Completion of the Mystery Project–Part 4–Purple Heart and Card

The final one of the three hanging hearts was the purple one, for my friend’s birthday, and I gave it to her a couple of days ago, together with a matching birthday card.

Some time ago she had asked me to make her something like this, and at the same time she gave me some pieces of wallpaper she’d got when she was deciding how to decorate her room. I decided to use bits from these for this project.

For the background for this heart, I cut a piece of music to fit in the recess of the frame – my friend is a musician, and she had got me a whole lot of old music from someone she knows, and I’ve had this a while now, ready for incorporating into art projects.

The particular piece I used was from the back of one of the books of music, showing samples of other books – the music was reduced in size and just perfect for this little frame.

I selected a few of the stems from one of the wallpaper pieces and fussy-cut them out to overlay on top of the music piece.

The stems stuck down and the ends trimmed.

The music paper had a slightly greenish tinge to it, so I enhanced this by distressing the edges with some Pine Needles Distress Ink to start with.

To this I added some Pumice Stone and Hickory Smoke Distress Inks to dull it down a little.

The music piece with its stems in place in the heart frame.

I worked on the back as before, packing out the recess in the frame with corrugated cardboard stuck down with masking tape, and making a back piece traced around the outside of the heart onto a piece of cardboard. I distressed the edges with Pine Needles and Pumice Stone Distress Inks.

Pumice Stone is a very useful colour. It’s not particularly inspiring on its own on a white background, but for dulling down other colours, it’s perfect.

These are the purple roses that I made for this frame, laid on a couple of the wallpaper pieces as a background.

Finally, here they are on the dark rose wallpaper. I really liked the spray of flowers on this paper and decided to use it for her birthday card (see below).

Here are the roses stuck onto the heart frame with hot glue. I have laid a few small flower pieces in place as I felt it needed something extra.

Inking the small flower pieces, using Seedless Preserves Distress Stain. On some of them, I also added a little Brushed Pewter Distress Stain for a bit of variety.

I made some die-cut leaves and coloured them with Pine Needles and Forest Moss Distress Stains. I hand-embossed these when they were dry.

Here are the finished leaves with the tiny purple flowers. The colour has come out a bit too bright on this black leather background! The true colour can be seen in the next photo.

Here is the finished heart frame with some of the leaves added, also stuck down with hot glue, first of all against the stems wallpaper as a background:

and on another of the wallpaper pieces for a slightly different effect.

The Birthday Card

I wanted this to co-ordinate with the heart frame, and I particularly loved the dark rose wallpaper and decided to use this for the card.

I selected the area with a complete flower spray, and also cut out some of the rose leaves from elsewhere on the piece. These didn’t need embossing because they were slightly curled, and there was shading in the printing of the leaves. I cut the piece with the floral spray to the correct size to mat and layer onto a black cardstock base.

The bottom left hand corner of the piece had part of a very large rose on it, which I didn’t want, so I cut a piece of background from the wallpaper to cover it, and then found a small paper doiley in my stash, which I inked with Worn Lipstick, Pumice Stone and Hickory Smoke Distress Inks, gradually building up the colour with Inkylicious Ink Dusters until I’d got the colour right to co-ordinate with the background piece. I trimmed off the excess so that it would fit over the corner of the piece.

The doiley glued in place over the piece of wallpaper background. Much better without that large rose.

Matting the piece onto the black card base. You can see that there are some leaves printed on the top edge – I was originally going to cut these off but decided against it. I love the “crazy paving” texture of the background of the wallpaper, which is slightly shiny.

The next step was to glue on the leaves. I did a mock-up to decide where to place the die-cut and embossed leaves and stuck those down first. I took the rose leaves cut from the wallpaper and filled the backs with quite a bit of hot glue so that they would retain their slight curve, and let them cool till set. I wanted the leaves to have some dimension on the card and not just be glued down flat, but the paper was fairly flimsy, so the hot glue had the effect of strengthening them considerably.

I placed them onto the card and heated them with my heat gun in order to soften the hot glue again and hold them in place.

Unfortunately this had the effect of warping the whole card, so it had to endure Shoshi’s Heavy Books Treatment overnight! It was much better in the morning.

I made a liner for the inside from some pink cardstock which I distressed with Dusty Concord Distress Ink, and stamped the sentiment with the same Distress Ink. I highlighted this with a pearlescent gel pen but this doesn’t show on the photo.

The completed card, on one of the wallpaper pieces as a background. I added a gold peel-off sentiment.

Here it is, with the purple hanging heart ornament which was her birthday present.

This completes the mystery project of three hanging heart ornaments and a birthday card. I really like the colour schemes and the wallpaper pieces, and have enough left of these, and some of the flowers (I used all the purple flowers) to alter the little frames my hubby gave me recently.

They are a bit bigger than the small heart frames, so I’ll have a bit more space to play with. Watch this space.

I have enjoyed working with the wallpaper pieces. I have a couple of old wallpaper sample books and really should start using these. They can make a good starting point for many projects, and they have lovely designs, colours and textures which can be enhanced by the addition of embellishments. Must do more of this!

WOYWW 498–Mystery Project Revealed

Writing this on Tuesday afternoon.

Three little hanging heart ornaments for friends, from this:

to this:

Here are some closer details.

Can you guess what I made the little terracotta pots from? Bet you can’t… Details in an earlier post.

The purple heart was for one friend’s birthday, so I also made her a card.

I have uploaded all the posts about the making of these hearts and the card and you can scroll down to see them if you are interested.

Some Fun with Photo Manipulation

The other day I was preparing some fruit for my normal “diet day” platter and cut a peeled clementine in half. I thought it made such a beautiful shape.

I thought I would have some fun manipulating this photo, as I did once before with a rather artistic piece of orange peel.

Clockwise from top left, adding effects cumulatively: black background, brightened colour; posterise; paper cut-out; polar co-ordinates. Quite fun, eh? I could have done loads more with it, and spent (wasted?) all day at it. (I know, I should get out more…) Oh, by the way, it tasted good!

Sourdough

I didn’t make sourdough again this week but made some more sourdough crackers and fed Esmeralda and put her back in the fridge to cogitate for another week.

She’s quite happy as long as she gets a weekly feed and a clean bed for the week!

Other Cooking

Overnight I made some more bread in the bread maker, with lots of seeds – sunflower, pumpkin, sesame and brown flax. Gorgeous and crunchy with a good nutty flavour!

I also made a salmon and broccoli bake for our supper. Here it is, ready to go in the oven.

Computer Update

Most things are now working OK, but the computer shop have told me that both hard drives that I took in have failed. The caddies are OK though. One of them I was pretty sure was dud (very old) but the other one is pretty new and still in guarantee so I’m hoping to get my money back on that one. Some things on the computer still aren’t working properly and I need to spend time resolving these issues but I’m too busy with other stuff at the moment.

Kitties

Ruby is still grounded because my hubby has been out a lot and the weather has been too awful so he hasn’t been able to spend any time in the garden. Neither of them has been hankering to go out that much (which isn’t surprising given that it’s raining all the time) but they are obviously needing to blow off steam more than usual!

Health Update

I had a very fruitful appointment with my surgeon last Thursday, and I’ve blogged full details here so I won’t go into it all now, but suffice it to say we discussed risks and advantages of further surgery or leaving it alone, and he is going to consult a colleague in Exeter to discuss the best way forward. I came away much better informed about why things had gone wrong in the spring, and the reason for my post-operative infection, and as a result, I am no longer quite so resistant to further surgery if that is what they conclude will be the right thing to do.

This situation is pants…

The pants saga continues, not having heard anything since my last conversation with them on 19th November, when I emailed the GP and requested a further prescription, and they promised they’d deal with it straight away. I phoned the rep last Wednesday and she didn’t return my call. I managed to speak to her today and she said she’d been waiting for news before calling me, and I said I would have appreciated a call to let me know at least what was happening, even if it was nothing!! This afternoon they called me back and said they were requesting another prescription as a matter of urgency, and I said I was so fed up with this and wanted the pants by Christmas. Ha ha. Tomorrow is the last dispatch day till the New Year. I was practically screaming by this point. I said that would mean they wouldn’t even be able to start making them till then, and she agreed that they usually took about 4 weeks, which would take us into February!! I said I could just about manage with two pairs (one on, one in the wash) but if I had an accident I’d be sunk. She said they’d mark the order as top priority. Again, she kept saying, as they all do, “I completely understand, I really do…” but it’s just words, words, words…

As I say, the whole thing is pants. Grrrr grrrrr grrrrr x 3,000,000. I could add a few choice words too, but I don’t want to break my laptop after all the trouble I’ve had with it recently.

Have a great time over Christmas everybody. I probably won’t be posting next WOYWW because it’s Boxing Day and we are out.

Mystery Project–Part 3–Turquoise Heart

For the second of the three hanging heart ornaments, I chose a turquoise and terracotta colour scheme. As I started making this, I decided to give it a suggestion of a Spanish theme, because the friend for whom I was making this one loves visiting Spain. I also wanted to make a more colourful, and perhaps more illustrative and pictorial, frame than for my other friend, the artist, for whom I made the brown frame.

This colour combination as a new one for me, and I was inspired by Zsuzsa of InkyDinkyDoodle blog – she uses a lot of these colours and I’ve always thought how lovely they were! Thanks, Zsuzsa. I’ve been meaning to try these colours for a while now.

I began by getting out various bits and pieces in order to choose what to use for the various embellishments on this frame. I didn’t use the poultry grit (broken up bits of shell) in the end.

I decided I wanted to add a couple of small terracotta pots as embellishments, and knew I didn’t have any such ready-made embellishments in my stash, and slept on it for several nights, wondering how to achieve the look I wanted. When I started rummaging in my mixed media oddments box, I came across a bag of empty silk cocoons that I’d bought several years ago at a craft show, and thought, “Perfect!” Not only were they exactly the right size, but they also had just the right texture, too! I trimmed them down to shape so that I could stick them to the frame.

To create the top edge of the “pots,” I stuck down two different thicknesses of string. This proved to be a very fiddly job and I couldn’t get the string to stick at first, and then I tried doing it with Glossy Accents, which eventually worked. You can see that I have cut one of the little pots to look as if it was broken. They look a bit dirty around the top because the cocktail stick I used to help me stick on the string was a bit grubby! No matter – they were going to be painted anyway.

The first step was to paint them with gesso.

Now they were ready for painting with acrylics. I used Burnt Sienna and created shadows with Burnt Umber.

On a scrap piece of watercolour paper which I’d cut to fit the recess in the frame, I painted a simple seascape and fixed it in place.

I cut a short length of black lace and stiffened it with some watered-down PVA glue and stuck this in place – reminiscent either of a Spanish mantilla or of the black wrought iron balconies so commonly seen in Southern Spain.

To create an impression of sand, I added some pumice gel medium and painted it with acrylics.

The frame was then ready for the rest of the embellishments.

Here are the flowers and leaves I used.

To stick the little pots in place, I filled the backs with hot glue and then stuck them in place with more hot glue.

Here is the finished piece, with all the embellishments stuck down with hot glue.

I shall be giving my friend this little heart in the New Year when we are planning our lunch get-together which had to be postponed from before Christmas. She doesn’t visit my blog so I thought it would be safe to post about it before she receives it!

Here are the first two hanging hearts together. At this stage I hadn’t done more than the basic preparation on the third one.