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!