New challenge 2015 { Calendar challenge}

Morning everyone, just popping in to let you know I am hosting a new monthly challenge for 2015. It has been a couple of years since I last hosted a challenge, so it's about time I got one started. 

This will involve a calendar..Intrigued? you want to play?

The Project: To decorate/alter a page per month in a calendar

You need: A cheap calendar

The rules: only 4

The Calendar:

I bought this cheap one. You can buy any size, any style, and type of pictures. This is your calendar, pick one that you like. 

These are the pictures in my calendar, again,... pick one that you like. There is a very good reason for this, which you will see in the rules. 

Here is the date/planner part of mine. I intend to decorate this too.. but you don't have to, that it entirely optional. 

The rules. 

1. Each month, decorate the picture page of one month. You can also decorate the date/planner bit too if you want to, but you don't have to. You can decorate in any way that you want:

paint,pens,pencils

collage

stitching

stamping

stencilling

or whatever...

You get the idea, anything goes... however... you must incorporate some part of the original picture... see now why you need to pick one that you like. You can paint,collage,stencil or whatever all over the page, but some original part must remain on show, and be part of your new design. 

2. Each month there will be a technique to incorporate, interpret it any way that you want, with any brand or style. But it must appear somewhere on the page

3. Each month there will be a theme or item of ephemera to include. 

4. Each month I will blog my finished page along with a linky, you blog your calendar on your blog and add your name to the linky in my post. 

That's it!

Here are a couple of sneaky peek previews of what I have done with my page. 

On January 1st I will blog my calendar page, and photos of how I decorated it. There will be a linky at the bottom for you to join in. You can link up straight away on the 1st, or take your time, the link will remain open all month. It will close on Feb 1st, when a new link for Feb will go live. (Sorry no prizes, this is just for fun) If you are unsure how this all works then wait till you see mine on the 1st and then join in. 

So you need to know the technique and theme/addition for January.. 

1.. Keep a part of the original picture and incorporate that into your design

2, Technique - Crackling, any brand of crackle glaze, or the pva crackle method.... or any other way you can think of to add crackling. 

3. Add some book text 

4. Blog your calendar page and link up from Jan 1st 2015

So who will join me? Hope to see some fantastic calendar pages from you all next year. 

Darcy x

Cotton Candy Girls

A while ago I signed up to do an online course with the gorgeous NATASA, I love her whimsy artwork, and when she decided to launch her first course I wanted to join in.

She called it Cotton Candy Girls, and in total we received 5 lessons and then 3 bonus lessons. Each lesson had videos and pdfs, and was well thought out with clear videos and very detailed pdfs.

I didn't have time to do the lessons as they were posted, but as everything was available to download, I was able to work through them at my own pace.

Each piece was done on either canvas or in a journal, but I felt I wanted to work on something that I could actually continue to use. So off I went to the charity shop and came home with some hard backed books, they were only 20p each. For the price of all of them I couldn't have bought even one canvas, so I was very pleased.

At first I thought I would pull out all the pages, and just use the covers...and then refill with blank pages. But then I got to thinking I could just alter the pages.

I really enjoyed painting these and would highly recommend you keep an eye on Natasa's blog for when she launches her next course.

So here are my finished Cotton Candy Girls.

week 1. The Angel

and the back..

week 2. Funky Hair Girl

week 3. Fairy Girl

week 4. Rainbow Girl

week 5. Girl with Cat

and the back...

There were 3 bonus lessons, one was a boy which I didnt fancy doing, so here are the 2 bonus girls that I did.

Bonus 1. Bonus Girl

and the back..

Bonus 2.  Soul Sisters

and now for the insides, so far I have ripped out pages, glued pages together, cut out secret compartments and created drawers. None of them are finished yet, so I shall just show you a few photos of the insides 'in progress' Now that the covers area ll done they will sit on the bookshelf and I can work in them like journals as i need to.. i think it will take a very long time to fill all 7 books, but I shall show you bits from them as I go along.

In this one I glued pages together to make them sturdy, and then at the back I glued a whole chunk of pages together and cut out section for matchboxes to slide into.

In this next one I cut out a secret compartment, no idea what i will put in here..

and in this one I cut out a centre section and added in a small journal..

Obviously there is lots of work still to be done on the insides...

Do you have postcards? do you have a lot of postcards?

I do, it would appear to be impossible for me to go to the cinema without picking up the free postcards. I have been doing this for ages, without any real purpose. Though they are handy for writing a quick note on to pop in with parcels.

This is half my stack...I recently gave the other half away.



I decided i wanted to do something with them, so I picked this one out....ready to alter. My thought was that i could alter lots of them and then collage them together....or not...

So i firstly covered it with gesso, which i then wiped off in sections to reveal the flag behind. I inked and sprayed over the gesso. I cut out a dress-up dolly and stuck her on, and gave her some gold leaf wings. At this point i decided to pop this one in a parcel going to USA, so I added USA number plates to the top and bottom.



I added distress stickles, and text. i coloured the dress with prismas.



I doodled and stuck on a flower. It's fairly grungy and messy and was so much fun to mess around with, it is by no means a pretty piece of art lol

I finished off by rubbing gold wax over the edges. then off it went in its parcel.



So now, what to do with the rest of the postcards...

Firstly may I just say my thoughts are with those affected by Wednesday’s shootings in Cumbria. I watched the awful situation unfolding on TV. My heart goes out to all the injured and the families of those killed.

Thank you for all your lovely comments on Wednesdays post, it really does mean a lot. I tried to get around all the links, apologies to any I missed. For those that asked, it took a week to make the project from start to finish. I began last Wednesday and finished this Tuesday, a lot of that time was taken up with just waiting for coats of gesso, paint, or glue to dry. Also stuffing the dolls seemed to take forever lol as I was packing it in really tightly to make them very firm.



Ingredients:
Heavy weight calico and gesso
Poly cotton and patterned paper bags
Stiff wire, much stiffer than 20gauge. Only my 20g has a label, the label on the stiffer one has fallen off.
Thin gold 28gauge beading wire and some pretty beads
PVA glue, and superglue or diamond glaze, double sided tape
Patterned paper. I used digi paper called Aspire from Scrap girls.
Small amounts of 4 ply wool and cocktail sticks
Tissue paper, white and coloured
Fineliners and promarkers and black dylon pen
Large brass brads
4 wooden cotton reels
Stiff cardstock
9 Cooks matchboxes
Acrylics paints, spritzers, stickles, gems.wax

I started with the drawers. 9 large matchboxes. I can’t tell you how many leftover matches I have now hahaha Here you can see the boxes and the cotton reels, ignore the pegs they were for another project, though some of them came in handy for holding stuff together while it was drying.




I painted around the edges of the sleeves, and along the outer edges of the drawers, and then glued the sleeves together with sheets of stiff cardstock between the layers. I then added more card on top, bottom, each end and at the back, so only the front is left open. I covered each of the pieces of card as I went along. Then covered the fronts and insides of the drawers, adding brads for handles.
Finally I painted the edges of wooden cotton reels, added some of the pattered paper and glued them under the block of matches. I added some faux stitching around the drawers with a black pen, so black dashes on the top edges of the lid and then rubbed over all the edges with gold wax. See previous post for finished pics of the drawers.



Next I made a rough paper pattern for the dolls, pinning and unpinning and trimming several times till I got the shape I wanted. The arms, legs and head are all done in 2 pieces stitched together. The body is done in 6 pieces, again stitched together to make a ball shape. I stitched the pieces on the machine, turned the right way out and stuffed before hand stitching together.

Head:cut 2...Body:cut 6...Legs:cut 4...Arms:cut 4



I used calico for the head and body, and poly cotton for the arms and legs. The poly cotton was coloured by ironing the print from a paper bag onto it. This is a great way to add colour to synthetic fabric, doesn't work so well on naturals.



I made a rough wire stick man shape and poked the arms and legs wires into the fabric then pushed in the stuffing; this keeps the wire in and makes the dolls poseable. I didn't measure or make it neat, just grabbed the wire and started bending with pliers, making sure the sharp ends were tucked in.

You can see in this pic the colour that came off the paper bag onto the polycotton.

The arms, legs and head are pined in place and then stitched onto the body by hand.

Next I painted the body and head with 3 coats of gesso, leaving to dry for a couple of hours between coats. Here they are drying off.

Here they are all stitched together and with head and bodies gessoed, just waiting to be decorated now. I had a bit of a panic at this point as I had no plan beyond this bit, and didn't know how I was going to decorate them. I really liked them and didn't want to spoil them, so I left them alone overnight while I had a think about it.

I coloured the legs with a black dylon fabric pen. Then stamped on the arms with black stazon and word stamps, in hindsight this should have been done before stuffing lol

Next I stamped up some white and coloured tissue paper, ripped it to bits and glued it all over the bodies with PVA, giving 2 coats of PVA to seal it.

I painted the heads with metallic acrylic paint and drew on the faces with black fineliners, adding a little colour to eyes and lips with promarkers. Flori has some dabs of stickles above her eyes and on her crown.

Here they are with heads painted and hair added, I left the faces till last as I couldn't decide how to do them. I even roped OH in to help, he came up and took these 2 pics of the blank heads and went off to draw some faces onto paper, however by the time he gave me his efforts I had already drawn the faces on lol He then proceded to digitally add a load of weird faces onto the pics on his computer, none of which were very flattering lol

Using leftover paper from the drawers I cut strips for the hair, making the ends curl for the girl and cutting the paper spikey for the boy. More paper for a crown for Flori with 28 gauge beading wire attached and beads. She has a few string beads around her neck, cut from a child’s bracelet.

Viktor has a bow tie, again with the same coordinating paper, and a gem glued on the middle bit, and glasses made from the 28guage beading wire. As the glasses don’t have arms, indeed no ears for arms of glasses to sit on lol they are just perched on his nose. Using a sharp pokey tool I made a small hole in the top of the nose, wound some wire around the middle of the glasses and then pushed the ends of the wire down into the hole along with some diamond glaze.

The wings are all made with the lightest of the patterned papers, roughly cut, spritzed and edges with wax, superglued onto the back of the body and topped off with a button.

Flori has some knitting; it is stocking stitch over 10 stitches, not sure how many rows. The letters are Swiss darned on, and the knitting is hanging on cocktail sticks with beads at the ends. No I didn’t knit on the cocktail sticks, I used 2.5mm sock needles and then transferred it all to the cocktails sticks lol I wrapped some more sock wool into 3 tiny balls and stitched them to the end of the scarf so they don’t roll all over my desk lol

Here is the knitting all washed and being blocked out with pins to dry. I wouldn't generally bother but it was curling over so much at the edges, blocking sorted that.

Viktor’s newspaper was typed up on the laptop and printed out. I trawled the blogs of girls from WOYWW looking for updated stories. I wanted to make some more newspaper pages but not enough of you had updated recently enough lol seriously I went thru tons of blogs on Tuesday afternoon, I guess you were all making your WOYWW projects and too busy to blog lol

Thankyou so much for looking, if you make any weird and wonderful creatures of your own, please let me see them.

OUCH! in lots of pain, the decorating, furniture building and attic sorting have taken their toll and I now have a really bad back....

in other news I spent the weekend at my friend jean's house, looking after her house, 2 dogs,cat and 6 chickens, while she was away. Up at 6.30am and feeding chucks in my pjs and boots by 7am...it's not a good look hahaha

On Monday it was our monthly art group, real name Efemera Ink...affectionally known as Glue and Stick...

This months project, put together as ever by the lovely
Ms.Efemera herself was a mini wall hanging. using pelmet vilene, text from a book, triple embossing, metal work,stitching and beading.

This is mine...

These are the ones done by everybody else, all the same but different...


This is my desk today, still fairly tidy. Stuff on the desk, a voucher from my friend for looking after her house, a video that i found in the attic of my sons birthday party from 1991. I now need to find a way of getting it onto a disc. Obligatory cup of fruity tea, some music discs and up the skirt of a doll that I have been making.

and here she is all finished, hanging up in my bedroom. When the window is open she gently twirls around.

Once a month I go to an art group run by my friend Ms.Efemera ,this month she showed us her interpretation of a bird,I think it is based on one that was in somserset studio magazine. The bird is cut out of calico and then painted and decorated. I used promarkers to decorate mine. The birds are then wired onto bits of driftwood. I think I shall call mine Bob and hang him in a window somewhere.



















The diy-ing has been non existent for a few days, I haven't felt great, the weather is so muggy and I seem to have a constant headache. But today I made myself make a card, I drew some Gaillardia and coloured them with promarkers, cut them out and mounted them onto a card.




















I have 7 more sock monsters almost ready, they just need eyes and mouths. I am aiming to get 40 in total finished by next week when the convoy sets off.

Art Journal

Stage 2

I painted all the pages using Plaid Keepsake Colours gel paints, they are lovely and light. I put them on with baby wipes, blending colours together and wiping off the excess. I didn't want to use a heavy paint as i wanted some of the white of the gesso and some of the original print to still show through.

I still have no idea what will go in this book, or even if these colours will remain, but at least I now have some colour. I have started collecting images from magazines, as I don't buy newspapers and magazines it might take me a few weeks. I shall be getting sunday newspapers for a while.

Hope you like it so far.

PS I have no idea where you can get those paints from, I borrowed my friends. If anyone knows where in the uk sells them let me know.

xxx