Craft4Crafters Show 2018 in Exeter

Yesterday I went to the Craft4Crafters Show at Westpoint in Exeter. I was thrilled to be taken by a friend and her mother, and another lady came too, and along with my wheelchair and a box for purchases, it was a good thing they had a big car!

This was the first time I’d been to a craft show for several years. Last year I was ill, ditto 2015, and during other years I was reluctant to ask my hubby to drive me because he was already doing so much for Mum and looking after me, and hardly had time to enjoy his retirement after he stopped being so busy with work. This year he would have driven me, except he’s still not driving after breaking his leg. Anyway, thanks to my lovely friend, I got there this year, and I had the most wonderful time. After the previous couple of months being so horrendous, this was a real treat for me, and my credit card had a real outing too!!

Now I’ve got my mojo back, I was keen to find things to help with current projects, in particular my mystery project – and I was looking specifically for dies, stencils, papers… Before we went, I had been on the show website and made a list of the stands I definitely wanted to visit, and also a list of things I wanted to buy – alongside this, I made a list of things I’d already got, so I didn’t inadvertently buy any duplicates; for instance, I wanted to stock up on some of the new Distress Oxides I hadn’t yet got. I went armed with my little notebook with the lists, and this was a great help, because it’s easy to get overwhelmed by everything and lose track of what you went for!

The first stand I visited, I found a Hunkydory scoring board (in glorious purple!) which I simply had to have – for years I’ve been using a Score Pal one but it hasn’t got enough lines on it and they are always in the wrong place for what I want. This new board has inches on one side, with divisions every 1/8 in. and on the reverse, centimetres, so everything is covered.

It is quite thin, and has a handle on top, and I think I may store it vertically which will take up less space. I’m thinking of having some sort of rack to store my various boards – envelope punch board, cutting mat, paper trimmer etc. so that I can pick them out as I need them, rather than having them floating around on the work surface, with the one I want at any given moment always being at the bottom of the heap. I need to do some serious studio reorganising, I’m thinking.

I stocked up on loads of double-sided tape (very cheap in bulk, three different widths) – I’ve been getting through loads of that recently, especially with my mystery project. I also got some more plain heavy white cardstock for card bases.

On the website I’d seen an intriguing tool I was very keen to look at – a Gyro-Cut, which is a craft knife with a rotating blade and an erganomic handle. I was able to try it out and loved it! After trying some basic cuts, I attempted cutting around a more complex stamped image, and the man said I’d done a very good job for a first attempt! So in my bag it went.

In the discount package I got with this tool, I got a bottle of glue for making the cutting mat tacky, to hold the paper in place while you cut. He said one coating was good for many repeated uses, and it could also be used on the back of stencils to hold them in place, and it would leave no residue on the unglued surface. I asked if this would be suitable for electronic cutting machine mats and he said yes – many people asked him this. It is water-based, and easy to apply. I have always used 3M spray photo mount for this and it’s horrible to use – really smelly, and hard not to get it on the surrounding area, and initially it makes the mat much too sticky, which damages the work when you try to remove it. I think this new glue will be very useful indeed, and he said that the bottle would last for ages, but I could always get more from their website.

Blendy Pens – these amazing water-based pens can be attached together so their colours blend, and as you use them, the colour gradually changes. I’m not quite sure how I am going to use these yet, but they were so intriguing, especially as in the kit was a little bulb-operated air brush which can be used with other pens as well, and he threw in a pack of stencils too. I shall have fun playing with those. Exploring online, they seem to be directed exclusively at children, and I can’t find any info or videos showing adults using them for serious artwork, but I think they have potential.

I got another Really Useful Box (4 litre size) to store my growing collection of Distress Oxides – it will fit nicely on the shelf with the other two that I keep my Distress Inks and Archival Inks in.

On the left-hand side, stacked up, are the Distress Oxides I already had (the complete set of the initial launch), and laid out are the new Distress Oxides I got yesterday. I didn’t want to get others in the range because several seemed very similar, but I think I have now got a good representative collection colour-wise.

I got some very nice mixed media stencils.

Leaf dies, frames, backgrounds, doilies, edges etc.

I particularly like the two doily ones, because they are made up of several dies that can be used together, or separately, or in different combinations, giving you lots of options for different borders etc. I’ve not had a lot of experience dealing with this sort of thing and I’m looking forward to experimenting.

I found some gorgeous quilling dies – something I hadn’t come across before – you cut them out and roll the pieces up with a quilling tool to make really quick flowers. I want to make a lot of these for my mystery project.

I didn’t buy the only stamen die they had left – the pretty ones were old out, and anyway, I can use something different. One option is just to roll up a plain strip, giving a flat surface onto which you can attach a gem or other suitable flower centre. The lady on the stand gave me a personal demonstration of how the flowers are constructed.

They also had dies for making easel cards, but the dies can be used for other purposes as well. Like the doily dies above, there are several in the set, and you can mix and match, and create mats, borders, windows, delicate frames, etc. etc. Again, I can’t wait to experiment with these. Leann Chivers, who designed them for Crafters’ Companion, and whose Facebook video I’ve linked to above, produces so many variations with stunning results.

I got an absolutely gorgeous 8 x 8 paper stack by Trimcraft (who I’d never heard of before) called “Gilded Winter” – all very subtle beige and cream with gold, glitter and embossing, and some double-sided. Fabulous patterns.

Here are some examples of the papers.

I bought a few separate sheets of 12 x 12 papers with a weathered wood plank design which will make fabulous backgrounds for projects. They are double-sided with a surf wave pattern on the back which I’m not so interested in but it’s very pretty. These are by Kaiser Craft and they are from a collection called Sandy Toes! They were produced in Australia, where they certainly know all about sand and surf.

I bought a mixed pack of Wendy Vecchi’s Clearly for Art which I’ve wanted to get my hands on for years, and a small pack of vellum. The pack of silvery glitter card was a freebie thrown in with some of the Distress Oxides that I bought.

Finally, a few oddments – I only bought one stamp, a peacock feather one which I really liked. Some stencil glue (bought before I saw the sticky mat glue) and some fabric glue, some gold embossing powder and a set of fine tip applicator bottles. That about wraps it up!

One thing I’d been looking out for, and which seemed in very short supply, was punches. Last time I went to a craft show there were lots to choose from. I am missing a few in my series of incremental circles and was hoping to fill these gaps, but I can always find them online, I expect.

I am going to have So Much Fun playing with this lot!

As for the rest of the show, there were quite a few demonstrations going on but I didn’t spend too much time on them because there was so much to see and we didn’t have much time. Also, especially at the beginning, there were so many people crowding around and I couldn’t see anything at all from a sitting position. I did stop at one a bit later when the crowds had thinned out somewhat – this lady was creating tiny miniature canvases with a paint pouring method that looked like marbling, using thinned-down gesso into which she poured different colours of fluid iridescent paint, and after minimal stirring she poured this over the canvas with beautiful results.

On her table she had lots of pieces that she had made, not just with this technique but mixed media, and she was happy for me to photograph them.

Gorgeous, aren’t they.

This was a beautiful altered book she’d done.

I didn’t take as many photos as I’ve done at previous shows, but several stands caught my eye – mostly textile ones, although I didn’t buy anything in that line this time. There were some stunning quilts.

These juicy colourful trims caught my eye.

Aren’t those Paisleys just delicious? There was also quite a bit going on with Indian textiles – braids and trims, sari fabric, etc. I photographed some beautiful embroidered panels. Lots of gorgeous bright colours!

Other interesting textile pieces included some smaller items made from patchwork.

You can see that it was mostly vibrant bright colours that caught my eye!

The same felt makers were there that I’d seen at the County Show – as usual they had their stunning Lion and Lamb hanging which I’d seen several times before (I took this photo on a previous occasion):

This year they had a new one – St. George and the Dragon!

I took a photo from the side as well, so that you could see just how 3-dimensional this is:

It’s huge, as well! A fantastic piece of work. Is there anything people can’t create?

There was a stand dedicated to MosaiCraft – what the man described as miniature Lego – you press tiny cubes of plastic onto a spiked grid and make a mosaic following a chart rather like cross stitch. While this wasn’t something I was interested in doing, their stand was quite impressive:

Apparently you can submit a photo and they will pixilate it, and create a chart for you, and make up a kit with all the tiny pieces you will need to make it.

I loved their disclaimer – also made with this method:

Nice Celtic knot panel above it, too, and how about that amazing tiger?

I had to photograph the sign for this stand, simply because I loved the lettering.

One one of the papercrafting stands, there were lots of stunning cards that people had made from the various products – so inspirational! When I see stuff like this I think that I could actually enjoy card making more than I do…

(The card in this photo, like the white one in the photo above, had a window – when I edited this photo I removed what you could see through the window (part of the wall behind, which was distracting) and replaced it with black. I love how the flowers and leaves trail across the aperture.)

One of the cards (which I didn’t photograph) had a piece of embossed acetate over the aperture, which caught the light and sparkled. Beautiful! Soooo many ideas…

It was all laid out pretty well, with most of the papercrafting stuff near the entrance, and the textile stuff (quilting, embroidery, sewing, knitting and yarns etc.) towards the back of the hall, so that people could concentrate on their particular areas of interest without having to search high and low for the stands they wanted to visit. There were other stands dotted around, with miscellaneous things not necessarily related to craft – Cats’ Protection was there, and Bicton College (agricultural), the RSPB, and a man demonstrating a knife-sharpening tool; there were herbs and spices, and sweets, and some beautiful clothes, and kitchen ware. I recognised the man on that stand because a couple of years ago I bought a set of kitchen knives from him at the Devon County Show – I proudly showed him the scar where his amazing bread knife nearly took my finger off in September 2016!! I told him that I used three or four of the knives at least once a day, and how pleased I was with them.

The four of us split up so we could do our own thing, and arranged to meet for our sandwich lunch, and again at the end, but we did keep bumping into each other along the way!

I was impressed how many disabled people there were at the show. It’s great to know that however limited one’s mobility may be, one can still be creative, and often one has more time for it when more active pursuits are out of the question. Before I was ill I hardly had any time for it. They had buggies that you could hire for the day but I was happy with my wheelchair which is more compact. So many people came up to me and complimented me on my wheelchair decorations and quite a few wanted to know how I’d done them. I get a lot of comments every time I go out, but at a craft show or an art exhibition, the comments tend to be more informed, and there is more appreciation of the amount of work involved.

After having such a rough time recently, today has been a real treat. It was so great being amongst all those lovely folks too, all with a common interest, and we had some nice chats with various people. Altogether a really good day out.

Creative Blog Hop

I have been invited to take part in the Creative Bloggers’ hop by my friend Lucy. We first met online, through the Thyme Machines forum we are both on, for our Cougar cutting machines, and soon discovered we lived fairly near each other, and then my hubby and I moved, and now live just up the road from her! We both suffer from M.E. and this restricts our activities quite a lot, so we don’t get together as often as we might, living so close.

Hop over to her blog:

http://loopylass2010.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/creative-blog-hop.html

to see what she gets up to. She is very skilful indeed in her use of markers to colour digi-stamps, and is a master at shading. Have a look, also at the work of her chosen nominees.

This is a continuous blog hop that will be every Monday, with lots of amazing and talented crafters and artists. Everyone who takes part answers four questions about their creativity. Here are my answers to these questions.

1. What am I working on?

Several things, as usual! (I am either a highly creative person or completely undisciplined…) The main project at the moment is a small album made entirely from recycled materials, and I have now got to the stage where I am decorating the pages with mixed media. I am also doing miniature Zentangle drawings on the marks left by drying teabags on watercolour paper, and am currently making a bereavement card which is a fairly complex project (no blog post yet, but watch this space!). I am busy saving and drying teabags ready for when I’ve got time to begin teabag art in earnest. I also have a major knitting project on the go. There are always videos of my work waiting to be edited, and I consider this part of the creative process, too.

2. How does my work differ from others in my genre?

Impossible to answer that literally, because I don’t have any particular genre! This means that whatever genre I choose to specify as my own, I am different from others in that genre because I have many other genres as well. I have been told that I have a lot of patience, and attention to detail, and I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I also like to think outside the box and mix my disciplines, and use materials from other genres, and from outside the art world altogether – I get great satisfaction from getting equally good results from products from the building trade, for example, which are a lot cheaper, or free if you know the right people! I enjoy the challenge of recycling and upcycling and using materials that don’t cost anything, and which might otherwise be thrown away.

3. Why do I write/create what I do?

Simple answer: I can’t help myself. I have a hunger to be creative, and more ideas than I will ever have time to bring to fruition, even if I lived to be 300! Some projects have to be made out of necessity – I am not a card maker by choice, but have to make them when the need arises. I get the greatest enjoyment from simply playing – trying different techniques and materials, and asking, “What if…?”

4. How does my writing/creative process work?

I often get ideas out of the blue, or when I am feeding my Pinterest addiction, and from other sources online. When we go out and I get the opportunity to visit studios or galleries, I come back bursting with inspiration. I have even had ideas for projects, or solutions to problems, in dreams! Most ideas go on the back burner because I am determined to finish a few projects before embarking on new ones. That being said, I am the worst hoarder of UFOs (Un-Finished Objects). When I start a project I often spend time mulling it over, and I don’t rush, so that ideas and plans have a chance to mature, and after sleeping on it, I am often more certain how I am going to achieve the desired result. I tend to make rather ambitious projects that take a long time to complete. As for my actual work, I am rather an untidy worker because I find that tidying up interrupts the creative flow. Because of this I waste time looking for things that have got lost under heaps of other things. I am not always able to think far enough ahead to avoid making mistakes, but as they say, “In mixed media art, there are no mistakes – just more layers!”

 

Here are the three wonderful bloggers whom I have chosen to take part next week, and who have graciously agreed to participate. Each one has inspired me in one way or another, and I am grateful for that, and also for their friendship and encouragement. My hope is that this blog hop will expose their blogs to a new audience, who can be as inspired as I am! I have deliberately chosen people outside the card-making and papercrafting genre which my limited explorations into this blog hop so far, have revealed are the dominant themes – after all, the blog hop is a “Creative Blog Hop” and this could include all forms of creativity, maybe even extending to gardening, cooking, music, dance and the dramatic arts! Who know where this could take us?

1. Diana

Diana is a professionally trained mixed media and textile artist and photographer, living and working here in the UK. She normally works with very subtle colour blends, often in unusual combinations, and her work has a delicacy that is quite entrancing. She loves moths and butterflies and has an extensive vintage collection, which she incorporates into her work. Lately, she has been working on the “Index Card a Day” (ICAD) challenge, creating miniature works of art on index cards, and she has chosen to explore the theme of “decay and repair” which coincides nicely with her love of moths; she has used pieces of damaged antique lace, embroidery etc. She has a unique style which she has made her own. Whatever she does, I always find Diana’s work totally inspiring, and it touches me at an emotional level beyond words. She is a faithful follower of my blog, and has proved to be a lovely, supportive friend, and has frequently encouraged my own faltering approaches to mixed media art!

My other two nominees are from Australia.

2. Judy

Judy is a highly prolific textile artist delighting in the use of rich, bright colours and the variety of objects she creates – dolls, puppets, stuffies, flowers, mobiles, masks, bags, banners, you name it… I am bowled over by the level of her productivity – she must have tons of energy! She creates pieces for sale in her local museum shop, and has a couple of elderly relatives living in residential care for whom she makes beautiful things to brighten their rooms. Some time ago she and I did a flower swap; I made a collection of paper flowers for her, and in return she sent me a marvellous wallet full of glorious fabric flowers with dangly beads and sparkles – for some time I did not know how to use them to their best advantage, and then decided to incorporate them into a mixed media project I was working on – decorated spoke guards for my wheelchair! These provoke comment wherever I go, and I always point out the wonderful flowers made for me by a friend in Australia! (Have art, will travel lol!) Once I have completed my current major project I am intending to get my new sewing machine going, and I have to say that Judy is a major inspiration for the plans that I am mulling over for the future. Poor Judy has been experiencing awful problems with her blog recently and lost a whole lot of followers, so I am sure she would appreciate some new ones!

3. Vonny

Vonny is a self-taught watercolour, oil and acrylic painter who is inspired and influenced by the sea life where she lives in Brisbane. Like Judy, she delights in bright colours, and wants her paintings to make people happy – they certainly have this effect on me! She also paints the most amazing birds – parrots and other exotic species, which are so lifelike I am surprised they stay on the canvas. She is often amusingly self-deprecating about her work, but the results are always stunning. I always appreciate the fact that she gives us the whole process of a piece, including the bits that don’t work so well – this is a great encouragement, and shows the creative process at work, and how one can remedy even the worst disasters! Like my other two nominees, she is a prolific worker and leaves me in the shade! Vonny also works in polymer clay, creating unique jewellery pieces, often in the form of sea life.

 

My blogging and creative life has been enriched by these three highly talented ladies, and I feel privileged to have met them online and been able to see their work at close quarters. I could have chosen any number of nominees who have influenced and encouraged me – there are so many! I hope my choice will inspire others to explore their own creativity, and maybe to start thinking outside the box.

I am blessed with a beautiful ARTHaven studio, fitted out to my own specifications, with a continuous, curving work surface around three of its walls. When I designed it, with different work zones for different disciplines (paper art, mixed media, textiles, etc.) I had no idea that the fluid layout would be so condusive to the blending of all disciplines. I would encourage everyone, even if they are not as fortunate as I am in their creative spaces, to push the boundaries of their creativity and spread their wings. I hope my choice of nominees for this blog hop will help them to do just that. Please sign up to follow their blogs and leave some comments to encourage them!

Thank you, Lucy, for inviting me on this exciting blog hop.

Mixed Media–Wheelchair Spoke Guards

Warning: Picture-rich post!

My mixed media spoke guards are now finished and duly installed on the wheelchair, just in time for the craft show last Thursday. I lost count how many lovely comments I received about them, and was surprised how much interest was expressed – people were amazed when I pointed out the materials I’d used, and several people asked if the spoke guards were made of felt! They all had a good feel at the quite tactile surface, and were surprised how hard they were, despite the fabric-like appearance. A question I was frequently asked was if they were waterproof – I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that one, except that I think they are probably shower proof, with all the gel medium etc., but I wouldn’t immerse them in water.

Since I became a wheelchair user, I have noticed some very interesting psychology when it comes to decorations. My first Christmas, I adorned the wheelchair with tinsel and baubles and everyone smiled, pointed, came and chatted, and were generally very positive. After Christmas I removed the decorations and I was invisible again. I then decided I would always decorate it, and again I got the positive response. It seems to break down barriers of embarrassment in the face of disability, and even though people’s eyes are drawn to the badge of disability (the wheelchair), what they do is to relate to the user as an individual, rather than “someone-in-a-wheelchair.” It’s fascinating. I wrote an article about this for the quarterly journal of Invest in M.E. a few years ago.

My previous post on my new spoke guards gave details of the beginning of the project. Although the result was successful, I learnt a lot of things along the way, and will make subsequent spoke guards more efficiently, and with a better end result. Enough to say at this stage that they were constructed from papier mache. This post is all about the mixed media treatment they received, in creating a background and surface embellishment.

This first picture shows a collection of materials to be used in the project. In the end I didn’t use all of them; instead of building up texture with the Polyfilla One Fill, I used acrylic gel medium exclusively for adhering the various background and texture elements, and some of the materials I’d thought of using to provide extra texture proved surplus to requirement – sometimes one needs to know when to stop, in order to produce a cohesive whole!

I am sure that Judy of Judy’s Fabrications blog will be thrilled that at long last, I have used the beautiful fabric flowers she sent me when we did our flower swap last year. I have been wondering how best to use them, and this way, lots of other people get to enjoy them too, as I take my art with me wherever I go!

You can watch the whole process in the videos at the end of this post.

This picture shows one of the spoke guards ready for decoration, with some of the flowers laid on – I marked their position in pencil, and built up the rest of the design around their placement.

You can see that I have pierced holes around the outside of the guard for attachment to the wheel with cable ties, and the centre has been cut to size to allow for the wheel hub. The three large notches cut from the rim would not normally be necessary for regular wheels, but I have a Yamaha power-assist system on my wheelchair with motors in the large wheel hubs, with three extensions to the push rims; when I push on these, the power is transferred to the motors in the hubs and augmented, greatly reducing the energy I need to move the wheelchair. The notches are to allow for a small amount of play in the mechanism; without them, the system will not operate properly.

The creation of the background began with the laying down of some flowers cut from an old piece of gift wrapping paper. They were stuck down with Golden Regular Matte Gel Medium.

When these were dry, I began laying down torn fragments of tissue paper, also with gel medium (I eventually used soft, rather than regular, as it didn’t lift the paper so much). You can see the two blank areas where the fabric flowers will eventually be applied.

The next picture shows the spoke guards with the tissue paper application completed and dried.

To soften and blend the effect, I added three applications of acrylic glaze, using my Pebeo fluid acrylic paints, mixing them with some acrylic polymer, first using a creamy-white colour. This before-and-after photo is the result; it has reduced the pinkness a little, and softened the hard edges somewhat.

It still needed something extra, and I used some yellow glaze, and then some beige, and blended with the use of further polymer, this is the result. I was careful to rub back the glaze over the paper flowers, so that they continued to show through, but in a nice soft, subtle way.

To add a bit more interest to the background, I did some reverse stencilling, using my honeycomb stencil which I cut using Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine. (For details of this machine, see my sidebar.)

I began by painting a small area with a light brown acrylic paint, and laid the stencil over the top. I then wiped it carefully with a piece of damp kitchen paper to remove the paint from the areas not covered by the stencil. I cut some red sequin waste into basic leaf shapes, and using the fabric flowers as a guide to position them, I stuck them down with regular gel medium – they required a fairly heavy application to make sure they were secure.

Following this, I added some swirls cut from brown card using Sheba, again placing them correctly with the aid of the fabric flowers laid on temporarily.

The next step was to add some stems (these eventually turned into roots!) to connect the various elements into a continuous whole around the spoke guard. To do this, I took a small quantity of nice slubby yarn in my stash, cut into shorter lengths and stuck down with regular gel medium. I found it easiest to lay the yarn roughly where I wanted it, and to adhere the slubs first, and then the rest of the yarn, making sure it was well and truly soaked with the medium and pressed down onto the surface.

I used this technique, applying yarn with gel medium, on the small seaside-themed box I made for a friend last year – this project also utilised the tissue paper collage process as well.

As the gel medium began to dry, I went round the applied yarn and scraped back any excess, and finally rubbed away any residue with my finger. When dried, this is what it looked like. You can see the pale pink and green of the yarn through the clear gel medium.

Adding some texture around the yarn was super-fun! With generous amounts of regular gel medium, I stuck down several air-dry clay pebbles I made a while back, and also some poultry grit, which I bought at our local agricultural merchants when my hubby and I went a few months ago so that he could get something for the garden – I went on a little wander with “art” uppermost in my mind, and found all sorts of things to create texture! Poultry grit consists of small broken fragments of seashell, which chickens eat (unbelievable but true!) and somehow manage to absorb and utilise to form shells on their eggs. This poultry grit looks far from appetising to me… but then I’m not a chicken.

It’s fabulous for texture, though!

Another thing I found in that place was a packet of small orange rubber rings, that farmers use to dock the tails of lambs! I popped those in my basket too, and here they are, in a different incarnation, embellishing Shoshi’s wheelchair!!! I applied these with a generous amount of gel medium as before, and it squeezed up in the centre of the rings, which looked interesting.

After applying all the texture elements, I stippled soft gel medium over the whole thing with a hoof-oil brush (also obtained from the agricultural merchants) just to seal everything in, and prevent any potentially loose bits of poultry grit from falling off. The whole thing ended up feeling very firm and secure, and you can apply quite hard pressure to the various elements and there’s no movement at all. The flatter elements (leaves and swirls, and the original paper flowers) feel welded to the surface, and you cannot get a fingernail underneath any of it, so there is no danger of these lifting. The acrylic gel mediums are excellent for this sort of work and give superb results.

The next step was to add gesso to all the texture elements that would be painted – this was everything except the poultry grit, which looks gorgeous as is, with its natural shell colouring.

Once this was dry, the next step was one of the most fun parts of this whole technique – adding shading to the texture. I have seen various mixed media artists on Youtube using this technique, and it is most effective. Cheap black acrylic paint is applied roughly over all the textured areas, making sure it goes right down into all the crevices.

Working in small areas at a time so that the paint doesn’t dry, you then wipe it off the surface and clean up the surrounding area. Initially I used a piece of damp kitchen paper to clean off the textured areas but later discovered that a wet sponge was more effective (and also saved on kitchen paper!). A piece of damp kitchen paper is best for cleaning off the background areas. What happens is that the black paint is left in the crevices where you can’t wipe it off, and this gives tremendous depth to the work, with very little effort.

Here is a close-up of the shaded texture. You can also see how effective the poultry grit is as a texture.

The roots were painted with a selection of brown and cream fluid acrylics.

When I rubbed the black paint off, the gesso started to come off the rubber rings, which was a nuisance, but I decided to apply some Treasure Copper (like Rub’n’Buff) onto them and this, combined with the patchy gesso, gave a nice distressed effect. Someone at the show asked me if they were made from Cheerios!!

This more or less completed the decoration of the spoke guards. Before adding the fabric flowers, I gave the backs of the spoke guards two coats of cream emulsion paint, and then painted the whole spoke guard, front and back, with matte acrylic varnish to seal everything.

Here are the finished spoke guards, with the fabric flowers laid in place, ready to be stuck down with hot glue.

This is a detail shot, showing how all the elements work together. You can just see the original collaged paper flowers, and the soft effect of the overlaid tissue paper. I love how Judy’s flowers complement the darker, more neutral texture elements, and bring out the soft colour of the background. Thank you Judy! I am thrilled with how your flowers have worked on this project.

Mounted on the wheels, they look like this.

Finally, the wheelchair with the new spoke guards installed on the wheels.

After taking this picture, the final step was to replace the tired floral decorations down the front frame. I used new silk flowers and the remaining few fabric flowers not used on the spoke guards.

Though I say so myself, I am extremely pleased with the result of this project. At the outset, I wasn’t at all sure that it would work, as I had never made anything like this with papier mache – I wondered if they would be firm, yet flexible, enough to stand up to the task, and also to enable the power assist system to function properly. Overall, everything has come out better than I could have expected, and it’s given me the confidence to make some more, and try my hand at some other styles – Zentangle? Steampunk? Marbling? The possibilities are endless!

Here are the videos, covering first the background, and then the embellishments. Enjoy!

Edit: Some time after making these, I was given some old estate agents’ “for sale” boards as the company was changing its logo. These are made of a double layer of corrugated plastic, each layer having a flat skin top and bottom. They are just large enough to cut a 24” circle for a spoke guard out of each. I can then cut out a gusset and attach the edges together with duct tape in order to make the convex shape. Painted with gesso, these will then be ready for mixed media application. This should be a lot more straightforward than constructing them from papier mache, and it will make them more lightweight, and also more waterproof.