Thursday Theme: All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Happy almost the weekend, Pocketeers!  This week's post is brought to you by the letters B-L-I-N-G.  As some of you know, I'm not a big fan of glitter the way a lot of crafters are.  As far as I'm concerned, glitter is a tool of the devil.  It gets everywhere, it multiplies, it never goes away... ugh.  But I do like metallics, pearlized effects, and shimmer.  I've even started to like rhinestones.  *gasp!*

I tend to use metallics as a neutral in a lot of things.  And I love using pearl or shimmer mists like Perfect Pearls or the Tattered Angels Glimmer Mists to add depth and interest.  Like here:

You can just barely see the shine in the photo.  Unfortunately, I've found that these effects don't photograph well.

 

 

Lately I've been more interested in using rhinestones as an accent, just to give a little bit of shine, a little bit of fancy to a piece.  Even when I'm using other materials that might be a little more rustic or grungy.  So the other day, I picked up these guys:

 

Iridescent goes with everything, and I just love those Goosebumps ones!  They'll make great flower centers.

You may even have noticed them on this from my Seth Apter book:

Shiny shiny shiny...

So, it seems somewhat natural that lately, I've been teaming up with my Mom to do something super blingy.  It started, sort of, a year ago.  At the Sheep and Wool Festival, I found these earrings, and couldn't leave without them:

I mean really, how fabulous is that?

I decided immediately that they would be perfect to wear for belly dance performances, since that is something I also study, and decided that at some point, I would have to make a costume to go with them.  Well, I have a recital coming up on Sunday, so about a month ago, Mom and I got to work.  I did the sewing and she did the beading, for the most part.  The only beading I did was the sequins on the belt, and she did help with the sewing.  But mostly we divided the labor along sewing (basic) and beading (complicated) lines.  And this is what we did:

Invisible Carrie!

Here's a closeup of the belt, with the faux button that Mom made.  That's right, she made it.  She also did all that beaded edging.

On the top, she beaded a meandering path on the band, bezeled and added fringe to a vintage button, and did the sequins and the beaded edging.  Rockstar.

All done by hand!

Mr. Pocket got in on the action, too, and mailled me this beautiful necklace to go with the costume.  It's perfect with it!

 

I'll try to post pictures of me in the costume once I have some from the recital, with the makeup and all the jewelry and the whole nine yards.  I'm so pleased with how it turned out, and super excited to wear it on Sunday!  It's really a blessing and a luxury to have such a talented family who's willing to work hard on stuff like this for me.  If you haven't already gotten familiar with her blog, please go to Zingala's Workshop and check out my Mom's other work.  She's amazing!  We've worked together on costumes before, for my friend's theatre group, and it's always fun to collaborate on stuff like this.  We make a great team :)

Thursday Theme: Fauna

This post could also be titled "Put a Bird on It."  I'm back to my disrupted Spring themes, after missing yet another week.  I'm kind of failing at being consistent lately.  But I'm back!  With birds! 

If you've been following me for a while, you know I have a weird seasonal affinity for different things.  One of those things, as it turns out, is birds.  Spring makes me happy to see and hear the birds again.  So I'm trying to bring them into my art a little more.  For example, I found this lovely bird stamp:

A couple of years ago, I saw this 7 Gypsies set of cling stamps and had to have it.  Ironically, I haven't used them much, because... well, I'm not sure.  Part of it is the scale, and that I haven't successfully managed to work them into a composition so that it looks good.  But maybe now that I'm more inclined towards ATCs, I can make something work.

In that set, as you can see, there are also butterflies.  Spring also makes me like butterflies more.  I like butterflies a lot in real life, but as an artistic motif, I generally find them to be overused.  Except in Spring.  And in a Prima set I got the weekend of the Seth Apter workshop, there's this adorable little guy:

 

 

Hopefully now that work is settling down, I'll be able to find some time to use these stamps some more.  Stay tuned for more Spring art!

Thursday Theme: Tissue Tangent

I had a clever series all planned out, based on the three good fairies in Disney's Sleeping Beauty.  I had started with Flora, remember?  But I got distracted from all I wanted to do with certain Spring themes, and last weekend's class jumpstarted my creativity but in a different direction.  So here I go, off on a tangent (shocking, I know) about my new favorite material.

Tissue paper!

I first started playing with tissue paper some short time after Michelle Ward did her Grab a Tissue crusade.  But I did something different with it and discovered that tissue paper gives you great texture when you let it wrinkle as you glue it down to a background.  I later discovered that I'm not so original with this innovation, but that's okay.  I recently rediscovered this technique and have run with it.  Some of this stuff you've seen before, so I'll just show the pics to illustrate the variety you can get with plain old tissue paper.

Alter Bridge canvases, and unfinished mushroom canvas panel.

My winter tree canvas and the layered ATC from two weeks ago.

You can very carefully die cut tissue paper, too, which is what I did here.  I used a Tim Holtz die to cut this to use as a scarf on a spread for The Night Circus in my favorites journal (still unfinished).

 

Over the weekend, I was using my stamping on tissue to layer images trick and talking with my tablemates about how much I love tissue paper.  So one of my new friends pulled out some beautiful printed tissue and shared it with me!  I used some in my book, as a background for this page that I didn't know what to do with.  Once I had the patterned tissue down, it gave me an idea for what to do not just with the page itself but with a big chunk of blank watercolor paper I had left over from cutting pages.  Funny how one thing leads to another.

 

Glued down with Elmer's, then dipped in leftover ink from dying the blank watercolor paper for a "mossy" effect (I hope).

 

 

So while dinking around with ideas after the workshop, I came up with one that, again, I'm sure someone else has done, but I haven't seen it, so I'm claiming it as my own idea.  See, I've taken to Liquitex's Super Heavy Body Gesso as a way of getting a cool raised texture with or without stencils.  So, I thought, why not try a relief background with that and tissue paper?  That way, if I want the background to be inked, I can ink the tissue paper, which won't work on the gesso too well.  So I rushed home after work and started experimenting.  Success!

 

See how the gesso stands out with its peaks and such?  And it definitely looks like something applied to the canvas?

With tissue paper pasted down over it, it looks like it's just part of the surface.  I love it!

So now I have a couple more techniques in my arsenal with my new favorite material.  I'm going to start paying more attention to the gift wrap aisle in places like Target and CVS.  I have already been keeping tissue paper from gifts, but I'm hungry for more colors and more patterns.  Especially after seeing the beautiful paper that my classmate shared.  Is there a material you've started to look at differently, or that you always liked but just recently really latched onto?  Give tissue paper a shot.  I'll keep you posted on further experiments :)

Wonderful Weekend!

Sorry I missed Thursday Themes last week. I was so busy prepping for the weekend that I didn't make anything new! What I was prepping for was an awesome two-day workshop with Seth Apter, which was my birthday present from my mom. We had a blast! Seth is a great teacher, and I would definitely take another of his classes. What we worked on was an altered book, using a vintage book that we gutted and made new pages for. Mine's not finished, and it's very different from my usual style. I used a lot of the new Prima papers from the Fairy Rhymes series and based the rest of the work on that style, so it's a lot more girly than usual for me. But I wanted to do something a bit fantasy based so that fit perfectly and gave me a direction. Anyway, I'll just show you what I've gotten done so far and let that speak for itself.

Thursday Theme: Flora

Another thing that Spring makes me appreciate more, besides sunlight and light colors, is flowers.  In the Fall and early Winter, I tend to focus more on trees and foliage and such.  By the end of Winter, though, I just want to see some damn flowers.  That's why I love daffodils so much.  Along with crocuses, they're the first ones I get to see.  And, as with most things that I like, flowers end up in my art.

I started early with the flowers this season.  That's because I had a Christmas project I wanted to do, which never came to fruition but I'm going to try and have it done for this coming Christmas.  For this project, I started sketching roses from Michelle Ward's photos of her garden.

Thank you to Michelle for letting me use her photos as models.

Another flower that tends to inspire me around this time of year is the cherry blossom.  So when I saw these Prima flowers I had to have them, because while they're not exact, they're reminiscent of cherry blossoms to me.  This little banner made its way onto a birthday card which I won't show because it's about 2 weeks late at this point so I don't want to spoil it for the recipient, because I still plan to mail it...

There's a lot I want to do with floral motifs.  I'm slowly accumulating, with Mom's help, the botanical stamp designs from Stampendous.  I want to do a series of ATCs with them a lot like my unicorn from last year.  But I also have these to play with:

Cocktail napkins!  Mom uses these all the time, so I'm going to play with them now too.

And last night, I was at a craft night with my dance friends, and I sketched what was going to be a collection of fantasy flowers designed to look like stylized musical instruments but the first one didn't really turn out that way so I just gave him some tiny friends and a surrounding of moss.

Not my best, but it was fun.

If I can find the time and the right inspiration, I might enter Tim Holtz's Tattered Floral Challenge.  I'm even considering working ribbon flowers into the dance costume my mom and I are working on for my recital coming up.  We'll see.  But I do find myself wanting to wear flowers, look at flowers, smell flowers, and just be around flowers.  I'm even drinking flowers.

It's delicious!  I love floral teas.

Do you get flower fever?  Where have you been working flowers in?  Do you have a favorite?

Thursday Theme: Spring Colors

Well, if I can't have Spring now, at least I can anticipate it with some color, right?  Cos I'm really tired of dark colors, which is really saying something because I wear a lot of black (it's a redhead thing).  So this week, I started playing with a more Springy palette.  There's decor:

Ok, so they're fake daffodils, but at least they won't wilt.

These are the birds I've been getting at Michael's.  The white ones are from last year, and the green one is new.  I think they're adorable!  And the squirrels stay out year round.

And last night I got to play around with some tags and things, finally using the Spring colors that Tim Holtz released last year, back when they were going to be seasonal only and not part of the regular Distress line.

This is Shaded Lilac, in a tone-on-tone attempt at this background technique: here.  But the stamping wasn't great so the colors got funky.

 Attempt #2 at the above.  But it bugs me that the design is off center, so I didn't do anything with this.

Off to not such a great start, but at least the colors made me happy.  And then I took the Squeezed Lemonade Distress color, along with Bundled Sage and a little bit of Forest Moss, added some Tattered Angels Glimmer Mist and a super sneaky high-tech material*, and started this ATC:

It was at this point, mostly finished, that I realized I should've been taking pictures of the process.

Finished, with Rock Candy Distress Crackle Paint glaze and 7 Gypsies studs.

That ATC has inspired a series, which I hope to work on soonish.  But there's a set of stamps I want to get in order to do it, so it might be a while.  In the meantime, I'm pleased with how this turned out.  It's simple but pretty cool.  And it's bright, which makes me feel like Spring is not so far away.  It's not, is it?

*My secret weapon:  tissue paper.  Shhh!

Thursday Theme: Bring on Spring

It's time.  It's finally time for Winter to buzz off and make way for warmer, happier seasons.  This is the last day of February, and I say good riddance.  I like Valentine's Day, but otherwise I have no use for this month.  It's about time March got here.  March, with its Spring Equinox, my birthday, St. Patrick's Day, daffodils, and, this year, Easter.  I cannot wait.  So, to rush things a little bit, here are some of my favorite things about Spring.

1. The Return of the Birds

Simple tag from 2010 (I think).

Already I've been stepping out of the house and hearing birds in the morning.  That makes me happy.  In Springtime, I like to decorate with birds and use them as a motif in my art, or at least I would use them more if I had more bird stamps.  I have been collecting these pretty little glazed porcelain birds from Michael's craft store.  They look adorable on my living room shelves.

2. My Garden

The view from my bedroom door last May.

 

The view from my bedroom door in January.

 

The first one is better, isn't it?  I can't wait to see my lavender blooming again and have fresh herbs growing again.  Not to mention my adorable little fern, Fred, has been suffering indoors all winter and is so dried out he's crispy, even though I mist him every morning (I don't name all my plants, but the fern just looked like it needed a name.)

 

3. My Birthday

Mr. Pocket is the best.

 

Yes, this one is about me.  Pretty self-explanatory.

 

4. Not Freezing My Butt Off.

 

This is an important one.  I don't have a picture for it, unfortunately.  Or perhaps fortunately.

 

5. Daffodils

 

Somehow I have completely failed to have a picture of my favorite flower.  It trumps all of the others because it's the first to come up, aside from crocuses, which I like almost as much.  One of my favorite poems is about daffodils, too.  It's William Wordsworth's "The Daffodils (I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud)"

 

 

Are you looking forward to Spring as much as I am?  What are you most looking forward to about it? 



Thursday Theme: Sing Along

Missed the Valentine's Day post. Timing problem. Not my fault. Okay, entirely my fault. But here I am with a new theme, inspired by my Valentine inspirations. There's one less piece to share than I had intended to have, but that's okay, it'll have to make an appearance some day when I actually get it done right.

Anyway, this week's theme is one that I tend to take for granted. This week's theme is song lyrics. I'm very much inspired by music, especially rock music and Celtic/new age music. I know, strange combination. Though you wouldn't think so if you listened to Blackmore's Night. Anyway, I digress. I work songs into my art quite a bit, whether by incorporating the lyrics themselves or by creating a scene that comes to mind when I listen to a song. So this year for Valentine's Day I was going to do a whole series of tags based on some of my favorite song lyrics about love. Here we go...

Okay, it's sideways at the moment. This is the refrain from A Maid in Bedlam, as recorded by the John Renbourn Group. Not perfect, but it'll do until I have better ideas for it.

One line from Down to My Last by Alter Bridge. The next line is "In your world I'm blind," but I like this sentiment so I focused on the positive.

Remember this guy? From the Oops post? It was going to have the beginning of the theme song for Ouran Highschool Host Club: "Kiss kiss fall in love!" Still need to start this over.

I also showed a glimpse of these canvases last time, because they were a re-work of a failed idea. The lyrics are from the title song on Alter Bridge's first album, One Day Remains. Each canvas has the first half of the line in the red strip and the second half of the line scrawled across the open space.

Also featuring Alter Bridge lyrics (sensing a common theme within the theme?), I threw this together one day in about 10 minutes. It just came to me in the car, and I wanted it to look messy and thrown together, which it does, and that's fine because it's not like I'm going to be trying to sell it or get anybody's approval for it. It's just for me, and for you because I've decided to share. Someday I'll find a frame for it.

Hidden lyrics from Broken Wings, also from Alter Bridge's first album.

It's not all hard rock in my non-lovey dovey stuff. I've got Christmas stuff:

The Peace Carol, from the Muppets and John Denver: A Christmas Together.

*cringe* Early work. With the title line from the theme song of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (the 2005 movie version).

I've got lots more floating around in my head, never committed to paper and whatnot. More Alter Bridge, some Shinedown, some traditional songs, all kinds of stuff. Who knows if I'll ever get it all done. In the meantime, at least I'm never without an internal soundtrack. What music inspires you?