Thursday Theme: Background Check

More backgrounds for my tagebuch! I've done some on Kraft paper tags now, too. More efficient photos this time - the second photo is the same tags as the first photo, but flipped over. Same techniques as last week, but with some stamps this week.

Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

It's gloomy outside, but I'm in a pretty good mood anyway. Two years ago, I married my best friend, the most handsome and sweet man in the world. It was a beautiful day and we were the absolute cliche of the blissful couple. So on this gloomy day, I gave him this. The more I look at it, the more I see things I could've done better, but I made it with love and he likes it so that's all that matters. In a way, I guess an imperfect canvas is like a marriage; there are always things you could do better but if you live with love and at the end of the day you're happy together, you're doing pretty well.

Thursday Theme: Background Check

I'm back with a new theme this week!  All week I've been working on incomplete projects.  Not finishing ones that are already around, mind you, but on creating intentionally incomplete projects.  See, Mr. Pocket and I are visiting his family in Germany soon, and since it will be my first trip to Germany, I wanted to keep some kind of travel journal.  And then I got to thinking about the German word for diary or journal, which is Tagbuch, or day book.  And I thought hey, that has "tag" in it.  I'll journal on tags!  But of course I can't just journal on plain, blank tags, and I don't want to have to bring a lot of supplies and start each tag from scratch, so I'm working on a big batch of tag backgrounds to take with me.  I'm doing both sides of each tag so that there's not a front side and a messy back side.  Here's what I've got so far:

This last one is the one I'm least pleased with.  If I make enough backgrounds, I might not use this one.

 

For all of these, I've used Distress Inks, Perfect Pearls Mist, Adirondack Paint Dabber, and Michelle Ward stencils.  More to come!  I need lots of 'em.

May Day!

In honor of the first of May, I bring you All of the Flowers.

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 :)