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.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
BeadFest Texas
Anybody want to come take a class at Bead Fest Texas with me? They opened up registration, and I decided on a whim to take "Scrap Box Bracelet" which is a full-day class on October 2nd. It's expensive but it includes almost all of the materials, so that helps. Here's the sample bracelet:
I've been meaning to learn cold connections and that kind of thing, anyway. Plus I like the bracelet.
I'm just going up by myself, unless I find somebody else who wants to go. (Which is not my way of saying "poor little me" - I don't mind going by myself. I'm kind of independent that way. But I'd love to meet up with other people who are going!)
I've been meaning to learn cold connections and that kind of thing, anyway. Plus I like the bracelet.
I'm just going up by myself, unless I find somebody else who wants to go. (Which is not my way of saying "poor little me" - I don't mind going by myself. I'm kind of independent that way. But I'd love to meet up with other people who are going!)
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Where I've been (short version)
I keep starting and abandoning entries about where I've been, and I guess that's because the question of where I've been is not really easily answered, or rather there are multiple answers. I spent most of the winter being terribly depressed - but I've been working on that and I feel considerably better now - and even though I neglected my classes horribly while I was busy moping, I did manage to pass my certification exam, so now I'm job-hunting. (And oh my god, I hate job-hunting more than almost anything in the world.) I've also been running around doing various neglected errands that will be easier to get out of the way before I start working again.
Except for the easter-egg painting flurry a couple of months ago, I really haven't done much in the way of craft stuff at all. And I'm not even letting myself shop for beads, to speak of, until such time as I start doing something with what I already have. I'm hoping when I get back to the working world I will get more interested in jewelry again; that seems to be my pattern. But I'll try not to be completely silent until then!
Except for the easter-egg painting flurry a couple of months ago, I really haven't done much in the way of craft stuff at all. And I'm not even letting myself shop for beads, to speak of, until such time as I start doing something with what I already have. I'm hoping when I get back to the working world I will get more interested in jewelry again; that seems to be my pattern. But I'll try not to be completely silent until then!
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Easter eggs
I've been sort of absent - sorry about that!
OK, so, when last heard from... I posted a couple of weeks ago about how I was experimenting with painting easter eggs. I finally got around to taking some pictures:
This was part of my first round of experimenting. (Visible behind is the only non-easter-related thing I did, which is a decoupaged letter S. There are some decoupage eggs, too, so I'll talk about that later.) I really think the most successful thing I did early on was that pink/purple egg with the sort of ombre effect. I ended up doing several of those. The larger green egg ended up getting painted over, although it wasn't entirely unsuccessful, I think, if you actually wanted something that looked like a miniature watermelon. It was sort of cute, it just didn't look like an easter egg!
These are paper-mache eggs from Hobby Lobby. As I said in the other entry, I chose the eggs mostly because I wanted something cheap to experiment on - the normal chicken-egg sized ones were three for $1, as I recall, even if they weren't on sale. There were two bigger sizes but they were similarly reasonably priced, although as you can see above, the medium size was shaped somewhat less like an egg and more like a potato, but I didn't let that stop me from decorating them just the same.
The basic technique here is real, real simple:
1. Take a paper-mache egg and paint it with layers of acrylic paint until you like what you see. If you don't like what you come up with, cover it with more paint and continue. (It seems to me that there's bound to be some point at which the paint gets so thick it starts peeling off or something, but I never hit that point. And some of these eggs have quite a number of layers.)
2. Once you're satisfied with your egg, start covering it with additional layers of varnish (I used Ceramcoat Glossy). Unlike the acrylic paint, which dries really quickly, the varnish takes some time to dry. If you want them for Sunday, you'd best start today, because if you are intending to take your eggs outdoors and actually, you know, hide them or something, I would recommend that you use quite a few layers of varnish. I did not actually test my eggs to see how they would hold up to this kind of treatment, though. (I'm contemplating playing Stealth Easter Bunny Saturday night and hiding eggs around my elderly neighbors' front doorways, just for the heck of it, so I might have something to report when that's done.)
I am not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, so my version of easter egg art was mostly a variety of squiggles and swirls, and the effects - like the ombre one above - that I could come up with by layering paint in various ways. I also discovered that painting a thin layer of white paint over brightly-colored patterns came out as sort of a "whitewash" effect that I liked. For example, I was trying to hand-paint stripes onto the one egg in the picture above, but they were not terribly straight and it was bothering me. But covered by a layer of white, somehow it magically looked much better! Here is the whitewashed version:
And here is the whole basket-full that I ended up with:
This basket is my actual childhood easter basket, by the way. It's still holding together pretty well, considering its advanced age.
There is a small and a large egg visible in there that are decoupaged. That I did with DecoPatch paper and ModPodge. It was pretty easy, even on the smaller eggs.
OK, so, when last heard from... I posted a couple of weeks ago about how I was experimenting with painting easter eggs. I finally got around to taking some pictures:
This was part of my first round of experimenting. (Visible behind is the only non-easter-related thing I did, which is a decoupaged letter S. There are some decoupage eggs, too, so I'll talk about that later.) I really think the most successful thing I did early on was that pink/purple egg with the sort of ombre effect. I ended up doing several of those. The larger green egg ended up getting painted over, although it wasn't entirely unsuccessful, I think, if you actually wanted something that looked like a miniature watermelon. It was sort of cute, it just didn't look like an easter egg!
These are paper-mache eggs from Hobby Lobby. As I said in the other entry, I chose the eggs mostly because I wanted something cheap to experiment on - the normal chicken-egg sized ones were three for $1, as I recall, even if they weren't on sale. There were two bigger sizes but they were similarly reasonably priced, although as you can see above, the medium size was shaped somewhat less like an egg and more like a potato, but I didn't let that stop me from decorating them just the same.
The basic technique here is real, real simple:
1. Take a paper-mache egg and paint it with layers of acrylic paint until you like what you see. If you don't like what you come up with, cover it with more paint and continue. (It seems to me that there's bound to be some point at which the paint gets so thick it starts peeling off or something, but I never hit that point. And some of these eggs have quite a number of layers.)
2. Once you're satisfied with your egg, start covering it with additional layers of varnish (I used Ceramcoat Glossy). Unlike the acrylic paint, which dries really quickly, the varnish takes some time to dry. If you want them for Sunday, you'd best start today, because if you are intending to take your eggs outdoors and actually, you know, hide them or something, I would recommend that you use quite a few layers of varnish. I did not actually test my eggs to see how they would hold up to this kind of treatment, though. (I'm contemplating playing Stealth Easter Bunny Saturday night and hiding eggs around my elderly neighbors' front doorways, just for the heck of it, so I might have something to report when that's done.)
I am not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, so my version of easter egg art was mostly a variety of squiggles and swirls, and the effects - like the ombre one above - that I could come up with by layering paint in various ways. I also discovered that painting a thin layer of white paint over brightly-colored patterns came out as sort of a "whitewash" effect that I liked. For example, I was trying to hand-paint stripes onto the one egg in the picture above, but they were not terribly straight and it was bothering me. But covered by a layer of white, somehow it magically looked much better! Here is the whitewashed version:
And here is the whole basket-full that I ended up with:
There is a small and a large egg visible in there that are decoupaged. That I did with DecoPatch paper and ModPodge. It was pretty easy, even on the smaller eggs.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
The Awards
I can never resist getting snarky about Oscar dresses, so I wrote this up and since it has a good bit about jewelry in it, I'm putting it here for your consumption. You can play along by looking at this slideshow, which are the same pictures I was looking at when I wrote this. Be sure to notice that if you hover over those pictures there are additional little "detail" pictures of jewelry and bags. One thing is very obvious with the jewelry, and that's that the usual big flashy necklaces are conspicuously absent this year. (Hmm, you think this means the whole "statement necklace" trend is over?)
Here's my little mini-rant, before we start: I'm soooo sick of strapless dresses. Do something different, people. Plus a lot of them are unflattering or just plain ugly, although the ones this year were not as bad as some previous years have been, on that score.
OK, starting here with the slideshow:
1. Cameron Diaz - this is beautiful, actually, and I'm not usually much of a fan of hers. Strapless aside, I like it. I do agree with whoever said she looks like Generic Hollywood Blonde, though. (Barbie Goes to the Oscars, maybe?)
2. Sandra Bullock - it looks pretty good in this picture, but I mostly didn't think it looked that good live. (Hey, it's not strapless, though!) The tissue skirt looked like aluminum foil a lot of the time. I tell you when it looked really beautiful, though, was in the long shot where she was sitting in her aisle seat and the skirt was arranged all pretty to the side. That one time, it looked really great.
3. J-Lo - this one was the opposite, it looked really pretty on the red carpet when she was swishing the skirt around. (Big swishy skirts had to be the #1 trend this year.) I do hate that foldy thing on the front, though.
4. Demi Moore - I really like this one a lot. Another strapless that works. I like the color on her, I like her hair, I even like the wrapped mummy effect at the top and the cascading ruffles at the bottom. When I describe it, like that, it sounds awful. But it just all works. (Added: the Fug Girls point out that it is rather seriously too tight across the top. But I didn't even notice that until they said it.)
5. Penelope Cruz - I like everything about this except the neckline. I like the color, the drapery, all that stuff. The bustline just looks weird, though.
6. Kate Winslet - I don't love this. It's sort of overly restrained. Too tailored-looking for my taste, I guess. Maybe it's supposed to just be a background for that necklace, which I do like. (I didn't even notice it at first, actually.)
7. Kristin Stewart. Hmm. Don't like her hair, love the navy, and at least her strapless fits. There's something funny-looking about this dress that I can't quite put my finger on. I love the trumpet part at the bottom - other than that, meh.
8. Sarah Jessica Parker - horrid all the way around. Wow, sort of breathtakingly horrible, actually. (And this is Chanel? Really?) And that color wouldn't flatter her even if the rest of the dress looked better.
9. Nicole Richie. Well, it's not a strapless, that's for sure, but ugh, just the same.
10. Miley Cyrus - it's not horrible on a SJP scale, but it kinda looks like she went out in her underwear. Be sure and look at her jewelry, though - that cuff in particular is beautiful. Bracelets seem to have replaced the big necklaces as the jewelry of choice this year.
I snagged a screenshot of her hand:
11. Zoe Saldana - I want to see what the Fug Girls had to say about this (see link at bottom), because it's certainly ripe for mockery. It did look sorta pretty swishing around onstage, though.
12. Diane Kruger - I usually think she looks great, but that black stuff looks oddly like it's some sort of goth tinsel or something.
13. Rachel McAdams - I have decided that Rachel McAdams is one of those chameleon-ish actors - she just looks utterly different every time I see her. I can't quite get over the stage where I'm going, Really? This is Rachel McAdams? (Or else maybe I'm getting her mixed up with somebody else, I don't know.) But really I like this dress a lot. It's pretty. I don't think those earrings go well with it, though.
14. Carey Mulligan - this looks too much like a prom dress. (Cute shoes.)
15. Anna Kendrick - the overall effect is really similar to Demi Moore - that is, the color (more or less) and the hair. These pale colors would wash out a blonde too much, but I think both these brunettes carry it off. The dress itself is pretty, except that that slit at the bottom ruins the line of it somehow.
16. Maggie Gyllenhaal - first of all, the description calls this "avant-garde", to which I say, I'm not seeing what's so avant-garde about it. I don't really like it, but not because it's so out there or anything, I just don't. What I can see of that jet thing in her hair looks pretty, though.
17. Vera Farmiga - I love you, Vera, but I hate this dress. Now this, I would call kind of out there. Pretty color, other than that, awful. It's, I don't know, an explosion in the ruffle factory or something.
18. Amanda Seyfried - I don't love it. This is the very pale person who is washed out by the pale dress. Those chocolate-diamond bracelets are kind of pretty, though.
19. Elizabeth Banks - I like the color, don't love the rest of it. (The text calls this gray, but it looks blue-gray to me. Which I like. I might have to go look at some other pictures of it.)
20. Mariah Carey - prom dress
21. Julianne Moore - another one who can't carry off the pale color. Maybe because she's a redhead? I'm not sure.
(As for the Fug Girls - here's a link to a lot of their Oscar snark, which I had not read until after I wrote the above. The Zoe comment is particularly hilarious. And they didn't like Kate's dress either, although they did like Vera's.)
Here's my little mini-rant, before we start: I'm soooo sick of strapless dresses. Do something different, people. Plus a lot of them are unflattering or just plain ugly, although the ones this year were not as bad as some previous years have been, on that score.
OK, starting here with the slideshow:
1. Cameron Diaz - this is beautiful, actually, and I'm not usually much of a fan of hers. Strapless aside, I like it. I do agree with whoever said she looks like Generic Hollywood Blonde, though. (Barbie Goes to the Oscars, maybe?)
2. Sandra Bullock - it looks pretty good in this picture, but I mostly didn't think it looked that good live. (Hey, it's not strapless, though!) The tissue skirt looked like aluminum foil a lot of the time. I tell you when it looked really beautiful, though, was in the long shot where she was sitting in her aisle seat and the skirt was arranged all pretty to the side. That one time, it looked really great.
3. J-Lo - this one was the opposite, it looked really pretty on the red carpet when she was swishing the skirt around. (Big swishy skirts had to be the #1 trend this year.) I do hate that foldy thing on the front, though.
4. Demi Moore - I really like this one a lot. Another strapless that works. I like the color on her, I like her hair, I even like the wrapped mummy effect at the top and the cascading ruffles at the bottom. When I describe it, like that, it sounds awful. But it just all works. (Added: the Fug Girls point out that it is rather seriously too tight across the top. But I didn't even notice that until they said it.)
5. Penelope Cruz - I like everything about this except the neckline. I like the color, the drapery, all that stuff. The bustline just looks weird, though.
6. Kate Winslet - I don't love this. It's sort of overly restrained. Too tailored-looking for my taste, I guess. Maybe it's supposed to just be a background for that necklace, which I do like. (I didn't even notice it at first, actually.)
7. Kristin Stewart. Hmm. Don't like her hair, love the navy, and at least her strapless fits. There's something funny-looking about this dress that I can't quite put my finger on. I love the trumpet part at the bottom - other than that, meh.
8. Sarah Jessica Parker - horrid all the way around. Wow, sort of breathtakingly horrible, actually. (And this is Chanel? Really?) And that color wouldn't flatter her even if the rest of the dress looked better.
9. Nicole Richie. Well, it's not a strapless, that's for sure, but ugh, just the same.
10. Miley Cyrus - it's not horrible on a SJP scale, but it kinda looks like she went out in her underwear. Be sure and look at her jewelry, though - that cuff in particular is beautiful. Bracelets seem to have replaced the big necklaces as the jewelry of choice this year.
I snagged a screenshot of her hand:
11. Zoe Saldana - I want to see what the Fug Girls had to say about this (see link at bottom), because it's certainly ripe for mockery. It did look sorta pretty swishing around onstage, though.
12. Diane Kruger - I usually think she looks great, but that black stuff looks oddly like it's some sort of goth tinsel or something.
13. Rachel McAdams - I have decided that Rachel McAdams is one of those chameleon-ish actors - she just looks utterly different every time I see her. I can't quite get over the stage where I'm going, Really? This is Rachel McAdams? (Or else maybe I'm getting her mixed up with somebody else, I don't know.) But really I like this dress a lot. It's pretty. I don't think those earrings go well with it, though.
14. Carey Mulligan - this looks too much like a prom dress. (Cute shoes.)
15. Anna Kendrick - the overall effect is really similar to Demi Moore - that is, the color (more or less) and the hair. These pale colors would wash out a blonde too much, but I think both these brunettes carry it off. The dress itself is pretty, except that that slit at the bottom ruins the line of it somehow.
16. Maggie Gyllenhaal - first of all, the description calls this "avant-garde", to which I say, I'm not seeing what's so avant-garde about it. I don't really like it, but not because it's so out there or anything, I just don't. What I can see of that jet thing in her hair looks pretty, though.
17. Vera Farmiga - I love you, Vera, but I hate this dress. Now this, I would call kind of out there. Pretty color, other than that, awful. It's, I don't know, an explosion in the ruffle factory or something.
18. Amanda Seyfried - I don't love it. This is the very pale person who is washed out by the pale dress. Those chocolate-diamond bracelets are kind of pretty, though.
19. Elizabeth Banks - I like the color, don't love the rest of it. (The text calls this gray, but it looks blue-gray to me. Which I like. I might have to go look at some other pictures of it.)
20. Mariah Carey - prom dress
21. Julianne Moore - another one who can't carry off the pale color. Maybe because she's a redhead? I'm not sure.
(As for the Fug Girls - here's a link to a lot of their Oscar snark, which I had not read until after I wrote the above. The Zoe comment is particularly hilarious. And they didn't like Kate's dress either, although they did like Vera's.)
Monday, March 1, 2010
Acrylic paint, and other experiments
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had been painting easter eggs. I've been having the best time playing around with it, even though I really have no idea what I'm doing. This didn't start out having anything to do with Easter, really, it started because I was wanting to try out the paint, and paper mache easter eggs seemed like a good (small, cheap) thing to experiment on. I had a set of Crafty Chica paints, which are sort of fiesta colors, not really colors that scream "Easter." I tried lightening them up with white to get more pastel colors, but while I was getting really pretty results, I was having trouble getting them to be consistent. (I guess what you'd have to do if you really wanted to be able to have the same color over and over would be to mix a larger amount up, sort of like they do with house paints.) So then I went and bought some Ceramcoat acrylics in sherbet pastels, and those are working out well, plus I'm still playing around with mixing them with the Crafty Chica paints, too, so now I've got pastels and brights and I can make everything in between, too. And then I started playing around with washing colors one over another and I ended up making some interesting effects, sort of accidentally.
I also stumbled onto a couple of useful tools that are a bit unconventional. One thing was something I had bought to protect my jewelry table - it was a fondant sheet from the cake decorating section of the craft store. It's a big plasticized sheet, and it has a 1" grid on it as well as big circles for rolling out icing. (I haven't used those so far for the painting I've been doing but it seems like they could be useful if you were doing something more precise than what I have been.) I ended up cutting my sheet up into smaller pieces, but that was because I live in an apartment and my space is really limited. I don't think everybody would necessarily want to do that. Up until I stumbled onto an ad hoc paint tray - see below - I squeezed my paint right out onto the fondant sheet. It cleans up fine with soap and water or a baby wipe. (I had bought the baby wipes for cleaning up rubber stamps, but they are amazing for cleaning a variety of things, I am finding. If you have children you probably know this already but I don't, so they are new to me!)
The other thing was that I had some of those mini quiches that you buy at Sam's Club - the brand is Nancy's Petite Quiches - and they come in plastic trays with indentations for the individual little quiches. They make great paint trays, which is something I hadn't gotten around to buying yet, and it's less messy than squeezing the paint right out onto the plastic sheet, like I had been doing. (That worked just fine, actually - except that since I'm working with egg shapes, they have a tendency to roll, and once or twice they rolled right into the paint.)
Oh, and I am sealing my eggs with Ceramcoat Glossy Varnish, which is very shiny and looks great. Pictures to come. They are not great works of art, since I have no real painting skills whatsoever, but they are cute, just the same.
(I also decoupaged some eggs, but I'll talk about that later.)
(Incidentally, this is apparently my 101st post! Pretty amazing, considering how slowly I started off!)
I also stumbled onto a couple of useful tools that are a bit unconventional. One thing was something I had bought to protect my jewelry table - it was a fondant sheet from the cake decorating section of the craft store. It's a big plasticized sheet, and it has a 1" grid on it as well as big circles for rolling out icing. (I haven't used those so far for the painting I've been doing but it seems like they could be useful if you were doing something more precise than what I have been.) I ended up cutting my sheet up into smaller pieces, but that was because I live in an apartment and my space is really limited. I don't think everybody would necessarily want to do that. Up until I stumbled onto an ad hoc paint tray - see below - I squeezed my paint right out onto the fondant sheet. It cleans up fine with soap and water or a baby wipe. (I had bought the baby wipes for cleaning up rubber stamps, but they are amazing for cleaning a variety of things, I am finding. If you have children you probably know this already but I don't, so they are new to me!)
The other thing was that I had some of those mini quiches that you buy at Sam's Club - the brand is Nancy's Petite Quiches - and they come in plastic trays with indentations for the individual little quiches. They make great paint trays, which is something I hadn't gotten around to buying yet, and it's less messy than squeezing the paint right out onto the plastic sheet, like I had been doing. (That worked just fine, actually - except that since I'm working with egg shapes, they have a tendency to roll, and once or twice they rolled right into the paint.)
Oh, and I am sealing my eggs with Ceramcoat Glossy Varnish, which is very shiny and looks great. Pictures to come. They are not great works of art, since I have no real painting skills whatsoever, but they are cute, just the same.
(I also decoupaged some eggs, but I'll talk about that later.)
(Incidentally, this is apparently my 101st post! Pretty amazing, considering how slowly I started off!)
Monday, February 22, 2010
Color schemes: blue and green
I love the colors they're using for the Winter Olympics:
This is a random curling photo I ganked from someplace; I picked it because you can see the wall of the ice rink pretty well in it. This same design (or at least a very similar one) seems to be on all the ice rinks and painted on fences, etc, all over the place. If you've watched any ice skating, you've seen the one there. I just think it's really beautiful. Blue and green is not a color scheme that's been extremely popular in recent years, but it's one I always liked. Water and earth, I guess.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Whee!
OMG, I got a listed in a Treasury! My first one!
Thanks to corkycrafts for including me! (And I seriously crave a couple of those other pieces there...)
Thanks to corkycrafts for including me! (And I seriously crave a couple of those other pieces there...)
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Color trends - Target edition
So I went to Target today and one of the things I noticed was a lot of stuff in my favorite pink/orange/yellow combination. The picture here is one of the last quilts I finished (which was a couple of years ago now). I came up with this combination sort of by accident, and at the time I thought I'd come up with something really original. But what I've noticed since then is that I've seen this combination more and more. Anyway, it's a great spring color scheme and I'd love to have more of it. Hmm, I need to look to see what I can do with that, bead-wise!
(Reminder to myself: I need to get this quilt and put it somewhere I can see it for spring!)
(Reminder to myself: I need to get this quilt and put it somewhere I can see it for spring!)
Color trends - really expensive handbag edition
I have been keeping an eye on The Purse Blog lately even though I am far too cheap to ever consider paying for even the cheapest of their purses (which are mostly in the thousands of dollars; this is really the very high end we're talking about here), and despite the fact I think a good many popular bag designs are pretty darn fugly. But it's a way to keep an eye on color trends and such, and I've seen a number of things lately that I do like a lot. This orchid (or grape) color is delicious - and I also really love this muted tie-dye effect. I'm not at all sure how you'd translate that latter one into jewelry, but I'm sure it could be done. And I'm definitely going to look for some beads in that orchid color.
Completely unrelated to anything: want to see something really adorable? Take a look at Lisa's Icelandic sheepdog puppies. I'm a cat person, in general, but who can resist puppies?
Completely unrelated to anything: want to see something really adorable? Take a look at Lisa's Icelandic sheepdog puppies. I'm a cat person, in general, but who can resist puppies?
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