WOYWW 500! Happy New Year!

What a way to celebrate the New Year, with the 500th edition of WOYWW! I wasn’t here for the launch of this astonishing blog hop (which has to be the best on the web) but I joined for No. 111 on 21st July 2011 – 7 1/2 years ago! My goodness, I hadn’t realised it was that long! Anyway, the fact that this has been going on for 500 editions proves how good it is, and that the irresistible urge to nose around in other people’s studios never dies!! I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Julia for starting this, and for faithfully hosting it for all these years. Through this blog hop I have made some very good friends and I’ve also gained so much creative inspiration and learnt lots of new skills. Thank you all so much for everything!

Now to my special 500th edition desk. Very disappointing, I’m afraid… If it hadn’t been a special edition of WOYWW I doubt if I’d have joined in this week because my desk is empty! The rest of the room, as you will see, is in a state of chaos. Over the far side of the room I’ve got all my knitting yarn boxes down (in an effort to search for a ball of purple yarn that I ended up finding in the sitting room…) and I haven’t got round to tidying up yet. So here’s an overview of the room.

Over Christmas I received these two very pretty carrier bags with presents in them, and I thought I’d keep them and possibly upcycle them as I liked the designs so much.

The smaller one on top is slightly sparkly.

I’ve been so tired since our busy week the week before Christmas but I did manage to cook a Christmas dinner, and we are still enjoying the remnants of the turkey! I wasn’t feeling at all well yesterday (good start to the year) with a bad headache and extreme fatigue, so I relaxed in front of the telly and watched the New Year Concert from Vienna – a fixture for me as I love the light-hearted Strauss waltzes and the dancing, and the beautiful architecture. It’s a treat every year.

While resting with my feet up when I could over the past week, I’ve made good progress on my purple circles knitting project, and have completed the back, and made a good start on the front. This is how much I’ve done so far.

I’ve done my regular end-of-year review post which you can read here if you are interested, or scroll down to the previous post.

Kitties

On New Year’s Eve they were both in the hammock together and this is how they looked after a vigorous mutual grooming session. Ruby has her arm round her sister, giving her a hug.

Now she’s got her leg over her too!

I love this picture of the two of them together. They are so affectionate with each other, and with us (although I think a lot of that is more to do with warmth!). They do love to be with us.

My hubby was trying to sort out his computer back-ups tonight and brought down his box of old external hard drives. Of course, someone had to get in the box, didn’t they!

What is it with kitties and boxes?

Ruby on the cat tree. For some reason, after giving it a wide berth for months, she’s got really keen on it again and spends quite a lot of time asleep right on the top.

They are both still grounded, but my hubby has made some improvements on the garden defences and they’ve been out a few times under strict supervision, and so far, despite her obvious interest in the perimeter, Ruby hasn’t attempted to get out. I don’t think she’s very pleased with my hubby’s latest efforts, which are making our garden look ever more like a prison camp. Next step, watch towers, search lights and electrified fences, and my hubby and I will have to practice our goose-stepping technique.

On the subject of cats…

Here’s a cat funny for the pantomime season.

Happy New Year, everyone! And a very happy 500th WOYWW!

Tattered Time Mini-Album Part 7–Page 1 Completed

I am hoping to get hold of some photos of my grandmother from my parents, but until then, page 1 of my album in honour of my Dad is now pretty well finished.

I have completed the wallet which contains most of the small photos of the ancestors; having followed Kathy Orta’s video, I have decided that if I make this wallet again, I am going to dispense with the multi-pocket insert because once the wallet is assembled, it is actually extremely difficult to slot the various folders and tags into it, and it also adds quite a bit of thickness to the finished wallet. All that is required is a single pouch, which would contain the tags and prevent anything falling out of the sides of the wallet. You live and learn!

The front and back of the wallet has been matted with papers from the Tattered Time and Lost and Found stacks. I made a plain belly band from black cardstock to hold the flap closed. (“Belly band” always makes me laugh – it makes me think of my less-than-slim belly these days, and what a very large belly band I would need to keep everything neat and tidy!!)

I decided not to put all the tags into it because it was already pretty bulky, so one of them is now located in the bottom flap of the main page, along with the tiny photo folder and the large journaling mat that I made at the beginning. This is what the wallet looks like open, with the pockets and tags inside.

The final part needed to complete Page 1 was a large photo mat to go in the full-sized pocket formed by the original bag. In this photo, I have pulled it out slightly so that you can see how it goes.

The front of this mat I have decided to dedicate to my grandfather’s service in World War 1.

When he died, I inherited, amongst other bits and pieces, his button box – all these buttons went into my button collection, including several First World War Royal Engineers buttons from his uniform which I have always treasured. I decided one of these must find its way into my album, so I cut the back off to make it lie flat, and glued it down with Pinflair gel glue, along with one of the poppies I made for my Remembrance page in my art journal last month.

I also managed to find an image of a Royal Engineers cap badge which I printed out, cut out and hand-embossed from behind, and stuck down onto the page, also with Pinflair glue.

The central part is a montage of two First World War images faded together in my photo editing software, Serif PhotoPlus. After printing this out, I tore around the edges, and distressed it with Tea Dye Distress Ink. I printed the two photos of Grandpa in his Royal Engineers uniform and distressed them with Tea Dye Distress Ink and stuck them down. These pictures were taken in Dover in 1914, where his first job of the war was to wire Dover Castle for electricity. When we visited Dover Castle a few years ago, I looked carefully to see if I could find any old wiring or junction boxes and point out his handiwork!

The final item on this mat is a small journaling folder made from an offcut of some gorgeous vintage script background paper from the Tattered Time stack.

Opening this up, the journaling is revealed.

One thing I forgot to mention before is that whenever I have done any journaling with my white Uni-Ball pen, after it has dried, I have applied Tea Dye Distress Ink over the top using an Inkylicious Ink Duster to tone it down a bit, as the white was very stark and bright against the vintage look of the pages.

Turning the large mat over, you can see the larger piece of vintage script paper from the Tattered Time stack, onto which I have matted the portrait photographs of my great-grandparents Henry and Eliza. I edited these in Serif PhotoPlus to give a more sepia-tint, and also distressed them with Tea Dye and a tiny amount of Vintage Photo Distress Inks.

I need to design and cut some file tabs, after which I shall put one on this large mat, so that it projects beyond the page and gives you something to pull the mat out with.

I keep thinking of other bits and pieces that I should put in! I have just remembered some of the stories Grandpa told about his work at the foundry, and the fine example of an apprentice piece of bronze casting in my possession – more tags needed! I doubt if this album will ever be fully complete…

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!

Tattered Time Mini-Album Part 2–Preparing the Bags and Beginning the First Page

Having prepared the gussets of the bags in order to form the pages, I painted all the exposed edges with black acrylic paint to cover the brown paper. I initially tried inking them with Black Soot Distress Ink but this did not give a very opaque finish, and the acrylic paint was thicker and blacker, and quite quick to do, too. I used cheap black acrylic from my big pot, rather than posh artist’s stuff!

I have been humming and hah-ing about the hinges for the binding, and decided to fold the extending edges of the bottoms of the bags in half longitudinally to form the hinges, as you can see on the next picture. On her tutorial, Kathy Orta doesn’t do this, but attaches a hinge to the full width of the flap formed by the bottom of the bag in each side, which is simpler. The trouble is, my bags are so nearly square that I didn’t want to take up any of them for hinges, preferring to extend the hinges beyond the width of the page so that I didn’t lose any width. I do lose a vertical pocket on the back of each page, but this doesn’t really matter, because that page is occupied by a full-sized flap hinged from the top, and I can always add a pocket if I want to. (Hope this makes sense…)

I realise that I must allow a lot of space for the thickness of the papers, tags and embellishments. There’s nothing worse in the world of albums than the classic “Pacman mouth” syndrome where the pages don’t lie flat, but appear to be bursting open with all their additions! Sticking down these folded flaps and creating separate hinges from cardstock, each with a “gutter” of 1/4 in. should add sufficient thickness at the spine end to allow for this.

Each hinge piece (5 in all) measures 10 3/16 x 2 1/2 inches (this smaller measurement is 1 1/8 for each side, plus the 1/4 in gutter). The two hinges to attach the assembled album to the insides of the front and back covers are 10 3/16 x 3 1/2 inches – allowing for a 2 1/8 extension onto the covers for added strength. At least, that is the plan so far! (These works in progress of mine tend to develop a will of their own, and often my initial plans go out of the window as various problems arise that I hadn’t foreseen.)

These hinge pieces won’t be added to the pages until I am ready to assemble the album. It will be easier to add the papers and embellishments while the pages can still lie flat.

After touching up any gaps with black acrylic paint, I am now ready for the fun part – beginning to mat the pages and the pockets. The hardest part is deciding what papers to use for what, and I need to plan what will go best with the particular aspect of my Dad’s life that each page is celebrating.

I’ve roughed out what theme I want on each page, and started to choose the papers. I have now matted the basic papers onto the first page, which I have entitled “Ancestry.” This page has two pockets, one along the bottom, and one down the left-hand side, and into these I will place various tags, photo mats and journaling about my grandparents and great-grandparents. The main theme of the page is engineering to reflect my grandfather’s profession.

The background paper is from “Tattered Time,” and the other papers are from the Tim Holtz stacks “Crowded Attic” and “Lost and Found.” I shall be incorporating papers from these collections as they co-ordinate pretty well with the Tattered Time papers, and include more small elements which are useful for embellishing and creating tags etc.

It has taken me a very, very long time to get this far! I think this is going to be a long-term project as it takes so long to choose what to do, and then there’s masses of detail to add. I am enjoying sorting through the papers, which are gorgeous, and thinking about the additions which I shall make.

Tattered Time Mini-Album Part 1–Planning

Yesterday evening I started a very exciting new project – my very first mini-album! This is something I have been planning for such a long time, and although I am in the middle of the Card Factory (which is actually more of a chore than a delight…) I really felt the time had come to make a start. I shall be slotting other things in between, so this will be an ongoing project, like my Fine Art Album and my art journal, and other things that I pick up as the mood takes me.

Let me backtrack to the beginning. It was in September 2011, over a year ago, at the Creative Stitches and Hobbycrafts Exhibition, that I saw, and fell in love with, the DCWV “Tattered Time” paper stack and just had to buy it. Ever since then, I have wanted to use it for something but was terrified of messing it up, and every now and then I would get it out and go through it, and stroke it, and put it back on the shelf again! I also did a bit of Youtube research to see what other people did with it, and so the germ of an idea began, to make a mini-album with it, but this has been very much on the back burner since then.

More recently, and particularly since my dad has been deteriorating, I have been thinking about his life, and all the things he did and loved, and looking at the Tattered Time papers again, realised that they expressed so much about him. He has always had a passion for clocks, and has collected and repaired them most of his life. He and I have always been very close, and have shared so much fun over his various interests, and I used to “help” him in the workshop when I was small, watching him work, holding things for him, and learning so much. We shared an interest in typewriters when I began my secretarial course – there are pages relating to this – and of course his major passion for music, which is also represented. These are just a few of the things which will be included in the album.

Since I bought the Tattered Time papers, I have also acquired the Tim Holtz “Lost and Found” and “Crowded Attic” stacks – I have used a few small elements from these, but for the most part, they are intact. There are some elements in these collections which will mix and match quite nicely with the Tattered Time papers.

As I have thought about this, the ideas have been coming in leaps and bounds. Just recently, going through lots of old family photos, I’ve come across so many of Dad in his young days etc. My plan is to make a paper bag album, and to add lots of photos and journaling, and also to make some “mechanical” interactive elements to reflect his love of engineering and all things mechanical.

It’s just my personal opinion, but I have never been a great lover of scrapbooking layouts which incorporate photos and papercrafting – somehow to me the elements don’t mix that well, and if one isn’t careful, it can end up looking rather bitty and messy – there are glorious exceptions, of course, but for the most part it leaves me cold. The Tattered Time papers are so glorious that I really don’t want to cover them up with photos, so my plan is to celebrate the papers, and showcase them to the best of my ability, and to hide the photos and journaling on tags and inserts etc., and make it an interactive experience to look at them.

Over the past few days I’ve been doing some intensive research on Youtube into how to construct these albums, and there are some superb tutorials – also on bindings and closures, and I have now more or less decided on what I want to do. Unfortunately most of these tutorials come from the USA, where they have access to a lot of stuff we just can’t get here in the UK – in particular the bags. I have managed to source some, but of course they are a different size, so I cannot follow the tutorials exactly, as regards measurements, and will have to improvise, but this will make the project that much more my own.

Last year, I made some bag skirts for Christmas gift bags. I ordered several sizes of these bags from Ebay, and the seller made a mistake and sent me far too many. When I contacted him about it, he said it would be more hassle if I sent them back, and told me to keep them, and I have often wondered what I was going to do with them. This evening I decided to use some of the medium sized ones to make this album.

These bags are fairly thick, so I hope they are going to work OK for the album. I had to remove the handles, which are made of twisted paper, and quite attractive, so I thought I would save them, maybe to use as embellishments in other projects.

(They are lying on my new scratch paper – not much on it yet so it looks a bit strange!)

I am not going to give a tutorial on how to make up these bags into an album, because it has already been done very adequately on Youtube. I have decided to follow Kathy Orta’s first-class multi-part Youtube tutorial which she made, using the Tim Holtz “Lost and Found” stack, as she makes full use of the bags and their gussets for an album full of pockets for tags. The first part shows how to deconstruct the bags for the album.

Here are my bags with the gussets prepared:

and showing how the gussets fold up to form pockets.

Most paper bags come with a serrated top edge. In this picture, I am trimming this off, so that the bag measures 11 1/4 in from the bottom, with the gusset folded up. This means the finished dimension of each page will be 11 1/4 in wide and 10 3/16 in high.

I have prepared six bags in this way, which should be sufficient to complete my album.

Watch this space to see how this project progresses. Depending on what else I have to do, and how I am feeling, it may not progress very fast! However, once I get going, there may be no stopping me…