WOYWW 278

Well, here we are again, back to another Wednesday where we all share what we’ve got on our desks! To join in the fun, please click on the WOYWW logo in my sidebar, which will take you to our hostess Julia’s blog, where all will be explained.

A week alternating between being busy and being too tired to do anything but lie on the recliner… Such is life for a foggy-brained M.E.-er.

At least I’ve managed to be a bit productive in a creative sense – I’ve finished my first masterboard. You can see it on top of the pile on my desk.

You can read all about it here (rather a long post, I’m afraid – it was quite a marathon to end up with the effect I wanted).

Underneath the completed masterboard are a couple more that I’m working on. I used the same sized paper to iron off the clear embossing resist, and decided to use these sheets to create further masterboards, one in green and the other in yellow. Underneath those is another sheet that I used to blot off the heat embossing on the green one – this embossing has now been on three pieces of paper! How’s that for recycling?

Last Wednesday evening I went to my first felt class, and the second is tonight. As for the piece I made last week, I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with it but I will probably add some embroidery and turn it into a little picture of a poppy field.

Meanwhile, it has been sitting on the hall table until my hubby announced that the kitties like lying on it!! I have put it in my ARTHaven out of harm’s way, but it got me thinking that once my felt-making skills are up to it, I must make them each a cat cave.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and most of Sunday after church, were spent crashed out on the recliner feeling total c**p, apart from a brief burst of creativity when I made a house-moving card for my aunt who has just moved into a residential home.

For those who expressed an interest last week, I made a matching envelope for this, using my new WR Memory Keepers Envelope Punch Board, and you can read about it here, which is also the blog post about the above card. I was really pleased with how the card turned out, and more than delighted with the envelope board which really does do what it says on the tin – the first envelope board I’ve actually managed to get to grips with!

Yesterday I managed to complete my latest Youtube video, which is about a tiny Zentangle drawing on a teabag stain, made into a thank you card. I always seem to have a backlog of videos because they take such a long time to edit.

Also yesterday, my hubby, Mum and I all went to the doctor’s surgery to have blood tests! Mum’s is her weekly one to get her warfarin dose stabilised, and they also looked at the latest wound on her leg where she bashed it yet again just before she went to my sister’s. It’s not looking too good and they took a swab. My hubby’s was for his sugar levels to see if he’s managing to stave off diabetes, and mine was to check my haemoglobin to see if I need another course of iron. Results should be in by Friday. I’m also hoping they’ll change the Gaviscon I’ve been prescribed because it is so disgusting!!

This coming week, if I get time in between doing the accounts (boring) I hope to make further progress on the two masterboards, and get back to my recycled mini-album which has been neglected of late as my mojo in that department seems to have forsaken me somewhat. I have now set myself a deadline to complete it by Christmas so I’d better get a move on.

Have a great creative week, everyone, and happy WOYWW.

WOYWW 266

For info on how to join in the world’s most famous (or infamous?) nosey fest, please click on the icon in the right-hand side bar, which will take you to our hostess Julia’s blog, where all will be revealed.

Here is my desk as at late on Tuesday evening.

As you can see, I am continuing to work on my Recycled Mini-Album. Today I completed another page with an emphasis on circles in the design. The page includes printing with bubble wrap, and creating circles using a pen lid dipped in paint. The background is made from the piece of kitchen paper I’d used for mopping up, which featured in last week’s WOYWW post.

For further details of this project, please scroll down to the previous post.

The book is sitting on top of one of my scratch papers – you can see more of this on the previous post, too. To the left is my blue desk-tidy which contains my foam applicators and stencil brushes amongst other things. I used these to create the circles in the border.

Working around clockwise behind the book, you can see the purple pencil box I use to keep my drawing pens in. Behind that, in the mini-bath, are some pieces of kitchen roll in the early stages of their creative journey before too much ink and paint have built up on them!

Further on again, and my gel mediums and acrylic paints seem to be taking up permanent residence on my work surface rather than being put away on the shelf that is their real home! Drawing pens in front, in black and white.

You can see the two bubble wrap printing blocks I made this afternoon. More details on my previous post.

Large rectangular tub of gesso almost out of shot, and some Distress Inks and my usual tin of paint brushes. Essential baby wipes on the drawers beyond!

Much of this week has been spent trying to catch up on my video editing. I have now uploaded a couple of videos about the Recycled Mini-Album, and also the Altered Pizza Box I made recently. All relevant blog posts will eventually be upgraded with these videos, but they are on Youtube already. Still got quite a few to go! I hate it that it takes longer to edit and upload a video than it does to do the actual project one was filming!

Other news – great excitement – our solar panels are being fitted this week! There’s a post about that below the one about my latest mini-album page.

Also, great news on the 5:2 diet front. Last week, you may remember, was my first week on this revolutonary new diet, and I was amazed to have lost 5 lb. I have now been doing it for 2 weeks, and at the end of the second week, I have lost a further 7 lb, making a total of 12 lb in two weeks!! I expect in time it will plateau out – I do not expect to continue to lose weight at this rate, but I am feeling extremely chuffed about it. Trouble is, nothing actually shows yet! Also, when I’ve lost weight in the past, I’ve tended to lose it from places I’m not really bothered about – like my face, and my wrists (watch strap gets loose!) – I am convinced that I could get really, really skinny except for my awful stomach which refuses to budge! Ah well, we can’t have it all our own way, I suppose.

Teabag Art–Preparing the Teabags

Some time ago, I watched a Colouricious video on Youtube (I subscribe to their channel) – one of a series on making things from recycled stuff and rubbish.

I was really intrigued by this, and especially that they managed to achieve a look that was exactly like leather, and the end result certainly didn’t look like used teabags!

Recently I decided to have another look at this, and googled “teabag art” and was astounded at the amazing things people were making with these humble little objects that most people throw away without a second thought.

I started saving my teabags, and asked my hubby to do the same. We drink Lapsang Souchong or Earl Grey tea, both of which are quite pale, so we are not getting the darker staining on the bags that you’d get with regular “builders’ tea” – how I wish I’d saved the mountain of used teabags produced by our builders during the months they were working on our house!! Anyway, they are still stained, but more subtly, and being lighter, lend themselves to further colouring with distress inks etc.

My hubby also started saving his herb “teabags” – I don’t think they should call this stuff tea because it’s never seen a tea bush in its life, and bears no resemblance to that most majestic and restorative of beverages!! His bags were made of different stuff (not much texture), were a different shape, and the stuff inside went rather solid when dry, and was quite revolting when taken out – especially the ginger “tea” which produced some stuff like cement!! I told him not to bother keeping them any longer, but just to save real teabags.

To start with, I was drying them on the corner of my ARTHaven sink, until I discovered online that if you dry them on a piece of paper (preferably watercolour paper which is substantial enough not to fall apart when wet), you get some very interesting stains, and these papers can then be used subsequently in art projects.

This is what my piece of watercolour paper looks like now, after several weeks of drying teabags on it:

I have discovered that you can, to a certain extent, control the shape of the marks left by the wet bags by how you place them down on the paper. The most interesting ones are created by screwing the teabag up so that its creases make contact with the paper. Many of these initial patterns are reminiscent of roses, and I am planning to make a piece using this paper as a background, entitled “Tea Rose” and embellished with 3-D paper roses made from tea-stained papers, and keeping the colours brown and sepia.

I am also planning to create a more organised background sheet by laying the teabags flat in a patchwork design. This should give a chequer-board effect which will be suitable for embellishing in a different way.

With teabag art, you certainly get the opportunity to make art out of every stage of the procedure!!

Once the teabags are dry, they need to be emptied. In order not to destroy the bag, I made a little slit, close to the edge, with a pair of very sharp, fine scissors, and tipped out the dry tea onto a piece of newspaper. While I was working on the bags, I had time to consider to what use I might put all this tea – with such a frugal and recycling project as teabag art, it would be most pleasing to be able to use the tea as well, so meanwhile, I stored it in a jar while I thought about how I could use it.

The empty teabags are quite creased. Before using them, the Colouricious team ironed them flat, but I thought that for certain effects, I could make use of these creases, so up till now, I haven’t ironed any of them.

Here is the video I made of the preparation of the teabags for making teabag art.

I shall be uploading subsequent videos in due course, so watch this space to see where this train of inspiration takes me! I am finding it fascinating that you can make art out of anything, with a bit of imagination! – and a lot of help from the Internet – all those hours languishing on the recliner because I haven’t got the energy to do anything else are not wasted, as during those times, Youtube and a Pinterest have become my dear friends!!

A final note on my videos. Just before we moved, I purchased a new video camera (a Samsung) on the recommendation of Lindsay the Frugal Crafter who had recently upgraded her camera to this model. I have set up a rig attached to the shelf above the main work zone in my new ARTHaven and my technique is gradually improving! In order to produce HD videos I have had to upgrade my computer – my two Windows 7 laptops are not powerful enough, and for some time I’d been considering moving over to Mac, but was held back by the fact that I am heavily invested in Windows and have a lot of excellent third-party software for which there is no Mac version. However, with the discovery of the Parallels software, I have gone ahead and can run Windows 7 alongside the Mac OS on my new iMac, and can benefit from the ease of the Mac interface and the speed and power of an up-to-date setup. There was no way I was going to “upgrade” my laptops to that most horrible of inventions, Windows 8, and anyway, the hardware was not up to the job.

I have upgraded my Pinnacle Studio video editing software from version 12, which I have been using for years but is now becoming rather limited, to version 17, which has a radically redesigned interface and a much more professional approach, can deal with many more video formats, and from which one can upload direct to Youtube! It’s a sharp learning curve, not helped by the fact that the user manual is absolutely hopeless, but there is lots of help online, and I am now mastering such techniques as keyframing which are helping to develop my skills. I do love learning new things on the computer!

None of this would have been possible before we moved, where our “broadband” speed was a joke. We are now operating at sensible and usable speeds with fibre-optic broadband, which means that uploading even a SD video does not take all night!

So from now on, my video uploads will be in full HD. With the new setup, the brilliant new user-friendly camera and my growing familiarity and expertise with the new software and hardware, you can look forward to seeing more of Shoshi’s videos!

Youtube Uploading

I've now discovered that hidden in the depths of my free FLV video converter is a whole page of parameters that can be changed, so I've increased the quality all round, and replaced the original video on Youtube with one of better quality - however, it's still not quite as good as the original...

They don't make it easy, particularly for novices, and I'm not exactly a novice where video is concerned (although not an expert, either, lol!) I suppose everybody records video in all sorts of different formats, so it's difficult to have hard and fast guidelines, but wouldn't it be great if Youtube provided a universal converter as a free download, so that everyone could upload their videos easily, and at the best possible quality to match that of the original. There are an awful lot of really dreadful quality clips on Youtube but I suspect the fault lies in the original filming.

Anyway, the program I've got seems to work adequately and it's free, which suits me!!