Walking around the Rockefeller Center in New York, it’s easy to be distracted, especially at Christmas, by things like the enormous Christmas tree, the musical light show on the front of Saks Fifth Avenue and the large skyscraper. But take a moment to look down, and you’ll find brass tree surrounds set into the sidewalk. Here’s a tangle pattern based on just one of those. Next week: Fairmont CP.
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I’ve been prepping samples ready for my next TV shows (Hochanda, Mon 16th Jan, 10am/1pm/5pm), and as normal the studio looks like a creative media bomb has gone off in it. I tend not to put things away as I go when getting projects ready as I usually have two or three different samples at different stages, so everything that is to be featured on the show is out on the table to remind me what to use. It’s all at hand, and relatively organised. Consequently, and despite all the space I have, I still end up working in areas barely bigger than a sheet of A3 paper.
But, with studio guests due for my annual Come & Craft Christmas Party tomorrow, it all had to get tidied up. Just for fun, I thought I’d film it as a time lapse – 40 minutes in 40 seconds. Not too bad, particularly with Esther wanting to come in and out of the door and Charlie supervising the vacuuming at the end…
It has been 18 months in the making. Well, may be a couple of weeks in the actual making, but with lots of gaps! This is my first (and possibly last) double wedding ring quilt, made as a wedding gift to good friends. I missed the wedding deadline, and their first anniversary, but managed to get it finished for Christmas.
It’s been a long while since I last published a tangle pattern that I’ve developed. Well, followers of zentangle inspired art (ZIA) will be delighted to know that I have written three step-by-steps for new patterns inspired by a recent holiday to New York.
The first is inspired by the doorway of 636 Fifth Avenue, part of the art deco Rockefeller Center. Same time next week: Deco Sidewalk – based on a brass tree surround very close to the same doorway.
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My Wanderlust journey has wandered off track recently… it has been a long time since I have checked in at each of the stops, and as the year draws to a close I thought I’d better check when I lost access to the class! Sigh of relief – I have a little longer to browse and save what I want to keep.
But in the meantime, I caught up with the One Collage Challenge. Every fortnight or so we were given a step, to take no more than 5 minutes, to build up a final collage. Prompts ranged from ‘add dots’, to ‘cover your page with a stamped image’, and the penultimate one – cover your whole page with gesso or acrylic paint.
Now collage isn’t really my thing – so the step by step was a good process. I didn’t really like what was developing, but that final unifying coat of gesso blended it all together into what turned out to be quite a pleasing piece of art.
Here’s a quick video showing each of the steps, and the impact they had on the building piece:
This is another of my specially designed tree decorations for today’s workshop in The Studio (candy cane one here if you missed it). The workshop has just finished, so you’ve missed out! Cut out from card and pushed onto a split-pin clothes peg, I’ve decorated with DecoArt Media fluid acrylics, Ranger Stickles and Liquid Pearls.
I had meant to show this off on last week’s shows on Hochanda. We were all set for Charlie to demonstrate pulling a rabbit out of a hat, but we had left it under the counter and completely forgot about it in the heat of the moment.
To be more accurate, this is a slide pop-up. The rabbit is my own illustration, possibly coming to a polymer stamp set soon! The top hat is one of That’s Crafty! Surfaces – a MDF upright, designed for the top hat to be the other way up – but with a bit of crafty hiding and wedging, it works just as well upside down.
For my next trip abroad, I wanted to make another travel journal. I have previously handmade a small hardback pocket journal and a fold-out accordion journal. This time I decided to make a handmade journal using a piano hinge. This, for the unfamiliar, uses tabs and cylindrical objects (in this case bamboo skewers) to attach the pages at the spine. The benefit for a travel journal is that every other spread is the depth of the bamboo skewer, which means there is plenty of room for additional items of collage and other ephemera, and pockets to store memorabilia. It’s also possible to easily disassemble the book at the hinge to work on individual pages, or remove and add pages as required.
Constructed from canvas textured acrylic paper, I knocked back the white using an off-white chalky finish acrylic paint. I added a darker shade at the base of each page, using the same paint to stencil the building outlines. Overprinting with various travel oriented stamps using archival ink completed the decoration. It seems that the convention for piano hinge books is that the spine is visible, and the skewers extend from the bottom and the top. I wanted a more traditional book appearance as well as a protective cover, so I constructed cover pages before covering them with lokta paper which resembles old leather. A few coats of soft-touch varnish added to that illusion as well as protecting the paper. Adding this type of cover does restrict the addition of further pages. As I intend to use this on the flight as well, I thought it wise to trim the skewers… Some care needs to be taken to keep the pages vertically aligned, but in practice friction seems to keep the posts in place.
I’m about to set off for the Hochanda TV studios ready for my shows at 5pm and 9pm today. The That’s Crafty! Design Team have sent in a-maz-ing samples, and I can’t wait to share them, and my demonstrations with you. In the first hour, I’ll be showing off true rust and patination effects on the new That’s Crafty! Surfaces hanging light bulbs and cogs, as well as cog upright and cog clock. In the twilight hour, I’ll be doing four quick makes featuring more of the uprights.
Don’t forget – the shows are live, and due to various reasons outside of my control, I’m sleep deprived… so have fun watching! And it’s been pointed out to me that the second show is after the watershed – will I have the nerve to misbehave?
Watch and catch up online, from wherever you are in the world, at hochanda.com. For UK viewers, Freeview 85 (you may need to retune), Sky 663 or Freesat 817.
I’ve designed some hanging decorations for December’s workshop that slide onto a wooden split type peg. There are several designs, but this is one of the newer ones, and certainly the most complex to colour in… Using nothing more than five colours of ProMarker and a pencil, this candy cane tree decoration is ready to copy! There are spaces available, but please book in as soon as possible – I have a lot of cutting out to do…
I’ve also been playing with my Foldio360 bluetooth controlled turntable a little more. It’s recently had some new DSLR settings provided meaning that, finally, it remotely controls my proper camera for top notch pics, which I can then edit and stitch in Photoshop. Now to find a decent 360° viewer plug-in for WordPress so that I don’t have to save as a clunky animated GIF.
