TMTA and Inch by Inch

This is a super quick, middle of the night post, for two challenges that are closing soon.

For the first time, I've been organised enough to get something in for Inchbyinch, where the weekly challenge is Black and White

I would like to note that it was a very hard palette for me to use - I had to drag my hand away from the gold paint. Also, I may be unintentionally breaking the rules by using sepia images. *frets*


Secondly, TMTA's theme is Tickets. I've tucked a ticket under this little girl's arm.


And that's it for me - it's far too late to be up and blogging.

Stamphappy 1-4-1 Swapping

The 1-4-1 ATC swap on Stamphappy is loads of fun - this week I received a gorgeous card from Val West, with bright colours on gloss cardstock.


It came in the most adorable little folder, which is just the nicest touch to a surprise gift.


I had made some ATCs to send, but Val's little folder made me feel sad about slipping my own cards into an envelope with nothing but a clear plastic slip. So I painted and stamped some library pockets for them.


Last weekend I had a blitz of crafting activity that may or may not have anything to do with the hard drive failure of my laptop. *is shamefaced* There's an amazing amount of time to fill when you don't have that neat little machine sitting right in front of you.


The backgrounds are newspaper, painted and re-painted to get lots of layers and depths and texture.


The stamp for the background is by Stampers Anonymous, one of those big stamps you can't live without for a nice, baroque look.



I've got a bit of a thing going on with flowers right now. And butterflies, which is a natural progression of thought, I suppose. And the moon. And I've never really let go of that fascination with the moon.


I really like doing this messy, wobbly edging with gold paint - it doesn't require great accuracy, and it reminds me of the aged edging you get on some vintage postcards.


Actually, there's quite a lot of ATCs here - it was an extremely satisfying day of work.


Two of these are returns for RAKs sent, and the others are all going out as RAKs for the 1-4-1 swappers. I haven't sent RAKs for a couple of years. It's fun!



This one doesn't really have a spot between her eyebrows. I think it's time to clean the scanner glass. Again.


One of these cards is not like the others... I had this one partially assembled for a long time, and riding the wave of creative energy, I finished it off. He's made from scraps from a zetti swap that I couldn't bear to throw away. Zetti scraps - I suppose you could call that zetti-confetti.

What I got up to last weekend

And it's taken me so long to post this that it's nearly the weekend again!

First of all, I dyed some painted silk for my Quilty Conscience exchange. I wanted a kind of pale blue, and the label on the packet said "Madonna Blue" which I took to mean a pretty sky-blue. The colour swatch seemed to confirm this.



Really, it was more like indigo. Who knew? The silk looks great, but my paint resist looks very scrappy against such a dark background. I'll have to hunt around for something different.

It wasn't an unmitigated failure, though - I gathered up some tags to dye since I had a pot of dye on the stove, and they came out very nicely. Some are plain, some are stamped with white paint, using one of my hand-carved bird stamps.


And I threw in some muslin scraps, I think they'll be handy, and will look lovely over gold.


And the best thing about dying tags is that in the bottom of the pot, when you tip the dye out, you find a whole lot of those circular hole-protectors that have drifted off the tags in the liquid. They're great for stamping on and attaching to other tags.


I made one of these pin-cushion rings out of the tab you pull from a carton of long life milk. Our tabs don't look like the one in the link, but they worked perfectly well.



I made it, and I admired it, and I left it on the table. In the morning, it was gone. And while I was photographing the replacement that I made last night, a little brown snout crept into frame. I shall be keeping this pin-cushion locked away.



Here is Stephanie modelling the ring. I think it will be very handy - I'm always putting my needle down, or tucking it into my shirt when I'm not using it then forgetting where I put it.



I made some fairy inchies for Inch By Inch, but not in time to make last week's theme. (Sorry for being so hopelessly disorganised, Fiona!) Serendipitously, I had to make a card for a friend who has come out of hospital, so they were put to good use anyway.


The first mailing group I joined once I had discovered papercrafts was Stamphappy, and I'm very fond of it - I've learned so much, and met so many wonderful people from the list. They've started up a one-for-one ATC swap, and I've received my first one, from Linda Aldred. It came in a beautiful hand-made envelope, and was posted in a tiny library pocket, that was the most adorable thing in the mailbox yesterday. The picture doesn't do it credit - foil card looks lovely in person, but is tricky to photograph. Thank you, Linda! It's lovely, and the mesh window is a really clever way to frame an image. I'll be filing that idea away! And I'll be putting something in the mail for you as soon as we're back from Melbourne.


This weekend is going to be much quieter - we'll be in Melbourne while Stephanie does some work-related education. We'll be far away from the craft table, but hopefully we can do some shopping while we're there. And it's sunny this time, too!

One last photo of my catburglar in action, with sports-style notation, because he moves so fast you can barely see him:

TMTA and my weekend

This weekend was beautiful - there was lots of sun, and we got out in the garden for a bit of winter pruning. The mornings have been icy cold - an indication that it's going to be quite a chilly winter. Here's Chewbacca, soaking up some of the last winter sun we'll probably see for a while.


This week's TMTA theme is Towers and Columns. I think this Collections stamp was one of the first that I ever bought, and it's very useful. (Like most Collections stamps are, I suppose.)


I'm trying to learn to love my colour laser printer, but I don't think we've achieved true harmony yet. I'm printing on the most excellent lightweight brown paper that is used as filler in the delivery boxes at work - we have scads and scads of the stuff, and it takes paint and ink beautifully. The laser toner is apparently a little fragile, though, because it started flaking off my Grecian woman straight away. I've sprayed the rest of my attempts with fixative now, in the hope that they'll be a little more sturdy. They look quite nice though - the brown paper really emphasises the warm tones:


What else did I get up to this weekend? I played with our new Dremel! Nina's workshop made us brave - we drilled glass and dominoes and wooden discs, and I planned out a necklace based on the nursery rhyme The Little Nut Tree:

I had a little nut tree
And nothing would it bear,
But a silver nutmeg,
And a golden pear.

I chose this theme mostly because I saw the nutmegs in the supermarket, and thought they'd be easy to drill through. But the nutmegs look good, all covered in silver leaf and varnished.

Although, en masse, they do look a bit like shiny possum poo.

And I've been embellishing my box with the pieces taken from my burned chiffon sandwich:


Now that I look back on it, it was very busy.

Chiffon sandwich, hold the chiffon

This instructional post is entirely inspired by Annette Husband, who posted an fantastic tutorial on Inkjet water transfers that I'm planning to try this weekend. I wanted to post my own tutorial on using fabric scraps and a heat gun to make embellishments.

I've been making embellishments from glitzy stuff trapped between layers of chiffon, stitching the layers then burning them back with a heat gun. I've seen this technique in Cloth, Paper, Scissors and in Maggie Grey's books.

This particular sandwich isn't actually chiffon, and I didn't like the way it burned - instead of cracking and shrinking, it went more fluid and blobby. It was an experiment, and I've learned from it. I'll still be using these pieces, in this case, for a 3D fabric box I'm working on, but in the future, I'll stick to chiffon. Or do more test burns.

I iron a layer of vliesofix to each piece of fabric, then sprinkle one side with lots of glitzy stuff. It's the time to dig out all those really garish brightly coloured stuff I love to stash but can never use tastefully: glitter, lurex threads, shimmery fabric scraps, sequins. I especially like to use the big, cheap, multicoloured sequins, because they melt into amorphous jewel-like puddles of colour.


Because the vliesofix is slightly tacky, gold leaf adheres to it pretty well; if it doesn't, a quick whiz with the heat gun will soften the glue enough. This is an extreme close up of what's in this sandwich: snippets of foiled tulle, sparkly yarn, sequins, and red/gold leaf flakes.



Then you press the layers together, and iron them (under a sheet of baking paper), with an iron that's warm enough to seal the vliesofix together, but not so hot that it makes your sheer fabric shrink or buckle. We'll save that fun for later. In this picture, you can see the glitzy stuff trapped between the two layers of sheer fabric.


Then I stitch the layers together - as the fabric shrinks, it clings to the stitching, and leaves an aged, crumbly residue. (Or in this case, slightly blobby.) I've stitched one piece in a grid with a butterscotch-toned variegated cotton thread. The thread needs to be cotton, or something non-synthetic that will stand up to the heat-gun.


And in this section, I've stitched a spoked wheel. I've found that the smaller the gaps between the stitching, the more structure the final piece will have, which is why my wheel has an inner and an outer circle. You could do all sorts of motifs this way, and the best thing is that they look better if you don't stitch nice, tidy lines. (This is good for me, because I'm a wobbly driver on the sewing machine.)


Now, the fun and destructive part. The first thing you need to do is open the doors and windows, because this is like burning plastic; it's smelly and the fumes could be toxic. So, make sure there's lots of ventilation. I heat from the middle of the grid out, holding my heat gun as close as I would for melting UTEE, moving the hottest part around the area I'm heating. You really see the purpose of the grid when the fabric is twisting and melting and pulling away from the lines of stitching: it holds the piece in shape, and ends up as the skeleton of the fabric. Here's my grid melted, with all the shiny treasures revealed:


And in close-up:


And the wheel, still in the framework of supporting stitches:



And all my wheels, snipped away from their frames:

The sheer fabric I used for these didn't shrink as much as chiffon does - if you're using chiffon, you should expect your piece to shrink by a third. As a consequence, my wheels were too big for what I wanted, which was to be medallions on the faces of a five-sided fabric box with a steam-punk theme. Never mind! I'm going to snip out tiny squares from my large grid, and stitch them to my fabric box, and embed lots of multicoloured beads into the gridwork. The wheels will keep for another project. I think they'll look great over black velvet. (Oh, velvet! Why can't I quit you?)

Back from a whirlwind tour

I'm back from my weekend in Melbourne, and thoroughly recovered. It was great to do a class, let alone one with the amazing Nina Bagley. My hands were very sore after crimping and twisting wire all afternoon, but it was worth it to learn how to drill through those treasure I've been hoarding for years, and how to go about turning them into beautiful jewellry.

It was also great for me and Stephanie to catch up with our tiny quilting group, Quilty Conscience: Debbi Baker, Coralee Barker, Karin Hutchinson and Ruth Kelly (plus assorted friends and family!). We had a great meal, a bit too much wine, and lots of conversation. It was so amazing.

We also swapped postcards, for the last theme, which was "Home".

Here's mine:

It's a fabric paper collage background, with a tiny house made from painted black paper, and itsy little sequins which are imported by , judging from the address on their label, but looking at their site, they appear to be wholesale only. I'm finally getting the hang of the zig-zag edge; this is the first time I've actually been proud of it.

Debbi's


Coralee:


And Karin's, which is just so lovely, I keep stroking the satin slippers. Oh, there's no place like home!


I made a fabric book to keep my postcards in. I really like having them accessible. We don't have much wall space in our livingroom studio, so I worry about keeping them on the table where paint is splashed around. They're nice and safe in this little booklet, and I can keep adding pages at the back as my collection grows.


Here's the inside, with one of Debbi Baker's beautiful postcards.

Treasure at the bottom of the garden

Neil Gaiman linked to the most amazing photos of fairytale houses, abandoned and intact because they were buried deep in a forest in Russia. I love fairytales with magical things hidden in forests, or even at the back of the garden. Remember Enid Blyton's 'The Wishing Chair'? Magical stuff.

Our garden is pretty wild. There's plenty of treasure to be found, thanks to our relatively lax gardening skills, despite the best efforts of my girlfriend, who is a demon with secateurs and blackberry poison. (That sounds scarier than I meant it to!)

Here are some treasures from our last foray into the tangle:

A tiny nest in a tangle of blackberry canes at the back of my garden:


Stepping stones that lead to nowhere:


A wall of briar roses:


Giant rosehips, big enough to eat:


And our house at the top of the garden:


It seems to be a long, long way away...