Malma again

I did a post back several months ago about the things you can do with Ikea Malma mirrors, and Ikea hackers just popped up with another one I really like, done with a laser etcher. I posted it to Pinterest under the heading Craft Supplies I Crave, although I'm not sure it's entirely true that I crave a laser etcher. Or at least, I only crave it in the way that a gadget-crazy person craves the latest and greatest iPad, if you know what I mean. I probably am a bit gadget-crazy, especially when it comes to art-related gadgets. I don't know what I'd do with a laser etcher if I had one, but wouldn't it be fun to play with?

I really haven't been doing much artsy stuff lately, which is why I haven't been heard from much over here. I'm taking another Claudine Hellmuth class this month, though, so if I actually manage to get anything seriously in progress, there will be updates.

Sampler

Remember back in September or so when I was working on the sampler grid thing for Claudine's class and I said I'd post a picture of it when I finished? (No, you probably don't. I barely did.) Well, I did finish it, way back then, and it's been on my wall all this time, but I never remembered to take a picture - but now I have! And here it is:

I don't think it's perfect, by any means, but it's pretty cute!

Layered stamps

I still have not gotten hold of any of Claudine Hellmuth's layered stamps, and I still really want to. Here's Claudine doing a quick demo (I think this will embed right, cross your fingers):


Scrap Time - Claudine Hellmuth's Creative Layer Stamps from Mark Giles on Vimeo.

As I said at some length last summer, I am a huge fan of all of Claudine's products - I haven't changed my mind about that at all, in the interim. (And no, she's not paying me in any way to say so. Just a happy customer.) Her paints in particular are wonderful. And if you haven't used her Sticky-Back Canvas, you're missing something - the ring she's wearing in the video is made out of it! It has so many uses.

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.

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!

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.)

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!

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.)

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!

Seasons

This was the weekly project for my class and I am really in love with it. The green on the tree - and the grass - was my own addition - the main technique for the week was doing gesso transfer, and the practice picture we had was this tree, but it was just black and white. I went to Michael's and bought this little 5x5" canvas on sale, and then I loved the results so much that I went back the next day before the sale ended and bought three more so I could do a set.

Actually when I bought the additional canvases (on Saturday) I was just thinking that I would do four different pictures - but now I have changed my mind and I'm pretty sure I'm going to do the same picture four times and make it the four seasons. I'm still mulling over what colors to use but I think I may darken the greens in the tree a little bit and use this one as Summer. I'm waffling, though, because I'm a little afraid of messing it up and it's so perfectly spring green right now. This is actually Claudine's Landscape Green paint, straight out of the bottle, except with a little Extra Time mixed in for the background. I didn't mix it in very well and it made it paint on just a little bit streaky. Which I really liked. (And then I painted the tree with my finger, instead of with a brush.)

And all of this makes me mull over the question of seasons, generally. I live in Texas and I think that makes my idea of seasons a little skewed. I have been known to say that the seasons here are Hot, Hotter, Not-quite-so-hot, and Sorta-chilly. (At least where I live. We don't usually have much of a winter down here.) Things bloom most in the spring, and by the time it's really summer, the flowers are usually mostly gone, the trees are really dark green, and the grass is turning yellow, half the time. Except for the redbuds. Maybe I'll try to do a redbud for summer. (As far as fall? If we have a real one at all, the trees turn somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And usually it's blazing hot right up til Halloween or so.)

Here's the link to the paint, just so you know what I'm talking about! (Also, this same color is very visible in the first picture in the entry right below this one, as the background to my earrings I made.

Twisted

I got Kerry Bogert's Totally Twisted: Innovative Wirework & Art Glass Jewelry, and all I can say is, I'm sorry I waited so long to get it. I love wirework and I'm always saying I want to start doing more of it, so maybe if I try a couple of these projects it'll get me kick-started. We'll see. But anyway, this book is beautiful to look at and the projects look great and the only downside I see is that it's making me want to go buy more lampwork beads to use!

Meanwhile the Claudine Hellmuth class starts tomorrow, so I'm excited about that. (I'm still missing some supplies - most notably the Cuttlebug, because nobody ever puts it on sale and I'm playing a waiting game on that. I decided I could probably manage without it, anyway.)

Patera pictures to come - and supply-collecting

It may be foolish of me to try to write an entry right now, when I'm operating on very, very little sleep, but I'm in the mood and I'm not always in the mood lately, so it seems best to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak. (In fact I'm not sure I've touched an iron since we moved a year and a half ago, but there is one around here somewhere, I do know that!)

I've made several pieces of jewelry lately - mostly with Patera findings, because I'm having fun experimenting with them. Most of them have come out quite decently, although just about every one has some flaw that makes it unsellable, at least to my mind. But not unwearable - so these are probably destined to become pieces I wear myself, or else gifts. What I haven't been doing lately is photographing anything, but I'm sure I'll get back to it eventually. I do want y'all to be able to see my little imperfect experiments with Diamond Glaze.

I've been gathering the supplies for the Claudine Hellmuth class (see sidebar for link), which starts next week. I ended up spending quite a lot of money on the search - although to be fair, not all of it is Claudine's fault. I am not good about sticking to a shopping list, and given an excuse to go in lots of craft stores, I am inevitably going to come out with things that have nothing whatsoever to do with Claudine's class. Like, for example, the new Industrial Chic line of jewelry findings that Michael's is selling. I haven't found a Michael's yet that has Claudine's line, although some of them are supposed to. But they all have Industrial Chic! I went to a couple of very large stores - the one on Bee Caves in Austin, and the one on Weslayan & Bissonet in Houston, as well as the also fairly large one in Pearland and the smallish one at Baybrook, and none of them had so much as a hint of Claudine's paints. So I don't know what "selected stores" means - they must be selecting ones in New York or California or someplace.

Part of the problem is that I am not an actual scrapbooker - I own some scrapbooking materials, mostly bought for other purposes. I do play around with card making and I seem to have acquired quite a little collection of rubber stamps lately, and of course I'm prone to buying anything at all that might be made to intersect with jewelry-making. Claudine's class is forcing me to buy things I hadn't gotten around to, like gesso and better-quality paint, and a brayer and other goodies which I really should have had already anyway.

Artwork

I don't know what's up with me and the classes all of a sudden, but classes and workshops usually make me happy, so maybe I ought to be taking more of them, right? Which is to say, I signed up for another class. I feel kind of guilty about spending money since I'm still not working, but I'm already signed up for these two (that is, the BeadFest class and the one I'm about to tell you about) and they're paid for so it's too late for second thoughts about that, really.

There should be a little badge in my sidebar for the new one, which is not a jewelry class but an artsy-collage sort of thing. It's called @ home with Claudine and it's an online class taught by Claudine Hellmuth. I've been mulling it over for a couple of weeks - I guess I first saw it on Claudine's blog and since I kept thinking and thinking about it, I finally decided to go for it. If it will prod me to actually do more playing with collage then it's a good thing. The supply list is a little bit overwhelming, but most of the stuff I don't have already is stuff I've been meaning to buy - like sampling Claudine's paint line, which I've been hearing really good things about. And the class doesn't start for a month, which means I can watch for coupons and sales and maximize my dollars, hopefully.