Mystery Project–Part 3–Turquoise Heart

For the second of the three hanging heart ornaments, I chose a turquoise and terracotta colour scheme. As I started making this, I decided to give it a suggestion of a Spanish theme, because the friend for whom I was making this one loves visiting Spain. I also wanted to make a more colourful, and perhaps more illustrative and pictorial, frame than for my other friend, the artist, for whom I made the brown frame.

This colour combination as a new one for me, and I was inspired by Zsuzsa of InkyDinkyDoodle blog – she uses a lot of these colours and I’ve always thought how lovely they were! Thanks, Zsuzsa. I’ve been meaning to try these colours for a while now.

I began by getting out various bits and pieces in order to choose what to use for the various embellishments on this frame. I didn’t use the poultry grit (broken up bits of shell) in the end.

I decided I wanted to add a couple of small terracotta pots as embellishments, and knew I didn’t have any such ready-made embellishments in my stash, and slept on it for several nights, wondering how to achieve the look I wanted. When I started rummaging in my mixed media oddments box, I came across a bag of empty silk cocoons that I’d bought several years ago at a craft show, and thought, “Perfect!” Not only were they exactly the right size, but they also had just the right texture, too! I trimmed them down to shape so that I could stick them to the frame.

To create the top edge of the “pots,” I stuck down two different thicknesses of string. This proved to be a very fiddly job and I couldn’t get the string to stick at first, and then I tried doing it with Glossy Accents, which eventually worked. You can see that I have cut one of the little pots to look as if it was broken. They look a bit dirty around the top because the cocktail stick I used to help me stick on the string was a bit grubby! No matter – they were going to be painted anyway.

The first step was to paint them with gesso.

Now they were ready for painting with acrylics. I used Burnt Sienna and created shadows with Burnt Umber.

On a scrap piece of watercolour paper which I’d cut to fit the recess in the frame, I painted a simple seascape and fixed it in place.

I cut a short length of black lace and stiffened it with some watered-down PVA glue and stuck this in place – reminiscent either of a Spanish mantilla or of the black wrought iron balconies so commonly seen in Southern Spain.

To create an impression of sand, I added some pumice gel medium and painted it with acrylics.

The frame was then ready for the rest of the embellishments.

Here are the flowers and leaves I used.

To stick the little pots in place, I filled the backs with hot glue and then stuck them in place with more hot glue.

Here is the finished piece, with all the embellishments stuck down with hot glue.

I shall be giving my friend this little heart in the New Year when we are planning our lunch get-together which had to be postponed from before Christmas. She doesn’t visit my blog so I thought it would be safe to post about it before she receives it!

Here are the first two hanging hearts together. At this stage I hadn’t done more than the basic preparation on the third one.

Card for a Centenarian–Box for the Card

Having completed the card yesterday, today I worked on embellishing a box for it, as it is too thick for an envelope.

The box was in my stash, and originally contained some samples of stoma supplies! (Nothing goes to waste chez Shosh…)

I painted the bottom, sides and edges of the top with black acrylic paint.

Inside the box, I sprayed it with some pink shimmer spray that I’ve had from when I started papercrafting, many years ago!

I noticed some had got on the bottom of the box and I really liked the effect of it on black (something I’d never tried before) so I ended up spraying the whole thing with it.

I thought the inside needed something a bit extra, so I painted on a thin layer of soft gloss gel medium diluted with water, and sprinkled on some variegated copper gilding flakes, dabbing them into place with the paintbrush.

I wasn’t really happy with it, so I made up a wash of gold acrylic paint with some iridescent medium and painted that on. It was really shimmery but the brush strokes showed more than I wanted, and this was particularly obvious on the lid, unfortunately.

Here’s a detail of the effect. You don’t really get the shimmer from the photo.

In the end, I covered the inside of the lid with some of the paper left over from making the card, first distressing the edges with Evergreen Bough and then Forest Moss Distress Inks. This improved the look of it.

Here is the card in the box. It will be wrapped in tissue paper.

The front of the box completed. As with the card, I added some stickles to the butterfly’s body, and to the centres of the flowers – Holly, and Magenta. In this photo, they still aren’t dry.

I used scraps of the cards and paper used for the card. The circular die cut was one of several in my stash that a friend sent me ages ago. The flowers were more left over from the Floral Mini-Album, and the butterfly is another die cut from the set I used for the card. I used the same two ribbons, and where the “Congratulations” gold card meets the decorative paper, I added a thin strip of gold card from my stash, trimmed when making some other project in the past.

Here is a detail of the floral embellishment.

As with the butterflies on the card, I lifted the wings of this butterfly and secured them in place with a blob of Pinflair gel glue under each one, to stop them being flattened.

Now that the card is fully dry, I can return to it and show you the finished result. Here are a couple of detail photos showing the topper and embellishments.

The sentiment on the inside of the card.

Finally, a photo of the box, the card and the embroidered piece, all for a remarkable lady whose 100th birthday we shall be celebrating with her at her party tomorrow.

I can’t believe I’ve completed this lot in under a week! The trouble is, apart from making bread, that’s all I’ve done this week, and everything else has been neglected!

Infusions Mini-Album–Completing the Title Pages

This afternoon I made the title pages for Books 2 and 3 of my Infusions Mini-Album. One or two of them had to be left to dry, and I will complete them after this.

Again, I used up some of the reject/spare pages. For the first one, I should have chosen a stencilled one that didn’t use Polyfilla because there was one of those to come, but once I realised, it was too late! I added text with the white Uniball Signo marker pen and a black archival pen, and added some white Rub’n Buff and Treasure Gold to the raised parts.

I did the text in the same way on the Stencil with Polyfilla title, and added some Treasure Gold to the raised parts.

Simple text on the next one. I think I had it in mind to add some hand-embossed leaves and flowers to this one so I hope I’ve left room for them!

For the Added Texture title page, I thought I’d use a mixture of textures. From left to right: bleached mulberry bark (I tore off a tiny fragment), coarse pumice gel, regular matte gel (for attaching the mulberry bark), glass bead gel medium, and finally crackle paste. These have to be left to dry overnight, especially the crackle paste which needs time in order for the cracks to develop.

Acrylics title page. In addition to the usual pens, I also added some shading to the text, with a soluble graphite pencil and a fine wet brush to blend it out.

For the Gesso title page, I decided not to add any card, but simply to spread gesso onto the squashed toilet roll, taking the gesso over the black painted edges. As I needed two pages for this title (to make the page numbers work), I added some texture by patting the surface gently with the flat of the palette knife, taking this effect over onto the right-hand page a little, but leaving a smooth central part for writing on. Once this was done, I sprinkled on some Black Knight Infusions from Set 1 and some In the Navy from Set 2, and spritzed it with water and left it to stand for a bit, before drying the surface with my heat gun. These pages will have to be left overnight for the gesso to dry completely.

Finally, the Cling Film title. I am not sure whether what I have done will work! I wanted to leave some cling film on the page, so I scrumpled some up and attached it with a thick layer of heavy body clear gel medium. Once it is dry, I shall trim off the excess cling film. This was attached to a spare stencilled piece with a very blurry image on it, from about the third impression of a wet stencil. We shall have to see how this turns out after it’s been left to dry.

Second Wind–First Part

WOYWW visitors – please see previous post.

I know this was supposed to be the year of the UFOs (UnFinished Objects) and that I wasn’t supposed to be starting any new projects until I’d made good headway on completing ones I’d already started, but sometimes the creative urge just grabs one, and one has to give in!

I have just finished listening to the audiobook version of Dick Francis’ novel Second Wind, in which a meteorologist flies through the eye of a hurricane. Apparently after the complete calm of the eye of the storm, when the second half of the circular weather pattern passes over, this is known as the “second wind” and it can be even more destructive, finishing off anything left after the destruction of the first.

This captured my imagination, and I thought I would like to make a little album just with a series of simple brush-stroke illustrations in an attempt to capture it. In my stash I have quite a few folded sheets of hand-made paper which I think were the covers of some wedding service sheets that I picked up after a service. I tore them in half horizontally against a ruler so that I could mimic the existing deckle edge of this gorgeous natural-coloured and textured paper.

I did some experiments because I knew it was likely to be highly porous, and I didn’t want any bleed-through.

 

With just one coat of clear gesso, there was still considerable bleed-through, but with a second coat, this seemed to solve the problem, especially if I dried the piece fairly quickly with my heat gun and didn’t leave it sitting around saturated for too long. I also tried Finnabair 3-D matte transparent gel medium, some professional artists’ fixative in an aerosol can provided by my hubby, my own casein-based manual pump fixative, and some Rustoleum Crystal Clear sealant spray, also in an aerosol can (that stuff stinks!). This was the only other substrate that allowed no penetration, so I decided on two coats of clear gesso, which is a lot more user-friendly.

All substrates allowed the application of water-based paints/inks without beading, and in every case it was possible to reactivate the paint with water after drying. The clear gesso gives quite a tooth, but since the paper is textured anyway, I didn’t think this mattered.

It was important that the chosen substrate was transparent, as I didn’t want to cover the fibrous texture of the paper, or its natural, undyed colour.

As for the painting, I did a series of test pieces on scrap printer paper, which buckles horribly when wet, and does not allow one to blend the watercolours after they have been applied, but it was just to give me an idea of the sort of thing I wanted to paint. I used watercolours, and towards the end, added some Distress Stains.

Once they were done, I wasn’t very pleased with them, and decided that less was more, and that once I began on the hand-made paper, I would keep the brush strokes to a minimum, and try to simplify the designs.

I have chosen a limited palette: black, yellow and orange, and little touches of purple. I decided to use the Distress Stains exclusively in the end, as the colours are more intense. The colours I chose were Black Soot, Mustard Seed, Wild Honey, and Dusty Concord. I smeared these onto my craft sheet and picked them up with a brush – for the detail I used several sizes of smaller round brushes, and for the black swirls, a large fan brush, wetting the brush a little first.

Here are the pages in order. They show first of all a peaceful scene, and then the arrival of the hurricane, the first wind of which increases in size and strength.

The first wind then begins to diminish as we approach the eye of the storm.

For the eye of the storm, I made this picture the only double page spread of the album. This illustration is not only the physical centre of the book, but is also the focal point of the concept.

The following pages show the arrival of the second wind, its development and its diminution.

The final picture shows the emergence once again of a peaceful scene in the aftermath of the hurricane.

Watch this space for further progress on this little book. I intend to add some more detail, maybe in the form of small amounts of acrylics, including some spattering, and possibly some touches of gold, using embossing, foiling, gilding flakes or gilding wax, and maybe some archival marker pen.

For the binding I am planning on my first attempt at a Coptic binding, using undyed waxed linen thread, and using some sort of boards for the front and back cover.

I have been thinking about “second wind” in the context of my own life. It’s funny how while its primary meaning is something destructive and terrifying, this expression usually means something quite positive when used in a metaphorical sense. Since my cancer, which necessitated the removal of my entire colon which was already diseased with ulcerative colitis, I have definitely come into my “second wind” in a positive sense, and am enjoying many activities I thought were lost to me, and many new ones besides. The negative aspect of my second wind struck me early this year when I had a blockage and was admitted to hospital for emergency surgery. The eye of the storm was the whole of 2016 when I was pretty well, and I thought that was the end of it, not realising that the second wind was just around the corner.

Cancer very often leaves a swathe of destruction in its path, both physical and emotional, and yes, there has been destruction in my case, but what remains has enabled me to rebuild my life from the ruins, and what I now have is very much better than what I had before. While I was going through the thick of it, somehow, at the centre, I always had my own personal “eye of the storm” where I had peace and joy, and remained positive. I hope my little album in some way depicts this journey, as well as illustrating the terrible beauty of one of the most destructive weather events on earth.