When My Mojo Leaves …….

Posted on July 29, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

When I am wanting to create, but inspiration has packed her bags and left I either make cards or flowers! I can spend hours – days even – making cards and flowers!

I play around with dies and stamps and try to put together something that is vaguely pleasing or pretty …….

It doesn’t always work out ……………………

……….and other times it does!

I went through an Owl phase when I got a really cute owl die with movable parts:

And a teddy bear textured phase – when you touch this teddy bear, it feels furry, I painstakingly glued on flocking…..and it was really fun to make!! [This is a Magnolia stamp, coloured with Spectrum Noir ink pens.]

All these cards are heavily embellished and impossible to post in an envelope.

I now have a large carton full of cards and other created items – we need to go to a market day and sell ’em off!

I wish my mojo wouldn’t leave quite so often.

Thanks for dropping by, do leave a note – it’s always lovely to see you’ve been 🙂

The Paper Bag Book

Posted on July 26, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

I decided to make the little book for several reasons –

1) it was originally meant to be included in the ‘Box to Book’ project, but just wanted to be too big for its intended slot – so it became a stand alone piece.

2) I wanted to experiment with more aged and tattered looks, I wanted to make a little book that looked as if it had been well loved for a long time.

3) I’d been reading about the importance of leaving behind examples of your own writing for your loved ones – and remembering how touched I had been when I discovered words handwritten by beloved old relatives, now gone. I thought I should make something that was written in my own hand. I started it in the ‘Box to Book’ project, and continued it here.

4) My recycling bug needed to make use of some cardboard and paper bags and used dryer sheets that were lying about on the desk getting in my way…

So, here we go. The first pic depicts some of the items used in the process of turning a bit of cardboard and a brown paper bag into a faux leather book cover, assembled around the almost finished book:

I cut the cardboard into two pieces. The brown paper was cut to size, crumpled up and generally mistreated. Then it was hit with swipes of ink straight from the ink pad in two colours – my favourites at the moment, Aged Mahogany and Old Paper. The two pieces of card were then joined with binding tape, leaving a small gap so that the signatures could be sewn in

The inside of the cover recycled a used dryer sheet, which has a really nice texture, like old hand made paper – liberally sprayed with a glimmer mist concoction of colours:

The almost finished cover – before the tweaking process:

The pages were made from ordinary white paper, cut to size, tattered along the edges to look like the hand cut paper you used to see in old books and generally mistreated to achieve that well worn look……. I wanted to get something of the look of a palimpsest* to the thing [don’t ask me why, it was just another crazy idea….] so I stamped every page with an illegible handwritten stamp from La Blanche in Old Paper, coloured over it with a coat of Aged Mahogany and then splattered drops of Old Paper in liquid form about, made a coffee cup sized stain on some pages and dog-eared others. I then hand copied a poem or a quote on every page.

The pages looked too plain for my taste, so now the flower stamp you saw in the first photo was utilised on every page and I spent a couple of happy hours colouring in and producing ‘water colours’ . Still not satisfied I hit every page with a good spray of gold glimmer mist for a bit of sparkle.

Detail

The little book looks suitably well worn, with coffee stains, age spots and the glimmer of worn gold still visible on some pages. It’s tatty and dog eared pages contain a wide variety of quotes and poems – from Winnie the Pooh to Khalil Gibran; Rumi to Leonard Cohen and includes Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shakespeare, Yeats, Byron and more. It’s all about LOVE!

With the book all but finished [tweaking!] I turned my mind to the bag. I opened up another brown paper bag and cut it into two, then stuck it back together again. I crumpled it up and mistreated it in a similar fashion to the paper that made the cover of the book. I glued down the medallion and gave it a good coat of multi medium gel for shine and strength and [hopefully] durability

At this point I realised I’d stuck the medallion on the wrong side of the bag and would have to disguise the rather prominent hem, which you can see at the top of the picture ….. so out came the lace and the ribbon and pearls and hot glue gun…… and we ended up with this.

And did you spot the button? It is one from the set that was made a few weeks back which I posted about as ‘Antique Buttons’.

I had fun making this and learned a lot in the process!

Thanks for dropping by, hope you enjoyed it – do say Hi – it’s nice to meet the visitors! 🙂

*Palimpsest literally means ‘scraped clean and used again’

Back in ye olde dayes when few knew how to write and paper/parchment was hard to come by it was common practise to scrape away previous script and use the paper again. It was still common practise in the early medieval period for monks [who did most of the beautiful script work that survives today] to re-use even older manuscripts considered of no importance to produce their work on. A recent discovery is the Archimedes Palimpsest. It has caused great interest when it was found that the original writing was a 10th Century copy of a previously unknown treatise by the renown philosopher. Scientists and scholars are still working together to try and decode it.

The ‘Last Tweak’ Syndrome

Posted on July 24, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

I’ve been playing around with a number of different ideas in my craft room – I have five projects in various stages of completion because I get to the ‘finished’ stage and then think ‘Oh, if I just do this, that bit will look better ……’ Then when I’ve done that I discover some other part of the project would also benefit from a wee tweak………. having done that of course the rest certainly requires being brought up to speed – and so it goes.

This is the case with the ‘Box to Book’ project, which is still in process, but which I assure myself is okay as it isn’t required until Christmas, so isn’t it good that I gave myself an eight month timeline with it …..? 🙂

The up side of all this prevarication and tweaking is that all kinds of exciting discoveries occur which leads to more inspiration, and all kinds of little practise runs happen and this, of course, leads to ‘I wonder what would happen if ….’ and so it continues.

I usually have to say ‘That’s it – no more!’ clap my hands together briskly and exit the room in order to stop the endless ‘last tweak’ syndrome.

Here are a couple of pictures of two items that came into being due to the tweak syndrome

Blue is my favourite colour – so I kept this for me. It dangles enticingly from the reading lamp on my desk, reminding me that tweaking is good!

This one made an appearance when I was first learning how to make flowers and use stamps and has hung around ever since – it holds an inspirational question, which I try to remember to ask myself every day. [If you read my blog you’ll know I fell off the horse with that one recently, but back on again now!]

Any way – the tweaking syndrome has led to another side project that I think is almost finished and which I will post details of in a couple of days – so this has all been a teaser to get your interest level raised – and to ensure that I cease tweaking and get it finished!

Hint: Its a small book in a paper bag ……….and now I hope it’s worth the intro and that you come back to check it out 🙂

Thanks for dropping by!

Quick Cards

Posted on July 23, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

Finally, I’m back with a little something to share….. I’ve been busy working on several projects and none of them finished 😦 but here are three quick cards from an idea I played around with a couple of days ago, but first a quick update.

Living in New Zealand we are very used to earthquakes – the country straddles a giant fault line and the recent events in Christchurch have revealed a new fault line, which may be moving north, and the reason that the latest events have occurred.

My hometown of Wellington, the capital city, has been shaken with earthquakes over the past few days, my eldest daughter lives there and is coping with the endless rocking and rolling, books tumbling off her bookshelves – and she is a book-aholic with bookshelves in just about every room…… Work takes both ED and her partner into the central city with it’s high rises which is always a concern when the earth decides to move!

Needing a bit of a stress relief, it was time to do something relatively mindless……..

I made an oval template and filled in the colour with distress inks, stamped, then coloured – colouring in for grown ups, it is so relaxing! Then I added the greeting and finally matted and mounted. All done in less than an hour.

Thanks for dropping by, hope all goes well for you!

Where Have I Gone?

Posted on July 11, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

Today I got a message on my last post made 19 days ago. The message was from my blogging friend katyoparty over at ArtOutWithYourHeArtOut The message said: “Where are you? I’ve missed your posts!”

What a good question – where am I?

As I pondered what to say in response I rejected all the reasons I might normally give – busy with clients, busy in the art room, busy reading, busy listening to self improvement CD’s, busy with family, busy with Orlando, busy playing slotomania on facebook …….

The truth is I’m not busy, I’m evading.

I’m evading the season, the weather, the emotional pulls that revisit at this time every year,. I’m in survival mode.

And I’m barely making it.

My work as a life coach means I help others find a path through their troubles, I teach them how to change their thinking from glass half empty to glass half full. I encourage, I make them exercise their emotional muscles, I give homework and never accept excuses when they try to fool themselves or feed me red herrings. They tell me I am a good life coach. I know I change lives, I am their mentor and none of them know when I am wobbly. I don’t let them see it.

But it’s really hard to coach yourself!

Having chosen to leave my ultra busy and over extended previous existence to become more quiet and contemplative in my daily life, I live far away from my life long friends and I have no family except my two beautiful and loving daughters.

I’m struggling with a question that goes something like this: how do I remain grateful for all I already have while wishing for something more? The longing for my family to be closer geographically tips me out of my contentment with what is. I become impatient and discontented with my situation. I lose the art of living in the moment, which is my greatest treasure.

Katy’s caring comment went bang straight into my heart. It came at a moment when I was feeling especially vulnerable having just read a couple of posts. One on dealing with loss and the other a really good Johnny Cash quote which hit home quite strongly.

I was on the verge of making the decision to pull myself up by the shoe laces, white knuckle it and get over myself. At a time when I felt really alone and really tired of being alone and really fed up with yet another year when the shadows from my past start to gather about and attempt to drag me back to a place I left long ago.

And somehow that question made it all alright. In this strange and still somewhat alien blogosphere someone notices your absence, someone cares enough to say hey, how you doin’? And a shaft of sunlight blazes into the place where my heart huddles coldly and reignites it.

Thank you for caring enough to send that message Katy. I am here, and I will be just fine now.

And I bet you never expected to get a response like that to your friendly enquiry! 🙂

Creating ‘Antique’ Buttons

Posted on June 22, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

I decided I may need some antique buttons for the infamous ‘Box to Book’ project………… I’m not absolutely sure, but might need to embellish a page or two with some.

I happen to have three Victorian buttons, one is from a beautiful antique night gown I used to wear when I was young and romantic – the night gown is long gone [along with my youthful romanticism – but that’s another story ….] and all I have left are the buttons, which I am a bit reluctant to actually use, as I just like having them lying about in my button box – smiling wistfully to myself whenever I stumble upon them…… which sounds a bit Miss Haversham-ish when said out loud…….

Two of them have such a beautiful hand made look to them ~ the one at the bottom left of the photo is off the night gown and the button on the right may be pre-Victorian and came from a ladies glove. It is very delicate and bendy – that’s a technical term – apparently just a bit of leather covered with some fabric:

I’d recently seen a You Tube video from the remarkable Jennibellie, a talented young English artist who recycles everything and I took inspiration from her and decided I too could make my own buttons!

I wanted to achieve a similar hand made look, but knew I would never have the patience to make something quite so small and would need to be satisfied with a slightly bigger version and mine also needed to be coloured to complement their supposed destination………

However, in true Contented Crafter fashion I completely forgot to take photos until the project was almost complete, so I staged a couple of steps – like this first one

All you need to start

I used half a food wrap inner tube – about the same size as a toilet paper cardboard inner, just slightly weightier. I opened it out and cut it into strips then squares, then rounded most of them up to make something resembling circles. I cut bigger circles and an equal number of smaller circles and had enough to make nine buttons.

I glued one big and one small circle together, nine times. When the glue was dry I punched two holes in each ‘button’ with my trusty WRMK crop-a-dile.

Using the multi-media glue I took squares of white tissue and wrapped each button 3 or 4 times with layers of wet paper. I used black tissue paper on two of the buttons and left them all overnight to set.

This morning they greeted me looking remarkably button like – I was most pleased with them and remembered to get the camera out!

The next step was to add layers of colour and a little patterning for interest:

I achieved this with a base of ‘Aged Mahogany’ and then randomly stamped a little floret stamp in ‘Blazing Red’ over the top.

When the inks were dry I embossed with clear powder to get a glazed appearance for the coloured buttons and made up a mixture of black, gold and green embossing powders to give an aged worn-gold appearance to the two black buttons:

And now I have to apologise for the quality of photos [yes, again!] any light coming into my play-room had been stolen by the black thunder clouds that had moved in and begun to hurl hail stones the size of golf balls at my tiny house………… poor Orlando retired to the bedroom and burrowed under the duvet ….. where I was tempted to join him despite it being 1:00 in the p.m.!!

I soldiered on and kept on embossing until I was satisfied with the results. Here is a close up of two buttons, on the left is un-glazed and the one on the right has been completed:

And here are all nine, finished and ready to go:

One pink button has been treated to a wee scatter of the worn gold mixture and has a satisfyingly well worn appearance, which my unfortunate photography skills have entirely missed capturing ….

Now it will be interesting to see if they make it into the current project – or maybe turn up somewhere else altogether!

Thanks for dropping by – always lovely to see you’ve been! 🙂

Little Free Library: Books Beneath the Willow

Posted on June 20, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

This is such a great idea – I just love it and would like to set one up if winter ever ends ….

Gardening Nirvana

Several times in the past few months, I’ve passed what looked like a tiny, curbside library. I’d heard about these little libraries somewhere, but it was just a vague idea, tucked away in my brain. I had never actually seen one and assumed they were ‘somewhere else.’ Do you know that place too?

Well guess what? We have one right here in our neighborhood. I’m hooked! I finally took the time to stop the car to show my sister, then went back later with my husband, a couple of books and my camera. It was so much fun!

Here is what I’ve since learned about the movement:

It started as a simple tribute to his mother, a teacher and bibliophile. Todd Bol put up a miniature version of a one-room schoolhouse on a post outside his home in this western Wisconsin city, filled it with books and invited his neighbors…

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Box To Book – Part 5 – The Cover Finished

Posted on June 20, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

I thought I’d better post these photos of my progress before I get side tracked [again!]

We are having exciting weather – it was supposed to snow but that appears to have missed my part of the country and we have just had rain – endless rain …… cold, wet, hard-falling rain!

Lots of flooding and landslides and roads closed and bits of the promenade falling off into the wild southern ocean ….. I’m not a fan of weather like this – give me snow any day!

However Orlando is as happy as a bug in a rug – or a cat ….. he gets to go outside to potty and come back in and get a towel down. He loves a towel down! He suddenly finds he has to go potty many, many times in the day – far more often than at any other [drier] time of the year – and, on his return, presents himself side on so that I may touch the wet fur and retrieve his towel and do my job…………..

If I could film at the same time as towel down I’d post a little something for your eddication and enjoyment…….. head back, eyes closed, mouth a little open and rumbling like an aeroplane preparing for take -off……….

However I digress. Here are the last photos I took a few days ago:

The finished cover

The title is made with individual letters stamped onto dyed grunge paper and embossed with gold and rubbed down a bit for a worn look. The antique lace was an after thought – found in my stash when I was looking for something else – and is perfect for just right there don’t you agree?

Lace has been attached to the spine for added texture

The row of tiny pearls shows up in this last photo, nestled alongside the antique lace…..

Currently I’m working on the verses and finishing touches for all pages – I do what I can in between towelling down the cat, keeping the cat warm, singing to the cat, taking the cat for his daily walk – well, I walk he rides in my arms and points the way with his nose – retrieving his lost toys from under furniture and or appliances ……and now and again seeing to the needs of myself or other folk……….

Lovely that you stopped by, leave us a note do….

Box To Book – Part 4: The Cover

Posted on June 12, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

Welcome, if you are a new reader [or follower 🙂 ] here is a brief introduction to this project:

Last Christmas I received a Grand Calibur die cutting machine which came in a large and sturdy box which – in a moment of madness – I decided to turn into a book. There are three previous posts showing the progress I was making – I haven’t made much progress for a while really………….

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So I hit a wall – I was thinking too much and everything I did was awful – truly awful!!

A good lesson for me to learn – stop thinking and start creating!

I got into the rut because I really wanted to make something special out of that box – the idea is to return the box to the original giver in a new form, so therefore I couldn’t muck it up………….. and, of course, therefore I thought too much and mucked it up ….. !!!

So I had a wee paddy and went into the play room today saying through gritted teeth – just go with your gut and play and chuck out all the ‘shoulds’.

And a miracle happened and in just a few hours I made the cover for the book:

I took some cream card stock and painstakingly put it through the machine six times to get the embossed pattern into it. I used stains in ‘Aged Mahogany’ and ‘Brick Red’ to colour it and when it was dry I sprayed liberally with glimmer mist ‘Black Cherry’ to get a slightly worn, but rich red. [NB:- The photos were taken with the low winter sun streaming onto the desk, the colour is not quite this pink in reality]

Then I prepared the inside lining for the cover. The small paper example to the right is the original, to the left after it is sprayed with the same glimmer mist colour. The edges are stained and slightly tattered:

When I had made two boards – front and back covers – I left them to dry and played around with the glimmer mist on some lace and punched a length of pretty paper using a Martha Stewart punch:

I decided it looked a bit insipid, so it too got sprayed liberally with the glimmer mist!

I cut a strip of grunge paper to size and that got a good coat of ‘Aged Mahogany’ stain and came out really pretty – it looks and feels like velvet! Then I attached the dyed lace with a light coat of multi-medium.

There was a strip of the inside paper lying around so I decided to use that on the front cover too, everything was glued on seperately and layered carefully.

Finally I attached the outer spine using a combination of hidden staples and tacky glue and then – fittingly – left it sitting under the weighty die cutting machine – the item which came in the original box – to dry:

When it emerged from under the machine it looked like this:

I’ve started on the title and a little something else which is needed – and I’ve got a line of pearl beads to attach tomorrow – but the worst of it is done. What a relief!

I’m really happy as at last it is starting to look the way I wanted it to – like a really old book that was beautifully and carefully hand made and has been much used and is now just a little the worse for wear ……

Thanks for sticking with it – let me know what you think………..

Orlando’s Revenge!

Posted on June 8, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

Last night, as you may have previously read, I went out for the evening to the historic Carey’s Bay Pub to watch YD eat an enormous Seafood Platter…..

Orlando doesn’t much like it when he is left home alone on a cold winter night.

He has no one to keep him warm.

Even though I leave on the lights, the heating and the music for his comfort and enjoyment.

I even make sure it is just the right music – he doesn’t much care for Bruce Springsteen for instance, that usually means the vacuum cleaner is coming out and he doesn’t much care for the vacuum cleaner either.

I have a play list on itunes which should be titled ‘Orlando’s Music’ it contains a variety of music from Faith Hill to Josh Groban; Bob Dylan to Ronan Keating and Delta Goodrem to Kris Kristofferson and even a bit of Adele, Alfie Boe and a few early Claptons. Nothing too loud and driving as it offends his sensitive hearing …….

Any way, all this is supplied for the comfort of the spoiled rotten little fella – but still when I came home I found him on my dining table, curled up to a dish of potpourri.

Orlando is not allowed to sit or lie on the table.

No one is.

Here is proof that Orlando takes no notice of me:

Look at the tilt of those ears – those are the ears of a Guilty Cat! That, ladies and gentlemen, is a Cat Who Knows He Is Doing Wrong – But Isn’t Going To Move!

The crystal dish does not usually sit on the table, it was left there when I was practising my photography yesterday. It is filled with potpourri and those balls and roses have sandalwood and other essential oils in them.

Orlando likes those smells and often buries his head into the bowl – when it is on the bookshelf which he is allowed on – which sends all the bits rolling about all over the place…..

These photos were taken this morning. I think he spent the night there.

He is still cross that I went out and left him home alone!

Geez!!