate all she is to us.

We’ve got her a lovely rose bush called “Blessings” which she will enjoy in their garden, and also some Thornton’s chocolates and fudge which she is very fond of. I thought it might be fun to make a box to put the little bag of choccies in, and decided to make a cylindrical box out of acetate, and print a design of sweet peas on it, which led me to the idea of hand-painting a silk scarf for her, with the same sweet pea design, and wrapping this round the choccies in the box instead of using tissue paper.

This is the sweet pea design I created in Serif DrawPlus.

This was a real rush job because I only thought of it at the last moment, and had to order the silk scarves. I already had silk painting supplies, and set to work, beginning with the gold gutta outliner, but it was too old and had gone lumpy, with the result that it kept clogging the nozzle of the bottle, and then squirting out uncontrollably, causing endless frustration and a ruined scarf, and many wasted hours. My dear hubby made a special trip into town to pick up some more for me, this time in a tube which was actually much easier to use.

The next day I was able to start the actual painting. Not only did I struggle with drawing the outlines nicely – my hand is not as steady as it might be – but when I came to paint, I must have left gaps, or been clumsy with my brush, because in several places the paint has bled onto the silk outside the outlines – any proficient silk painter would turn their nose up at my paltry efforts (it’s been many years since I did any) and it certainly wouldn’t win any prizes, but knowing my mum, she will be thrilled with it anyway! I made her one with daffodils on it years ago, and she still loves it and wears it a lot – she is my most uncritical fan!!

Anyway, I’ve had to accept it as it is because I haven’t got time to do it again, and no guarantee that I’d do it any better the next time… Here’s the result.

What I did was to take my original design, adapt it and scale it up on the computer to 36 inches wide, and then desaturate it and use various filters to emphasise the outlines and simplify the shading, so that I could print it out and use it as a pattern for my painting. Obviously I had to print it on quite a few sheets of paper, and I made the template for half the scarf, turning the frame around over the design when the time came to paint the second half. Here is the half-design.

As for the box, I created the border design and templates for the lid and base in Serif DrawPlus, converted them to svg files and cut them with Jiminy Cricut. I printed the sweet pea design on inkjet acetate which has a slightly rough coating on it to absorb the ink. When making the box I put this surface on the inside, and lined it with a plain sheet of acetate to protect the surface.

I inked the base and lid, and the border pieces randomly with Tim Holtz Distress Inks in Spun Sugar, Milled Lavender, Pine Needles, Broken China and Dried Marigold, to match the pastel shades of the sweet peas. I had a terrible job gluing the whole thing together as nothing seemed to stick to the acetate, and in the end I used Pinflair glue, running a thin line down the length where the vertical “seam” in the acetate had to be, and squirted a good amount around the inside of the base and lid, and simply jammed the tube of acetate into it and left it to dry overnight, which seemed to do the trick – I gave up trying to glue the inside surface of the pierced border design. The lid was lined with a strip of acetate to make putting it on and off the box easier – without it, the edge of the border kept catching on the box, which would have made it difficult to use.

When I’d finished the box, I thought the top looked rather flat, so I designed a cut file for a 3-D sweet pea to be cut from card and inked. This is the first “Penny Duncan-style” flower I have ever done and it was fun to do. I made up several mock-ups in plain white card so that I could tweak the design until I was satisfied with it. (Unfortunately this photo doesn’t show it in as much detail as I’d like, but you can get an idea.)

The cut file includes an open flower, a bud, some leaves and a calyx each for the flower and bud. These parts are cut out on the Cricut and assembled using the hot glue gun and wire wrapped with florist’s tape. In due course, once my mad rush is over, I intend doing a video tutorial on this, and will soon be uploading the cut file to my SkyDrive album for free download – just give me a chance to complete my ridiculously long to-do list first!!

Here is the completed box, with the scarf inside.

This is a detail of the lid:

It’s her birthday tomorrow, and I can’t believe I’ve actually finished all this – I did the final bit of silk painting last night, and heat-fixed the dye with the iron, and today I’ve wrapped everything up. To decorate the parcels, I’ve made some little bunches of flowers made from florist’s ribbon, following the instructions I learnt at the last couple of craft shows – last time I bought the starter kit including a DVD of instructions.

I’m not terribly good at it yet, but I’ve no doubt I will improve with practice! These are little white daisies with yellow centres.

These are tiny purple roses:

and finally some grape hyacinths:

Here are all the flower bunches together, including another blue one which I did to put on a friend’s present.

Here is a picture of all the things I’ve made for my mum for her 90th birthday, and her Mothering Sunday card.

Finally, all is packed up and ready to go! I’m so looking forward to seeing her on her birthday tomorrow (actually it’s today now! It’s gone 3 a.m.!)

We will have a cup of tea with them and spend a bit of time with them tomorrow afternoon, and then celebrate her birthday jointly with Mothering Sunday when we take them out for lunch on Sunday.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM!

Soon I shall be posting about my next project which I’ve started – Wonderwoman’s 50th birthday present – I’ve had great fun doing a bit of crackle glazing on a small wooden mirror. I’ve got until 6th April to complete it! Watch this space.