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Day 10 in my endeavour to create something every day for 365 days. Today’s prompt was to make something with water or be inspired by it. I didn’t have the best of days today and felt a bit moody, so the water park fun land I was going to build (who doesn’t want a water slide in the living room?) will have to wait for another time. Instead I Tried out some mixed media techniques, which cheered me up (if you can’t have a waterside in your living room, at least you can splash around with it when creating some sort of art).
Result:
I’ve said it before: I really can’t draw. But maybe I can learn?
Thanks for stopping by! Stay safe! And dry.
Handmade decos are always a nice touch to a card or a scrapbook layout, I think. It just feels great to be able to make something from scratch from the supplies you have, and it gets a little more personal, which is what I always want with my Christmas cards. Sometimes a Christmas card is only thing you send someone that year, maybe to a friend or a loved one that lives far away and you’ve haven’t had a chance to see or talk to in a while. That’s why it feels important to me; I want the recipient to know I’m thinking about them.
So here are some of the Christmas cards I made this year. I decided to hand paint some baubles with watercolour. I really can’t paint at all, but this technique is fairly easy: Draw a circle on some watercolour paper, dampen the circle with water, then add colour, a little bit at a time.Make it a bit darker around the edges and leave a little spot where you don’t put any colour at all, which makes it look a bit shiny.
When deciding on size, I punched out a circle with one of my punches and used that as a template. That made it easy to punch out the baubles perfectly circular after I’d painted them. Also, I used some of my small snowflake- and heart stamps to make a decorative pattern. I stamped the pattern in water resistant ink before I added the watercolour. Lastly I sprayed the baubles with some shimmer mist. To make the card a little dimensional I adhered the baubles with some foam dots.
I was really pleased with these cards, I wanted to make more like them, but I went on to other ideas, more posts to come!
Stay safe, everyone. :)
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This years pile of Christmas cards, I’m sending them out today! Close shave, but I managed to get all the cards done and put in addressed envelopes in time. Today is the last date to send off your Xmas cards in Sweden, if you want to be sure they make it out in time.
I really had fun this year with the Xmas cards; some were more personal than others, but all in all I managed to do a great variety of cards! Beats making 25-30 cards exactly the same, as I used to do a few years back. Back then I was obsessed with them all matching and looking the same, until one day, when I came to the conclusion that that was BORING, and it wasn’t like the recipients had started a secret club who’d have yearly meetings where they’d compare the results of all my postcards they’d gotten. Don’t limit your own creative freedom! That’d just be silly :)
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The Christmas cards needs to go in the mail next week if they are to arrive in time, especially the ones I’m sending overseas. So I have to get a move on! I thought I’d done rather well so far, but when I sat down and reviewed my list I realised I still have a few to make. Gah! Glue glue glue! My problem might be that I never like to make the same type of cards more than a couple of times, 2-4 for the most of any card. It’s much more fun that way, getting to try new techniques and motifs and colours. But I guess it’s not so great when it comes to speed and productivity, hehe…
I like to add handmade embellishments to whatever I make, if I can manage. So I tried to paint these X-mas baubles in watercolour. I don’t really know how to paint but painting different layers of the different shades worked out quite well. I made them the same size as one of my circle punches, do cutting them out was a breeze. I have soem pics of the finished X-mas cards to post, I just need to get them off my camera. But here’s a sneak peek at least! Have to get back to stamping and gluing and making more cards! *Hurries back to my crafting nook*
P.S. What’s the chance of me setting up a Craft Signal light, like in Batman? It could be a monkey. I could flash it towards the ceiling and make an alarm noise and run to my work space shouting: “To The Craft Cave!”… Seriously have to look into this… It feel very important… Maybe I should write a theme tune…
It doesn’t have to be the most fantastic photo that makes you remember, and it doesn’t have to be from the most special occasion. Of course even the every day things can be just as memorable as the big events.
Going through my photo stash I came upon this photograph; it is ten years old, a friend of mine took it, and it’s a photo of me in my early twenties. What struck me about this picture were two things: It was a picture of me just being myself, and it was a photo of me in my first apartment.
Seeing it made me remember a thousand things in a matter of seconds. It reminded me of what I used to wear, of my favourite necklace, of my nose piercing, of my first SLR. It reminded me of moving away from home, of my small one-room studio and all my favourite things in it.
I lived for almost eight years in that small place and a lot of things happened there. It was a place where I wrote stories and made up new recipes, and a place to invite my friends to.
So that is what I wrote in my journalling:
I couldn’t find a paper I thought went with the photo and the sentiment, so I painted this pattern by hand on a piece of recycled paper. There are some better photos of the details in my last post. I also embossed the clock and filled in some of the details with some acrylic paints.
Overall it feels great to have gotten this photo out of the dusty box it used to be in. I sort of represent that whole time in my life. Yes, this layout took quite some time to finish, but it was a happy project to complete.
Stay safe, everyone!
I started on a new 12×12 layout the other night, and I sat for quite some time going through my stash trying to fins something I thought went with the photo. I couldn’t find one.
The photo is one of myself, about10-11 years ago. A good friend took that photo of me, sadly though we lost touch many years ago. I think that photo of me is one of the few from that time I really like. I was in my early 20′s, an sure, when one is young and pretty (harr harr) of course there are a couple of nice looking pics of you, but at that age it’s not often one poses on a picture as oneself. This photo though, is just me in my messy room in my first apartment, holding a camera. The colours are sort of murky (so was my apartment) and there’s a lot of clutter (MY clutter) and I look rather scruffy. But it’s me, at that time.
I felt that none of my patterned paper really matched. So I started to paint one of my own, on a piece of 12×12 recycled, unbleached paper. I’m not quite done with the layout yet, but thought I’d show a few pictures. Hope to share the whole thing with you soon!
Stay safe and thanks for stopping by!
My crafting supplies has been packed in boxes since the end of March. This is a sad, sad fact. A very happy fact is that I have been moving houses (read more about this here) and moved in with the man I love. This is completely awesome; it feels like a rare treat to get to live with someone who is supporting, encouraging, loving and inspiring. Sure, he makes jokes about glitter being the plague of crafting, but he’s encouraging none the less! He is, for instance, the reason I got more courage and motivation to practice on my camera skills.
In the last year I’ve taken more photographs than I have in the last five all together. I’ve taken a lot of chances to practice and by now I feel I know my camera pretty well and actually know how to use it to get closer to the results I envisioned. Also, I’ve kept it handy during the move and have been able to sneak in a project or two with Tricks. It’s been a lot of fun! I needed her to wear some antennae for one of them, and she crafted some really cute ones with wire and patterned papers.
I’ll do a post later on with more details of the crafted antennae, but meanwhile you can find the photo post on my other blog, here. I just have to share this little picture, I love it!
Looking through the photos I’ve taken the last year I realise I’ve started to build up quite a pile of photos I want to scrapbook or put in an album. While it’s great when one happens to capture a specific moment by chance, you know one of those lucky snap shots, actually creating photo ops are just as fun, and it’s really something else when you start to get them printed on actual nice photo paper, and not just see them on a screen. And once you lay them out before you on a table you can’t help getting new ideas. Now I just need to get my crafting supplies from the storage and set them up. That is a project all on its own.
Tricks have been making all these neat and almost edible bracelets lately, they really remind me of the candy bracelets you could get as a kid (and you’d walk around all day with them around your wrist and eat the little sugar beads once in a while, at the end of the day you’d bee all high on candy and have sticky wrists).
We decided to take a few shots of Tricks in her bracelets, which is easier said than done during winter season. We didn’t have a lot of extra lighting, so we had to use the flash, which meant that the shadows got terribly sharp, but in the end a cheap lamp from Ikea got to play the part of a softener. Thank you Jed for that idea:
In the end a lot of the shots came out un-sharp, but we got a few good ones, so this is the end result. Here’s Tricks!
It was a lot of fun, I’m really getting more and more into photography, and am starting to love my digital camera. It helps having people around with the same interest!
Love!
I’m making a small album with photos from my trip to Italy, and I couldn’t find an album I liked. I got a generic one instead, and am going to try and spruce it up. I wanted some chipboard numbers to glue on the front but could not find any in the right size or shape. I did however find really cheap ones made of light weight wood at the craft store, sold piece by piece. So, that way, I can alter them any way I want, and in the end I don’t have a box of left overs I won’t use. Win!
So I painted them red with ordinary acrylic paint, and then I used a glossy accent that crackles as it dries. It’ll match the Italy-inspired ribbon i found, so now I feel all co-ordinated and matchy ;) Gluing them on the front cover of the album with some bead glue will keep them in place.
 Cheap and plain wooden numbers, painted to match the colours of the ribbon. (Also notice the time warp back to 2001)  Use a glossy or crackled glaze to give it dimension (you can glaze just about anything...)  Ready to use, crackeled red numbers to glue on album.
Oh, of course, I forgot to post the picture of the card I made Natalie for her birthday! I got this beautiful Graphic 45 paper from Sara, and decided it would be perfect for the card I was going to make.
It was a lot of fun to make, I used metal wire and beads and feathers and sequins and chipboard. So, this was the result:
 The picture isn't sharp enough but there is a small bead dangling from the wire up on the right side, which I quite like
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