Wood Effect Anniversary Card

Today is our 32nd wedding anniversary. Where did the years go?

Having been so ill recently, I only managed to give my hubby a bought card for his birthday, and that was bought for me by a friend! I thought I’d better push the boat out a bit and make an effort and make a nice card for him for our anniversary.

At the County Show last Friday I was fascinated by a little wooden tag attached to the most expensive chopping board (if it hadn’t been for the price I’d have bought it because I fell in love with it!) – the little tag was made of laser cut veneer, and as soon as I saw it, I knew I could make something similar in card, and this would be the basis for my hubby’s card.

I began in Inkscape, working on my Apple Mac which is connected to the Cougar cutting machine (called Sheba). I found a free svg file online of nesting hearts, and I cut a dozen heart-shaped frames using two of the nesting sizes – unfortunately I forgot to photograph these till it was too late, but this is the paper left after they had been cut out. I ended up with a dozen smaller hearts (the bits that fell out of the frames) and most of these will go in my stash for other projects. In this photo you can also see the A4 piece with a window cut out for the front of the card.

I seem to end up using American Cardstock card for most of my cutting projects because it cuts like a dream. However, it’s not quite robust enough for a card base with lots of embellishments so this would have to be reinforced later on.

Again, I kept forgetting to photograph my progress. For the front and back of the tag I cut two hearts the same size as the outside of the frame, and these pieces also had our initials cut in them, as well as some little geometric flower petals like on the tag at the show. Propped up against the paint pot, you can see the completed frame, and the thickness I was able to achieve by laminating several layers of card together. When the edges were painted they looked like a bit of plywood! See below for the painting technique to replicate woodgrain.

The initials on the right were the pieces that fell out when I cut them from the hearts, and would be used to embellish the inside of the card.

I had intended to leave the initials in the hearts hollow as well as the petals, but you could see through and the one on the reverse was confusing, so to overcome this problem I stuck a small square of gold card on the back of each piece, so that the initials were gold, and opaque.

I glued the frame pieces stacked together to give a laminated and more rigid frame for the embellishment. In this picture you can see the linen carpet thread I used to suspend the embellishment, and the two heart pieces (front and back) ready to be attached to the frame.

Here is the first piece attached to the frame, with it’s little square of gold card glued on, to make the initial solid, and the hanging thread.

Here is the finished tag, with the side with my hubby’s initial on the left, and mine on the right.

I am so pleased with this little heart embellishment – it reminds me of some olive wood Christmas tree decorations I’ve got. I think one could take this idea further and make them in different shapes. They have a Scandinavian or Eastern European feel to them. I’ve wanted to make something like this for ages and thought of using mounting board but this is too thick to cut with Sheba, and you couldn’t cut them by hand. The laminated frame idea works well, or one could just laminate solid shapes. You could still have a design pierced through. They might make nice little Christmas gifts, or perhaps wedding favours.

Moving on to the card base, I painted the whole of the front with beige fluid acrylic, and then with Desert Sands Infusions, taking care to paint broad vertical strips to represent the wood grain, as I did on the heart pieces.

Turning to the inside, I created another type of woodgrain background, this time with Distress Stains, to make a lighter background as a contrast. Normally I don’t much like the unevenness you get with these (the dauber bottle isn’t my favourite form of delivery) but for woodgrain the effect is ideal. I used a combination of Antique Linen and Old Paper. This is the technique I used for one of the pages in my Floral Mini Album.

Here is the main card base, and the piece I cut and coloured with Distress Stains to be stuck on the back of the card front. The hanging string would be sandwiched between these two layers. You can also see the two thin circles I cut from gold card, to frame the hole, both front and back, to give a nice finish to the card.

Here are all the materials I used to create the embellishments inside the card. I used a couple of the hearts cut from the middles of the frame pieces, and coloured them to look like wood, as for the front of the card, but this time, to add a bit of bling, I also added a light touch of Treasure Gold (gilding wax). For the sentiments I simply used some peel-offs that I’ve had in my stash for years. They were very small, but I like the effect of the gold on the woodgrain, and I didn’t want anything competing with the rest of the design.

The edges of the hearts were distressed, and they were glued together and stuck down, and some shading added. The initials were what was cut out of the front and back of the embellishment. I daubed them with Antique Linen and Old Paper Distress stains, and they also had a light dusting of Treasure Gold.

I cut a piece of plain white card and stuck it to the back of the card base for extra rigidity. Even though it was just the back, I distressed the edges with Gathered Twigs Distress Ink to take away the starkness of the white card.

Here is the finished card lying flat.

Here it is standing, so that you can see how the embellishment turns and moves as it hangs freely in the aperture of the card.

The completed inside of the card. You can see the embellishment through the aperture of the card.

I think this faux wood effect has come out very well. When I  have used Infusions in this way before (see this post for an example), I used Desert Sands Infusions straight onto white card, and it came out very orange – not a problem if you want it that way, but I wanted a more subtle approach here, so I used the Infusions on a painted substrate. You could make faux woodgrain in this way with any colour you wanted really.

Another reason I like this effect is that it is very suitable for a card for a man. It is strong and more sombre but it also has a natural effect. I used a similar theme on my hubby’s anniversary card in 2016, but this time with a woodgrain effect created with an embossing folder.

I seem to be in a bit of a brown phase again at the moment, after the bright colours of the Floral Mini-Album! I can’t wait to try replicating the effect of the absolutely fabulous wooden moths I saw at the County Show…

WOYWW 319

I’m feeling quite a bit better now, as the second week advances after chemo treatment #3, so I’ve been a bit more active on the creative front.

My desk today.

Annotated for your delectation and delight! You will be glad to hear that true to her cheapskate character, Shoshi has rescued some little twists of wool from the back of the settee – these obviously got down through the recliner mechanism to the floor since I completed my knitting project! Not one to throw anything away, however manky if it can still be used, these now sit in all their glory on my desk waiting to be cleaned up! You can see also that my paint water remains suspiciously clean.

Moving on, I have two lavender sachets remaining from that project, and as tomorrow I am seeing the two ladies I became friends with in hospital, I thought I would make up two more boxes to put these in. One of them will have the little chemo card inserted – she and I are neck-and-neck in our treatments, mine being every 3 weeks on Fridays and hers every three weeks the following Mondays (sad that the hospital is so badly organised that they couldn’t do us both together lol!!). The other one’s cancer was so well confined to her bowel that she didn’t need chemo (don’t I envy her!!).

You can see one of the box pieces waiting to be embellished. I am in the middle of sorting out which rubber stamps I want to use for this, and have got a selection out. The set on the right is a new Chocolate Baroque set that I haven’t used yet.

As always, there is stuff lurking around (usually carefully hidden out of shot!) waiting to be put away, and underneath the desk are a couple of Really Useful Boxes (RUBs) waiting for a home to be found for them, and the top one now contains various bits and pieces for art doll making.

Last week someone asked what I was using a screwdriver for! I was a bit mystified about this till I realised she must mean my Bosch hot glue gun which is a bit of a monster, I admit… It lives at the back of the desk on its charger.

Moving downstairs to Desk #2 (!! – my table in front of the recliner) I have got my doll making stuff out.

I downloaded a Tilda doll template from Pinterest last week, and sized it to what I thought would be suitable. It’s coming out quite small so I’ll probably redo it a bit larger, but I think it will be OK. You can see I’ve started stitching the pieces together. I know this would be a lot quicker on the machine but I am not able to sit in my studio for extended lengths of time yet and quite enjoy being in the zone with tiny back-stitching on the comfort of the recliner. On the left is a collection of cut out pieces of card comprising another angel template, this one a multi-layered felt one, inspired by an image I found on Pinterest. I’ve got a big bag of felt scraps and will cut it from these, and add some embroidery to embellish it. At the back of the table is the fabric I’m making the current Tilda doll from (the body is made from a beautiful old Egyptian cotton sheet which is so fine that I am having to use longer pins than my usual ones because they are slightly thinner, but they are still leaving marks which have to be smoothed out. I am using a fine Betweens needle to sew the pieces.

My tools and other bits and pieces are in a tray taken from one of my RUBs. Useful little compartments.

And now for those of you who haven’t visited me since the last WOYWW, I’ll put you out of your misery. Here is the “sneak peek”:

You can see the “funny stuff” as part of the embellishment. Here it is in all its glory.

It was part of some pot-pourri we had years ago and I saved it for art stuff. You can read all about it here. Nothing to do with angels!!

Finally, I thought you might like to see how the brainless knitting is coming along.

Progress is slow, but at least I’ve made some! It’s good to work on while having the chemo (till I start to feel too poorly to do it) and also if I feel up to doing something, but nothing too involved. In addition to this, this week I have revived Inkscape (free, open-source, very powerful vector drawing software) and have been designing some things to cut once I eventually get my Cougar cutting machine up and running again. (Long overdue…) I can do this on the computer with very little effort and it’s highly creative.

I am hoping to have the rest of this week, and all next week, feeling a lot better and managing to work on projects again. My angel project is moving ahead extremely slowly but I am still not putting pressure on myself to complete it by any given date. I’ll keep you posted.

Happy WOYWW everybody. I’m joining pretty late in the day so I hope you are all still there!

Edit – I have just signed up for WOYWW, only to read of the devastating news of the sudden death of Eliza, one of our regular members. It makes my last sentence take on a whole new meaning. I shall miss her posts, and the regular news of her beautiful cat Yoda who always made me smile week by week.

WOYWW 258

Click on the WOYWW logo in my sidebar and visit Julia’s blog, to find out what this is all about, if you are not already part of the fun, nosing around other people’s work desks!!

Here is my desk this week.

I don’t know why it is, but each week these days, I seem to be between jobs when WOYWW comes around, so I never seem to have anything very interesting going on on my desk! This week you can see the mini-album I’ve been working on, now complete (the book at least – the pages have yet to be decorated). It is made entirely from recycled materials, and anything else (metal embellishments, paint, etc.) were already in my stash.

To the right of it, you can see the small piece of roofing felt with my test samples of different finishes – acrylic wax, gel medium and acrylic varnish – to help me decide on a finish for the half-binding of the book.

I tried to include my iMac in the picture, because on the screen there is a nifty little gear wheel that I have created in Inkscape, but it doesn’t show up at all! I’ve been struggling most of the afternoon trying to get Inkscape to work with the Mac, and it seems to be OK now. I am designing a gear wheels stencil which I intend using to embellish the pages of the mini-album.

The little purple box contains my Zentangle pens and other drawing stuff. The cream coloured tin bath is a convenient place to keep things tidy – on top is Lunch Lady Jan’s pincushion which I really treasure! Beside that is a selection of gel mediums, gesso and paint that I was using for the book, and a jar of dirty paint water. (Well, there has to be some sort of evidence of work going on, doesn’t there!)

You can see better pictures of the book if you scroll down to previous posts.

The rest of the room is, as usual, in utter chaos. Still loads of teabags hanging around feeling neglected!

Have a great week, everybody, and may your creative juices flow, your mojo reign supreme, and may you have lots of goodies to share with us!

WOYWW 184

Well, Wednesdays wend their way round the weekly calendar like whisked whitening don’t they… how’s that for a bit of wobbly wordplay? To find out what all those W’s mean, click on the WOYWW link in my sidebar, which will Take You To Our Leader the wonderful Julia who hosts the weekly desk-snooping extravaganza where we all delight in how messy and creative (or otherwise!) we all are.

Not a lot to show on my actual desk this week, after I’d finished my friend’s birthday card. There are some swirls I cut with Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine (details in my sidebar of this wonderful machine), some of which I used on her card. Also my ongoing Tattered Time album – not too much done on that since last week except that I’ve pretty well finished page 1, apart from all the other stuff I’ve decided to add. I think that’s going to be the story of this album – it will never be finished as I will keep thinking of more things to put in it!

In the ice cream tub are the sentiments I made for the album. Under the swirls you can see the initial sketches I made for designing some file tabs (see below), sheets of planning notes for the album, and various pieces of the papers I am using in the album. Top left, you will see the beautiful little pincushion that Lunch Lady Jan sent me when we did our ATC swap a few months ago – thanks Jan – you can see it’s in constant use! One of those thick hat pins is just right for unbunging my Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive, for example. On the left you can see my mess of rulers all mixed up with paper scraps – now my hubby’s bought me that nice piece of guttering, I really must get on with making my ruler holder! The rulers drive me nuuuts.

The other thing I’ve done this week is to design a couple of file tabs in Inkscape, which will be cut and used in the album. They will be useful to add to tags and photo mats etc. which need to be pulled out. You can get a punch that makes them, but I haven’t got it, and anyway, I thought it would be fun to design some of my own, in different styles. The first one is a semi-circular one which will fit nicely into a semi-circle cut in the pouch or page edge.

The second one is a simple, plain tab such as you might find on office files.

I am planning to design some further shapes, too, including ones incorporating gearwheels (for this project) and also maybe some butterflies and flowers. The tag and pouch I showed you last time is finished, but so far I haven’t cut any of these shapes. Once I am satisfied that they cut out and function as expected, the files will be uploaded to my Skydrive ready for free download for anyone who wants to use them. For someone who was initially terrified of Inkscape and disgusted at its non-user-friendliness, I am now a complete convert, and like many such converts, I am quite evangelical in my enthusiasm for this extraordinary piece of software that is soooo powerful and has endless features that I have barely began to explore, and what’s more, It’s FREE! There are loads of helps online in the form of Youtube tutorials etc. but first and foremost I am grateful to the experts on the Thyme Machines forum (the forum for my cutting machine) who really got me going on it.

Have a great week everyone, and I hope you all manage to survive the weather here in the UK, or wherever else you might be.

WOYWW 182–Tattered Time Album

Well, it’s Snoopy Time again! Time to snoop around each other’s work desks and see what we’ve all been up to this week. The lovely Julia of Stamping Ground (see the WOYWW link in my sidebar) does her best to keep us unruly mob in order as we open our inner creative sanctums (or should that be sancta?) to the glare of worldwide publicity, warts and all.

This week I started an exciting new project to join the ranks of my UFOs (Un-Finished Objects) – all of which are progressing slowly together in parallel! It’s a mini album (actually not so mini) made from paper bags and using the DCWV Tattered Time paper stack. I bought this over a year ago and since then it’s lived on the shelf, only to be taken down every now and then to be stroked because it is… Gorrrrrgeous.

This is what I’ve done so far on Page 1.

It’s in honour of my Dad, and the first page is about his ancestors – my great-grandparents and grandparents. For full details and to see some better pictures, please see my most recent blog posts.

Yes, I know… I should be working on the Card Factory. Trouble is, I’d MUCH rather be doing this.

I’ve also started designing some tags in Inkscape, ready for cutting with Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine (see my sidebar for details of this machine). Here’s a screen shot of my first one – a work in progress – a tag with a decorative top, and a matching pouch. I shall also be designing some for the mini-album, and svg cut files and pdfs will eventually make their way onto my Skydrive for free download for whoever wants to use them.

Have a very happy and creative WOYWW, everybody. Not sure if I’ll do any better this week than last week at visiting desks, but we shall see!

Poppies for Remembrance–Tutorial

I am creating a page in my new art journal entitled “Remembrance” as it is Remembrance Sunday. I am embellishing it with some paper poppies which I have made, and to prevent the blog post on the art journal page being too long, I have decided to post separately about the construction of the poppies.

I designed the poppies and leaves in Inkscape. This is a bitmap image of the svg file which is available for free download from my OneDrive, if you would like to download it and use it on your cutting machine, or alternatively, print out the image at whatever size you want, and use it as a template. I cut two sizes of the poppy and leaf pieces.

I cut the shapes using Sheba, my Cougar cutting machine – you can read about this machine in my sidebar. The two poppy shapes are designed to be laid one on top of the other, at right angles to one another, to create a 3-D flower once the petals are embossed.

Cutting the leaf pieces from green cardstock:

Cutting the poppy pieces from red cardstock:

Unfortunately I didn’t get very satisfactory cuts, but then I have been reliably informed on the Thyme Machines forum (the forum for my cutting machine) that card from that particular supplier doesn’t cut very well! I got there in the end, though, even if some of the pieces needed a bit of trimming with fine scissors afterwards. Here are the pieces cut. I have made far more than I need for this project, so that I can make up some poppies to go in my stash.

The next step was to shade them, and I did this with Distress Inks acting as watercolours, with a fine brush. Inking the leaves, using Forest Moss Distress Ink. I rubbed the ink pad onto my non-stick craft sheet and picked it up with the wet brush.

For the poppies I used Festive Berries Distress Ink.

I thought they needed to be a bit darker and more defined in the centre, so I added some Shaded Lilac Distress Ink to give them more dimension.

Here are all the pieces with the inking completed, ready for embossing.

Each piece was hand-embossed onto a piece of fun foam. Embossing the leaves from behind, so that they would be slightly convex when assembled:

Embossing the poppies, this time from the front, to make the petals cup-shaped. This time I used a larger embossing tool.

All the pieces embossed:

They were then assembled using Scotch Quick-Dry Adhesive – I would have preferred to have used hot glue but my new cordless glue gun was taking too long to charge. I applied a dab of glue to the centre of one piece, and gently pressed the second one in place, at right angles to it, forming the poppy. This glue is recommended for making boxes, so I think it will be strong enough.

I glued some leaves onto the back.

To make the centres, I drew some circles of two different sizes onto a piece of scrap card, and filled each circle with a good blob of Pinflair gel glue.

Then I stuck flowersoft all over them and dried them with my heat gun.

Unfortunately they don’t do black flowersoft (or at least, I haven’t got any!) so I used the darkest colour I had. Once the glue was dry, I simply painted them with black acrylic paint and cut them out. I finished them by running a black marker pen around the edges to cover the last of the pink.

Then all I had to do was stick them into the centres of the poppies, again using Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive.

In this photo, you can see little spots of white where the glue is showing; this was still wet, but once it was dry, it was colourless and invisible. Here is a detail photo of some of the poppies.

I shall soon be uploading a post about the Remembrance page in my art journal, now that it is completed. Watch this space!

Art Journal Page–Remembrance

My latest art journal page is for Remembrance Day. It seems unbelievable that we are only two years from the centenary of the beginning of the First World War; I remember seeing on TV a few years ago, a programme entitled “The Last Tommy,” about the very last survivor of that terrible conflict, which was supposed to be “The War to end all wars…” The veterans of World War Two are now becoming very elderly, and soon that war will pass from living memory, too.

The conflicts go on, of course. At this time of year we remember not only those who died in the two World Wars, but also all of our armed forces fighting around the world, especially at present in Afghanistan. Our nephew returned home from there just a couple of weeks ago, and we are very glad to have him back, safe and sound, but this is not the case for far too many. Our hearts go out to the families of those who will never return, and for those whose lives are forever changed because of devastating injury.

Last year I designed a new service sheet for Remembrance Sunday for our church:

I have based my journal page loosely on this design.

When I did my Tyger Tyger page, I was disappointed at first that some of the green ink had bled through to the next page, but on balance I was glad, because it formed the basis for the left-hand page of my Remembrance layout.

Here is the page with the background text mapped out in pencil.

These words were then filled in with brown water-based pens.

Here is a detail of this text.

I knew this would obviously be much too strong to be a background, so an acrylic glaze was required, to tone it right down. Before I could apply this, though, the water-based ink had to be sealed to prevent it running when the paint was applied. I recently acquired this spray sealant:

It seems to work very well, but the only problem is, it stinks. Big time! You are supposed to use it in a well-ventilated space, but it’s far too cold to open all the windows at the moment! I left my ARTHaven door open to get rid of it, and then the whole house stank of it. Ah well. One must suffer for one’s art…

Here is my pizza box spray booth, with scrap paper under the pages of the art journal that I’m working on, to protect what is underneath.

Here are the materials for the acrylic glaze.

I used a mixture of brown and white acrylic paint, with some acrylic polymer to thin it to a glaze. This is what it is like mixed.

Here is the first layer of the glaze applied.

I painted it on, and blotted it off with kitchen paper several times, until I was happy with it. The text was still too obvious in the centre where I wanted to put a picture, so a lighter layer needed to be applied.

You can see that the text is still visible, even through several layers, but it is much more subtle, and forms a varied and more interesting background than just leaving it plain. I dried this off with my heat gun. I did this for each stage of the project from now on – mixed media is great, but the most frustrating thing is waiting for each stage to dry before you can move on, so I bless the inventor of the heat gun!

Now I was ready for the interesting part: painting the details. First I painted some war graves and a Spitfire.

I deliberately kept these fairly muted, but ultimately the gravestones were a little too muted and there wasn’t a lot I could do about that after I’d added the text.

To complete the right-hand page I painted a silhouette of a lone Tommy in a blighted landscape with some barbed wire. Again, I kept the palette muted, to suggest an old black and white photograph.

Now came my first disaster! I wanted to splatter some red onto the foreground to represent the blood shed in the great world conflicts, and thought my best bet was Barn Door Distress re-inker. I should have remembered from the last page that what soaked through the page was Distress Ink! I spattered it on OK but it took an absolute age to dry, despite several sessions of blasting it with my heat gun, and it turned out quite translucent and not that bright – not the effect I was after. Worse still, when I turned back to my Tyger page, the wretched stuff had bled through, despite my having sprayed the Remembrance page with sealant!! All is not lost, though, because I think I can touch it up and cover up the red spots. Now I’ve managed to get a nice random spattered effect, I can go over the pale red spots with acrylic paint. (Looking back at the Tyger page subsequently, I think I’m going to leave the red spots because I find I’ve grown to like them!!)

I also managed to get a couple of somewhat linear spatters which I didn’t like, but these could be covered up with the barbed wire to be drawn in the foreground – these marks now determine the course of the barbed wire, which was going to be pretty random anyway. There aren’t usually mistakes with mixed media and art journals – merely challenges which can be covered over or incorporated into the ongoing design! However, from now on, I think I am going to miss alternate pages of this album so that any bleed-through won’t be a problem, and glue these blank pages together. (That way, I may actually be able to fill the book in my lifetime, too!)

In this picture, the darker spots are the ink which had not yet properly dried.

The next stage was to add the border. The famous words are “The Ode of Remembrance” from a poem by Laurence Binyon, entitled “For the Fallen,” first published in The Times in September 1914; it is read each Remembrance Sunday after the Last Post and the two-minute silence.

The gaps in the text, and the space in the top left-hand corner, are where painted poppies would be inserted.

Here is a detailed shot of the journaling and the foreground barbed wire. I wrote it first with a red water-based marker, and then went round each letter with my size 08 permanent black marker that I use for zentangle drawing. These colours mirror the colour of the poppies and their centres.

To complete the page, I cut some poppy shapes with Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine (see my sidebar for details of this machine). To see how I made these flowers, please see my blog post here.I designed the poppies and leaves in Inkscape. This is a bitmap image of the svg file which is available for free download from my Skydrive. I cut two sizes of the poppy and leaf pieces.

I saved an image of the outline of the pieces as I wanted them to appear on the page, and printed this out. I cut it out and laid on the page to show where the various pieces would go.

I drew some small poppies using water-based marker pens to fill the gaps in the text. The paper poppies, with their leaves, were then adhered in place on the page, according to the arrangement of the printed piece. This is the finished page.