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.

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.