Completing the Flowers and Leaves for my Altering Project

WOYWW visitors – please scroll down to previous post.

I have now finished making the flowers for my mystery project, and I have also made some leaves.

I made a selection of single-piece flowers and layered some of them for a bit more interest.

I used Orange Peel and Turquoise Stickles for the centres of some of them, and for the rest, I added a nice big blob of hot glue and sprinkled this with orange Flowersoft equivalent – this stuff is called Soft Magic from Carole’s Crafts, in light orange – I’ve had the set of these for ages and can’t remember where I got them. I don’t use it very often and it does make rather nice flower centres. It’s one of those supplies that lives in a drawer and gets forgotten about!

Here are all the turquoise flowers I have made.

Moving on to the leaves, I cut them all with the left-hand die from this Die’sire Classiques set, “Assorted Leaves.” I don’t much like the second die and haven’t used it yet, but I bought these dies at a craft show early this year, for the first die which has proved very useful.

I cut all these leaves from scraps of American Crafts white cardstock so I didn’t have to break into another whole sheet. I then hand-embossed them all with two sizes of embossing tools into a piece of fun foam.

Colouring two sets of leaves, one to go with the turquoise/terracotta flowers and the other with the brown flowers.

For the terracotta ones I coloured them with Rusty Hinge Distress Stain, painting on the ink in a random, blotchy way, and then repeated the process with Gathered Twigs Distress Stain, and finally distressed the edges with Walnut Stain Distress Ink, using a home-made ink blender.

For the brown ones, I used the same method, first with Pumice Stone Distress Stain, followed by Gathered Twigs, and finally with Antiqued Bronze Distress Stain for a subtle shimmer, and again, distressed the edges with Walnut Stain Distress Ink.

Here are the brown leaves, together with a selection of brown flowers.

These are the terracotta leaves, together with a selection of turquoise flowers.

I am now ready to continue with the rest of the project – I have already made good progress – and I will be able to show the finished results in a couple of weeks’ time.

I have made far too many leaves and flowers for my immediate use, but will use up the excess for other projects – most probably when I alter the little frames that my hubby gave me recently.

Some More Florabunda Alphabet Letters

Yesterday I drew some more Florabunda alphabet letters, and have now done F to J. I noticed that the first few looked a bit sparse compared with later ones, so I added some more flowers to the backgrounds and re-scanned them, so they are now more of a piece.

Only 16 more to do and the alphabet will be complete! Here’s how it looks so far.

These will be nice to use on personalised cards, and now that they are scanned in, I can make them whatever size I want. I can also colour them if I want, but so far I quite like them in black and white.

Yesterday I made a leaflet which I want to show to the organisers of the cancer information centre at the hospital when I next visit. I am hoping they will allow me to run an informal group of say half a dozen people, so that I can teach them the basics of the Zentangle method of drawing. I do not profess to be a teacher and am not a Certified Zentangle Teacher (CZT) but in a small way, I think I could share what I know, and get people started on what is a most relaxing and fulfilling activity, which is very de-stressing, and could really help people to deal with their cancer/chemo a little better. I do hope they will agree to let me do this!

If they give me the go-ahead, I can adapt this leaflet and make it into a poster, with their contact number and details on it.

Health Update

I am now well into my second week of my final chemo cycle, and have been feeling pretty terrible for the past two or three days. This happened last time too, on the reduced dose – I thought I was getting away with it because I felt so good in week 1 compared with other cycles, and then it hit me big time in week 2! This time, it’s worse, and I’ve had symptoms I haven’t had since earlier on in my treatment – I felt a bit nauseous this morning but fortunately that passed before lunch because I took my pre-lunch anti-sickness meds. Also, the peripheral neuropathy was quite troublesome this morning, and again my hands seemed to seize up, but these symptoms are transitory, thank goodness. I suppose that I should expect this, because even with the reduced dose, the effects are cumulative. I’ve felt extremely wiped out again, not helped by the fact that for the past few nights I have slept very badly, and I had a sleep this afternoon. I’ve felt very weak and wobbly, and my balance is much worse than usual so I am having to be careful moving around the house. I am using my trolley rather than my crutches and that does help.

I know that this will pass, and that by the end of this week I should be feeling a lot better again! Knowing that feeling better is no longer a prelude to being cast down to the bottom again by another treatment is having a huge psychological benefit, and I can put up with anything in the knowledge that this is temporary, and that I am now at the beginning of the road back to being my “normal” self again!

Birthday Card for Gisele

Today is my friend Gisele’s birthday, and rather than choosing one of the (so far very few!) cards from the Card Factory, which she may well have seen as she follows my blog, I made her a card today from scratch.

I used a couple of die-cuts from the marvellous pack that I recently received from Judy in Australia. I added a little distressing to both circles, and hand-embossed around the edge of the smaller one which has some music on it.

The pink flower was made from some die-cut pieces which I also hand-embossed, and assembled with Pinflair gel glue, and decorated with Flowersoft and Stickles, and the leaves were some ready-made rose leaves from my stash.

I cut the swirls and the sentiment using Sheba, my Black Cat cutter (see my sidebar for details of this machine). The swirls were from a cut file of Penny Duncan, and the sentiment was my own design using Edwardian Script font. (This file is on my SkyDrive, available for free download.) The sentiments were cut from a shade of green which echoed the leaves. All these items were cut from American Crafts cardstock which cuts beautifully on my machine. The swirls were darkened with Vintage Photo Distress Ink before being stuck down onto the die-cuts, and the flower added on top.

The decorative paper was part of a stack I bought when I first started, from Ebay. I haven’t used a great deal of it because as time has gone on, I haven’t liked it much. This particular sheet had been toned down with Picket Fence Distress Stain some time ago when I was working on another project, and seemed to be right for this pink-themed card.

The card base was plain heavy white cardstock that I’d bought at a craft fair some time ago, distressed around the edges with Worn Lipstick Distress Ink.

Inside I distressed the edges with Spun Sugar Distress Ink and added a music background stamp using Old Paper Distress Ink, and a Happy Birthday sentiment using Festive Berries Distress Ink. We both signed the card using a pink glitter gel pen.

All very pink and girly!!

Off to a party tonight to celebrate her birthday.

ARTHaven – Pegboard Accessories

My pegboard accessories arrived today – great excitement! I have put them up, but of course I shall have to live and work with them for a bit to see if they are how I want them. The joy of pegboard is that you can change things around so easily, so it’s no problem.

Here’s a general view of the work corner of my ARTHaven, showing the new Ikea rails and the pegboard complete with accessories.

A couple of different views:

These are some screw-top plastic jars. The lids remain clipped onto the pegboard, and you unscrew the jar from underneath. They will be useful for paper flowers and other small things. Alongside them are some open-topped plastic bins which I am keeping my stickles and alcohol inks and one or two other things in. Below the jars is one of two tool racks that I bought – I am not using the second tool rack at the moment but may have need of it in the future. I would like to find a way of inserting tubes into some of the holders so that I could use it for pens – perhaps a metal cigar tube would do? Something to explore… I have also put up a couple of ordinary pegboard hooks on which I have hung my Stanley knife and my brayer. (On the subject of craft knives, I have tried a few, and find the Stanley knife to be by far the best – it’s a lot more substantial than a lot of smaller craft knives, and seems to cut through without as much pressure. The blades are also readily available in any DIY store.)

Here are the plastic bins with some things in them – as you can see they are not yet all filled. I am sure they soon will be! I also bought 3 of the towel rails, and have put my kitchen roll on one. The others will be used for ribbons – I have got a large pack of ribbons due to arrive in the next day or two, more than will fit on the remaining 2 towel rails, but I can always get more of these if I need to.

Finally, I got a couple of wire baskets, which I am using at the moment for my small stamp pads and peel-offs, and for my heat-embossing stuff, and my flowersoft pots. Underneath I have put a hook to hang my heat gun on. Across the top there are 2 small wooden shelves which my hubby made for me, supported on long pegboard hooks. The small cardboard boxes on top contain card scraps, my stash of cards that I’ve made, and other bits and pieces. I have quite a large collection of these small, strong boxes with hinged lids, from a mail-order company where I get supplements and beauty products, and eventually I want to cover them with decorative paper and put pretty labels on the fronts.

I got the actual pegboards from Amazon (they are made by a company called Sealey), but the accessories proved quite difficult to find in the UK – the USA is blessed with many suppliers of a superb range of things, including coloured pegboards and clear acrylic shelves, and hooks which do not fall out easily, etc. etc. My new accessories do not seem to suffer from this problem, but the standard hooks can be a real pain. Apparently the best way to secure them is with cable ties, once you have decided the final place you want them.

After a lot of searching online, I came across a UK-based company which appeared to be the only place which sold any decent and interesting accessories. They are called Garage Furniture, and here is the link to the pegboard section of their website:

http://www.garagefurniture.co.uk/pegboard-accessories.shtml

They have been an absolute pleasure to deal with throughout; nothing has been too much trouble and they have been so helpful and friendly. The gentleman I spoke to on the phone was interested to know how I would be using their products, and he expressed an interest in getting into the crafting market, which I agreed would be a good idea; he is thinking of investigating the craft show circuit, and I am sure that if he had a stand, it would attract a lot of interest. I told him that there is a severe shortage of stuff available in the UK, and it might be worth exploring importing some of the US products.

Ed.: It now appears that this firm might have gone out of business. I have tried to access their website and it doesn’t seem to exist any more. What a shame. There doesn’t seem to be anybody else doing the full range of accessories.

Now I have got to spend some time working in my new environment and making sure it works for me! Being so adaptable, I am sure that it will be easy to change things round to suit my needs. If I want to put more accessories on (the most likely thing is more towel rails for my ribbons) I can move the shelves to the top of the pegboard, and make more room. I’ll let you know how I get on!