Gimp

So I fell down the stairs three weeks ago and hurt my feet - I know I'm darn lucky I didn't actually break something, like my head - but my feet are still achy enough that I skipped the quilt show this year and I'm still aggravated about that. I was intending to go right up until the last minute, but I finally decided that it was a bad, bad idea, given the amount of walking involved, and I think that was the right decision but I'm also still sorry I missed it. I'll get over it eventually. I was actually intending to take some pictures this year too. (The background there is that I used to take LOTS of pictures at the quilt show - as in hundreds - and the last couple of years I went cold-turkey and didn't take any. So there's a history with me and the quilt show pictures.)

There has actually been a bit of crafty stuff going on around here, off and on - for one thing I went to my first-ever Stampin' Up demo, and enjoyed it immensely. So I will probably be going to some more of those. I've also started making a new set of (smaller) jump-rings for my Scrap Box Bracelet, so that I'll actually wear it, hopefully, and then I'm also working on an advent calendar. I found a board one that looks more or less like this (assembled but completely unfinished) at a craft store. I bought it a couple of months ago, and I'm not actually sure which store I bought it at, either JoAnn's or Hobby Lobby, I think. I'm currently planning on finishing it fairly plainly, at least for this year. I've been putting gesso on it and I might put a layer of paint on top of that, and then I'm just going to put colored numbers (probably printed out from the printer) on it and stop, for now. Next year I might do those cute things with the paper cut out to fit the box-fronts and such, but this year I'll do good to get numbers on the thing. And soon - very soon - I've got to start working on the Christmas gifts that I promised to make.

Nevermore

Sand Fibers did a whole post full of ravens, including this one, which I adore:

Raven pendant from Etsy seller polkadotmagpie

(Also take a look at this cool mixed media piece with ravens, too, from the AS Creative Team Blog.)

Creative Juice

Cathie Filian is posting really adorable Halloween crafts this month - it looks like she's posting something daily all month. So go look, because there's some great costume ideas and also some cute decor ideas.

Quilted autumn leaves

quilted autumn leaves
Originally uploaded by Mellicious

It's fall - even here on the Gulf, the nighttime temps have dropped quite a lot - and I just happened to notice this picture of my beloved fall leaf quilt, which apparently made Flickr's 'interesting' page briefly back when I first posted it. (Here is the finished version: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mellicious/140829643)

I had been planning on making a fall-themed quilt for several years, and I had quite a stash of fall fabrics. But I went absolutely crazy with the 3" paper-pieced leaves, and I ended up begging bits of fabric at the retreat I was at while I was working on these blocks. I know my mother and my aunt both contributed, and I think I few other people too. It's still not anything resembling a charm quilt - there are definitely repeats, but it does have a nice variety of fabrics.

Now I need to go find this quilt and get it out for the season.

Scrap Box Bracelet

Here is a partial shot of the bracelet I made in my BeadFest Texas class:

The class was excellent, and I actually got my bracelet finished, which is amazing (although I may go back and redo the jump-rings, because while they look great, they are a little large for normal use. By which I mostly mean that they seem prone to catch on things.) Anyway, I duly pounded on metal and used various kinds of rivets and cold connections, and I am very happy and tired and I enjoyed my class immensely. Kim St. Jean was the teacher; she has a book coming out after Christmas, I believe they said.

(I'm not kidding about being tired. I hope this is moderately coherent.)

Kim's book:
Mixed Metal Mania: Solder, rivet, hammer, and wire exceptional jewelry


(Or you can also order it from her website, I believe: http://kimstjean.com/ )

Tumbling down

I think I mentioned before that I've been playing around with Tumblr, and actually I've been using it lately at least as much I've been using Twitter, or probably more. I enjoy Twitter, but Tumblr is a lot more versatile - and unlike Blogger it can figure out what size to make an embedded YouTube video without me having to figure it out for myself! My Tumblr account is called Delicious Color, rather than Delicious Beads. I'm not intending to stop updating here - as a matter of fact I may well do Nablopomo in November, like I did last year, and post daily - but things like random pictures and video and such are probably going on Tumblr. It's just easier.

I realized something in the last year or so, and it's the reason for the shift of name - and that's that my love of color runs a lot deeper than my love of any particular craft. I used to say I liked quilting because it was like coloring, except with fabric instead of crayons, and I think I like beading and, lately, painting things, for exactly the same reason. It's all about the color. I'm not intending to change the name of this journal any time soon, though. (I did register Delicious Color on Blogspot and Etsy as well as Tumblr, just the same, though, just in case I decide in the future I want to!)

Here's another book I was leafing through in the bookstore the other day. (Amazon links probably will stay here, for the most part, partly because that's something that Blogger does make easy!)

Grid

I showed some of my 2" squares the other day, and here is the full set:

They're now glued down to their intended background, but I haven't got a good picture of that yet so I thought I'd go ahead and show you what I have.

Here's a better look at four of the five new ones:

Two of them are the Bazzill glazed paper I talked about before - those are the two with the white on them. You go really lightly over them with watered-down paint, and it tints the unglazed parts. I think they really came out lovely. The other two are transfers - the green one is scrapbook paper transferred onto the back of sticky-back canvas, a technique I've talked about before. The blue one is just transferred onto paint, similar to the gesso transfers I did before. Actually I had to ink it back in, because I rubbed too much of the design off. Claudine had said that doing these transfers with an inkjet printer was a bit iffy and she really recommended taking it down to Kinko's or wherever and making a copy, and I didn't, so I imagine that may have been part of the problem. (Also, once I got it down on the black background, it was way too dark and didn't show up well, so I ended up gessoing it around the edges to compensate. But it looked good once I did that!)

The ninth one, the only one I haven't covered, is the purplish-pink one on the bottom left of the first picture. It's another Bazzill paper, an embossed one tinted in much the same way as the glazed ones. I actually think on reflection that the color I used looks awfully pink and I may darken it, or more accurately blue it, a bit. Stay tuned.

Halloween fun

I went in the book store earlier, and I saw some fun Halloween crafty things:

Witch Craft: Wicked Accessories, Creepy-Cute Toys, Magical Treats, and More!


Ruby slippers!

Also, has everybody seen the Martha Stewart thing? It doesn't show up as a book on Amazon, so I can't link it, but I've seen it on a couple of newstands already -- it's called "Halloween Handbook: the best of Martha Stewart." (Oh my, even after all these years, I am still secretly a librarian - I automatically switch to lowercase for a subtitle, which is an LC cataloging rule, or at least it used to be!)

- aha, here it is:
Martha Stewart Halloween Handbook Special Collectors Edition 2010

I didn't recognize Martha right away!







Oh, and there's also this one: Zombie Felties: How to Raise 16 Gruesome Felt Creatures from the Undead

This is one of those crafts I'd never get around to doing, but if it's your thing, they're pretty adorable!


When I checked out at the book store (I bought the Martha Stewart thing, I couldn't resist), the cashier made a random comment that it still felt early for the holiday stuff to be coming out, or something to that effect. I don't feel like it's especially early for Halloween stuff, though, do you? I feel like after Labor Day it's fair game. I don't really want to see Christmas stuff out yet, though, unless it's at Hobby Lobby or someplace. I figure you have to start early on craft things if you're going to do them and stay sane.

Harry Potter, and misc. crafts

I am dying to see the new Harry Potter movie, and there's a new trailer out:



(Oops, I thought I was grabbing the low-res version, and it looks like they have substituted the high-res version instead. So you probably want to click over to YouTube or The Leaky Cauldron so you can actually see the whole thing!) (I am either going to have to figure out how to post video so that it sizes correctly on my narrow format, or quit attempting to embed video. Or change my format, but then that's another whole kettle of fish.)

In craft-related news, I went to Michael's yesterday to get clear embossing powder, which we needed for Claudine's class, and I came out with several wooden items which I did not intend to buy. But they had the most adorable sort of retro-looking rockets - I think they were actually supposed to be birdhouses - and I have several very small children on my Christmas list who I never quite know what to buy for, so my mind immediately started clicking when I saw these. (They were marked down about 60%, too - I'm not sure if they were marked down because birdhouses are "summer" items, or if it was part of the general markdown of all the summer children's craft stuff. But that makes it a seasonal markdown either way, doesn't it?) First I picked up one, thinking of the one little boy on my list, and then I thought, Wait, why can't girls have rockets? and I got one more. Now I'm thinking I might wish I had at least one more. As I recall, the little girls in question have rather violently pink color schemes in their bedrooms, but hey, I think a pink rocket sounds kind of adorable, actually!

Oh, I'm still working on my "grid project" but I have one more color mixing result:
Every blue-ish color in Claudine's paint line (which means Sky Blue, Smidge of Blue, and Classic Teal) mixed together = Turquoise. Which was not at all what I was expecting.

Notes to myself

On-the-fly color mixing (with CH Studio paints):
Sky Blue + Purple Palette = a really lovely cornflower-ish color
Smidge of Blue + Dab of Yellow + Pastel Yellow = a nice forest green
(I discovered the latter because I tried the first two  - that is, Smidge of Blue and Dab of Yellow, which is a darker golden-yellow - and thought the resulting color was too dark. So I thought "Add more yellow!" and when I reached for the yellow I picked up the pastel yellow instead of the darker one. But I like the color I came out with a lot, so I wanted to remember what it was that I did.)

I just tried Claudine's "glazed paper resist" and it came out absolutely gorgeous. This uses Bazzill glazed cardstock painted very very lightly with a sponge (I used these). The glazed portions act as a resist. I'll post a picture when I have one.

I do have one picture to share - I'm two weeks behind on the class projects which means I'm just now working on the grid project. Here's what I had as of yesterday:

These are 2" squares, plus a 2" strip on the left that was where I was experimenting. The blue leaves are Bazzill embossed paper, done in a similar way to the glazed cardstock technique, with a sponge. The color is Smidge of Blue (which is very dark in the bottle but lightens up nicely, as you can see). I would really like to have been able to get the color to go on a little more evenly, but on the other hand I think the mottled blue looks pretty cool, too. I imagine getting it more even is partly a matter of practice.

The other three squares, going clockwise, are stencilled, embossed with amethyst PearlLustre and Perfect Pearls, and photo-tinted. The dark green on the stencilled one is the mixed color I was describing above, and the lighter green is Claudine's Landscape Green. I have never really stencilled anything in my life so I thought this came out really well for a first try!

Lampwork

I bought some little spacer beads from Amy Houston recently, and I really love these beads. They're about 6mm wide, so they're not super tiny. (I'm guessing it's not easy to make lampwork beads much smaller than this, though!)

This is one of the sets I got. I love these colors.

(I also wish I could take pictures as good as hers!)

Anyway, I decided I like these so much that I did my first-ever Alchemy request on Etsy, so I can get more of these and pick my own colors. Even with a bigger quantity, it's hard to narrow it down, but I'm working on it. I want every color, darnit!

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Not to keep harping on things Amazon, but I am really eyeing the new lower-cost Kindle. $139? That's a lot more tempting than the old version was. (It's not currently in stock, but they say it will be in a few weeks. Which is probably faster than you could get an iPad right now!) The $189 version with bigger screen and free 3G also sounds pretty tasty. (That's this: Kindle 3G Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G + Wi-Fi, 6" Display, Graphite, 3G Works Globally - Latest Generation)

Amazon bargains

You never know what you're going to find on Amazon, and how much they're going to feel like charging that day. For example, I found a blog post (unfortunately I no longer remember where it was!) that featured a couple of pages from Print & Stamp Lab: 52 Ideas for Handmade, Upcycled Print Tools. So I looked it up on Amazon, and lo and behold, they happened to have it on sale for $5 and change. So I am now the proud owner of that book. It's got some pretty great ideas in it, so it's definitely worth the five bucks. I wish the other two books in the series (Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun and Collage Lab: Experiments, Investigations, and Exploratory Projects) were also on sale, but apparently not. The ways of Amazon are mysterious, as I said.

Aside: aha! here is the excerpt - on Craftside.

I found another thing unexpectedly on sale the other day, and that was the Cuttlebug Machine for Die-Cutting and Embossing with Bonus Tool Kit for $39.99. That's a good price, so if anybody's been waffling, I would recommend grabbing that one because you never know how long that price will last. (Full disclosure: I do theoretically get a small cut of the dough if you buy one though my link, as you probably already know. Since I have yet to actually ever even make the threshhold to get a $10 gift certificate, however, you'll have to forgive me for not taking that part of it very seriously!) Watch what price it gives you, though, because, for example, if you click on this link instead: Cuttlebug Die-Cutting and Embossing Machine - the price jumps over $20. Go figure.

(Added: aaaand as predicted, the price has changed. See below for the latest.)

"Upception"

This is really brilliant. (I suspect you need to have seen both movies - "Inception" and "Up", that is - to really appreciate it, though.)



What's amazing is how well it all fits. Who thinks of this stuff?

(I've seen "Inception" twice, by the way, I loved it. And I love "Up" so much I've watched it repeatedly on video, which is something I don't do a lot.)

Hmm, I think my super-narrow format is going to cut off a good bit of the video. You may want to click over to the original source.

A dose of nostalgia

I was watching this video earlier on itunes:



It's still a pretty amazing thing technically, and an amazing piece of craftiness on somebody's part. (Also, my god, Peter Gabriel looks so young!)

Added: if you enjoyed that one, be sure to also check out Sledgehammer, which according to Wikipedia was made before the "Big Time" video. It's probably even more impressive technically (and a better song, in my opinion) but I'm still fond of "Big Time" also.

Paints and color schemes

When I posted about the circles and rub-ons thing I made, I meant to write down exactly how I mixed these colors, because I knew I would forget, and I wanted to write it down for my own reference. And of course I did not actually do that, and now I want to know.

We are now on week 8 of 12 in Claudine's class, which is starting to sound like we're getting toward the end, although really there's quite a lot to go, still. This week's assignment is another thing on an 8x8" canvas, and I'm wavering between doing an entirely different color scheme, or making it match the first one. Or I guess since I want it to go in my living room, which is basically dark green, I could come up with a somewhat different color scheme that also matches the green. So similar without being all matchy with the first one.

(If you listen to me when I'm making quilts, in particular, you will find that "matchy" is my idea of a bad word. I'm a scrap quilter to the core, I am bored when people just take fabrics from one line of quilt fabrics and make a quilt out of them. Or when they are too too careful about matching things exactly. I find that things tend to look better when they don't quite match perfectly. I'll put the picture of my "monochromatic" all-green quilt at the bottom so you can see what I mean about not matching too carefully.)

Now one thing I was intending to say was that I just love Claudine's paints. If they have a bad side, it's that they're a little on the expensive side compared to craft paints. And as I understand it, the reason for that is that they're not really craft paint, they're art paints (acrylics) adapted a little for a craft market. They're very high-quality paints, in other words, which is why they're more expensive. And I've been using craft paints a good bit this year so I can see the difference immediately. Claudine's paints have a much nicer texture to them - they seem smoother, and boy oh boy can you tell the difference when you try to mix them. The page I linked above (this one) has a little video about mixing paints, and also a link to a pdf with simple color-mixing recipes. I find this pdf tremendously helpful.

I'm looking at the colors on the circles of the other thing I made. One is sort of a teal, and I think it is just Claudine's Classic Teal lightened up a little bit with Blank Canvas, which is the white(ish) color (it may be slightly off-white, is why I'm hedging there). That's this row:

(Ignore the big swirly parts, that's the rub-ons. It's the paint in the circles that I'm concerned with here.) -- Then there's another green that I think I made by mixing Yellow Pastel and Sky Blue. It just looks like a fairly normal pale green.

And there are two purplish rows that I'm fairly sure are variations on the same mixture - Purple Palette plus Painterly Pink. One row leans more toward purple and the other one toward pink.

I'm pretty sure I just remixed those two using the same two colors, it's just the proportions.

So now I'm off to look at Claudine's mixing pdf for ideas!

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Here's my "monochromatic" quilt that I mentioned above:

Basically I used anything I had that could remotely count as green, and just mixed it all together. So there's blue-greens and yellow-greens, and pale greens printed on white and tan and maybe even yellow - as long as it "read" as green I used it. (I did end up throwing out some prints that too obviously had a lot of other colors in them; they were distracting, it turned out.)

I really have to finish this quilt someday. I finished the top, as you can see, and I even got the fabrics together to do the back of it, but I never quilted it. I even have the thread!

Back on the other topic... hmm, I could do an all-green version of the 8x8" grid thing.... this has possibilities.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

Mirror Mirror on the Wall...who is the fairest CB folder of them all??

This is really a cute Cuttlebug-inspired idea - not at all what you'd expect.

Watches, part 2

Here's the Swarovski-bead watch I talked about in the last entry, and then I also I finished the watch that was unfinished at the time:

The little cube beads are some that I bought from Sonoran Beads last fall at the quilt show (they're in this post - and they're on sale on their website at the moment, too, I notice!) The spacers in with the cube beads are some I had on hand - they work really well, but I think they're really, really cheap - they may even be that metallicized plastic stuff. But oh well, they look fine, and nobody but me will probably ever notice! It's this last one and the coppery one from the last entry that I've been wearing like crazy all week - the Swarovski one just seems too elegant from every day, and the blue stretch one is just the tiniest bit snug - I may have to either remake it for myself or give it to somebody else. It's already occurred to me that these would make really terrific Christmas gifts, anyway!

Look, I made some jewelry!

I know it's been true lately that the only way a new reader would really know this is supposed to be a jewelry blog is from the name. Well, I guess there's some jewelry-related stuff in the sidebar, too. There just hasn't been much jewelry-related content. So that's why I'm excited to finally have some.

First of all, we have some earrings:

This is not a great picture, particularly because the two cat's-eye beads don't pick up the light equally. They look much better on my ears, or alternatively, on the 123Bead website, where I got the stuff to make them, so you might want to look at their picture instead. (They sell a kit to make one pair for $3.95, which is pretty reasonable, I thought, and is how I bought mine, or they sell the beads and findings separately.) These are just about the world's easiest earrings to make - they come with a really long headpin, and you just put the bead and the cone on the headpin, make a loop, add the earwires, and you're done.

Then today I took a class at Antiques Beads where we made watches. I got two and a half watches done in class so I thought that was pretty good. (Although actually the class was supposed to be over at 3:30 and most of us were still there at 5:00, so I guess it's not quite as amazing as it might have been!)

The two finished watches both used watch faces I already had, both of which came from Fire Mountain, I think. The blue ceramic beads came from Michael's - I had it in my head that I needed a blue watch. The great coppery beads were ones I had bought at Antiques Beads the day I signed up for the class, and they were gone today so it's good that I didn't wait! The other watch face I bought today - the store had a whole lot of watch faces that were $7.95, which seems like a good price to me. I know I've paid more than that for most of the ones I've bought in the past, anyway. (Plus you get 20% off on things you buy the day of a class, so it was actually, what, 6-something.) I also bought a bunch of round Swarovskis and some bead caps to make one more watch, because Donie, who taught the class, had brought a sample that was made like that and it was really pretty. About half the class ended up making one like it. I had another rectangular face like the one above so I used that and made it earlier tonight. I'll post a picture of that one later. It's terribly elegant. I had made watches in the past but I learned a lot of new techniques so I'm glad I took the class.

Circles & rub-ons project

I'm a couple of weeks behind with the weekly projects for Claudine's class, so I just did the week three project in the middle of week 5. (Actually, being rather famously a procrastinator, I consider this to be pretty good. But I've kept up with the classwork in general much better than I really thought I would.)

There's nothing terribly complicated about how this is put together. It has several layers:

• an 8x8" canvas
• a piece of scrapbook paper for background
• 2" circles pasted down in a grid
• rub-ons

Claudine's version looked quite different from mine - it had entirely different colors, and one big rub-on of a chandelier. I couldn't find the chandelier locally and I didn't love it enough to order it specially online, so I went looking for something else. I never did find one big one that I liked all that well, but I found these Heidi Grace ones in sort of a metallic turquoise color that I thought would do. So then that also gave me my color scheme - I was thinking of cool colors generally, sort of blue/green/purple. I found a stack of 8x8" DCWV papers that I think were called "Old World" that had a pale moss-green patterned sheet in it

I'm really pleased with how this came out - this is a fairly small piece, and I'm already thinking about doing a bigger version. I have all kinds of space on my walls. (Or I could also do a series. Hmm.)

Early Halloween mania

I really have a thing about Halloween. I have tons of Halloween junk already - far more than one household of two people has any use for - and I am having to restrain myself from going out and buying all the new crafty stuff that's coming out for this year - for example, the stuff shown in these two YouTube videos from Two Peas. It's all just so cute! Meanwhile, what I ought to be doing, assuming I want to get in a Halloween state of mind, is making jewelry with all the skull beads I bought last year, but have I been doing that? Of course not. (Here's the Anna Griffin paper from the first video, in case you don't want to sit through it. This stuff from My Mind's Eye is also terrific.)

I did buy a Halloween punch on clearance a few weeks ago - a Martha Stewart haunted house:

(I don't know why Blogger is insisting on showing this sideways, but I can't seem to fix it!)

I think it was called a double punch, because it punches inside the punched-out area. It's cute but it's also terribly bulky - I don't really think I'll be buying too many of these! (Clearance items are my big weakness - as I imagine they are for many people. You can buy stuff and still feel virtuous. I'm always telling my husband, "But it was on sale!" and he just sort of rolls his eyes. I do try to at least restrain myself even there, and not end up with junk I don't even care about.)

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Completely unrelated to Halloween - but part of all the mass of coverage of CHA which has been coming out for the past two weeks or so - is new stuff from Nunn Designs. (look! actual jewelry! Lately you'd never know that this was supposed to be a jewelry blog!)

If I get around to doing another post, I do actually have some jewelry to show. Nothing fancy, but cute.

Heat embossing and other experiments

Here is the latest and greatest from Claudine's class:

This is done in a similar way to the video that's been posted on Ranger's site - here. (Let's see if I can embed it...)



The only difference is that instead of embossing a second color, we're dusting on Perfect Pearls powder. I think the silvery color of it looks really appropriate for the gear images! (Masks by Tim Holtz; I used Zing embossing powder in Rouge, which seems to be a very similar color to the Adirondack powder that Claudine uses in the video.)

(Also, that little book that Claudine holds up at the beginning of the video is what we're making in the class - it's a little chipboard "technique book" with samples of all the techniques we're learning. I think we're supposed to have it finished in the next week or two, although the class goes on until way into September.)

I'm going to have to show some of these canvas techniques to my quilting friends, because these really do result in sewable fabric in the end. This one comes out pleather-ish in texture, although much lighter in weight than most leather, and the one I'm going to show you next felt sort of like a decorator-weight fabric when I got done. The biggest size this canvas comes in is 12x12", though; I suppose that anything much bigger would get too unwieldy! (Here's the link to the canvas; I have not seen it in any of the big craft stores as yet, although I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up soon because it's really got a lot of interesting uses. The non-chain scrapbooking store near my house does carry the whole line of Claudine's products, though.)

Here is the one we did last week:

This is paper transferred to the sticky-back canvas. You lay scrapbook paper face-down on the sticky side of the canvas, then wet the paper and peel the bulk of it off. I had some trouble with knowing when to stop (you can see it most clearly in the top left corner. But I thought at least to some degree it gives the "fabric" a nice distressed look - and it really does feel like a fabric when you're finished, and not so much like canvas. I am told you can sew with it fine; it doesn't gum up your needle or anything. (This is K and Company scrapbook paper, from a stack I bought on clearance lately at Michael's. Which probably means it's from last year's line, or at least last season's.)

I have a couple more things to show, but I think I'll make them a separate post later. I'm feeling sort of woozy right now!

Spring and summer

These are my two little trees done on 4x4" framed canvas. I got worried when I saw this picture because the horizon looks so off on the second one, and it is a tiny bit off, but not as much as it looks like in the picture. I decided it's not so off that I can't live with it.

Which is good because the blooming tree has already been redone a couple of times. The first try is here and I got carried away with the stippling and it got so you couldn't see the structure of the tree any more and I hated it. So I actually sanded it down a little since there was so much paint on it, and gessoed over it and started completely over. Then on the next try, the transfer didn't take right, so I had to do it a third time. And I went back just now (which was after this picture was taken) and did a tiny bit more stippling on the right side of the tree because I thought it looked too flat on that side. I used very little paint and just rounded it out a tiny bit. So now I'm stopping, even though I'm not real happy with the lettering at the bottom.* If I put it up on the wall and I really hate it - the lettering, I mean - I guess I could go back and try again later. But I'm not doing anything else to it right now.

I got the third one mostly done last night, too, the autumn one, and it looks pretty good. I used Altered Orange for the background and Modern Red (which is a very orange-toned red) for the tree. I finger-painted the tree like I did with the green one. I'll get a picture of it eventually. I want to lighten up the background because right now I think it's going to look too dark compared to these two. And I have to decide on a word to put on it. Anybody got any suggestions? I've got "grow" for spring and "bloom" for summer, and all I can think of is "shed" for fall but there's bound to be something better than that. And then I was going to put "renew" or maybe "restart" or something like that for winter. (The winter tree should be comparatively easy to do because it will just be bare, of course.)

On the whole, I think stippling worked really well for the blooming tree. I used two colors of paint to keep it from looking too dark - it was Dash of Red (which is basically a dark magenta) and then I think the other one was the same color lightened up a bit, like I did with the pink heart. I did this a week or so ago, which is why I'm already forgetting.


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I have an ongoing project, that I've been working on practically since my mother died three years ago, to scan a lot of her old pictures, and get rid of at least part of them. She took a LOT of pictures, and a lot of the time I know she had duplicate sets made - like, for me, or for the people she went on vacation with, and such. And the pictures of vacations she went on just don't have much meaning for anybody else. I mostly end up keeping the pictures she's in, and throwing out the rest. Scanning at least some of them makes it easier to do the throwing away. I'm a hoarder by nature, and throwing things out is something I have trouble with, but I live in a two-bedroom apartment and you just can't keep everything. So that's why if you look at my Flickr photostream, there are long stretches of things like my mom in New Zealand. And then there are the quilt pictures - several albums of those, too. Her quilts and other people's quilts. I don't know if I'll ever finish this "project" but I work on it from time to time and at least I can whittle it down a bit.


* I did the lettering with these stamps, which I really love, and a Black Soot Distress stamp pad. The quality of my stamping is another question.

Embossed Metal Card Tree

This is so cute, but it's the kind of thing I'd never get around to doing!
Embossed Metal Card Tree
(done with a Cuttlebug; you can tell what I've been looking up...)

I don't know why it never occurs to me to look on Amazon for things like a Cuttlebug - they have a really good deal if you have Amazon Prime because the shipping is free. I bought mine from HSN in a sort of package deal, but if I'd seen this price I might have got it here instead.

(I know, I know, y'all are tired of hearing about the Cuttlebug already, but I suspect this won't be the last you hear of it. I'll try to at least refrain from posting it every time I see one on sale!)

Bonus Cuttlebug link: "sandwich stacks" - i.e., recipes for how to make different dies and folders fit in the C-bug properly. This is genius! (Um, you may need to join that site to access that link, I'm not sure.)

Expensive (and not-so-expensive) papercrafting machines

Reader KarenD (probably the only person among my current readership who has met me in person) has different hobbies than me these days (hers are quilting and knitting, I believe) and she didn't know what a Cuttlebug was. I tried to explain, but here is the picture of mine, which I don't believe I had previously posted.

(My goodness, it looks green in this picture - it's actually not green at all!)

It came from HSN, of all places; they had a deal which included quite a lot of embossing folders and that's what I was most interested in, anyway, although I am nosing around now to see what dies are available. (It makes me a little nervous: they claim that they can use most all brands of dies, and I get very confused about which ones will actually fit. I know I saw a chart at one point and I need to find it again. I hear you can break the plates if you do it wrong!) Anyway, it embosses a small area beautifully, and theoretically also die-cuts - I only say theoretically because I haven't tried it yet!

Cuttlebug is the cheapest (I think) of this kind of machine - it has no electronics whatsoever, just a hand crank, which is presumably why it's cheap. The high end is the Cricut, which has cartridges which cost almost as much as the whole Cuttlebug machine does. I am not ready for one of those, for sure. But there are also a bunch of machines that do similar and sometimes entirely different things which I get very confused about. There are some Sizzix machines which are very similar to the Cuttlebug, I think, except that some of them are larger, as I understand it. And papercraft guru Tim Holtz is coming out with a new machine of his own. Then there are some completely other ones, like Yudu, which I think does screenprinting (is that right?) and Xyron, which applied adhesives to paper - effectively making them into stickers. (Once again, that's if I understand it correctly.) There are also some letterpress machines which I have been seeing around lately.

I like that the Cuttlebug doesn't take up all that much room when you're not using it. The plates on the sides fold up and it has a handle for moving it about, although it's surprisingly heavy when you pick it up. I usually just stick it under the dining room table these days. (The dining room table has become craft central. The crafting table I had set up for jewelry-making in the back bedroom only gets occasional visits where I come to take something else into the other room. Luckily we never actually eat in the dining room!

Cuttlebugging

So, I got to use my new Cuttlebug! I put a piece of sticky-back canvas in the wrong way the first time I tried, so I guess that means I got a deboss effect instead of an emboss, but it still looks pretty. The debossed one is on top, and the emboss, which was what I intended to do the first time, is the bottom one:

Putting the paint on was very easy to do; I was surprised at how well that part went.

The other technique I've tried from this week's class is transferring a paper image onto sticky-back canvas. I sort of messed it up but not too bad - it just looks a bit more distressed than I really wanted it to! I'll post a picture of that later.

I have one more technique from last week's class to show:

This is reverse-stamping - you paint your surface with paint mixed with slow-dry medium, and then you use a stamp to take some of the paint off. The trick, apparently, is working fast, because even with the slow-dry it was wanting to dry faster than I was stamping. About the only place you can clearly see the stamp I was using is in the bottom left corner - it was a flower stamp, a single flower, but I overlapped it so much it's really difficult to tell. I was going for a sort of background effect and while I think this color is a little bright for a background, I really like the effect, overall.


In other news... I found a style of storage box lately that really works well for storing craft supplies -  it's a Sterilite 2.7 Qt box (according to the label), and it's about 3" deep by 8" wide by 11" long. I got mine at Wal-Mart but I know lots of other places carry that brand. It's big enough to hold bottles of Claudine's Studio paints:

I wrote the names on top with a paint pen, so I wouldn't have to fumble around looking for colors, and it holds all 15 of them handily, with a couple of embosser bottles thrown in for good measure. The one here is pink (as you can tell); I also have a clear one, and I think maybe they also came in lime green. I have stamp pads in one and some of my flatter punches and brayers in another. They are the kind of box where the handles snap up and lock the lid on, which I like, and they also stack very nicely. I think if I had more I would definitely be able to find uses for them (especially considering how my collection of paints and things is growing). I should add that the taller bottles don't fit in these, even Claudine's gesso, etc, doesn't. There were some more sizes, though, so there might be options for storing other sizes of stuff in matching containers.

Pink canvas heart

This week in Claudine's class:

This is actually the project from last week, changed up a bit. It will probably end up on a card eventually, but right now it's just a big loose heart. I used Claudine's Dash of Red paint mixed with Extra Time (which is a slow-dry medium) for both layers - it's just got some Blank Canvas mixed in with it on the bottom (larger) layer. The smaller heart is a piece of paper from an old madrigal book covered in gel medium and then reverse-stamped just like I did with the piece I showed earlier this week. This time I used a Hero Arts stamp of my mom's that I have been hanging onto. It's violets, although you can't really tell it here, and it's about 1x3", so this is stamped multiple times one under the other. I was worried that the ink would start drying by the time I got all the stamping done, and not resist the way it's supposed to, but it worked fine. The bottom layer used a paisley stamp, which I think is from Stampabilities, stamped with the paint/Extra Time mixture onto sticky-back canvas.

(Added: if anybody else gets the notion like I did to use Dash of Red and Blank Canvas to make pink, I can tell you that it works, but if you want a pale pink, it's going to take a lot more Blank Canvas (i.e., white) than I used - I think this was about a 50/50 mixture on the larger heart, and you can see it really only got it down to a sort of raspberry color. I would think to get to a really pale pink would require using at least twice as much white as I used, and probably more!)


The big wholesale craft market was thisnext weekend (in Chicago, I think it was) and Ranger has been announcing new products all weekend, including new stuff for Claudine's line. I really like the layered stamps, that's something I haven't seen before. (Another thing I love is this Tim Holtz seasonal paper. I'd be running right out to buy some of that if I could, although presumably it's not in stores yet so I am forced to be patient.)



And in other crafty news... my local Wal-Mart seems to be dismantling its craft department, or something. I'm sure they're not entirely getting rid of it, but it's hard to tell what's going on. First I thought they were just getting rid of the fabric-by-the-yard, the way they've been talking about doing for years - it was completely gone - but there seems to be more to it than that. Because then I went to look at the scrapbook section and there wasn't nearly as much merchandise there as there has been. I thought, well, maybe they're reducing the amount of scrapbook stuff they carry, but that doesn't really make sense, either - I mean, scrapbooking is still a hot craft, right? Every other store is increasing the amount of stuff they carry. (Unless they're just abandoning the craft market to the specialty craft chains - but that doesn't sound very Wal-Mart-like, does it?) So now I'm thinking that maybe they're just moving things around. Maybe they're moving the papercrafts over by the office supplies the way that Target has theirs, I don't know. It's not like I even buy much craft stuff at Wal-Mart - but I'm still wondering about it.

New books #3: Scrapbooker's Creativity Kit

Now this is not a book you might expect me to purchase if you know me well, because I am not a scrapbooker (as I think I've mentioned):
The Scrapbooker's Creativity Kit: Prompts And Ideas To Jump Start Your Layouts
But I'm taking Claudine's class and it sounded interesting (and I found a good price on a like-new copy!) so I thought I'd try it. And I think, now that I have it, that it's really not just for scrapbookers - or at least, it can be adapted to other things. What this basically is is sort of a prompt tool. It consists of two card sets and a book. One set of cards is colors and the other one is words. You're supposed to pick one word and two colors and brainstorm from that. I certainly think you could use this for collages and maybe for other things - the color part especially I could see using for jewelry, and maybe the words too. The book itself is full of example layouts from a number of different people as well as Claudine - some of them take the word part literally and incorporate it in their layout, and others just use it as a taking-off point. It's really interesting to see how differently different people respond to the same prompt.

I'm always partial to things that help you brainstorm - sometimes I can do my own brainstorming without assistance just fine, but other times a little push in some direction or other is really a lot of help. (Sometimes even if you don't like the results of the brainstorming, it helps, because you say to yourself, No, I don't want to do that! and it helps you clarify what you do want to do. At least that's sometimes what I do.)

New books #2: Custom Cool Jewelry

I think I've linked to this book once before, but that was when I had been perusing it in Barnes & Noble, and I actually own it now.

Custom Cool Jewelry: Create 200+ Personalized Pendants, Charms, and ClaspsThis book is about two years old now, and I suspect that a lot of the mixed-media type of ideas in it have gotten much more mainstream during that time - heck, this book may be the reason I've seen a lot of these ideas around in various guises. I'm glad I got it, but I really can't think of too much else to say about it than that I like it, and it's probably worth getting, if you don't already have it, because it's packed so full of ideas.

(Are you noticing a pattern here? I'm a terrible reviewer, that's the pattern. If I hate something, then I have no trouble ranting about it, but I often have trouble figuring out how to express admiration for the books or movies I really like!)


Aside: this isn't where I bought this book, but but while I'm on bookish subjects, I also have a bit of a recommendation about a good bargain for people who buy a lot of books: BOMC2. I think a lot of people shy away from book clubs, but this is a gigantic improvement over the old-school book clubs. It doesn't do away with automatic shipments; what it does is let you choose what's shipped. What happens is that you make a list of books off of their website, sort of like a wishlist -- or a Netflix queue, only you're buying rather than renting. Once a month, they send you the top book off the list, and what makes it great is that the price for these books is only $9.95 including shipping. That's almost always cheaper than Amazon's price, and far cheaper than the list price. They don't have a gigantic selection like Amazon, of course, but I have been using it for quite a few months now and I have not yet come near running out of things that I want.

Bonus Twilight themed links, because I can't seem to stop once I started: Cleolinda, who I was talking about the other day, did a post that talks about some Twilight jewelry (among other subjects - if you're in a hurry, just scroll down til you see pictures of rings). She also links to this ring, which I really like a lot. -- Well, you know, if I wore rings, which I mostly don't. But still, that doesn't stop me from liking it and it certainly doesn't stop me from linking it. (While I'm at it, I will probably favorite some more Twilight-y stuff on Etsy, if I see something else I like. So check the sidebar.)

New books #1: fabric beads

I have several new books I haven't talked about yet. (I may put them into several posts because more than one Amazon link per entry tends to get wonky.)

Fabulous Fabric Beads: Create Custom Beads and Art Jewelry
Kristal Wick didn't invent fabric beads, but she does seem to have perfected a technique for making them. I have plenty of fabric to play with, so I really should try this. (I kept looking at the pictures and thinking that they were made on some kind of form, because of the black "showing" at the top and the bottom. But it turns out that what the author does to achieve this effect is dip the top and bottom in black paint. See, the things you learn when you actually read the book!)



Bonus link:
If you feel the need for more Twilight jewelry, Alphastamps has a cute Twilight-themed bracelet.

Watermark resist

It just occurred to me that I never did post the picture of my latest bit of classwork here:

This is a resist done with a watermark stamp and painted over. I actually used a Perfect Medium stamp, because I couldn't find the Ranger Watermark inkpad that was recommended, but the one I had worked just fine. (The class consensus, though, is that Versamark, which is another brand of clear ink, does not work as well, for some reason. I didn't try it myself.) You stamp on the painted background, and then paint over it with watered down acrylic paint before it dries. The black is the paint, which wasn't dry yet when I took this picture; the blue is the stamped image, showing through from the painted background. It's a neat technique. I can think of all sorts of uses for this!

There were a couple more techniques for this week - a distressing technique that also used the watermark stamp pad, and stamping with paint onto canvas. I have had mixed results with that last one, so I'm still playing with it. You're supposed to spray water on it, and the first time I forgot it completely, and the second time I think I used too much. I'll get it right eventually!

One more thing about Twilight

I knew this existed, but I was too lazy to look it up, and then Cleolinda did the work for me by providing  links right on her Twitter feed: Twilight in 15 minutes. She actually linked to the new one (Eclipse in 15 Minutes), of course, but there were helpful links right there to the others, so I'm golden. And it is, as usual, very funny.

If you've never read any of Cleolinda's parodies, she's been posting them on Livejournal for years, and she even has a book, which has completely different parodies than the LJ ones, although it's now out of print (but I'll post an Amazon link anyway). (She also writes this almost unexplainable thing called The Secret Life of Dolls which I totally adore, and wish she would write more of. Cleolinda is totally to blame for me ever deciding to watch Twilight in the first place.)

Added: At my husband's suggestion, we checked out one more piece of Twilight mockery after I wrote this: Rifftrax, from the Mystery Science Theater guys. It's downloadable audio which you then synch up with the video - the effect is like MST3K minus the robot silhouettes. It was the first time we'd tried it but it worked quite well. For $3.99, it was a fun bit of entertainment.

Administrivia

(I don't know where I stole "administrivia" from - somebody I read somewhere uses it though. I'd guess it was my friend Col; at least it sounds like him. In any case, it always seems very apropos.)

I just wanted to say, what with my readership apparently burgeoning and everything - I have nine whole followers now! - that I am so far resisting changing my comment settings, even though I have been picking up some (apparent) comment spam. So here is my rule: if you make a comment with no noticeable connection whatsoever to the subject matter, and you're not somebody I know in the slightest, and it has a link in it (or alternatively if it's entirely in a script I can't read, like Chinese, and it has a link) with no apparent connection, either, then I am going to assume you're a spammer and delete it, if I notice. Just to clarify. Relevant links are fine, and are in fact encouraged. I love links, in general. I'd just ideally like my comment section not to be a big swamp of spam.

I also worked on my sidebar a little - I added a few papercraft stores that I particularly like, and rearranged things a bit. As always, it's a work in progress!

Those sparkly vampires

I'm doing something I never quite thought I'd do - I'm watching Twilight. It's not really my thing, but I was curious. It's become such a pop-culture legend, you know? And I guess I can see why the teenage girls are all into it - it's that whole doooooomed romance thing, I think. I might be more into it if Robert Pattinson was more my type, but he doesn't really do it for me. I don't know why, exactly, because I do think he's good-looking. I think it's partly that I think his hair is stupid. Taylor Lautner comes closer, but I think that may also be the hair, because I'm well aware that I have a thing for long hair (which in turn shows my age, I think - I hit adolescence in the  70s, when long hair on guys was all the rage). (Then I looked the movie up on IMDb, and now I feel like a pervert - Taylor Lautner is eighteen. He was born in 1992, for god's sake. Which means he was, what, 15 or so when this was filmed. But like I said, I think it's the hair. Teenage boys are usually not my thing, not at all. And it's not like I'm ready to go join Team Jacob or anything. And anyway, I think he loses the long hair in later movies, doesn't he? I don't remember ever seeing pictures of him with long hair at all, although I'm sure I just didn't pay attention at the time this came out.)

Anyway, I am trying not to mock the movie overall - it's really not as bad as I expected. Even the part where Edward sparkles, which is probably the most obviously mockable part, was done in a relatively subtle way, somewhat to my surprise. And the sparkling is in the book, right? so they pretty much had to have it in. I did sort of enjoy this, and I'm not entirely ruling out watching New Moon someday, but I'm pretty sure I'm not masochistic enough to read the books, still. So I am gonna have to rely on other people to tell me what's in the books. -- And if you're a huge fan of the books, don't hit me, okay? I'm just pretty sure that would be too much of Bella moping for me to take.

I'm sure this is a surprise to absolutely nobody, but there is, of course, Twilight jewelry. I had to look. And I saw a very clever Twilight card tutorial the other day, if I can remember where I saw it. (Aha - here.) I know there's Twilight merchandise out the wazoo, but that's as far as I'm willing to look. I'll go back to my book now. (Which The Pillars of the Earth, if you really want to know, but I just started it so I have no real opinion yet. I've had it for ages and keep forgetting about it.)

Color trends - wedding dresses

I don't know that this is actually a trend, but I'm hoping:

Because I get so bored with wedding dresses. What would you call that color, sort of a pale taupe? It seems a little more grayed-out to me than a pure sand color. Anyway, whatever it is, I like it. Plus look, it has sleeves, even if they're only little bitty things. Honestly, have you seen anybody wear a wedding dress with sleeves in the last decade? I can't think of any, although admittedly I don't go to all that many weddings.

(From the Purse Blog - who doesn't seem to stay with the subject of purses with much more consistency than I stay with beads!)

Maybe I feel so strongly about this because I had a not-so-secret yen for a wedding dress that wasn't white or off-white: the color I had in mind at the time was very pale blush pink. But this was in 1987, and there was no internet, and you just couldn't find anything but white or off-white that still looked like a formal wedding dress. I was traditional enough to want a fancy wedding dress but untraditional enough to think about varying the color, at least. And short of dyeing the fabric myself, or something (which was also pretty unheard of back then), it just wasn't to be had. (Actually a year or two later, the very pale pastel dresses started turning up in wedding magazines, you would know. Just a little too late for me!)

Stuff I bought at Paper Source

Warning: this is one of my periodic, slightly excessive I-went-shopping-and-here's-everything-I-bought posts. Just so you know. (It could be worse, much worse - at least I don't get around to doing this every time I go shopping!)

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Just last night, this postcard came in the mail:

But as it happens, I already knew that the Paper Source store in Houston was opening, and in fact is already open, and I went there yesterday. I knew it was coming - the store, that is, not the postcard - because I still get their catalogs in the mail (despite the fact that I really don't think I've ordered from them in some time) and I noticed a while back that Houston was listed in the "coming soon" list - which I was ridiculously excited about. I probably would have been even more excited, except that I have been in a Paper Source store before - the one in Dallas, back in December - so I did know what to expect. That was enough to keep me from going completely ballistic, I guess.

The Houston store is actually not as big as the Dallas store, I don't think - the Dallas store is in a mall and the Houston store is right on the street on Westheimer, which might be more expensive real estate - but it's got the stuff it needs to have and it's really adorable. It's a brand-new building (just west of Crate and Barrel, for any local people who happen to be reading) and it's tall and narrow and made to look fairly convincingly like a brownstone. (Hmm, I wonder if the classroom is upstairs, actually - I didn't think of that before. If it's downstairs I sure didn't see it!)

So this is what I bought:

really cool paper:
http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/item/Purple-Silver-Paisley-Fine-Paper/300_621/103320.html - this looks woven, almost like it's a fabric
http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/item/Pixel-Wrapping-Paper/3650.040/459889.html - the picture does not do this justice. I am a color junkie and this is so right up my alley.
plus a paper sampler (sort of like this one):
http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/item/Paper-Scrap-Bag-Warm-Colors/3325.020/39999844.html The one I got is heavy on bright pinks and yellows, colors that are really appealing to me these days!

a Halloween stamp:
http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/item/Happy-Halloween-Rubber-Stamp/2901.015/805840.html

red embossing powder:
http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/item/Zing-Opaque-Rouge-Embossing-Powder/2902.011/718813271233.html (that doesn't seem to be exactly the same color I got, though, unless the picture is bad - mine is bright bright red)

plus some useful but somewhat more mundane stuff that I won't link, like Staz-On stamp cleaner and a Versamark pen. (Really I restrained myself admirably, on the whole!)

I have no idea what I'm doing with either one of the papers but I'll think of something! The Halloween stuff was because I seem to be going on an early Halloween bender - which might be okay because I need to start making some skull jewelry if I really intend to sell some this year like I said I was going to. The red embossing powder is just because it appealed to me and I am just starting to experiment with embossing and so practically anything I buy is going to be new to me.

I remembered - after thinking about it for a minute - why I found Paper Source in the first place, long before I got interested in papercrafts in any kind of half-serious way. It was the heart cards. I don't know if I saw a link somewhere or maybe saw them in a magazine, but somehow I found out about them and ordered some heart cards and some envelopes. I sent them the first year with just "Happy Valentine's Day" handwritten on them, and then I sent them again some later year with this stamped on them. It was the first stamp that I ever colored. I've ordered various other things from them since them, but that was where I started.

(The official grand opening is not until July 24th, incidentally. Just in case you're interested in going.)

A new kind of donut

Those of you who've been reading here a while may remember that I have a weakness for donuts - the jewelry kind, that is. And on a related subject (the relationship will become clear in just a minute), I have been resisting playing around with Suze Weinberg's Melt Art techniques, even though I like a lot of the stuff she does with it, because I'd have to buy a good many more supplies and I've already bought about a metric ton of supplies lately. But in one of her blog entries lately she showed UTEE donuts (they're at the bottom of that page) that are about 2" tall, made with a mini-donut pan, that really tempt me. I may have to try that at some point soon. Darnit.