‘Believe’ | The Contented Crafter

Wow, lookit me go! It’s still January and here’s another post! I hope it won’t be too much of a shock for you.

I’ve been pottering, and the silver lining to the no-show summer is (Ta-da!!) the tiny house has now been entirely decluttered. I mean ENTIRELY! There is nothing in this house now that is not useful or beautiful and probably both. The laundry was the last space holding onto ‘someday’ things. The last drawer has been sorted and tidied and there is nothing left to do now but keep it all ticking over nicely. Can you see my halo, isn’t it bright and sparkly ……..

I rocked up to my local stationers a couple of days ago and had them scan all twenty of the pieces in the art journal I worked on for the last three months of 2016. Plus print out copies of all the yupo paper/alcohol ink pages I had made. I’d decided to copy the ink spreads and then doodle so that I have lots of options to play.

Did those last two sentences sound like a foreign language to you? Read on my friend, read on.

Yupo paper isn’t paper, it’s a synthetic, a plastic pretending to be paper. It is therefore classed as a non-porous surface and things can be done to this stuff that can’t be done on paper, no matter how many gsm’s it is.

It’s also, at this end of the world, horribly expensive and something I intend to try only once in this life. Hence the photocopying before doodling remark. I treated myself to fifteen sheets and waved a fond farewell to $25.00.

One of the really fun things we can play with is alcohol inks, dripping drops of different colours onto the page and watching what happens. The ink spreads out and ‘blooms’, changing colour somewhat at the edges, more with some colours than others. Mixing different colours together results in different spreadings, different blooms, and sometimes even no blooms. It’s like taking part in some mysterious class in alchemy and is totally fascinating to observe.

When the dripping and watching and wondering is done and the inks are dry (which doesn’t take long at all provided you don’t over drop in the first place) you doodle. Doodling is also fun! It can be done in front of the TV if you are so inclined, or can just be a quiet, meditative activity that steals hours from your life 🙂

Here’s some examples of the ink drops

Here’s one I have started to doodle on

And here is the only spread that is finished so far.

And here is that last spread cut into four pieces and note cards made using different coloured card and with writing paper inserts. The following two photos taken at the desk, under lamp light, in the middle of a dreary, wet day:

Notecards 1

Notecards 2

I’m not complaining though, we had three lovely sunny, warm days on the trot. It was quite exciting!

I have to say I really like these notecards, and in the interests of encouraging the renewed interest in letter writing, I’m going to package some up and put them in my shop. And do a giveaway. Stay tuned for that.

‘Believe’ is finished.

This is a texture rich piece and there’s also a ton of gold metallic paint in there so it looks entirely different in different lights. This is a slightly skewed scan, which is entirely unexciting as far as mood lighting goes. You must therefore use your imagination to see all the gold glimmery bits. Sorry about that.

I’m quite pleased with this one.

I hope you like it too.

So what do you think, are you tempted to play with yupo paper and alcohol inks? Have you done so already? How did it go for you? And what do you think of those notecards?

Thanks for coming by today, I love that you did!

She was here for a couple of days earlier in the month, Lady Summer, but seems to have given way to a resurgent and surly Winter who still has something to say.

I used to call the city where I live ‘The Riviera of Antarctica’. I had good reason for doing so, low rainfall in the extremes of the year and high sunshine hours too. Lately though it seems we have been upgraded and now reside as the Capital of Antarctica.

There were, I was told a couple of days ago, four cruise ships coming into harbour to dispel their thousands of well-heeled patrons into our fair city to enjoy a day or two of Southern Hospitality. (Please bear in mind I don’t read the papers or listen to the radio so all my gossipy news is picked up at the dog park, where I loiter around with a mismatch of folk while our pets chase each other round in ever decreasing circles in an attempt to keep warm. So I may get actual facts slightly wrong.) Anyway, they picked the wrong day to arrive. For a ‘Weather Bomb’ also chose this time to put in an appearance.

Apparently old man Winter was really p***ed off about something and he hurled a few icicles our way along with torrential rain and winds that drove the rain horizontally against the landscape. I spent yesterday with the heating on, tucked in a blanket watching the one hundred videos saved to my ‘watch later’ tab on You Tube and pretending I lived in the far north of Canada where I was enjoying a really pleasantly mild winter.

I have no idea what happened to the hundreds of well-heeled tourists, but I imagine they retreated back to their cruise liners and waited patiently to be taken to a more salubrious part of the world. I did hear that one of the ships, an especially large one which sometimes has trouble making port due to time and tides and its immense size, nearly keeled over in the wind, but that might just be an unfounded rumour.

Just bear all this in mind if you ever meet somebody who says they went to New Zealand one summer, had a cold and miserable time and the hurricane level winds almost caused their gigantic ship to capsize. They were probably on that particular liner.

Any way, with all this inclement summer weather I’ve spent a deal of time playing about in the art room and trying to find my painting mojo again.

I made cards. I cleaned up and cleared out THE STASH…. We crafters never throw anything away because it can be used on something, somewhere, one day. I have stuff I’ve kept for ten years or more and, as I’ve cleared out everything else in my tiny house, it’s now time to clear out some of the ‘someday stuff’ that makes up a lot of THE STASH. I figure that if I live to be 100 and make a card every day, I still won’t have used up all the stuff lurking about in that pile of ‘someday I might be just what you are looking for’ stuff. So, I used a ~~lot~~ teeny bit of that stuff on the cards I made, which slowed me down no end and made me realise why I’d never actually used it up before. I’d spend so much time sifting through piles of stuff I’d forget what I wanted it for by the time I found it.

To be honest, I was also prevaricating. Delaying the actual moment when I would start work on an actual canvas……. it’s always so terrifying for me – I wonder if it is so for every other person who paints.

Any -hoo, back to the cards, here’s a selection of cards ready for next Christmas – made using the same embossing folder and different paper remnants, some worked, some didn’t……

The onto the stash scraps and bits and pieces. Small note cards to start

Large greeting cards, all made using my hand made papers and various ‘stash’ items

In between card making I spent some time acting as Chief Consultant and Shopping Assistant to my daughter, the Official Photographer who is doing up her new flat and who had decided she wanted a ‘pinkish’ bedroom.

We made the headboard and used that as the jumping off point for what ever came next. While we were busily attending to the fiddly bits, young Sidd-Arthur was also busy making sure the bed was nice and comfortable for her…… that’s his rear end you are looking at