Mould Making and Stamp Mounting

I had my fourth chemo on Friday and although I felt awful for the rest of Friday, yesterday and today I am feeling quite a bit better and have managed to do a few things. The worst part has been raging peripheral neuropathy in my hands and feet and the only thing to do is to keep them as warm as possible – not easy doing things with 2 pairs of gloves on!! Last time I had a good weekend but then crashed for the rest of the first week, so I am hoping this won’t happen again. Things were much better in the second and third week though, so I think the reduced dose is helping.

Yesterday I spent some time working on editing images for one of the secret projects I am working on, and this morning I decided to make some moulds from the new metal embellishments and gearwheels I got on Ebay last week. For one of the projects I am working on, I wanted to use a particular rubber stamp from a set I bought ages ago but hadn’t yet used, and I hadn’t realised that I had never got around to mounting them, so I did that today, too.

Mould Making

In addition to the gearwheels, I also got a couple of metal pairs of wings and hearts from Ebay. All these metal embellishments are quite heavy for use on cards, and are better on albums and other projects, so I decided to make moulds from them – that way you can use the originals with impunity, but still have an endless supply! I make them up in Friendly Plastic or UTEE or polymer clay, or even Polyfilla One Fill (Joint Compound) – whatever takes my fancy.

I finished the EasyMold Silicone Putty (the purple sort) and then started the Amazing Mold Putty (yellow) to finish this project. Need to order some more of this!

The putty comes in two pots, one coloured and one white. You take equal quantities of each, and mix them together until you can no longer see any streaking, and then you press the object into it. It cures really quickly so you need to work fast – the large mould in the picture (the pair of wings and the heart) was starting to go off while I made the impression because I didn’t mix up enough to start with, so I am not sure how well that one will work. I can always make it again if it’s not a success.

Once they are set, you can pull the object out, but you shouldn’t use the moulds until they are fully cured. I usually leave them overnight to be sure.

Stamp Mounting

My last attempt at stamp mounting using EZ Mount Foam was a bit different! Usually this is a horrendously sticky and unpleasant job, and even with Tim Holtz’ wonderful non-stick scissors with their micro-serrated blades, they get coated with sticky gunk and have to be cleaned off, and it gets all over your hands… So last time I decided to use my hot knife, after seeing a Youtube video on this, and while it worked really well, it made the most humungous smell which took a long time to get rid of!

This time, therefore, I decided on the Talc Method. I always keep a jar of unperfumed talk on my work desk as it has all sorts of uses. This time I sprinkled some on the craft mat and rubbed some on the blades of the scissors and cut out the stamps which I had already stuck onto the ultra-sticky surface. I put the clippings into the talc and kept adding more to my fingers and to the scissors, and the result was pretty good!

Clean-up was easy afterwards – all the bits went in the rubbish bin and didn’t stick to my hands. I wiped off as much talc as I could from the surface of the stamps, and put them back on their packaging. The scissors had a bit of glue on them (minimal) and I used a quick spray of Stick Away from Crafters’ Companion (an essential part of my kit).

Nice job, eh?

More later, on how I use these things.

Stamp Mounting and a Health Update

This afternoon I mounted some unmounted rubber stamps I’ve had for a while. I got these from Chocolate Baroque – 2 A4 sheets named “Harlequin Fragments” and “Lace Fragments.”

Chocolate Baroque stamps are gorgeous – I have a few different ones. It’s always worth checking for “broken biscuits” on their site. I’ve never come across this idea anywhere else but it’s brilliant. Sometimes when they manufacture a sheet of stamps, it comes out faulty, but maybe all but one, or most of the stamps on the sheet, are perfectly fine, so it would be silly to ditch the whole sheet. They cut out the OK ones and when they’ve got all the stamps that would be on a perfect sheet, they sell them as “broken biscuits” – perfect stamps making up a complete set, but just not all in one piece! They are going to be cut up anyway, so who cares if some of them are already separate? There’s a significant price reduction and well worth getting. Of course it’s unpredictable which sets will be available as a “broken biscuits” set but if you’re prepared to wait, the set you want may come up eventually. A great idea, for both the manufacturer (no waste) and the customer (good value)!

Today the EZ Mount Foam I ordered arrived. This is a foam rubber sheet with an extremely sticky surface on one side, and a cling-mount surface on the other. You peel back the backing sheet and arrange your unmounted stamps onto the sticky side and then cut them out. There’s another backing sheet protecting the cling-mount surface, and once you peel this off you’ve got your stamps mounted and ready for use with an acrylic block.

This is a job I loathe doing. Even with my Tim Holtz scissors that have non-stick blades, the scissors and your fingers get extremely sticky and it’s pretty hard work! I recently discovered a Youtube video on cutting them with a hot knife, so I gave this a try today. I didn’t do quite such a good job as on the video but it did make pretty short work of a horrible job, and it also made the most horrendous smell! Here’s the equipment I used.

I used a glass heat proof kitchen cutting mat. You can see the sheet of EZ Mount Foam, some adhesive remover wipes, Tim Holtz scissors and talcum powder, and my hot knife – this has interchangeable blades.

When I’d finished, I dipped the scissors in talcum powder and trimmed off the excess around the stamps, and cleaned up with an adhesive remover wipe. Great results all round.

Here are the two sets of stamps, cut out and mounted, and ready to use.

I was interested to read yesterday that it isn’t a good idea to store EZ Mount Foam mounted stamps on an acrylic sheet because there’s a chemical reaction that happens between these two surfaces and your stamps can end up permanently fused to the acrylic! Time to sort my stamp storage, I think! They ae perfectly fine loose in the bags like these ones. I keep the original packaging and/or leaflet so I know the name and manufacturer of my stamps, and they are hung on my little rail above my work desk. I got the split rings and the conference badge clips from Ebay, and used a piece of wooden dowel slotted through the ornamental shelf brackets to hang them from. It works brilliantly and my stamps take up very little room.

 

Health Update

This morning we went to the hospital for my pre-chemo bloods to be taken, and for my oncology appointment. I have to go to the hospital for this, rather than the surgery because extracting blood from a port requires special training that the surgery nurses have not had. This morning it was pretty horrendous because although they were able to insert the needle and flush the port-a-cath, the blood simply would not flow! On the third attempt she got a reasonable sample.

We then went down to Oncology and I saw Dr. Dyke, Dr. Lo’s registrar. I reported to her how poorly I have felt throughout the three weeks since my last treatment, with all the side effects being more severe and longer lasting than after my first treatment, and after consulting with Dr. Lo, she said they would reduce tomorrow’s dose by 10 percent. The amount is calculated on body weight but every individual is different and not everybody responds in the same way, and sometimes adjustments need to be made. I also asked if she knew exactly how many treatments I would require, because all I’d been told was that it would go on for six months, and I’d worked it out at 9 or 10, depending on when they stopped, and she said it would only be 8! I am very pleased indeed to hear this, because three weeks from tomorrow, I shall be half way through!! Yaaayyy! Full details on my Cancer Diary page.

Kitty Squad, Lavender Sachets and WOYWW 313

What’s on your workdesk (this) Wednesday? I have to say there’s not much on mine, because I’ve been too exhausted recently to sit up in my ARTHaven studio, and have decamped downstairs so I can be creative with my feet up! My poor hubby, what he has to put up with. Look at the state of our sitting room.

Zooming in where I am doing most of the actual “work” (if you can call it that), here is what my table looks like when I’m busy.

I have two things on the go at the moment. I always find the smaller the project, the more stuff I need to make it. First of all, I have started a project using my new Stampotique Originals stamp “Kitty Squad.” I bought this last year, and because health issues overtook me in the New Year, this is the first time I’ve used it.

The first thing I do with Stampotique Originals stamps is to unmount them from their wood blocks. I hate wood-mounted stamps. They take up far too much room, and it’s difficult to see exactly where they are going to stamp. So I broke out the adhesive remover and found some EZ-Mount Foam and set to work. Very sticky job, and it gets all over my non-stick scissors from Tim Holtz, too. Anyway, job done, I started to stamp whole sheets of card with this stamp.

Then I fussy-cut them out. What a job. I still haven’t finished. Here are some of them laid out randomly on my brown masterboad/background sheet. (It can only be called a masterboard if one intends to cut it up and use it in projects, something I can never bring myself to do.)

They look a bit like bugs… More photos later, when I reveal what I’m going to do with all these kitties. It’s an experiment and I have no idea if it will work. Still, fussy cutting is quite therapeutic!

My other project is to make little lavender sachets for all my fellow chemo “cows” sitting patiently in the milking parlour, chewing the cud and waiting for their chemo infusions to finish. It’s a bit of a glum experience, and my friend Maria in the US has told me about her cancer-survivor friend who started “Happy Chemo!” by giving people small gifts. I felt inspired by this and thought what nicer than to give each person a lavender sachet to sniff. Lavender is so calming and healing and lovely, and last year, our neighbour gave me a whole armful of clippings from her lavender hedge and there is still masses left over after making quite a bit of infused lavender oil.

I’m good at pretty, but not so good perhaps at the more manly style, so I decided that alongside the pretty ones, made with scraps of lace and ribbon and pretty embellishments, I’d make some plain calico ones for the chaps. I have never stamped on fabric before (except for a brief experimental foray into stamping on teabags), so I used sepia archival ink, using my other new Stampotique Originals stamps, “Medium Bee with tiny bee.”

I love the look of the sepia on the unbleached calico.

My plastic tray full of goodies for making the bags. I’ve also got several large boxes and quite a few smaller ones littering up the place (see first photo) with all the stuff I “might need” for this project!

These are the seven bags I’ve finished so far. Each one has some form of embellishment, and each one has a tiny heart charm sewn on which reads “made with love.” You will notice that each bag has a little loop. You can hang this over your thumb for sniffing purposes, and later you can hang the bag on a clothes hanger if you want.

I have a lot of recycled embellishments, including bits and pieces from sabotaged cheap jewellery from the village fete. Some of my little bags have a disc of abalone shell from a necklace I took apart. The iridescent colours of these shiny shell fragments are beautiful. I’ve also got a couple of plastic “charms” that came out of a Christmas cracker – bright red plastic – which I have painted with black gesso with the idea of rubbing gilding wax on them – great for this project.

I couched some white cotton cord (which I smooshed in some Gathered Twigs distress ink on my craft sheet) around the edges of the calico bags, and frayed the ends of the loop to create tassels.

I’ve still got a lot of them to make. Eventually each one will be tucked into a little box – I found the design online and downloaded the template – a pretty box cut from a single piece and assembled in such a way that it remains closed until the recipient desires to open it. I am going to use thick watercolour paper to make these (probably) and they will be embellished with mixed media – each box will reflect the design and/or colour of the sachet within.

It was my birthday on Saturday, but as with my hubby’s birthday on 19th and our 29th anniversary on 24th, it was a low key affair as I didn’t feel up to celebrating. Let’s hope that we will be able to celebrate big time next year! My friend Marlene sent me a box of crafty goodies for my birthday which I unfortunately put away before I remembered I hadn’t photographed it, but there were lots of fabby embellishments, gems, rubber stamps, die cuts, etc. etc. What fun! Some will be incorporated in the lavender sachets project.

We went to a stoma open day today (yes, such things DO exist…) – see my Gutless Bag Lady blog if you are interested (link top right of this blog). My stoma is now settled enough for the nurse to set up a prescription for me (saw her last Friday, when I also saw the surgeon, who is well pleased with my progress). Oncology appointment tomorrow, and then my next chemo on 12th June. It’s all go. I am now feeling a lot better after the first treatment’s effects are starting to wear off, and I’m trying to take full advantage of these “good” days.

Sorry not to be able to take part in the WOYWW 6th anniversary ATC swap, but I am hoping to send one to each of the people who have very kindly sent me an ATC to cheer me along my road to a cancer-free life!

Happy WOYWW, everybody, and may chaos reign in our creative spaces, and may God grant us enough of His creative spirit to enable us to bring a small modicum of beauty out of that chaos during the coming week.

WOYWW 279

For information as to how to join in our wonderful weekly hop around to see how messy our desks are, click on the WOYWW logo in my sidebar, which will take you to our hostess Julia’s blog where all will be explained.

I haven’t had much time this week to do anything much creative, because I’ve spent about four days on the recliner resting and feeling exhausted. I think our recent busy-ness has been catching up with me. Also, being the first week of the month, I have been busy doing the accounts, which I have now finished. In addition to this, two or three weeks ago I had to apply for a new blue badge (disabled parking badge) and sent off the application to Devon County Council, only to have it returned and to be informed that I now had to apply to our local town council since we’d moved. The form duly arrived, and of course it was different, and required different documentation, so apart from the (quite embarrassingly awful) photo I had done in a photo booth recently, I’ve had to more or less reapply from scratch. What a pain it all is! It seems these days that you can’t move without having to provide at least 3 documents proving your identity, and I have nothing with a recent photo on it.

Anyway, to my desk. This is what that end of my ARTHaven looks like today:

On the left, on the curve, is my iMac. Balanced on top of my little rack of tapes is the gorgeous pincushion made for me by Lunch Lady Jan a few years ago when we did an ATC swap with WOYWW. My distress inks are all out because I’ve got fed up with them in a box, and have yet to decide how on earth I’m going to store them… On the main desk is my latest masterboard which I completed last night (see previous post). This is what it looks like now.

You can see the brown one I made, on the pulled-out unit to the right of the picture, beside my new envelope punch board.

The other night I spent quite a long time cutting up a new set of alphabet stamps that came with my recent new parcel of stash, and sticking them down onto EZ Mount Foam. Even with my Tim Holtz scissors that have non-stick blades, it was an extremely sticky and unpleasant job! Not my favourite occupation but it had to be done.

I am hoping to have more time and energy for art during the coming week. I have been finding it very frustrating that what small supplies of energy I have, tend to get used up doing things I have to do, and then there’s none left for any fun! I’ve had the result of my blood test and I am still anaemic, so back on the iron again. Shoshi pumping iron lol!

Happy WOYWW, everyone.

Natural Dyeing, New Stash and Future Plans

In preparation for my upcoming felt making classes, I need to dye some Merino wool rovings, and decided to do a small amount, by way of an experiment, using avocado skins and pits (stones) which I have recently seen on Youtube. I thought I would put in some other bits and pieces too, while I was at it, and these will come in useful for future textile projects if the result is successful.

Here are the items I chose.

In the middle at the back you can see the Merino roving, and across the middle, some different types of lace. Some of these are cotton, and some synthetic, which will take up the dye differently. At the front is a small quantity of hand-spun wool – some of my earliest attempts, done many years ago and lurking in my “yarns for dyeing” box. They are nice and slubby and uneven, and may be incorporated into the felt.

Here is the dye bath. I used just one avocado pit and half a skin – the remains of my lunch today! You don’t need much if you are only making a small dye bath for a small quantity of materials.

Since these are natural foodstuffs, I have no qualms about using a regular cooking pan in the kitchen, but when I use my synthetic dyes, I work in my ARTHaven and use the microwave up there, to avoid contamination with food preparation equipment.

You can see that the outer shell of the pit has come off and is now resting inside the skin. The colour of the dye bath is darkening nicely after simmering for about 20 mins. The longer you leave it, the darker it gets, in the same way that the longer you leave the materials steeping in it, the darker they will get.

The materials have to be wetted through, and I prepared a bowl of warm water with some vinegar added – this should help the dye bind with the wool, but I am not sure what effect it will have (if any) on the other materials. I also added some gentle organic dishwashing liquid to remove any residual grease from the wool (especially the hand-spun yarns) and to aid the penetration of the water into the fibres – soap reduces the surface tension of the water, hence the bubbles!

Again, since these are regular kitchen substances, I am happy to carry out this process with my ordinary cooking equipment and supplies.

After wetting for at least half an hour, the materials can be lifted out of the bath, rinsed, and added to the dye, and left until the desired colour is achieved. I ended up adding another couple of half avocado skins because I didn’t think the dye bath looked quite dark enough, and after simmering for another 20 mins or so, it looked better. (For some time now, I have been saving the skins and pits and freezing them, so I can use them when I want. Good thing I like avocados, isn’t it.)

The materials in the dye bath. You can see what a gorgeous shade of dusky pink is generated by the avocado. Not quite what one would expect! Although you can remove it from the heat at this stage, I left it simmering, with the lid on.

The materials after being removed from the dye bath. These were now rinsed thoroughly and left to dry. First, the lace:

It’s interesting that the nylon lace at the bottom has taken up the dye more strongly than any of the others. The motif lace at the top is a lovely subtle shade, and the crochet cotton one underneath has hardly taken up any dye – it doesn’t show up clearly on the photo, but it’s more or less cream. The third one down is slightly darker than the top one.

Now for the wool.

The little skeins of handspun wool at the top have turned out very well. They feel a lot softer now the residue of natural lanolin from the fleece has been washed out. The roving underneath is slightly paler (probably because it’s less dense). I had to handle this very gently while rinsing it because any agitation would tend to make the fibres felt together, and I don’t want that to happen quite yet!

In a day or two, there will be a photo of the materials after drying thoroughly, and ready for use.

Today, my much-anticipated parcel of new stash arrived! I was glad that we cancelled our outing today – I was much too tired after yesterday’s long day in town, shopping and having my eyes tested, and needing to rest to be ready for tomorrow’s jaunt to Bath. I was therefore here to sign for the parcel.

Opening it up, I found the contents very prettily wrapped in tissue paper with a ribbon and a nice little tag.

Opening it up, here is what was revealed.

There are several stencils, and a large bee stamp, wood block mounted, so I will need to unmount this and apply some EZ-Mount Foam. The alphabet stamp, which is going to be so useful in my mixed media work, is unmounted, and will need to be treated likewise, before cutting it up to separate the individual letters. I also ordered various metal embellishments, carefully chosen as I could see they would be suitable for making moulds. On the right, at the back, there is some more Golden acrylic polymer which I get through quite a lot of – it is brilliant for thinning acrylic paints to create glazes, without losing any of the adhesion of the paint, which can happen if you use water to dilute them. There is also some fabric medium, so that I can convert ordinary acrylics into fabric paints, and a bottle of liquid pearls.

In the centre, the oval blue thing is not a bottle – it’s the punching button on the Envelope Punch Board! I think this is going to be a lot of fun to use, as well as being very useful. It comes with two charts indicating what size of paper to use and how to score the different sized envelopes – one chart is Imperial and the other metric. I have never really got on with envelope boards before and had more or less given up the idea of making envelopes, until I discovered this new tool which everyone seems to be raving about – it will be a good investment, I am sure, saving lots of money in the future as I will no longer need to buy envelopes! Not to mention the fact that you can make them to match your cards, and also that the board can be used for making all sorts of gift boxes.

In upcoming blog posts you will no doubt see a lot of these things in use.

Regarding the stencils – when I eventually get my Cougar cutting machine going again, I shall be making more stencils. However, I have had problems in the past, cutting very small shapes, because the small pieces tend to lift and get clogged around the blade, preventing decent cutting. I do not mind buying the odd stencil that I know is going to be difficult to cut!

Other new stash that I have got: yesterday I trawled through several charity shops and came home with some great stuff. I got some T-shirts and a couple of checked and striped men’s shirts and table linen (for the fabric), and some doilies, and the most magnificent satin quilt with some embroidery down the centre (all real bargains). This last item I do feel a bit reluctant to cut up, but I did buy it for this purpose so must steel myself to the task! I shall be blogging about these things in due course. They will all be cut up and repurposed. I am planning to get my sewing machine going in the New Year (if I finish my recycled mini-album by Christmas, which is what I am hoping!) and along with my teabag art, I am planning on making some altered clothing, especially using T-shirts as the basis, onto which I will add layers of other fabrics, and lace trims and embroidery, and possibly some paint. I have seen a lot of this online and am keen to give it a go. I may even incorporate some of my felt!

The first module of the felt course starts next Wednesday evening, the day Mum returns from my sister’s. It lasts for five weeks. There is another module in February, also for five weeks.

All I need now is a ready supply of energy and lots of time. I hope that’s not a pipe dream!

Edit: Photo of materials after drying overnight.

Unfortunately the photo doesn’t show the colour of the lace very well. The lace at the top (cotton crochet) has taken up virtually no dye, but the front two pieces are actually more pink than the photo indicates. The Merino roving has felted slightly, but fortunately I can still pull the fibres apart.

Recycled Mini-Album Pages–Circles

I’ve completed another page in my recycled mini-album. For the background I used a piece of kitchen paper which I’d been using for mopping up and cleaning brushes, with a predominantly black and white colour scheme with a touch of blue. I love the randomness of these papers, and also the large scratch sheets I use to work on, cleaning my brushes and rubber stamps on them and generating layers that build up in to unique background sheets.

Here is the black and white kitchen paper. Kitchen paper is 2-ply, and the layers can be pulled apart so you get twice as much for your money!

Here’s another one with a different colour scheme.

Sometimes the paint causes the layers to stick together, and they have to be gently teased apart. Sometimes this is not possible without tearing the paper, but I love the holes that result! It all adds to the texture.

I shall probably be using some of this one in the Recycled Mini-Album too.

Here are some newer pieces of kitchen paper at the beginning of their creative life:

Who knows what they will end up looking like? Top left in the picture are some used baby wipes. They are now dry, of course, but I can still use them for mopping up. They have the added advantage that they do interesting things when heated, shrinking up and eventually breaking into holes, so definitely useful for mixed media projects.

This is the scratch paper I’m creating at the moment – as it was just after I finished my current page. I have been concentrating on circles and swirls. You can generate interesting patterns by thinking about how to move the brush as you clean it, rather than just scrubbing randomly.

There was quite a bit of black and white paint left on the palette at the end of the project, and I lifted this off with a large foam brush and added it to the scratch paper, resulting in this:

I find this all very intriguing and adventurous, and it goes along with my current recycling ethos! Perhaps to be truly recycling, I should use newspaper as my scratch papers… or cardboard packaging? Certainly ideas worth considering.

I also found a couple of background sheets I made several years ago, which may come in for this album too. I can’t remember exactly what I did, but there is definitely some distress embossing powder on them. They were embossed using a Cuttlebug embossing folder (Iron Works). They are wonderfully rough and textured.

However, to return to my Recycled Mini-Album pages, here is the page with the kitchen paper stuck down with regular matt gel medium.

You can see the borders from the larger pages underneath. Laid on the page are some circles cut from silver tissue paper. My hubby brought home some wedding service sheets one day – people always leave them behind and he knows I can often make use of the materials. These sheets had been hand-made by the couple and weren’t anything to write home about, but they had these tissue paper circles glued on not very firmly, so it was easy to pull them off and keep them for future use. I thought they’d fit in well with this page, and they also dictated the theme of the page which is circles.

I lightly distressed the two photos using a combination of Weathered Wood (fast becoming one of my favourites!) and Black Soot Distress Inks. I am finding that the photos seem to be developing a green tinge when I use them in the album – I am not sure what is causing this, but it could be a combination of factors, or maybe some substances reacting against each other. I have to spray the scanned and printed photos with fixative because I have an inkjet printer, and it may be this that is reacting with the gel medium used to adhere the photos to the page, or it may be a reaction between the inkjet ink and any of the products I am using.

I have made a video of the process of creating the page but as usual I am behind with my video editing and the video is not yet ready to be included with this post, but watch this space and it will appear in due course. Here is the completed page. I wasn’t sure to start with whether I liked it, but it’s beginning to grow on me!

In addition to the tissue paper circles, I have created smaller circles using the lid of a pen dipped in silver metallic acrylic paint, and also done some bubble wrap printing using the same paint. Here are the bubble wrap printing blocks I made this afternoon:

The white is the Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive which is still wet. It will dry crystal clear. I stuck the bubble wrap onto some wooden blocks I’d saved from when I unmounted all my wooden block rubber stamps and remounted them on EZ Mount foam. I got this idea watching a Youtube video this afternoon, and it certainly makes the bubble wrap easier to handle. For this project, I just used the smaller one.

The border of the page was done with the same black and white acrylics that I’ve been using for all the page borders. This time I used a circular foam applicator for the larger circles, and stencil brushes for the smaller ones, wrapping an elastic band around the bristles to keep them in a tight circular formation. I tidied up the border with black and white pens afterwards.

As a result of the position of this particular page in the signature, this border will not be visible underneath other pages.

Explosion Box Pt 3

Update on the Explosion Box: A friend on the Brainfog Forum suggested I sewed the folded paper spring to stop it extending too far and flopping over, so I've done that - just up 2 opposite corners. It still flops a bit and may possibly need sewing on all 4 sides, but I think it's acceptable. Here's a picture of it lying on its side to show the stitching:

I haven't done a lot on the box itself as I've spent most of the time cutting out some new unmounted rubber stamps and sticking them on adhesive foam ready for use with perspex blocks. This is an extremely arduous task which has made my hands very tired - cutting the self-adhesive foam is also extremely sticky and made a mess of my scissors! I cleaned them off very successfully with StazOn cleaner. (That's quite funny - it doesn't stay on when you clean it lol! - it's the StazOn brand - the cleaner is to clean StazOn ink off stamp pads! Sorry - just the way my mind works... It's a solvent for alcohol-based inks and I thought it would deal with non-water based glue too, and it did very well.)

Here's a picture to show the extra bits I've put on the box:

It's a good thing my friend is away at the moment as I'm terribly behind with this project and there's no way I could finish it in time for the actual birthday!

We've got quite a busy day tomorrow and I may not do anything on this project - I'll see how I am after we get back from the barbecue we're going to.