WOYWW 488–Two Completed Boxes

My desk today.

All tidy again! And a finished project!

I finished the two boxes on Monday evening, so in plenty of time for Thursday! We are seeing our friend tomorrow and I am giving her one of the boxes so that she can transfer her copy of the Floral Mini-Album from the biscuit tin it has been living in since February!

I had a lot of trouble with sticking on the metal embellishments. The hot glue didn’t seem to stick onto the metal properly and the embellishments started falling off. I had to scrape off as much of the glue as I could from the boxes, and then I tried again with Pinflair gel glue and this seemed to do the trick, but I hope they don’t start falling off again or our friend’s box will have to come back for running repairs.

You can scroll down for previous posts about the boxes to see how I made them.

Crochet

I think I’ve made enough embellishments for the striped scarf now. I made a few more of the larger crochet leaves this week, and on Sunday I steam pressed all the crochet leaves and flowers.

I have a little more work to do on the felt balls that I made, as they aren’t quite felted enough. They are needle-felted, but need a bit of wet felting technique applied to them to firm them up a bit. Once that is done, I can think about sewing all the embellishments onto the scarf.

I have started making the peacock feathers for the next scarf I’m going to knit.

I bought the cotton yarn for the peacock feathers from an online site – 25g balls in five lovely colours, and they came in this sweet little bag. For this pattern, you need to use cotton in order t0 comb it out to make realistic-looking feather barbs. I haven’t got to that stage yet. More photos will follow in due course. I’ve decided to do some feathers with shafts and some not. The peacock feathers will be on the ends of the scarf.

I’ve left tails on all these crochet pieces so I can sew them on.

I bought the yarn for the scarf for £1 in a charity shop, and had to re-wind it straight away as the skein was collapsing a bit and getting tangled. I am not sure what it is made of because it came without a yarn band, but it is some sort of acrylic, I think, and it is lovely and soft, and the colours are fabulous!

Unlike the striped scarf which is knitted from 4-ply pure wool, stocking stitch on a circular needle, this scarf will be done in moss stitch, and single thickness, rather than in the round. It will also not be as wide or as long as the striped one. I made an experimental start last night but unravelled it after a couple of rows because it was too wide. I’ve got a friend coming tomorrow to watch a DVD with me and I shall begin it again then.

I shall enjoy doing some more knitting, and getting the second scarf done, which shouldn’t take me so long. I have also got any number of UFOs (UnFinished Objects) to get on with, including an unravelling and reknitting job that’s been hanging around since last winter. It’s high time I made inroads into these UFOs because that was supposed to be the main emphasis for this year!

Kitties

A couple of sweet pictures of them sleeping together, taken on Sunday evening.

I came down a bit later to find them like this:

Lily seems to have got Ruby in a face lock – you can see her other paw underneath – not sure how Ruby’s managing to breathe!!

Another fun position, this time on Monday evening:

Ruby has always liked sleeping on top of her lovely warm and soft sister. Now the weather’s got so cold, they are happy to stay in more. When I’m sitting with my feet up I nearly always have Ruby and quite often Lily as well.

Sourdough

My sourdough last weekend wasn’t a huge success. When I tipped it out of the bowl into the Dutch oven I didn’t aim very straight and it ended up half up the side of the casserole where of course it stuck because only the bottom was floured. I got it out OK when it was baked, but it came out looking more like a pasty than a loaf of bread!

Cutting into it, it looked OK, and it tasted fine. Several slices laid out look rather artistic, with that Paisley-like shape!

Again, it’s not rising as much as it should. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.

This week I also made a normal loaf in the bread maker, half-and-half wholemeal and white, with added sunflower and pumpkin seeds – my normal basic bread. The sourdough loaf isn’t big enough to last the week. It keeps ages, and would keep a week easily, if we didn’t keep eating it all!

Health Update

I had my eyes tested on Monday. My eyesight hasn’t changed that much since two years ago so I don’t need new glasses which is a relief – even keeping my existing frames (which I have now had since about the year 2000!!) they are fiendishly expensive. They told me I have developed slight cataracts in both eyes but nothing to worry about yet. I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference in my vision except when I’m tired, and I feel as if I need to rub my eyes because they seem a bit blurred. It’s a bit depressing to be told that, though, because cataracts are what old people suffer from lol!!

Also on Monday I had bloods taken at the GP’s surgery – when I went back on the rivaroxaban (anticoagulant) the GP told me she wanted to check my kidney function after a fortnight. It took another fortnight to get an appointment with the nurse! Waiting times seem to be increasing across the board these days, at the surgery and at the hospital. She told me I was due for a general GP checkup and I can arrange this when I go in for the next lot of bloods in November before my oncology appointment.

My CT scan is a week tomorrow, and I have absolutely no doubt that this will confirm that my hernia has returned. It’s taken me two months to get this appointment.

Have a happy WOYWW everyone and a nice creative week ahead!

Box for Floral Mini-Album–Completing the Project

I am happy to say that so far at least, the metal corners have remained in place on the boxes, after my second attempt at sticking them on, this time with Pinflair gel glue in place of the failed hot glue. Today it still felt slightly tacky, and I am sure that it will soon be dry and holding the metal embellishments firmly in place.

Today I began embellishing the boxes, in a similar style to the albums that they will contain.

I got my dies out and cut more of the Moroccan tile trellis one in gold mirror card. Before cutting them, I covered the back of the card pieces with double-sided tape, which I tend to do for complex or small dies because it makes applying them to the project so much easier.

I love this die. It’s not just really pretty, and a brilliant foundation for applying flowers and linking them together, but you can cut it up and use just bits of it, or join it up in a different arrangement if you want.

I then die-cut quite a few leaves from a selection of dies – I’ve got quite a few flowers left over from the album project but unfortunately I’d used up all the leaves.

I cut them from scraps of cardstock in different shades of green. I didn’t have to cut into any whole sheets. Even quite small scraps are adequate for this so it pays never to throw anything away!

After this I gave them a bit of variation with three shades of Distress Stains.

Most of them I left flat, but the simple leaf shapes I hand-embossed into a piece of fun foam with a ball embossing tool.

Hot glue comes into its own for sticking down paper flowers and hand-embossed leaves. The centres of the flowers were embellished with Stickles. I love the effect these colourful glitter glues give, adding a subtle touch of bling. (Unfortunately I took the next photo before I’d remembered to do this!)

The completed boxes.

The side of the box.

Detail of the embellishment on the top of the box.

Detail of the front of the box.

Detail of the side of the box.

The box with the album inside.

That just about wraps up this project. I am so pleased to have finished it in good time for Thursday when one of them will go to its new home.

Box for Floral Mini-Album–Beginning to Work on the Insides

After not being able to spend time in my studio recently, this evening I managed a couple of hours, and made some progress with the construction of the two boxes. We are seeing our friend early next month and I would like to get her box finished by then, even if I don’t manage to finish mine, so that she can keep her copy of the album in it, rather than in the biscuit tin in which it currently resides!

This evening I cut the pieces for the second box, from mount board as before. I had already disassembled the mock-up box because it is going to be much easier to embellish the inside when it’s in bits, and I wasn’t happy with the way I’d assembled it, just using masking tape.

I have painted the insides of each piece with black acrylic paint, using a foam brush. I laid them out on newspaper on my studio floor to dry.

While they were drying, I started work on some decorations for the inside of the boxes.

A while back, my friend gave me some lovely table napkins that she’d picked up in a restaurant she’d visited, and thought I might be able to use them.

They are rather thick, and not made in layers like most table napkins, so I couldn’t separate them. I decided to tear out the borders.

I also tore out the little pianos.

I inked the strips with Worn Lipstick and Dusty Concord Distress stains, spritzing the ink on my craft sheet and dabbing with a big soft brush, and then spritzing the strips to blend the colours a bit better, and then drying them with my heat gun.

I am intending to tear them into shorter, random lengths and stick them down onto the black painted mount board pieces after I’ve decorated these with Distress Oxides – I’m not quite sure how I’m going to do that yet but it may be a combination of applying the Distress Oxides with a blending pad and spritzing, and some stamping. I want the whole effect to be fairly subtle.

I have ordered some metal hardware from Ebay, for embellishing the outside of the boxes – corners, clasps, handles and feet, which I hope will give the boxes a nice professional finish.

Floral Mini-Album Pt 17 Tags and Tabs for Pages 5 and 6

Recently I made a new mini-album, about my mum who died in December. I was unable to publish anything about this until now because it is a present for her best friend, who sometimes visits my blog, and I wanted it to be a surprise for her. I wrote a series of blog posts as I did each stage of the project, so I didn’t forget what I did, and they will be published in sequence now the project is finished and has been given to our friend.

If you want to see the finished project, please click here.

I forgot to photograph the original papers for the tags for page 5, or to include the Infusions in this photo, but to begin with, I applied Violet Storms and Violetta infusions to the paper from the paper stack, and then added  Hickory Smoke Distress Ink all over, using a blending tool, to smooth out the texture a bit, and to darken it.

I distressed the edges with Black Soot Distress Ink (again, no photo, I’m afraid).

Moving on to the tag for page 6 (the reverse of the tag for page 5), this was another one which didn’t require much treatment because the original paper from the paper stack wasn’t too bad. I merely double-distressed the edges, using Peacock Feathers and Black Soot Distress Inks.

Here are the pieces, matted onto black cardstock.

I cut and inked the tabs for these tags as before. I cut them from a scrap from one of my Tim Holtz paper stacks (can’t remember which one, I’m afraid, as the papers have got muddled up). For the side showing on page 5, I used Dusty Concord and Vintage Photo Distress Inks, and for the side showing on page 6, Peacock Feathers Distress Ink, and I distressed all the edges with Black Soot Distress Ink.

I then proceeded to stick the tabs onto the tags, without thinking what I was doing, and twice I stuck them in the wrong place! I was able to remove them by softening the glue on the double-sided tape with my heat gun, but when I attached them wrongly the second time, I added a bit of Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive to restore the stickiness somewhat, and this did NOT want to soften with the heat gun, and when I pulled them off, they also lifted some of the colour from the printed paper. Grrrr. What a mess! I tried to cover the exposed white card with Peacock Feathers Distress Ink but you can see in the next photo that it still shows like crazy… I was so cross with myself for being so stupid, and all I can do is to try and add some judiciously placed embellishments when the time comes, to cover up this boo-boo!!

Here at last are the two tags with their tabs in the correct place – one showing the side for page 5, and the other for page 6.

This photo shows the tags in place, the first showing page 5, and the second turned over to show page 6.

Here are the pages again, this time with the tags pulled out, to show how they co-ordinate with their respective pages.

Pages 4 and 5 aligned, to show the double-page spread, complete with tags.

Here are all the pages, from 1-6, stacked up, showing how the tabs line up on the page edges. Not only do they enable the tags to be pulled out, but they also help turn the pages, as well as adding a decorative element.

Floral Mini-Album Pt 16 Tags and Tabs for Pages 1-4

Recently I made a new mini-album, about my mum who died in December. I was unable to publish anything about this until now because it is a present for her best friend, who sometimes visits my blog, and I wanted it to be a surprise for her. I wrote a series of blog posts as I did each stage of the project, so I didn’t forget what I did, and they will be published in sequence now the project is finished and has been given to our friend.

If you want to see the finished project, please click here.

I have discovered a very useful tutorial on Youtube for using your envelope punch board to make tabs. I decided to make tabs for the page tags, to make it easier to pull them out, and also to indicate that there is actually a tag inside the page to be pulled out! The tabs also add a decorative element.

I cut the tabs for the page 1 and 2 tag rom the red paper from the paper stack, and punched them with the envelope punch board, and rounded the bottom corners with my corner rounder punch. I inked half of each tab piece with Dusty Concord Distress Ink, using an ink blender, and then distressed the very edges all round with Black Soot Distress Ink.

I put 1” wide double sided tape on each side of the tab, and trimmed the excess with a small pair of curved scissors.

The tabs folded over and stuck down onto the top edges of the two tags, with the inked side on the page 1 side of the tag, and the plain one on the page 2 side, to match that paper.

Here are the two pages (one for each album) with the tags inserted, showing the tabs at the top.

This is what the tags look like when they are pulled out.

I didn’t do a lot to the paper I chose for the tag for page 3; just some double distressing, first with Hickory Smoke, and then with Black Soot Distress Inks.

Page 4 needed a bit more work. At this stage I forgot to photograph the paper as it was, but you can see it in the photo that follows. I also forgot to photograph the process for altering this paper, but I smooshed it with Pumice Stone Distress Ink first of all. This is a very subtle colour and is useful just for dulling down rather bright colours. My ink pad needs re-inking so I had to repeat the process, and afterwards, because it still didn’t show up very much, I applied ink onto the paper with an ink blender, and spritzed it with water, and dried it with my heat gun. I am quite pleased with the result.

This photo shows the double distressing I did on these tags, first with Frayed Burlap Distress Ink, which is a very similar colour to Pumice Stone, only slightly darker – nice and subtle – and finished with Black Soot.

This photo shows the tag matted and layered on black cardstock, and lying on top of the original, unaltered paper from the paper stack. Unfortunately I had problems with this photo too – not sure what was going on with the camera – the light was most peculiar and the colours were not right, and after manipulating it in my photo editor, the original paper is almost right (a bit darker in reality) but the tag has come out too brown!

Moving on to making the tabs for these tags, I cut them from the drab grey-ish paper from the paper stack (small sample in the centre of the picture) and punched them with the envelope punch board as before, and inked them as follows: for page 3, I used Peacock Feathers Distress Ink, and for page 4, Dusty Concord, and distressed the very edges of both tabs with Black Soot Distress Ink.

Here they are, in situ on the two tags – the left one shows the side for page 3, and the right one, for page 4.

You will see that in this case, I have glued the tabs onto the centre of the tags. Here are pages 3 and 4 with their tags in place.

This is how they appear with the tags pulled out.

Finally, laying them under pages 1 and 2, you can see how the tabs line up. On the left you can see page 1 on top, and on the right, page 4 is on top (for the 2 albums).

There won’t be a tab on the tag for the final page, because it has a flap that can be used to pull it out from the page.