Gifts for Friends

Today I am at a workshop with my arty friends Chris and Lin. So I made them each one of T!m's tiny houses.

And here are the other sides.

Cotton spools with a bead and fibres.

This set is for Lin.

And these ones are for Chris.

Country View Crafts have a theme of things with wings this month, so I am entering my tiny houses.

Wooden Box

This is the third size of the collection of TH Idea-ology vignette boxes. Tissue tape added to the back along with some Calico Crafts windows and a couple of little pieces I made using wooden spools, mini bulbs, washers and more Calico wings and hearts. Rusty nails, more washers and some rusty wire. 

Art Dolls

Had a little play this morning with some bits of wood and some printed images and came up with these couple of art dolls. They were inspired by Mark Montano's video which you can see here.

A Stitch in Time

No actual sewing on this key ring, but has a sewing theme to fit in with this weeks challenge over at Artful Times, so I hope it counts!

Wooden spool used as the body, PA word stamp, altered fabric stamped onto a piece of fabric and adhered round the middle of the reel. Sewing pattern stamped onto shrink plastic, shrunk and edged in gold leaf.

 

Safety pin and zipper embellishments added along with the woolen fibers.

Altered Wooden Spool

Over on the PA blog there is loads going on including the launch of the new GD.  This week it is the turn of Clare Lloyd who invited us to alter a spool, you can see hers here.  Above is my version.

I coloured the spool and wooden cogs with a mix of tango and blood orange fresco paints. I stamped various LP images onto a piece of card, coloured them with Portfolio pastels and cut to size to cover the middle of the spool.

Close up of the spiral wire attaching the body, head and castle hat.

#3Up Challenge - Happy 10th Birthday

August was PaperArtsy's 10th birthday and to celebrate Leandra invited us to play along with the #3Up Challenge, except this time, instead of getting 3 items we all got a huge package of all sorts.  This was my bag of goodies.

There were instructions and some rules which are all documented on the piece of paper top left in the photo.

This was the colour pallet I was given to work with.

The wooden frame was coloured with squid ink fresco paint and given a light rub over with stone.

I stamped tissue paper in black stazon with an image from the Ink & the Dog, Buttons #5 plate.

The tissue paper was ripped and randomly stuck to the frame using mod podge.  Once dry it was sanded.

Now I had a bit of dilemma with these embellishments, initially I was going to use one as a pin cushion, but I couldn't push anything into it.  So, I decided to take one apart and discovered it was a metal dome!! Hmmmm.........what to do with that then!!

I wanted to give the image, Ink and the Dog, Buttons #6 plate, some depth rather than just placing it in the hole, so I mounted it in a couple of polystyrene corners, the ones you get in packaging.  .

I used dusty concord distress marker with a water brush to colour the background, re-stamped the tailor tags onto white card, cut them out and stuck them over the top to keep them white.

Then after lots more stamping, cutting, colouring, painting, re-positioning and finally sticking, this is how it came out.

One of the rules was to use at least one stamp from each plate.  I managed parts of all of them on Buttons #5 and I used all but 1 image from Buttons #6.

Hop over to the blog and see what everyone else did with their bag of goodies.

Numbers

I've been asked by the lovely ladies at Out of a Hat Creations to join them for the month of August. So we've kicked off today with the first theme which is 'numbers'.

Way back in May over on the PaperArtsy blog one of the DT there came up with this fab idea of a key spool. To check out how to make one, click here.

Altered Eclectics have an anything goes theme.

A Cog 'n' Spool

I decided to continue playing with the colours and images used on my stampbord plaque but I wanted to use a different shape and there it was, a mini cog.  It measures 6.5cms, tip to tip.

I painted one side in ice blue (only because it came yesterday!!) and green olives fresco paint.  I stamped the LP010 image in olive green stazon and used a black posca pen to do a bit of hi-lighting.

I painted the other side in haystack and blood orange and stamped the LP005 image in black stazon.  I used a white posca pen for the hi-lighting on this side.

Then I needed to decide how to display it.  I tried tying various things around the cog ends but nothing worked to enable me to show both sides.

So I took a wooden spool and luckily it just sat nicely in the hole at the top, so I set about decorating it. I painted it in the above colours, stamped the script from the Ink and the Dog background plate in black stazon and for the middle, I used some of the green washi tape that I'd made a couple of days ago here.

CraftyBoots have a challenge, anything but a square, so I'm entering my cog n spool.

Anything but a Card have a theme of get messy, so again I'm playing along with this piece.

Key Spools

Over on the PaperArtsy blog earlier this week France not only made some fab key spools but she did a video to show us how she did it, which you can find here. Now I am a little behind the times as I didn't have any spools, that is until the lovely Lin Brown of Yours Artfully, kindly offered to send me some. 

Obviously my first colour choice had to be green with a theme of wings, stamps are from the PA ink and the dog wings plate.

And for the second one I chose an oriental theme and stuck with the traditional colours using LP stamps.