Floating Butterflies Birthday Card Part 2

Warning – picture-rich post!

Continuing to work on this 3-D card for a friend’s birthday – if you want to see the first part, please go here.

I realised that I had not cut enough frames to complete the card, so I cut a couple more (a spare one to go in my stash) and I also cut some more butterflies while I was at it. I have plenty for the card, but these can go in my stash too, to be inked at a later date for future projects.

The next step was fun. I wanted to cut a decorative piece to attach inside the card, visible through the aperture on the front.

Every time I am using inks, I mop up by spritzing the craft sheet with water and wiping it up with a piece of kitchen paper. I am careful to limit the colours I use on each sheet, and once they are completely covered with ink, they are stored away in a pizza box to be used in projects. I love going through this box and enjoying all the vibrant colours! An added bonus is that kitchen paper is 2-ply, so once it is dry, you can pull the two layers apart, and you get two identical sheets of inked paper.

I went through the box to find one I liked, that would go with this project, and was very pleased with this particular one, which is very richly coloured, with some nice splodges on it, and which would contrast with the background of my card.

I opened up another pizza box, this time containing acetate scraps. I keep a lot of this, cutting up packaging if it has decent-sized flat pieces. There are different thicknesses in the box too, so there is usually something that will do for a project. Acetate has so many uses.

In this case, I needed two pieces – one to make the window in the aperture on the front of the card, and the other from which to cut the spiral which is the main feature of this card. For the window, it wasn’t important how thick the acetate was, so I chose a fairly thin piece, but for the spiral, it needed to be rigid enough not to collapse in use.

Last time I made this card, I remember having difficulty with the spiral. There isn’t a template for this, and on the original Youtube video it wasn’t really clear what would work best. This time I decided to keep the final test piece, as a template in case I want to do this project again.

This is my second attempt. I used my Martha Stewart circle cutter with a pencil to draw the circle – in this case with a 4 inch diameter.

I marked the centre first with a cross, and lined this up in the centre of the circle cutter, and ran around with the pencil in the “4-inch” hole. The clear central part of this tool rotates on a ball-bearing. It has the added advantage of being exactly the same size as the base of my little fabric caddy that I keep my tools in, so as well as being a useful place to store it, it also acts as a revolving base. I was very pleased when I discovered this.

I cut the spiral in paper first, and once I was satisfied that it would work by attaching it temporarily to the inside of the card with a couple of spots of Prit glue, I used the template to cut the spiral in acetate.

With a pencil, I traced around the inside of the aperture onto the inside of the card, to mark the position of the inked kitchen paper.

I moved the inked kitchen paper around under the aperture until I was happy with the patterning on it for this project. I held it firmly and went around again with my pencil, creating a cutting line – this was quite hard to do because the colour was pretty intense and I had a job to make it show up sufficiently, and also, I had to be careful that the pencil did not tear the paper.

Once it was marked, I cut it out, and applied it to the inside of the card, lining it up with the pencil lines I’d made, and attached it with soft matt gel medium, using a brush, and then smoothing it out with a palette knife, and then left it to dry.

I took a CD pen to mark the acetate for the frame. These pens are excellent for marking on shiny paper. I drew a line just in from the edge of the aperture to show me where to cut the acetate to fit. The acetate shape had to be large enough to cover the aperture completely, but not so large that it would extend beyond the cut frame which would eventually be stuck down to cover the edge.

The acetate window in place.

Because I omitted to cut enough frames, I did not have one available for inking when I inked the background and butterflies, so I had to colour the new white frame, using distress stains.

Both the inner frames in place, attached with Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive.

The card folded closed, showing the inked kitchen paper through the acetate window, and with the second gold frame in place to finish the aperture.

Time to add the embellishments. To begin, I laid the acetate spiral in place inside the card.

First I added the “Happy Birthday” sentiment and the “60,” both of which I had cut out with Sheba, the top layers being sprayed along with the butterflies and the shadow layers being cut from gold mirror card. The banner for the “Happy Birthday” was sprayed as well, and the two layers arranged to provide maximum contrast. You can see that I have also arranged some butterflies on the spiral inside the card.

Using my alcohol pen and a couple of different colours of alcohol ink, I added some colour to the gold butterflies and just touched the pen to the sprayed butterflies. I had layered some of these.

Here are some of the completed butterflies. When I layered them, I flipped up the wings of the top layer, and stuck it to the bottom layer with a thick blob of Pinflair gel glue, so that when it dried, the wings would not get flattened.

A couple of pictures showing the spiral inside the card. This is a bit difficult to photograph because the spiral is transparent and therefore not really visible (which is the whole idea), and also being at different levels, not everything is in focus, but you get the idea, and the fact that the floating butterflies cast a shadow, adding to the impression of depth.

On the left-hand side you can see that I have applied a small ink-sprayed circle, embellished with a gold butterfly. This covers the end of the acetate spiral.

Here is another “Happy Birthday” sentiment on the inside of the card, this time without a background banner layer, and I’ve deliberately kept the colours fairly light. You can clearly see some of the masked butterfly shapes n the background here.

The card front, pretty well finished. I have glued down the butterflies using Pinflair glue to keep the wings up. The butterflies through the window do not yet have any alcohol ink embellishment.

Turning my attention to the back of the card, I used a cut-out formed when creating the frames, and coloured it with distress inks to co-ordinate with the card, and added some water spatters which I then blotted off with kitchen paper. I did a draft of the lettering on a piece of scrap paper and traced it off onto the shaped card on my light panel, using a permanent black marker. After this, I filled in the letters with a sanguine marker and highlighted the letters with a white gel pen.

Here is the greeting panel stuck down onto the back of the card.

Here are the final photos of the completed card. You can see that I have added some alcohol ink to the gold butterflies on the spiral inside.

The next photo was taken from a slightly different angle, giving a view through the acetate window, showing the butterflies flying in the opening.

Some detail photos.

A full view of the inside of the card, showing the floating butterflies on the acetate spiral.

The right side of the inside of the card.

The sentiment on the inside of the card. In this photo you can clearly see the butterflies on the background, created with the mask-and-spray technique.

Turning to the back of the card, again you can clearly see the mask-and-spray butterflies.

Detail of the greeting panel.

Again, on these detail shots of the back of the card, you can see the mask-and-spray butterflies.

I think this is a card worthy of a special friend celebrating a special birthday!

Floating Butterflies Birthday Card Part 1

A friend has recently celebrated a significant birthday, so I thought I’d make her a posh card. I have been working in Inkscape quite a bit lately, designing some new cut files for Sheba, my Cougar cutting machine which is now up and running again, and I’ve been looking back at some of my old files that I used for previous projects, and decided that instead of designing a new project from scratch, I’d revamp an old one that I was particularly pleased with, with a few variations.

This is a rather special card with lots of butterflies, and when you open it, more butterflies appear to float in mid-air, being attached to a spiral cut from acetate, attached to the left and right sides of the inside of the card.

You can see my original one here.

Cutting the Shapes

Here is a picture of the gold mirror card being cut on Sheba.

The mat removed from the machine, with the cut card still in place.

The cut-out pieces. You can see that I have cut two gold frames and quite a lot of butterflies. The lacy butterflies are overlays to be stuck onto coloured card.

At the top left of the photo there are quite a few small gold butterflies. These were cut with a Stampin’ Up butterfly punch from the remaining piece of card after cutting the shapes on the machine, and from another offcut of gold card. I don’t like to waste any! If I don’t use all these butterflies on the card, it doesn’t matter because they will go into my stash.

Also in the picture you can see some “Happy Birthday” sentiments. These are actually shadow layers, and the text, cut from other card, will be overlaid, to reveal a narrow gold mat layer.

I also cut two very narrow rings which were measured to fit on the lids of some small papier mache boxes which I am altering at the moment, and the circles are the pieces cut from their centres. There is also a curved banner mat layer which I shan’t be using for this project – it will go in my stash – and finally the mat layers for the numbers to go on the front of the card.

Here are the pieces cut from white card. I have overlaid the gold lacy butterflies on top of their underlay pieces to show how they will work. You can see that there are two banner pieces, onto which the “Happy Birthday” sentiment will go, and the card base which is A4, with an aperture cut in it. This will be covered with acetate on the back, through which you will see the butterflies on the acetate spiral.

I cut several “Happy Birthday” sentiments. I designed these some time ago, using the Edwardian Script font, and then editing it so that the words would cut as a single piece, and would not fall apart when cut. I cut these particular ones pretty small and Sheba, my Cougar cutting machine, did a good job.

To colour the card base and the embellishments, I used my “Mask-and-Spray” technique – I’ve done a separate post about it here.

I prepared a mock-up of a possible layout for the card. The “60” was originally going to be stuck down onto an acetate window that will be stuck to the back of the card base, behind the aperture – since finishing the card I’ve rethought this.

One of the things I love about this technique is the use of the kitchen paper to mop up the excess ink – I had to do this several times, because with all the ink, and spritzing with water to move the colour around and mix it, it all got pretty wet. Following what I’ve seen others do online, I rolled the whole kitchen roll over the piece. The ink soaked through several layers.

You end up with quite a lot of absolutely gorgeous coloured sheets. Each one, of course, is two-ply, and you can separate these, and you get double the quantity! I use these inked pieces in different projects, and when I’m using kitchen roll for any cleaning up purposes, I gradually build up the colour on individual sheets, which I keep in a box within easy reach – I choose one which already has some ink in a similar hue so that I don’t end up with a load of papers looking like mud! Once they are sufficiently covered, they go into another box ready for use. I hate throwing stuff away, and after all, there’s a lot of expensive ink soaked up into these papers, so why throw them away?

Wouldn’t you agree that this is a glorious result? – a spin-off that means that with the mask and spray technique, you end up with three different materials for projects – coloured cut pieces, a decorative background, and some soft kitchen paper to be used in a variety of ways.

Preparing the Pieces to Make the Card

Here is the collection of inked pieces together with the card base. The pieces include a couple of circles for use in the construction of the card pop-up, two overlapping banners for the sentiment, the sentiment itself, and the “60.”

Working on the sentiment, I made a mock-up of the text pieces with their gold shadow layers, and the two banner pieces, and thought that there wasn’t enough contrast, so I experimented with dabbing one of the text pieces with Seedless Preserves distress stain. This gave a good result.

Here is a mock-up of the front of the card, showing the completed sentiment pieces on top of their gold shadow layers, and the gold frame to finish the aperture in the card base. I stuck the cut sentiment pieces down using Crafter’s Companion Stick and Stay repositionable permanent spray adhesive, and the layers of the banner with Scotch Quick Dry adhesive.

In the next blog post, I will show how the card is assembled and finished.

Mask-and-Spray

I love this technique. I invented it myself (although of course others might also have done so, but I haven’t seen it done before!). It kills two birds with one stone – back in July 2012 when I first got my Dylusions spray inks, I cut a lot of flower pieces that I wanted to colour, and laid them down on a piece of card, and sprayed the inks. The pieces acted as masks. I then removed the pieces, which left white, unsprayed shapes where they had been, and replaced them the other way up, in different places on the background piece, and re-sprayed it. What I ended up with was a collection of pieces coloured on both sides in a gorgeous random fashion, and a great background with flower shapes, also in different random colours. (There are several posts about this in the July 2012 subfolder of this blog.)

I employed the technique again recently, as part of the Floating Butterflies card I made for a friend’s birthday, using the butterfly shapes I’d cut with Sheba (the name I have given to my Cougar cutting machine), and used the card base (also cut with Sheba) complete with its aperture, as the background piece, and then repeated the process so that the inside of the card was sprayed with random butterfly shapes too. I will soon be doing a couple of blog posts about making this card. I haven’t been able to upload these until now because I didn’t see my friend until yesterday, when I gave her the card, and it was under wraps till then!

This time I didn’t use watercolour paper, but cut the shapes from white American Cardstock 12 x 12 which is fabulous stuff to work with – it cuts like a dream on Sheba, and it seems to stand up very well to the amount of water you chuck at it with this technique. It’s also thinner than the watercolour paper I’ve got, and so it makes finer flowers, and it’s also less expensive! Watercolour paper is a bit of a pain to cut on Sheba because it seems rather dense and fibrous, but it cuts a lot better if you spritz it lightly with water once you’ve stuck it down on the cutting mat, and leave it for a few minutes to soak in. The American Cardstock is a lot more convenient all round, and is also available in the standard 12 x 12 size.

The next batch of photos are stills grabbed from the video I made, which will be on Youtube eventually, when I’ve had a chance to edit it.

The first one shows the beginning of the “mask and spray” technique.

Removing the butterflies after the first spraying, showing the white shapes underneath.

#Sometimes the ink is so wet that it creeps under the shapes but that doesn’t matter – it all goes to make the resulting background more random and undefined.

The next photo shows the butterflies being replaced in different places. The original white spaces will be sprayed with pure colour, and the already-sprayed background will get extra layers of colour, and the butterflies get their backs coloured in the process.

The piece being re-sprayed.

The butterflies removed again.

There were a few white spaces left, where I’d overlapped the butterfly pieces over original white bits, but these soon disappeared with further spraying.

In the past I’ve just done one spraying for either side of the butterflies, but in this case I did it more than once, till I got the result I wanted. Here are the butterflies being removed after the final spraying.

Some of the sprayed butterfly shapes. I love the variation in colour, and the fact that some look more textured than others.

The outside of the final background piece, which is the card base.

The inside of the card, duly masked and sprayed.

This is a very useful technique for producing nice random backgrounds and masterboards quite quickly and easily, and it also provides you with a good quantity of cut pieces (flowers, butterflies, etc.) to go in your stash to be used for other projects. It is also the most tremendous fun to do – really hands-on and messy and creative!

WOYWW 377–Tidying, Technology and Time for Art

I have been tidying up! After literally months of looking briefly at the far side of my studio and then quickly averting my eyes because my constitution simply wasn’t strong enough to deal with the mess and how much energy it would take to tidy it, I decided on Monday to make a start. I spent an hour, at the end of which my back was aching (always a sign I’ve done too much) and it didn’t look that much different… In serious danger of becoming demoralised, I closed the door on it and had a rest. Yesterday I spent about 2 hours in there, not just finishing that bit of tidying, but also reorganising certain things – for instance putting a tray insert into the Really Useful Box that contains my Brushos, Dylusions paints and sprays, and now my Infusions. Ahhh, the satisfaction!!

Anyway, take a gander at the far side of the room now – my textile and drawing zone. Admit it, you are impressed. If you’re not, you should be after all my hard work haha!!

This is what it looked like before:

That picture was taken in May, and since then it had got worse… In addition to tidying it up, I’ve also replaced the grotty cardboard boxes that used to be on top of the shelving unit with nice plastic ones.

The main motivation for this grand tidy-up was that this afternoon a friend is coming for tea. She hasn’t been before – I only met her fairly recently, on the Moving On After Cancer course – she lives just round the corner from me. She said she was very interested in what I do and said she might bring something round to do, so hopefully we’ll be spending some time in there together, in between cake guzzling (I’ve been baking again today too, for the first time for ages).

I decided that in honour of her coming, I’d get out a few of my pieces, most of which you will have seen before. You can see my ZIAs (Zentangle-Inspired Art) propped up in the corner.

Here is my display area as it is today. Some of the work is mine, and the rest is lovely stuff that different people have sent me which I continue to treasure – if you look carefully you may see something you yourself have sent me!

The small area between the display area and my main work area has always been a muddle. I have now organised it better, and brought a couple of magazine racks through from the office. The large envelopes they contain used to be propped up (well, falling over mostly) on the floor to the left of the fireplace, and were really difficult to get at. They contain things like waxed paper, masks, instructions for doing various techniques, etc. etc.

The pull-out unit on the right, which fits under where I sit, but I never keep it there because that’s where I sit, and also it provides a useful surface, has now returned to being a cutting zone. Also in evidence is one of the many boxes I have that my stoma bags come in! They are a useful size for storing small things in.

This is the main work area, as it was on Tuesday evening.

You can see the 12 x 12 background pieces I made recently with my new Infusions paints. On top of them is a small bowl with the little mixed media piece I’ve been working on, concurrently with my other project which is still under wraps – literally – it’s hiding in the bowl under the piece! In the bowl on the right are some bits and pieces for that project, including some things I cut with Sheba, who you can see sitting in all her new splendour on the left, with her new support tables which are working a treat! Better cuts all round.

I had to cut another frame for the project, so I decided to cut a spare, and filled the rest of the space with more butterflies. I did these a couple of days ago.

There will be more on this once I’ve finished the project.

On the left of the previous picture, in front of Sheba, you can see part of a new project I’m working on – a small album about our wonderful walk through the woods with our friends recently. In front of the ribbon rack you can see the pieces of card that I have cut for the bases of the pages, and printouts of some of the photos I took.

This is what the main work area looked like earlier, when I was sorting through the printouts. I’ve also got out some sheets of parchment paper which are going to be used as pages in the album too, with Zentangle drawings on them.

I’ve also been playing around with some of the flowers and leaves that I cut when doing my mask-and-spray technique with the Infusions – I’m definitely going to use some of these in the project. Everything is duplicated because I am going to make a virtually identical album for our friends who introduced us to that stunning place – I thought they might like a nice memento of our visit.

I’ll try and remember to take some photos of our tea later on, with my best china!

This week, as well, I’ve been wrestling with technology and trying to get the home network set up – I’ve never got it working satisfactorily before, but now at last I’ve got all the computers talking to each other. We also had a Sky engineer out twice, setting up our new SkyQ system which I am still getting used to. So it’s been a really busy week.

Happy WOYWW everybody, and a great creative and fun week ahead for one and all.

Shoshi’s In Print Again!–and Computer News

No sooner than Jane Marbaix’s marvellous Zentangle book has come out, featuring Yours Truly, than another great Zentangle book makes its debut, also featuring Yours Truly!

This time it’s Beate Winkler, CZT (Certified Zentangle Teacher) from Germany, who has written a truly inspirational book – about the time Jane approached me, so did Beate, asking if she could include my pattern Y-Ful Power in her book, and of course I said yes.

Yesterday this book arrived in the post. This time it is a hardback, beautifully illustrated with examples of Zentangle being used on the most unusual of objects, and some interesting new techniques to try, too. Here are some pictures.

Slipped inside the front cover were some leaflets from Beate – the top one is a gorgeous Zentangle on parchment paper.

Signed copy! How thrilling is that?

Frontispiece.

List of contents.

Zentangles embellishing bracelets and bangles.

After my adventures with my kitchen bin, I couldn’t resist sharing this page with you!

A decorated table.

Another one featuring something very familiar to me from recent work – a wooden wine box.

How is this for astonishing – a Zentangle piano!

Shoes, clocks and watches.

A VW Camper Van!! That would certainly turn some heads when out and about.

Is there anything that can’t be embellished with Zentangle? To my knowledge, nobody has adequately answered that question!

ZenGems. This is definitely something I’m keen to try. At first I thought they were real 3D objects embellished with Zentangle, until I looked more closely and realised that the “gems” are drawn with coloured pencils. Great representation of reflective 3D surfaces.

And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for….. or not! – in the A-Z list of featured patterns at the back of the book, Y-Ful Power by Shoshi.

Computer Woes and Joys

Last week, my beloved old laptop finally died. This was my first laptop, that I bought back in 2007 when I was going downhill rapidly with my health and dealing with the horrible period living in Limboland prior to my diagnosis of ME in the autumn of that year. During this period, I was finding it increasingly difficult to sit up at the desk working on my old desktop computer (the sort that a friend recently described as the “giant beige tardis” lol!

It was a 13-inch HP Pavilion laptop.

This laptop has been through a lot with me since that time. On it I started this blog, and joined various forums, and made a lot of friends near and far. It was used to capacity and more – after its hard drive failed, I had this replaced with a 500 Gig drive (more later on this) and this made quite a difference. In about 2009 I inherited another laptop, another HP Pavilion, but this time a 17-inch one, and this gradually became the one that was used more – it lived downstairs after we moved house, and the small one took up residence on my office desk and was used mostly for the accounts, correspondence, and held my entire music library and Audible audio book downloads, sound editing software, and all my Bible studies (including sessions I devised and taught to my group over several years, and numerous downloaded articles and resources). I have done a lot of sound recording and editing on this laptop. The larger laptop was better for photo and video editing, having a bigger screen.

Some time ago, the small one started to run rather hot, so I bought a couple of laptop cooling mats with fans, one for each laptop, and these do help.

At this stage I was running Pinnacle software on the larger laptop, for my video editing. I gradually got more and more frustrated with this, as it was pretty unstable and kept crashing, and half the time it behaved somewhat unpredictably, and when I got my new HD video camera, the version I had wasn’t capable of editing in HD. So I bit the bullet and bought my iMac, because the state-of-the-art video editing software, Final Cut Pro, works only on the Mac platform. This software is awesome, and it does what it says on the tin!

The small laptop had been getting slower and slower, and occasionally wouldn’t boot at all, and running very hot, and I feared another hard drive failure. It kept going, limping along until this week when I decided it was time for it to be admitted to Computer Hospital – they told me it was running so slowly because of what they called “heat throttling” – the system running itself more slowly in order to generate less heat, but sometimes this became too much, and it would shut down to protect itself. They were able to get it running OK, but were unable to run a full HD test because it kept shutting down because of overheating, so they removed the HD and tested it on one of their bench computers.

They phoned me to say that the HD was fine, and if I wanted, they could strip the laptop right down and check for dust mats, fan failure, etc., to find the cause of the overheating, but it would be a lot of work, and since the laptop was pretty much at the end of its life expectancy of 10 years, it was likely that it would suffer motherboard or processor failure fairly soon, and I’d be better spending the money on a new laptop.

I went into a sort of bereavement for a day or two – I know it sounds silly, but I think one’s first laptop, especially if it is associated with important events in one’s life, may take on the significance of one’s first car – there’s never a subsequent one that holds the same place in your heart, or is as memorable! Also, this particular computer was a real pleasure to use – the best design HP ever came up with, in my opinion – my later HP laptop looks very cool, but the keyboard is pretty horrible, and I consider the trackpad to be virtually unusable – I use a trackball mouse with it.

I asked them to put the HD in a caddy so I could run it as an external HD. Everything was already backed up (having lost so much in my early days of computing, I’ve got quite paranoid about backing up!). The larger HP laptop is unusual in having two HDs and I was using the second one for video, but as the iMac has now taken over that role, this drive was redundant. I have therefore now transferred the data from the small laptop onto it, and am running this old laptop in virtual form on the larger one, which is now on my desk, so not much change after all! The large laptop is now really two computers in one. This computer has its problems too – the CD drive is a bit unreliable, and it’s starting to run a bit too hot as well, so I can’t expect it to keep going for much longer.

While the laptop was in hospital, I gave the situation some serious thought. I had been running 3 Windows PCs – the two original HP laptops, and the new HP laptop that I bought fairly recently, and the iMac which lives in my studio, permanently attached to my Cougar cutting machine. I have been experiencing the same problems with that, that I had with my original beige desktop PC, becoming too fatigued after sitting at it for any length of time, which has meant that I have neglected my video editing because that is so time consuming. All through last year, while I was dealing with my cancer, I didn’t do any and it had been on my mind that it would be very useful to have a second Mac to help with this, but I wasn’t prepared to spend the silly money required for the high-spec MacBook that I wanted.

Now seemed to be a good opportunity for change, and I didn’t think there was much point in replacing the dead laptop with another Windows laptop – better to end up running only 2 Windows computers, and have 2 Macs.

Ebay to the rescue! Straight away I found a MacBook Pro – OK, not in its first youth, and with some wear and tear on the case, but seriously upgraded so nice and powerful with massive capacity, and for a bargain basement price – so I bought it!

It arrived yesterday, and the man who sold it to me has been an absolute star with his correspondence, helping me with initial problems setting it up, in a very friendly and helpful manner. He sent it very promptly, with tracking details etc. – a real pleasure to deal with him, and I am more than delighted with my new toy.

If I didn’t have so much invested in Windows after many years with this system, I’d go exclusively with Mac – the build quality is superb and the design eminently strokable and fabulous to look at, and the operating system makes Windows feel distinctly clunky by comparison! I know many people who wouldn’t exchange their Macs for anything.

People ask me, “FOUR computers? Why do you need four computers?” Good question! They are all used for different things, and I’ve always used them to capacity and do a lot of different things with them – audio-visual, design, word processing, office work (accounts and corresp0ndence), and more besides. Being restricted in my activity levels with my health problems, I do spend a lot of time on my computers and can definitely justify having the total number that someone many years ago predicted would be the maximum number of computers that the entire world would require – four! – surely the most inaccurate prediction ever made!!