Decorations for Half-Tester

My first post in 2015! One of the things I have resolved to do this year is to try and clear the backlog of UFOs (UnFinished Objects) in my ARTHaven, and also to get back into some more textile-based work. One of my oldest UFOs was a project to create decorative drapes for our pine four-poster bed – something I started and never finished. I made the curtains but not the decorative top part. Last autumn I got a new adjustable bed to help with my various medical conditions (I am sleeping a lot better these days) so the four-poster had to go, which I was very sad about. The whole of the top section lifted off and could be disassembled, leaving the bed intact, so we kept the top and disposed of the pine bed base. A local carpenter used the timber from the upper part to create a new half-tester which is attached to the wall above the bed.

As before I have a small strip-light wired to the inside of the frame, and in the picture you can see the pull-cord hanging down. You can also see the velcro strips attached to the framework, to attach the fabric drapes – I will need to add some more for the decorative top part.

When I started making the pieces for the top, I also cut some smaller pieces in the same design and fabric, and used them to decorate a bag that I made:

You can see the separate flaps, each embellished with machine applique and hand embroidery, and each one finished with a different style of tassel.

These are the card templates I made for the bed project. At the back, underneath, you can see the two templates for each piece – the larger one is for cutting the fabric, and the smaller one for cutting the heavy interfacing. After cutting these out, I tacked the fabric onto the interfacing so that the applique and embroidery would go through both layers, and to finish each piece off, the edges of the fabric would be turned in over the interfacing, and a backing piece added.

The smaller templates are used for cutting out the applique pieces which are first ironed onto some Bondaweb.

What I have decided to do now, is to make each finished piece double-sided, and to attach the tops to the outside and the inside of the frame, respectively. Hopefully they will hang properly, but if not, I shall have to make separate pieces for the inside and outside, and maybe add tassels only to the outside pieces.

The next picture shows the pieces I have already started, with the machine applique. Top right is a pile of more pieces – no room to spread them all out to be photographed.

The next photo shows some of the embroidery materials to be used to embellish the pieces. I have a collection of coloured threads with lurex – as usual the photo doesn’t show the sparkliness of these yarns – they are the large spools at the back. In the front of the basket is a selection of different coloured embroidery threads, and on the table in front, scissors, my mother-of-pearl stiletto and some crewel and chenille needles, and on the left, a selection of Indian shi-sha mirrors.

I have done a lot of embroidery using these in the past, including on my wedding dress. These little circles of mirror have quite rough edges, and no holes for sewing them down as you’d find with sequins; there is a special shi-sha embroidery stitch which anchors them onto the surface of the fabric, rather like a rubbed-over setting of a gemstone in jewellery. When these tiny mirrors catch the light, they wink and flash, which is very dramatic on any fabric in motion such as a curtain, and they give a very rich, exotic look. I love them! Originally they would have been made of flakes of mica, but they are made of glass these days – the mirrors are far from optically perfect and look rather dull and grey before they are attached, but they do reflect the light wonderfully well.

Here are the pieces to which I have added embroidery so far. Some of them require further embellishment. The stitches I am using are fairly simple ones – chain stitch with variations, and stem stitch. I have never been any good at satin stitch or long-and-short stitch, and love using chain stitch to cover areas with colour, and for outlining shapes.

As I progress with this work, I shall be showing some detail shots of the embroidery, but at this stage, this is just showing what I have done so far, after opening up the box and reminding myself what I have already achieved. I did all this so many years ago that I couldn’t really remember at all what I had done, and when I opened the box, was surprised to find my book on tassels, and also some wonderful notes from an embroidery day I attended when we lived in Plymouth – probably back in the 1980s! It was like Christmas, opening the box and finding all the lovely fabrics and shapes. This has to be one of the oldest UFOs in my possession, and high time it got an airing and was finished!

Autumn Thank You Card

The second of two posts today.

Warning – long post, picture-rich.

A card for the teacher of our felt-making class. She has been so wonderful over the past few weeks – just the right balance of demonstration and instruction, and letting us get on, encouragement and inspiration. As this five-week course came to an end I suggested to the others that I make a card for us all to sign, which would be given to her at the end of the final session last night.

Since the theme of this course was loosely an autumn theme (although we have proved that anything goes!) I thought I would make an autumn card.

Using a palette knife, I applied a thin layer of Polyfilla One Fill (known as joint compound in the USA) through my large leaf stencil onto an A4 sheet I’d created from my backgrounds folder.

As this was only a thin layer, it didn’t take long to dry, with the help of my heat tool. I then added some Forest Moss distress ink, using an Inkylicious Ink Duster.

Then I applied the Polyfilla through my bricks stencil, this time applying a much thicker layer, fading out the edges.

I trimmed the card down to size to fit on an A4 folded to A5 card base, and used the stamp set “Real Leaves” from StampAttack to add some leaves to the blank piece.

I used the Tim Holtz Dot Fade stencil to apply some Antiqued Bronze Distress Stain over the leaves.

After this I applied some Clear Rock Candy Distress Crackle Paint – I have had this for ages and it had got distinctly gloopy! I tried adding some water to thin it down, and gave it a good shake, and hopefully that will do the trick. These products really should have a “use by” date on them, because we all assume they last forever, and they certainly do not. No cracks appeared; only a rather rough, textured shiny surface which I quite liked.

After drying with my heat tool, I added some Walnut Stain distress ink using one of my home-made ink blending tools (a piece of Cut ’n Dry foam stuck onto an old wood block left when I unmounted some stamps).

I decided the leaves needed something extra so I added some Crackle Accents but this was not a success – I forgot that you are supposed to leave this to dry naturally at least until the cracks start to appear, and I launched straight in with my heat tool because I’m too impatient to wait! So no cracks from either product! Never mind, they look nice and shiny at least! I added some Walnut Stain distress ink to darken them a bit.

Time to cut them out. I rather enjoy fussy cutting and find it quite relaxing.

Once the Polyfilla through the brick stencil had dried, I coloured it with a mixture of distress stains and distress inks, and used both blending tools and Inkylicious Ink Dusters, using Spiced Marmalade, Rusty Hinge, Brushed Corduroy and finally some Vintage Photo. Using the Ink Duster enabled me to colour the sides of the bricks.

To emphasise the bricks, I painted between them with Black Soot distress ink, swiping the ink pad over my craft sheet and picking it up with a wet brush.

I attached the leaves with hot glue, which proved not to be ideal because one of the leaves popped off just before we gave the card to the teacher. Pinflair would have been better.

At this point I distressed the edges of the sheet a little with some Vintage Photo, and began work on the card base. I ran the Vintage Photo distress stain around the edge to give a darker base, and then repeated the process using the Antiqued Bronze distress stain. It doesn’t look much on the photo, but in real life it has a nice metallic sheen.

Originally I wasn’t going to do anything fancy inside the card, but I found this brilliant tutorial from Jozart, and I thought it would be fun to make the inside more interesting by using her idea. For the pop-up, I used a lighter-weight card, and coloured it by swiping various ink pads across my craft sheet, spritzing them with water and smooshing the card through the ink. However, it all got much too wet, and while the colour was great, the centre tore, so I decided to abandon it and save the card for cutting the sentiments from. You can see the tear in the picture, running from the centre towards the bottom.

I cut another piece for the pop-up, this time from some pale yellow card, and  used the brick stencil to apply distress inks, in Spiced Marmalade, Fired Brick, Rusty Hinge and Vintage Photo, all applied with blending tools. When I did the Vintage Photo, I offset the stencil slightly to create a shadow effect but it ended up lighter than the bricks. I ended up adding shadows using distress ink as a watercolour as before. I did the same with Black Soot between the bricks.

I then had to ink the pop-up background and the back piece. I didn’t smoosh them this time, but used blending tools and Ink Dusters, with Vintage Photo, Spiced Marmalade and Forest Moss.

The inking on the pop-up and back piece completed.

For the sentiment, I used my new alphabet set (Darkroom Door Alphabet Medley), stamping onto the rejected background piece with Versamark and then adding Biscotti Perfect Pearls with a soft brush and heat sealing it. I made another sentiment for the front of the card, and I cut these out as little strips with individual words on them. Originally I tried using gold embossing powder, but it didn’t show up enough.

Here is the text attached to the back piece, using Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive.

 

As I had the stencilled brick across the fold of the pop-up, I decided to fussy cut the brick edges to make it look more natural.

Here is the pop-up, scored and folded, and laid on top of the back piece.

I attached the remaining fussy cut leaves onto the pop-up using hot glue.

It was at this point that I discovered that when the card was folded, the pop-up stuck out beyond the edges of the card… Ooops!! You can see that I have scored a second line on each side, 3/4 inch in from the original score line, which has solved the problem.

When the pop-up is open, it is possible to see down inside at the lower part of the back piece, so I inked it well with Mowed Lawn distress ink and added some leaf stamping (same stamp set) in the same colour, and also added some of the ferns to the sides of the pop-up.

After this session I ended up with a fabulous piece of kitchen paper that I’d used to mop up all the gorgeous inks! Once it is dry, it will be used for other projects.

The fussy cut leaves are quite similar to the background in colour, and I needed something with a bit more impact to finish the layout, and while I was trawling through some Tim Holtz videos on his website recently, I found an excellent one on Glassine paper. He made some leaves coloured with alcohol inks. In the next picture, you can see two sheets of glassine which have had alcohol ink applied, in Sunbright Yellow, Chilli Pepper and Lime Green (Pinata brand) and Adirondack Gold and Copper Mixatives, and some Pinata Clear Extender (the equivalent of Adirondack Alcohol Blending Solution), all applied with the felt blending tool. One sheet has been crumpled

Not having any dies or punches for leaves, they had to be cut out by hand. I made some leaf templates from scrap card.

The glassine leaves mounted on the card front.

The pop-up was made from fairly thin card, and I thought it needed reinforcing, so I stuck another piece behind. Then I inked the back in case it showed.

The completed pop-up.

I stuck the pop-up inside the card, using my ATG gun. Before sticking it, I swiped the glue tape with a Pritt glue stick so that it was repositionable.

The completed front of the card. I attached the sentiment using Pinflair glue.

Now for some detail shots, first of the outside of the card:

and the inside:

To complete the card, I inked the back, using a combination of distress inks in Spiced Marmalade, Forest Moss, a little Fired Brick and Vintage Photo.

For the envelope, as this is a standard sized card, I chose a plain white one from my stash and inked it to match the card, adding some inking inside. I stamped a few leaves using Evergreen Bough distress ink, but unfortunately the stamping showed on the reverse – I would probably have done better to make a separate liner for the envelope, but maybe I’m being too perfectionistic here!

The finished card and envelope.

I think this card has the feel of autumn about it, and hope it is an adequate thank you to a lovely lady who is also an excellent teacher – the felt course has been such fun, and we are grateful for all the time and energy she has put into preparing it, and her enthusiasm and passion for felt-making, which has inspired us all. I have wanted to make felt for a long time, and this course has been a springboard for great things in the future!

WOYWW visitors – please scroll down for this week’s post.

Multi-Pocket Envelope Pouch Template

As I mentioned a few days ago, I have been awaiting permission to upload the UK version of Laura Denison’s Multi-Pocket Envelope Pouch template – she has now kindly granted me that permission, so here it is. It is a super little pouch with lots of pockets for tags and photo mats etc., and I shall definitely be incorporating it into my Tattered Time mini-album.

This is page 1, showing how to fold and construct the main pocket from the envelope. US business envelopes are longer and narrower than our UK ones, and this template is based on the type of reply-paid envelope normally enclosed with a business letter, slightly smaller than the regular A4-type envelope, but without a window. We all get plenty of these, and probably most of them end up in the bin.

Pages 2 and 3 show how to cut pieces from two sheets of A4 paper, to construct the inner pocket.

This 3-page template has now been uploaded to my Skydrive for free download as a pdf, or three separate jpgs. Page 2 will probably not print out properly because most printers won’t print right to the ends, and the template only just fits on a sheet of A4, but the pdf can be used as a cutting guide.

I am having a bad day health-wise today, so am unable to make up this pouch for you at the moment, but I will do so asap so you can see what it looks like. Meanwhile, have a look at Laura’s video and you’ll get the idea.

Tattered Time Mini-Album Part 3–Pouches

Having watched Laura Denison’s video on making envelope pouches, I decided to have a go today. As usual, I ran into the constant problem of UK stuff being different from US stuff. They have long narrow business envelopes which are that bit longer than ours, so they make a better proportioned pouch. Anyway, nothing daunted, I took one of our long narrow envelopes and made a start on a pouch.

I then decided to start designing some to cut from cardstock, and made a larger, single pouch. Here is what I did.

The one on the right was distressed with Black Soot Distress Ink, but it took quite a lot of work to get it as black as this, and in the end I thought it would be much more straightforward to do what I have done on the paper bags for the pages of my album, and paint them with black acrylic paint, so this is what I did on the larger pouch on the left.

The one on the right is a sealed business envelope with the ends slit open, and folded, so that there are two openings at the top. The next step would be to create a smaller pouch at right angles, to go between the two layers, and then to glue the two layers together. I cut the semi-circles with my 2 inch circle punch, just through the top layer in each case. I think this semi-circle is too large, and today I decided to get a 3/4 in circle punch for this purpose. You would not believe how long it took me to find one here in the UK! There were some available from the US but with such a heavy postage rate that they weren’t worth considering. In the end I found one on Amazon.co.uk but it was a bit more expensive than I’d hoped, but by then I was fed up with searching, and went ahead and ordered it!

Before gluing the folded envelope pouch, decorative papers can be matted onto the various surfaces. The single pouch would have decorative papers matted onto the front and back, and possibly inside the back, at least part way down, to cover the join in the back, and the black paint. The semi-circles would then be cut again through these papers where appropriate, with the same circle punch. Laura says it’s best to do one layer at a time because sometimes the punches won’t cut through two layers of paper at a time. Turning the punch upside down, it’s easy to eyeball where to cut. On my pouches, I did mark the centre line so I could line up my punch and get the semi-circle centred. When they are complete, you make tags, photo mats or journaling pieces to slip inside the pouches, and the pouches can either be attached to your page, or slotted into any pockets you may have created on the page.

This is the template I designed for the larger, single pouch, which measures 5 3/4 x 7 in when finished.

This template, in pdf and jpg formats, is on my Skydrive ready for free download. I am hoping to add further templates in the future. Having made this very basic one, I am keen to try making some more complicated ones, and also some tag templates too.

Not too much achieved today on my album pages, but I’ve spent so much time online trying to find punches etc.! We were out for the evening and there was ironing to be done too. Ah well.

Stencils

I’ve been busy making stencils with Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine. I made a few a little while back, but wasn’t 100% satisfied with them because the acetate I used was standard laser printing acetate which is a bit thin, and not up to the somewhat robust treatment that stencils tend to undergo when used in mixed media work.

I’ve discovered various different things you can use to cut stencils, but remembered I’d got a whole box of binders for the heat binding system that I bought some years ago for a project my hubby was doing – some of these covers have gone a bit yellow for some reason, so I thought I’d try cutting them.

Here is one of them, cut from its back cover:

They are certainly a bit thicker than standard acetate, and cutting slowly at Velocity 40, and Force 120 with a double cut on my machine, and using the 60-deg+ blade, I was able to get reasonable results. Some of us on the Black Cat forum have been saying that the small rectangular test cut that the machines will do doesn’t always give very accurate results when it comes to cutting the real thing – the shape is small and regular, and not very intricate, and sometimes cutting the real thing requires a different amount of force. Unless one can determine from a test cut exactly what force and speed is required, one can end up wasting quite a bit of material. Gaz, one of our forum members, and a positive mine of information and useful advice (thanks, Gaz!) has designed a new test cut shape which I have tried, and which works well – it combines straight and curved lines, open and closed paths, giving a more accurate estimate of how the real thing will cut. (I have thickened the lines somewhat, when exporting as a bitmap, so it shows up better.)

When I cut the last lot of stencils, I had problems with small cut out pieces lifting from the mat and being carried along with the blade, preventing further cutting. Loupy, also on the Black Cat Forum, suggested spraying the back of the stencil sheet with repositionable adhesive to create a “double whammy” sticking effect with the adhesive already on the mat (thanks, Loupy!), and this certainly helped a great deal – the added advantage is that the back of the stencil is then slightly sticky and holds in place when you use it. The back of the binders is also made from shiny white card, and I can keep the stencils on this without them sticking, so it’s win-win all round.

However, I had great difficulty peeling the cut stencil off Sheba’s mat without the stencil tearing, as it was so well stuck down! In the end the only way to remove it was to spray it with Crafter’s Companion Stick Away as I lifted it, to dissolve the glue, which of course started to remove the glue from the mat… I am thinking of getting a new mat for general use, and keeping my current one for stencils (I am already using the back of it, because in the early days I scored the top surface deeply by using too much force – common newbie mistake!!) – I can easily re-spray it with Crafter’s Companion Stick and Spray for each stencil I cut. This isn’t a long term project anyway, because when all the stencils are cut, I shan’t need to do any more from those particular svg files, unless, of course, I want to design new ones… Unlike normal svg file cutting in card, which you may want to repeat many times, once you’ve got a stencil, you don’t need to make more copies of it, but can use it repeatedly.

Designing the stencils has been fun as it’s helped improved my knowledge base where Inkscape is concerned! Through this process I have learnt how to use the Tiled Clones feature, which is very useful, and a quick way to make any sort of lattice.

Anyway… here are the stencils I’ve created recently. The first one is approximately 6 x 6 inches, and is of a brickwork design.

Here is a picture of a test piece I made with this stencil, using Distress Inks in Rusty Hinge, Barn Door and Walnut Stain, using my Inkylicious Ink Dusters.

If you look carefully at both this picture and the actual stencil, you can see near the bottom left where two small pieces of the stencil were torn away when I lifted it from the cutting mat. I’m not too worried about this, because mostly, in use, the stencils won’t be used in their entirety anyway, but to add texture in patches.

This is my “Increasing Circles” stencil. I tried to draw this using Tiled Clones but couldn’t get it to work how I wanted, so I just drew several different sizes of circles, and duplicated them several times, and arranged them as randomly as I could across the page to give the effect I wanted. Again, this measures about 6 x 6 inches.

Sheba doesn’t like cutting small circles much, and even with adhesive on the back of the stencil, some of them did tend to lift a bit. There are a couple of tears between some of the circles but I don’t think this will affect the end result much in use.

The next one was a significant failure!! I got a bit carried away in Inkscape, and drew lots of gorgeous gear wheels and clock bits, and got totally confused about what would cut out and what would remain – I do find it hard to visualise this unless it’s a very simple design! You can see some large holes with no detail, and all the detailed bits cut out at the bottom! Rather than ditch it, I thought I’d keep the cut out bits to use as small masks, or perhaps to add to a project – transparent clock gears might be a fun embellishment! Nothing ever wasted…

So… My Clocks and Gears stencil is going to have to be adjusted somewhat, to make it cut as a decent, useable stencil!

Here is the Scallops stencil. I haven’t cut this one yet, so there’s no photo, and I’m hoping it will cut OK.

My final one in this session is the Honeycomb stencil. I nearly made the same mistake as I did with the Clocks and Gears but realised my mistake while I was still in Inkscape, so didn’t waste too much time! If I’d gone ahead as it was, the whole of the centre section would have fallen out, leaving a huge rectangular hole with nice zig-zag edges! Not a lot of use really…

This design was created using Tiled Clones. I had to do a bit of tidying up with the nodes afterwards so that the edges were clean, and there weren’t lots of tiny, untidy bits cut. This stencil measures approximately 10 x 8 inches, but again, will probably never be used in its entirety. There are a few torn bits but I should be able to avoid these in use. I think this will be a very useful stencil as it’s an attractive design.

One thing about using stencils in mixed media art is how you can use them not only to paint through, but to remove paint through – effectively transforming the stencil into a mask! While the paint is still wet, you lay the stencil on top, spritz with a little water if necessary, and then gently rub with a baby wipe to remove the paint through the cut areas of the stencil. Depending on how hard you rub, and what’s underneath, you get different effects. With a layer of gesso on the substrate, you get a much stronger, brighter result, because the gesso tends not to absorb the paint, but when the paint is applied to the substrate with no gesso, you get a much more subtle, gentle effect. Both are good!

I saw a good hint recently somewhere online (sorry, can’t remember who it was) that if you want to enlarge the border of the stencil to prevent inking over the edge, you can add some duct tape (or is it duck tape? I never know… Anyway, why do ducks need tape…?) folded over the edges to give a bit more depth. This enables you to cut useable stencils as large as possible from the given size of acetate that you’ve got. Not sure if I’ll need to do this, though, because most of the time I won’t want to stencil right to the edge. Also, if the stencils end up appreciably larger, I won’t be able to store them so easily. I am currently storing them on their backing sheets, inside clear punched folders in a loose-leaf binder.

The images on here are all bitmaps, of course, so that you can see them. The svg files for cutting are now uploaded to my SkyDrive for free download. Enjoy!