A WOYWW Visitor and More on Infusions Mini-Album

Today Margaret (Glitterandglue) spent the day with me – she is down in Devon, about to attend a course on Pergamano being held locally. She really didn’t want to come all this way down and not meet up, and we had a really lovely day. I’d set up the table in my studio so that we could both work in there, but we didn’t actually do anything except natter and have a Really Good Time!!

My hubby was out, so she and I shared a home made soup and bread lunch. I’d made broccoli and Stilton soup, and a plaited challah loaf, followed by stewed apple and  custard and we tucked in!

She had brought some absolutely fabulous Pergamano pieces that she’d made. Here she is with some of them displayed on the table.

A detailed shot of the pieces.

The little pyramids are a selection from a total of 24 which she made as an Advent Calendar. Each one is numbered, and they are all different. They have a painted design on one face, with the number on the opposite face, and on the other two faces, panels of Pergamano work in different patterns. These parchment covers slide up the ribbon loop at the top, exposing a box underneath, with the ribbons attached to the top. The sides of the boxes can be opened in order to insert a chocolate or other small gift in each one. They were utterly and completely exquisite – I couldn’t believe the fineness and detail of the work. The flat triangular piece in the centre of the table is a card – the three triangles open to reveal a small card inside.

Margaret had, of course, brought her Pergamano kit with her, ready to use on the course, and she got it out to show me – there are lots of different tools for embossing and for piercing, and two different mats for these processes. She was going to get me going on this but when I saw just how tiny and detailed the work was, and how incredibly time-consuming, I knew it wasn’t for me – it reminded me of my abortive attempt to learn Honiton lace making before I was married – incredibly intricate work that you have to do for weeks before you get anything worthwhile to show! I may be a patient person when it comes to my creativity, but there are limits!!!

I admire Pergamano greatly. It looks like a combination of lace and embroidery, and the designs can be very pretty indeed. Having seen it being done for the first time, I admire even more the people who do it. As Margaret says, when you see images of it online, they are always close-up photos, and you don’t really get a correct impression of just how tiny the patterns are.

I think I shall stick to mixed media and playing with stuff that makes lots of texture and colour, and above all, mess!!

After she had gone, I spent a couple of hours in the studio, working on the Infusions Mini-Album again, and tonight I finished making the tags for Volume One of the album. Here are the latest photos.

I had originally decided that I wouldn’t put any text on the front of the “Stamping” title page tag, but decided to go ahead and do that after all.

The reverse of this page is as I left it when I completed it back in September. This page shows my wild grasses stamps on an Infusions background.

Moving on to the next page in the album, we come to the water droplets page. This is a stamp from Designs by Ryn, and one of my favourite – it is incredibly realistic.

Turning that page over, we have the painted flowers page.

Finally, the Versamark stamping page.

I added more Infusions to the back of this tag. You can see that the reverse of the page has not been decorated. This will be covered with endpaper of the album.

The final photo shows the set of blotting up sheets that I created. After sprizting each tag, rather than wasting the wet Infusions on the craft sheet, I blotted it up with some small square cards I'd cut for this purpose.

Not sure what I’m going to do with them all yet, but in the meantime I shall add a distressed edge using Black Soot distress ink. I’m getting quite a collection of these now.

Copper and Sepia Thank You Card

This evening I made a thank you card for a friend. She had seen my Mamhead album and admired one of the sepia tracing pages, so I made her a card based on the same photo and the same technique.

The photo doesn’t really do it justice unfortunately.

Here is the original photo.

I printed out the photo to the size I wanted for the card, and laid some parchment paper over the top and taped it down. I traced some of the outlines using a sepia pen.

I used copper Perfect Pearls from my Perfect Pearls palette to pick out some leaves and stems, with a fine watercolour brush.

I cut the two pieces of paper out with a craft knife, allowing a small amount extra of the parchment down the left side, which I folded under, and stuck to the back of the photo, so that the parchment tracing could be peeled back to reveal the photo, as I had done for the album – the album page was done in gold rather than copper.

This is a lovely technique because both layers enhance each other, and it makes the page (or card) interactive.

To finish the card I matted and layered the picture onto some copper metallic paper and some mottled brown paper from my stash, and mounted the whole thing onto a tent-folded piece of A5 pale yellow card.

I thought it needed something extra, so I found some silvery-grey “Thank You” sentiments in my stash box which I’d cut with my Cougar electronic cutting machine some time back – they tone really well with the parchment paper – and stuck them down using Scotch Quick-Dry Adhesive, and outlined them with the sepia pen. Using a home-made ink blending tool, I also sponged on some Tea Dye distress ink around the edges because the card base was showing a bit, and this definitely improves the appearance.

I added a tiny spot of two-way glue pen onto the top right corner of the photo – if you apply this glue and allow it to dry, it becomes like the glue on post-it notes. I did this to keep the tracing in place and to stop it flopping forwards. It can be peeled back to reveal the photo, and then repositioned. It did occur to me later that it might have been more sensible to attach the parchment piece at the top rather than at the side but I’ve been feeling pretty exhausted and brainfogged lately so put it down to that!

Earlier today I continued to work on my Infusions album, sticking the samples onto the flattened toilet rolls – I didn’t bother to photograph this because it really wasn’t very interesting – just a rather tedious, messy job! You can see when I started this the other day. This is my least favourite part of making an album. I seem to be making an awful lot of pages and I think there are too many for a single album and I am thinking about binding two or three separate ones into one large cover, which could be quite intriguing.

The latest pages are now under a stack of heavy books to flatten them.