Beautiful Card from Paula

I have been suffering pretty severe effects from my second chemo session and starting to feel a bit sorry for myself, getting fed up with it going on day after day – at least the nausea and other effects have subsided but the fatigue seems endless. In the middle of all this, last week I received the most wonderful package from the USA from Paula. If you haven’t seen her work, do check it out because she makes the most beautiful cards with intricate die-cuts and gorgeous embellishments, and I am sure she would appreciate a visit to her blog.

She sent me a lovely little pack of crafty goodies to use, with lots of die-cuts and embellishments, which I am going to have a lot of fun with. Also included in the pack were some precious little vintage Valentine cut-outs. Just look a that adorable little bird’s nest with the eggs in it, too!

She also put in a choccie biccie as a spoily – delicious despite it being so NOT what my waistline needs lol! Great feel-good factor though, touching those parts that only chocolate can reach! On the little tag it said “All you need in life is a friend who has chocolate. …I’m that friend.” Lol!!! (I’m afraid I can’t photograph the biscuit. I’ve eaten it!!)

Everything was beautifully wrapped and I felt very spoilt indeed as I opened each little package.

She has made me the most beautiful card, in her signature style with delicate die-cuts and gorgeous papers. The white-on-white is so sophisticated, with a little splash of colour with the delicate lilac of the flowers and the blue organza ribbon.

I had to take lots of detail shots to show just how beautiful this is, and how much trouble she went to to make me something I shall want to keep and treasure.

I have tried to light this so that the photos really show the shimmery nature and different textures of the paper and card she has used. There’s a lovely contrast between the bright silver behind the sentiment and in the corners and the matting and layering, and the more subtle brushed silver and the embossed glitter cards.

I love the floral embellishments with the ribbon and the little pearl flowers.

This embossed glitter card is so beautiful. I hope you can see the sparkle on it. Really hard to photograph to do it justice.

The base card, which extends around to the back of the card, is stunning. Beautiful silvery colour with a subtle design.

Inside the card she stamped a gorgeous floral corner decoration, and I do so love the stamped sentiment! This is definitely something I would use inside my own cards! Beautiful words.

This exquisite card, and the other gifts in the pack, certainly did a lot to cheer me. I feel so blessed to have such friends as Paula, who are prepared to do so much and go to so much trouble, to help me on my way through my horrible chemo!

Thank you, Paula.

Recycled Mini-Album Pages–Astronomy

The second of two posts for today.

Another of my dad’s keen interests was astronomy. He owned a small telescope on a tripod and many times when I was still living at home, he would wake me to go out into the garden in the freezing cold to do some star gazing. Despite the discomfort I always enjoyed this and he showed me some interesting things. When we came in we generally made a nice warming cup of cocoa before returning to bed.

For this page I have chosen one of a series of photos he took of the transit of Venus in 2004.

First of all, the backgrounds. The image on the left-hand side is of an orrery that I found on the Internet. The right-hand background was created with acrylic paints.

First of all I painted the whole surface with a very dark blue (a mixture of Windsor blue and black) and when this was dry, I added the swirling nebula using alizarin crimson, more Windsor blue and a touch of phthalo green, all lightened with a little titanium white.

The tiny stars were created by spattering with metallic silver acrylic paint, which was also used to paint the larger stars.

Onto this background I pasted the images, using regular matt gel medium. The text was scanned from a label written by Dad, which I found in the envelope containing his transit of Venus photos. The photo at the top shows his telescope set up to observe this rare phenomenon.

For the border, I painted around the edges with black acrylic paint, and then, using my white marker pen, I drew the dots and stars, and added the text on the left-hand page. I added an arrow with a black waterproof pen, to indicate the shadow of Venus – it wasn’t really showing up sufficiently! To complete the page, I added some glass bead gel medium to the edges of the photos.

I photographed this page using a scratch paper I have created using black and blue acrylic paint, and a little silver from this page. Here is a photo of it – I am not sure if I will add anything else to it.

The other scratch paper that I’ve made, from recent pages in the mini-album, I made by arranging the colour in stripes. Most of this was from cleaning brushes, but I have also cleaned off my palette knife (particularly the black and white marks). Originally this was going to be a mostly orange scratch paper but I quite like the addition of all the other colours!

Now for some detail shots of the astronomy page. The glass bead gel medium is still not quite dry, and shows white, but this dries crystal clear.

This page completes the penultimate signature of the book.

Card from Recycled Medication Sachets

Those who follow or visit my blog will know that I’m in Full Recycling Mode at the moment, and lots of things I would normally throw away are prompting the question, “Could I make art out of this?”

For my ulcerative colitis, I take medication in the form of granules, which come in individual plastic foil sachets. Taking two of these a day, I realised I was throwing quite a lot of the empty sachets away, and asked myself if they could be recycled in some form. I asked my hubby, “Could I make art out of these?” He pulled a face and replied emphatically, “NO!!” I think he thinks I’m completely off my head at the moment with my obsession with used teabags and empty food boxes… but he should be used to me by now, after 28 years of marriage!!

Anyway, I decided to give it a try. The project turned out a lot more difficult than I’d anticipated as these sachets are made of the most unresponsive material ever!! However, I was determined to make my hubby a card for his birthday today – one in the eye for someone who so doubted my abilities to make art out of such things!

I have made a video of most of the process – disasters and successes – but unfortunately I got so carried away that towards the end I didn’t notice that the camera’s memory was full, so I didn’t manage to complete the whole thing. I also forgot to take very many photos. (Actually, altogether, this project seemed fraught with problems from beginning to end!)

Empty sachets cut open, with some “spills” made from them. The scissors are to stop the beastly things from curling up again!

Epic Fail! My first attempt at creating the background for my project.

I tried to stick the flattened out sachets onto a piece of card using gel medium. They kept curling up and not sticking, so I left it to dry under a pile of books. The result was anything but successful, with a very messy and lumpy surface.

I tried sticking the sachets with Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive (my favourite wet glue) but it didn’t work, probably because the surface was so slick, and not porous. For paper and card, that glue is second to none, but not for this, unfortunately. I was at my wits’ end, trying to think of a way of sticking them, when my hubby phoned, so I picked his brains without giving him any details about the project, and he suggested double sided tape. I was sceptical, but decided I had nothing to lose by trying, and lo and behold, it worked a treat.

I covered a fresh piece of card with strips of double sided tape, and laid down the opened-up sachets onto this, centring the first one and cutting the excess off the sides of the outer ones. It was really, really hard lining these up, because the surface was soooo sticky, and stuck on contact, and the sachets kept curling up. I managed some degree of success in the end, and once it was done, I embossed it with the Cuttlebug, using the folder “Diamond Plate,” which I thought would give the card a more manly air!

I thought the stuff might melt in an interesting way, and produce some nice wrinkled surfaces like Tyvek, but it was very stubborn and only rolled up on itself, but with further heating, it got quite tacky, and I was able to scrunch it up and make it stick to itself. I made six scrunched up ones and laid the three smaller ones on top of the larger ones, hoping they wouldn’t end up simply looking like scrunched up tin foil! I stuck them together with double sided tape and secured them to the embossed card with small jewelled brads. This piece was then layered onto a piece of black card, which in turn was stuck to a white card base.

I had a terrible job rolling the sachets to form the spills which I wanted to use for flower stems – the stuff was so darned slippery and it was very hard to get them to roll tightly enough, but after experimenting, I discovered the best way was to start them off around a wooden barbecue stick, and after a few turns, to withdraw the stick, and pull back on the roll to tighten it, before applying exactly the right amount of pressure (learnt by trial and error) to complete the roll. A line of ATG double sided tape secured the roll.

I stuck down three stems made from the spills, using narrow double sided tape, and then heat-embossed in silver the Happy Birthday sentiment at the top.

Here is the finished card:

and a detailed shot of the flowers.

I used the reverse side of the sachets for the background, being unprinted, and a slightly duller silver than the front surface, which I used for the 3-D pieces. I have got some dull silver card which would have been a lot easier to handle for the embossed background, and I would have ended up without all those joins, too, but I wanted to prove that I could make something out of the sachets!

I gave my hubby the card this morning and he loved it. When he opened it, he saw that I had stuck a sachet onto the inside of the card, with the message, “Who said I couldn’t make art out of these?!!”

Honour is satisfied! However, this was such awful stuff to work with – very unforgiving, and very unresponsive, and the whole project involved a huge amount of very frustrating work. The result wasn’t over-impressive after all that, so I don’t think I shall be continuing with this material. Some things are better for recycling than others! If anyone can come up with some other ways it might be used, I’d be glad to hear it, but from now on the empty sachets will be going into the bin again, I’m afraid. The only part that I think may have potential for the future is the rolled “spills” which could be quite effective en-masse, but it’s a lot of work! Is it worth it, I wonder?

Dad’s Album–A Wee Sporran

I’ve been working on the album I’m making about my dad’s life. Sorting through the box of papers I found quite a bit about his mother’s side of the family, so I have decided to extend the “Ancestors” page to cover my Scottish ancestry as well. Being primarily about my grandmother, this page has a slightly more feminine appearance than the rest of the album, with a distinctly Scottish flavour.

I have now printed out the scans of the various artefacts from the other day, ready to be cut out and used on the project.

I also printed out a couple of sheets of tartan. I chose the ancient hunting tartan of Clan Fraser rather than the dress tartan, as it is much softer and more subtle in colouring – the hunting tartans, to my mind, are more attractive. My grandmother was from this clan, whose area covered the north eastern Highlands, including the Aberdeen area. She had a very distinctive accent found nowhere else but her own small area on the River Spey.

This is the underside of the large envelope flap, now painted black. If you look carefully you can see the small circle of card which I glued over the brad back.

The brad and thread fastening on the front. For the envelope flap I have chosen a Tim Holtz sheet from his paper stack “Lost and Found,” showing vintage medicine labels.

I used the orange ultra-sticky double-sided tape to stick the envelope front down.

I  bought several rolls of this from a craft show, and discovered that left stacked up, they all stuck together, and I had an awful job separating them, but managed eventually by inserting the blade of a knife between the rolls and gently levering them apart. This stuff is seriously sticky! I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this problem, but I decided that to prevent it happening again, I needed to keep the rolls separate, and I did this with pieces of waxed paper – I save this whenever I can as it has loads of uses, from postage stamp sheets, the backing of self-adhesive labels, etc. etc.

Before sticking the envelope front down, I took two more sheets from Tim Holtz’s “Lost and Found” to create a couple of fold-out sheets for photos, journaling and embellishing. I cut them the exact size of the page minus the binding, adding half an inch for the hinge. I scored along this line and stuck the two pages together with my ATG, and then inserted them underneath the envelope front, sticking them down onto the envelope back, also using the ultra-sticky double-sided tape.

Once this was done, I was able to stick down the envelope front, trapping the half-inch hinge of the pages between the envelope front and back.

Here are the pages opened, revealing the plain backs of the Lost and Found sheets, both of which have sewing themes on them. My grandmother was a keen needlewoman, and when we cleared her house after her death, I inherited a huge quantity of sewing threads and equipment, and even after many years, I am still using much of it.

This is what the pages look like closed. You can see the black binding piece on the right. On the back of this whole piece is the first “Ancestors” page which concentrates on my grandfather’s side of the family.

I trimmed the tartan pieces to the sizes I wanted, and pleated one by scoring alternately at 1 inch and 1/2 inch, using my Scor-Pal score board.

I made a series of parallel cuts from the edge of the other piece to a distance of half an inch, each 1/16 inch apart, and then ruffled these with my finger to separate them, and create the illusion of the fringe on the apron of a kilt.

Laid over the pleated piece, here is a mock-up of the kilt, with the template I drew of a sporran.

I took a small piece of scrap card and embossed it, using the Tim Holtz Texture Fade embossing folder “Cracked.” I cut the shape of the top of the sporran from this, so that the lines radiated outwards. I painted the card with black acrylic paint, and when dry, I dry-brushed it with silver acrylic paint, as per Lindsay the Frugal Crafter’s recent tutorial on faux metal – a brilliant tutorial – so simple yet so effective, with a hundred uses.

I then took a piece of heavy scrap cardstock and created a piece of faux leather from it, from the instructions which were part of Andy Skinner’s online course “Timeworn Techniques,” which I downloaded before we moved house. The results are quite astonishing – not only does it look like real old leather, but it feels like it too! I used the same Tim Holtz embossing folder for this as I used for the sporran top, to give a nice crumpled distressed look.

Here is a mock-up of the wee sporran. I created three tassels from silver thread that I wrapped around a narrow piece of scrap card to get the length. The tops of the tassels were made from triangles of craft metal rolled around a cocktail stick, and the thread on the top of each tassel was threaded through the top of this and passed through a hole in the faux leather, secured with a knot on the back, and secured by glueing another piece of cardstock on the back of the sporran piece and trimming it close to the edge. The undersides of the metal tubes were stuck down onto the surface of the faux leather with Scotch quick-dry adhesive to keep the tassels in place on the surface.

I pierced a line of holes around the edge of the sporran using my Tim Holtz ruler which has holes at 1/16 in intervals along its length, with the aid of a piercing tool, and then ran a line of backstitch through these holes with waxed carpet thread, securing the ends on the back as I did for the tassels.

The “metal” top of the sporran is just laid in place on the above photo. I have glued it onto several thicknesses of cardstock to make it nice and thick, and it will be attached to a tag which will go inside the sporran, and be removed with the “clasp” that I shall form on top of the faux metal piece. The tag will have a photo and/or journaling on it. The sporran will be glued to the kilt apron and chains will pass from the top on each side, to the edges of the kilt pieces.

Watch this space for the continuation of this Scottish themed page and the completion of the kilt and wee sporran.

New Youtube Video–3-D Silver Butterflies

Remember this?

I did a post on how I made this, over a year ago, and since I hadn’t uploaded anything to my Youtube channel for a while, I thought I would make a video slideshow of the project from the many photos I took during its construction.

Using Pinnacle Studio 12, with the addition of panning and zooming, titles and background music, it is soon easy to forget that this consists only of still photos.

Not having access to my creative world at the moment pending our house move, I thought I might make some more of these video slideshows of different projects which were never filmed while I was making them.

This particular project was made into a special birthday card. I would not normally do this, because stick a folding back onto a project and a greeting inside, and it immediately becomes ephemeral in the eyes of most people, and after the event it is celebrating, often reaches the same destination as the products of a famous card retailer – the bin! (This is one reason why I don’t concentrate my efforts on card making, and prefer to make something more permanent.)

This was a fun project to do, and I hope in future to explore further this whole area of light and shade, and reflectivity.