No art? Here’s why…

Hi all,

Apologies for the lull in artistic expression – I’ve been busy decorating/renovating the dining room. There’s been art in the planning though – I’ll be sharing my travel art journal (a handmade book, and will be August’s make and take at Manic Stamper Craft Club), and canvases for the dining room incorporating newspaper cuttings from 1937 I found under the floor when sorting out the radiator and electrics.

And here’s a heads-up: another week of daily tangle pattern goodness starts on Monday 1st August.

Happy holidays!

Gingham Tablecloth Card

This week’s theme at my favourite ProMarker challenge site, Passion for ProMarkers, is ‘gingham’ [Week 108]. I decided to make my own gingham paper, and it sort of developed from there. It was particularly timely to have available the free gift stamps from Quick Cards this month, the ‘Time for Tea’ stamp collection by Beth Gunnell. I replicated their colour scheme as my head’s a bit fuzzy at the moment, but the card design is all mine.

UPDATE: I was in the top five for the challenge 🙂

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Encaustic & Oils

I was inspired by a piece currently displayed in the Leicester Society of Artists exhibition at New Walk Museum in Leicester to look into the whole technique of encaustic and oils. A quick and dirty Google/YouTube search showed the basics: layers of molten beeswax sandwiching and fusing with oil paints and other inclusions (such as the silver glitter in my piece). So I got out my trusty Melt Pot from Ranger, added white beeswax and got going on my first piece last night. I’m rather pleased with the results: melting the wax between layers was quite an art, as too much heat will move the oil paint, too little and fusing with previous layers doesn’t work. All the time it’s being worked, the opacity of the wax varies and it isn’t until fully set and cool that the final opacity is apparent. I love the abstract nature of the piece and the clear layering within it. A tricky technique to master I suspect, but one that I’m going to follow up.

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A different take on jam labels?

 

I harvested my crop of blackcurrants yesterday evening and was pleased to have got around 900g from my one bush down at the allotment. A bit of boiling, sieving, sugaring and wrinkle-testing later and I had seven jars of blackcurrant jelly setting nicely. Full of my own creative juices this morning, I came up with a novel idea for the labels: I wanted to use the very blackcurrant colour of the jam to depict the fruit on the label. So I printed the text onto my labels (Avery L7160) and used the long-arm Cropodile to punch out three holes per label. A few green lines as stalks and a dab of white Signo pen and ’tis done. It’s a bit hard to see the colour in the photo (and indeed on the jar!) because the jelly is so dark, but the side on view shows the reflections in the glass to  show the punch through more clearly. A quick idea to personalise your jam labels.

Tie A Yellow Ribbon

I’m cutting it fine with this week’s submission to Passion for Promarkers challenge [Week #107, ‘tie a yellow ribbon’]. From selecting colours, finding the cardstock,  drawing the bow freehand, shading and blending to cutting out, mounting, photographing, uploading and blogging in less than 45 minutes. And all because I don’t have any yellow ribbon in my stash! Managed to submit it with two minutes to go… and I’m not a morning person either!

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Beaded Poppy

Following an enquiry from my sister, I tried making a beaded poppy. Still not sure exactly why she wants one, but I was sufficiently motivated to have a go.

I did this freestyle in brick stitch, making the first petal shape up as I went along. The other four were approximate matches to the first. The centre is meant to be a circular brick stitch, but didn’t quite work out that way, but does the job nicely. There’s something not quite right about it, and I suspect it’s the shape of the petals and the overall flower. A bit more work needed, but a good enough first go at brick stitch, and also a 3D beaded project. The whole thing is about 8cm diameter and each petal has a self-supporting gentle curve to it.

Rokpool – tangle pattern

Day Seven: I’ve saved my favourite until last… Rokpool developed from a sketch twice the size, but I couldn’t tell what fit into the gap between what became mussels neatly lined up. So I shrank the sketch down, and added the ripples. I love the pattern that resulted, and it reminds me of woodcut type patterns.

There you go, another week of daily patterns is over. I hope you enjoyed them!