I’ve done it, I’ve done it, I’ve done it!!!

At last I’ve got my blog background how I want it (till I change my mind lol!) – to get rid of the dark layer over the background, all I did was change the template from “Picture Window” to “Simple.” I’m not sure why they put that dark layer over that particular template – it certainly had me scratching my head, if not tearing my hair.

Anyway, I think I’m happy with it now – we’ll have to see how it goes, and whether I get any negative feedback – or should I say constructive criticism?

Thank you to everyone who has helped me with this, in particular Rachel and Wendy.

I hope all my followers and visitors enjoy my blog’s new look. Thanks for your patience while it was in a state of flux.

WOYWW 149

Well hello again everyone – it’s Wednesday again, and that’s Desk Day!! Julia over on the Stamping Ground organises us week by week and we show off our messy (or otherwise) work desks for the world to see – click on the link in my sidebar to join in the fun.

My “Choc-a-bloc” mixed media project is progressing slowly. The first choccie box insert has now had its depressions between the projections filled with Polyfilla One Fill and it’s been in the airing cupboard all week! It’s had its first coat of gesso. The one on the left is ready to be filled with Polyfilla when I get time, and meanwhile it’s sitting on top of my hand-made paper from last week, and my Indian flowers. I have got a clay extruder coming from Ebay, and when this arrives I will be able to pipe some stems onto the project and really start to develop the piece.

Busy day today – we went into town this morning and went to the art shop where my hubby bought my birthday present (I’ve got to wait a while for it!) – he’s giving me a set of Derwent Inktense pencils – these are totally awesome! There will be more on this in due course. I also bought some nice heavy paper for mixed media work, and on the right of the desk you can see the new pens I bought for my Zentangling, together with a lovely fat 8B soft pencil for shading, and just beyond them, some cheapie little rollers and sponge applicators for my mixed media work. I bought a nice big tub of gesso too – less expensive than my Golden gesso. (That’s the tub that looks like ice cream lol!) Just beside that, the small white objects are some old fridge magnets that I’ve painted with gesso and which I will Zentangle eventually.

Finally, on the left, propped up, is my latest sheet of Zentangles – I’ve done a separate post about these. I am very pleased with how they are going!

I haven’t put my knitting on my desk this week because it looks pretty much the same as last week, only a bit longer!

The main thing I’ve done this week is revamp my blog background, which I hope you all like! It’s still a work in progress – see the post I did yesterday on it – and hopefully soon it will be as I want it.

Happy WOYWW everyone, and thanks to everyone who visited me last week – I hope to visit a few more people this week.

New Blog Background–Work in Progress!

Thanks to my friends Wendy and Rachel, I have now been able to get my newly designed blog background and header to work. It’s still a work in progress and I apologise if some of the headings aren’t yet that easy to read – for some reason the background is coming out much darker than my original design – it’s as if a dark semi-transparent layer comes down over it immediately after you open the blog. Hopefully we will iron out this small difficulty and you will soon see it as it should be.

Details of the Design

The header consists of a montage of photos (from left to right) of some knitting I did ages ago (now awaiting unravelling and knitting up again) – Kaffe Fasset style in yellows and purples. I love that tunic top, but unfortunately it is now too small for me, but one day it will be knitted again in all its former glory!

In the middle is a snippet of an interesting rock formation at the Bullring in Oban.

On the right is my first piece of hand-made paper made from recycled paper towels (kitchen roll), distress inks, DIY glimmer mist and gilding flakes.

The butterfly is an image I had on my computer, and the flowers are photos I took of several hibiscus flowers I made last year according to Penny Duncan’s cut file of the hibiscus flower – I extracted them from the background and they are now useful as digital elements in my projects.

I did the design of the whole blog background in a combination of Serif CraftArtist Platinum and Serif PhotoPlus, and the faux embroidered border along the bottom of the header was an element from CraftArtist. The montages were done by using different blending modes and transparency settings.

The main body of the blog consists of photographs I took last year of some ancient parish records dating back to the 1600s, from which I have created some vintage backgrounds. You can see some of them on this project – the book-style card I made for my mother’s 90th birthday last year.

Top left is a photo I took of some honeycomb, with a bee on it, and underneath this, and on the right as well, are some photos of a wonderful old cracked pot I photographed years ago when I got my first digital camera.

At the bottom on the left is a photograph of a beautiful wall that I photographed at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire when we were on holiday there several years ago.

I have also made a texture overlay of this.

Bottom right (but not really visible, I’m afraid, as it seems to be a bit cut off!) is a photo of a glorious Norfolk split flint wall. (I also made a texture overlay of this one.)

I love taking photos of walls, tiles, textures…

On both sides, I have added to the montage some of my recent digital backgrounds created from a still-life painting in oils.

Unfortunately, while the dark layer is still over the background, these are not visible.

I think this new blog background expresses far better the sort of person I am than the previous one, which I chose when I first started my blog. The new background incorporates my love of colour and texture, and photographing such things, and also some of the creativity I enjoy. It’s been a long hard slog to get it up and running, and hopefully over the next few days we’ll iron out the final niggles and you’ll see it in all its glory!

Six New Zentangles

Today I drew six small zentangles, each approximately 3 inches square. Rather than drawing them in my Art Journal, this time I did them on bright white card. I have quite a large supply of this, which I bought in a local copy shop, and it turned out to be hopeless for what I wanted it for – it does not fold well because it becomes weak, and it does not cut well with Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine. However, it is lovely and smooth, and I thought I’d try drawing on it, and it was sheer pleasure!

After rapidly drawing my “string” (the basic shape of the tangle) for each one, and beginning to work on them, sometimes the pattern, as it developed, would suggest something to me, which then became the title of the piece. In some cases I deliberately pursued this title. What I love about these basic square zentangles is that they draw themselves – at the beginning one does not have a plan, and one has no idea how they will turn out.

Here is the sheet of six zentangles.

Here they are, one by one. The first one is entitled “Patchwork Quilt.”

“Garden of Delight.”

“Ocean.” The prow of a ship on the ocean waves, with the ocean bed below. Note the suggestion of twisting ropes, the fishing net, the ship’s wheel and other features!

“Bird.” Wings, song, and a nestful of eggs!

Untitled Abstract. No title suggested itself to me as I drew this one.

“Purse.” Jewelled and fringed purse to hold all my worldly wealth?

Hope you enjoy my latest designs.

Seale Hayne Outing

Seale Hayne used to be an agricultural college, and since it closed, the beautiful buildings have been taken over by Dame Hannah Rogers School for children with disabilities, and a variety of other uses too – it is quite a centre for the arts these days, and also they have a very nice cafe there.

My hubby asked if I’d like to go out today, and he drove me up there. We wandered around the beautiful buildings and visited the art gallery and various other nooks and crannies, and ended up in the cafe having tea and home made cake – delicious!

Here are some of the photos of our day. (The full set is in my Photobucket album here.)

This is the main entrance into the courtyard. I love the rounded stone arches and mullioned windows throughout the building.

Inside the main building we found a corridor with some very interesting wall lights – I am noticing Zentangles everywhere these days! This is one of four different designs:

Wandering outside again, we found some animal enclosures; they have chickens and ducks, rabbits, goats and sheep. Here are some of the ducks.

Lovely hygienic habits ducks have, don’t they!!

They had several seats dotted around the grounds, made out of enormous pieces of driftwood, which I found most intriguing.

There are several interesting archways linking various parts of the building.

Back inside again, we found this display of masks in one corridor.

Nearby was a small vintage-style sewing room

I certainly agree with that sentiment!

Then on to the Art Gallery. Gorgeous stuff in here!

Here are some small canvases embellished with what looked like small polymer clay tiles, and tiny beads. I fell in love with these!

This was a display of incredible free-form pewter vessels which had obviously been poured in molten form over a bowl.

They reminded me of some similar objects that a mixed-media artist friend of mine made (we own one) – she used hand-made paper formed from dyed silk tops. This is something I’ve wanted to try for a long time, and have various ideas, which do not include molten metal, though! I particularly like the one lined with gold.

There were several fabric clocks on display, including this one:

Really funky and fun!

More art to inspire my zentangling:

We then discovered a quilting department, with a shop selling loads of beautiful fabrics and equipment, and a quilting workshop beyond with a display of quilts. I am not into quilting myself, but always enjoy the fruits of other people’s labours! Look at these gorgeous fabrics…

and threads…

They also had an intriguing thing they called a “jelly roll” – seemingly a collection of strips of fabric which had been rolled together to form this beautiful object.

The trouble is, I would never want to use it! I’d have to have one for use, and one for stroking – like my gorgeous Tattered Time paper stack!

After we’d had our tea, we left, and stopped on the drive so that I could photograph this incredible structure we’d spotted on the way in – a display of huge butterflies all made of CDs!!

The backs were all silver, of course. People are so imaginative… I’m always wondering what to do with old CDs!

On our way home, my hubby stopped the car so I could take some photos of the lambs in a field – there were lots of them, and they were all skipping about and playing, and leaping in the air with all four feet off the ground! I love to see this.

There were wild flowers everywhere – the daffodils are still out, and there were lots of primroses, and the May blossom is starting already. I adore the spring, and it was so nice to be able to have an outing and enjoy it all, even though the sun wasn’t shining and it was rather grey.

Altogether a lovely day, thanks to my wonderful hubby.

My Horrible Blog

My blog is looking HORRIBLE at the moment. I’ve been thinking for ages how fed up I was getting with the old background – I’ve had it since I first started, and it’s feeling pretty tired these days, and really doesn’t express who I am, so I decided to revamp it. I’ve designed a nice background in Serif CraftArtist Platinum, using my own photos, including some pictures of my own work.

Some time ago my friend Wendy sent me some instructions how to change the background, and I have been trying since last night, absolutely without success – the picture is coming out much too small, and if I try and change the size of my blog and the columns in the layout editor, nothing will fit.

I’m at the hair tearing stage now, and have emailed Wendy for some urgent help – and if I can’t sort this out, it will either go on looking quite ’orrible, or I’ll have to resort to another pre-made one, which I really don’t want to do.

So my apologies everyone for allowing such an eyesore to appear in my name in Blogland!! Hopefully it won’t be for too long.

WOYWW 148

I cannot believe another week has gone by! I know we all keep saying it, but it’s true! Time is flying by…

It’s Messy Desk Time again!! Julia, the Queen of Desks, hosts our wonderful “What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday” and tries to keep us in better order than most of our desks ever achieve. To join the fun, click on the link in my sidebar.

I haven’t done a lot different this past week, but I’ve been developing my Zentangling skills and am very pleased with my latest effort, based on a small plankton organism (from an electron microscopy image) – I’ve done a separate post about that.

I’ve also done a few more inches of my knitting! It’s quite fine, so it’s taking me a while, but I don’t mind that, as it’s lovely to do while I’ve got my feet up watching TV or Youtube videos.

Finally, I’ve just made my first piece of hand-made paper (well, re-made paper really, from paper towels) – I’ve done a separate post about that, too. In the photo, you can see that I’ve laid my Indian flowers on it as the colours are lovely together, and I might end up using them in the same project.

At the back of the picture you can see my acrylic gel medium (soft matt) that I used for the paper, the gesso and Polyfilla One Fill for my Choc-a-Bloc project – it still doesn’t look very different but I’ve put some more coats of gesso on, so it’s now ready to progress to the next stage.

Happy WOYWW, everyone, and thanks for all the lovely comments last week!

Hand-Made Paper

Whenever I smoosh with my distress ink pads on my craft sheet, I either use a piece of scrap card to mop it up, and save these to make backgrounds with, or if I’m feeling lazy, I just mop it up with paper towels. I am careful to use separate sheets for different colour combinations, and decided when I had enough, I’d start making something with them as the blended colours are so gorgeous.

Tonight I made my first one. This is only two layers thick, and may need building up a bit from behind if it proves too delicate. I first took the sheet with the blue colours on it, and added a bit more distress ink, using all the blues, smooshed and spritzed with water on my craft sheet, so that no white remained. I then laid this out flat, carefully, as it was quite wet, and took another sheet, with mostly purples and bits of green, and again added more distress ink to ensure complete coverage.

This piece I tore into smaller pieces, and gently spread soft matt acrylic gel medium onto the backs, and laid them onto the background, adding more gel medium as I went. When it was covered, I coated the whole surface with the gel medium and sprinkled on some gilding flakes (variegated green, although that doesn’t show up much – they just look gold!) and gently flattened them onto the surface with a large soft paintbrush. I dried it to almost dry with my heat gun, leaving it to dry completely overnight.

I love the result! I think this could be used for different things, according to what you mounted it onto. You could use it to cover three dimensional objects, gradually building up the layers like papier mache. I’m certainly going to use it to cover those small papier mache boxes you can buy – they are so irregular that it’s hard to cover them with ordinary paper. This first sheet was just done to the size of a single sheet of paper towel, but you could build it up into as large a sheet as you wanted, and whatever shape, too.

You could add anything to add texture and interest – bits of thread, leaves, angelina fibres, anything really, covering each layer with gel medium.

You could also use a gloss or semi-gloss gel medium to give a more shiny surface if you wanted.

Watch this space as I make up more of this!

Plankton Zentangle

Yesterday, I looked up my photos that I took at the National Marine Aquarium in 2009. In the corridor on the way out, they had a display of electron microscope images of microscopic marine life – plankton etc. which were quite amazing – they looked like something from science fiction, off another planet! Under each one, it said how many would fill a level teaspoon – some numbered into the millions. Such beauty, at such a small scale that it is only with our most modern equipment that we can see them at all…

I thought this one might make a good starting point for interpretation in the medium of Zentangle.

This one was quite large, at only 860,000 to a teaspoon!! Amazing to think this weird object is a living thing, isn’t it.

Anyway, here’s my take on it, Zentangle-style.

Zentangles Step by Step

I’ve discovered an awesome Zentangle site which has great instructions for doing loads of different designs, and over the past couple of days I’ve been working on some of them. I decided to do what they call the “step-outs” for myself so I can easily access them from my Art journal.

Image removed for copyright reasons.

I particularly like the one on the right, entitled “Cubine” – I tried to draw this the other day, without much success, but once I’d found the step-out, it was easy. It’s so three-dimensional, and you can decide from which angle you are looking at the boxes by where you draw the black squares – I’ve tried several variations here.

Image removed for copyright reasons.

Braids and twists take quite a lot of practice to get them even. I’m still not there yet but hopefully eventually I’ll be able to do decent ones without even thinking about it.

The one at the bottom left on the above photo, repeated on the left page below, “Finery”), I haven’t got quite right – but it’s coming! It’s a very pretty flowing pattern which would be suitable for the edge of a design. On the right hand page below, I love the “Spotlite” one, and also the woven design, which looks really hard to do, but if you line up your dots or squares, it’s easy – and you can get different looks.

Image removed for copyright reasons.

Image removed for copyright reasons.

“Nzeppel,” bottom right in the above photo, I drew too small, and it was hard to fill in the detail, but I redrew it, and was very pleased with how it came out, especially the one on the left, drawn as a complete design with other patterns..

Image removed for copyright reasons.

Here it is in detail.

I struggled no end to get to grips with “Paradox” – a gorgeous pattern of curves made up of straight lines, and just couldn’t get my head round it until I found Suzanne McNeill’s Youtube video where she uses them to embellish a Christmas decoration. Suddenly it clicked, and now I’m doing them like a pro!! (Well, nearly…)

There are many variations on how these can be used, and I discovered a marvellous web page with exciting things to try. (Looking at the heading of this lady’s blog has inspired me to revamp my blog as I’m fed up with the background which I’ve had from when I started it – this is a job I must get on with!!)

Finally, here are details of a few more of the designs – I love these circular floating motifs! In the second photo, the woven design is so easy to do, and very effective, and I love the “laced” one – really fun.

In my Art Journal, I’ve started jotting down a few ideas of shapes to use for tangling. A couple of years ago we went to the National Marine Aquarium and in the passageway on the way out, they had a series of framed photographs of electron microscope images of plankton and other microscopic marine life – they were so beautiful, and I took quite a few photos of them. I am going to dig these out, as I think these unearthly looking creatures would lend themselves very well to this technique!

I hope you are enjoying sharing my journey of discovery into the wonderful world of glorified doodling!!