WOW! with a bit of Creative Chemistry 101

I’m up early, all excited about my stint at Hobbycrafts at the NEC, Birmingham today and tomorrow on the WOW! Embossing Powders stand. They have just brought out some silicone moulds – come and see the jewellery pieces I’ve made (I’ll pop them on here next week when I have a moment). Also created last night using their new embossed resist card with inspiration from the Creative Chemistry 101 Day Five teaching on Distress Stains comes this little (8x20in) sampler for the show:

Golden Landscape – heat embossed canvas

I’ve had a bit of a play with my Wow! Embossing Powders whilst waiting on my official design projects to get posted… Here’s what I did today:

 As normal, it’s quite tricky to photograph metallic/glossy finishes, but I think you can get the gist. I used a 10x10cm canvas board and layered up Brass, Rich Gold and Ebony powders before adding foliage layers using stamps. A nice prototype to work with 🙂

Reversible canvas bag

I’ve got the sewing bug sooo bad! But that’s ok as it justifies getting the new sewing machine 😉

This afternoon I decided to make myself a stained glass window bag to carry all my quilting paraphernalia to and from future workshops. I didn’t have a pattern to follow, and worked it out as I went – there was only one minor glitch along the way fixing the handles, but got that sorted without too much unpicking. I’ve somehow made it reversible, but who’d want to hide the colour side? After three hours ironing, sewing and cogitating, here’s the results:

And I thought I’d made it big enough – but no, it’s an inch too small (16 inches square) after all the folds and seams were a smidge imprecise. The next one should be quicker 🙂

A little bit of history…

Whilst sorting out the dining room, I had to go under the floorboards and found sections of the Leicester Mail and a Daily Express from Wednesday, 5th May 1937. The country was gearing up for the coronation of King Edward VIII a week later, and it was the day before the Hindenburg disaster. Fascinating reading! And whilst changing the radiator, I scraped off several historical layers of wallpaper. I’ve incorporated both, and the new wallpaper, into three art pieces to adorn the newly painted walls:

  

Each canvas panel is 12×12 inches, with the centre area painted in the room colour (Dulux Barley White) and edged with quarter inch brass tape from Ranger. The ageing was done with brown Neocolor II wax soluble crayon. Each section of newspaper was scanned and stuck down with matte multi-medium. The same was done with the wallpaper samples. The flowers are cut from the new wallpaper, Sanderson’s ‘Sweet Bay’ (Pattern No. DPFWSW102).

Zentangle mini-canvases

Zentangle mini-canvases by perfectly4med
Zentangle mini-canvases, a photo by perfectly4med on Flickr.

Thought I’d share my mini-canvas zentangle inspired art pieces. The canvas and easel are packaged by Reeves and I got them for £1 each from The Range (also available in other online stores). They are 7cm square. It was quite tricky to draw on the weave of the canvas so I used a thicker pen than normal. I also found a blending stump was required to evenly spread the pencil shading.