Creating your own craft supplies

 Collage Snippets

We buy so many craft tools, materials, supplies and equipment to enjoy designing, creating and making our arts and crafts. We become interested in what we are attracted to and begin learning about our chosen activities and we draw, cut, paint, sew, experiment, trial, evaluate, appraise and assess our results. We become designers, creators, inventors, craftsmen and women, artists and artisans. We focus on significant interests and activities that give us the most pleasure and we often engage with like minded people and can become fascinated and absorbed by what we do. I know that is what has happened to me over the years and I love being totally wrapped up in creating and hours can pass by without me noticing what else is going on around me. I get totally engrossed and lost in my thinking, research and experiments. When I've finished, nothing pleases me more than that feeling of being happy and satisfied with what I am holding in my hands.

Having said all that keeping up with all the new trends and products can be difficult as everything gets so expensive and we all love to try out new and different things which can cost a fortune. But there are many ways to help us achieve the looks and designs we are happy with without necessarily going for the most expensive all the time. So ...........

Imagine - you're at the point of pulling a design together and for me that often would mean adding a collage to a project to get the desired vintage/shabby/artistic feel that pleases me. BUT I have almost finished that pack of Tim Holtz snippets that I love to use and I haven't ordered a new one yet from Country View Crafts. What can I do as I desperately want to get it finished and not put it away to have to come back to? I have a couple of tricks up my sleeve - one is I have bought some sets of Tim Holtz stamps that will allow me to recreate some of his snippets for myself (see supplies below). The ones I stamped recently are just black permanent ink onto white card so they can be used on their own or can be coloured up to fit any project.

 Brilliant - I create some backgrounds, stamp and cut ready to use. That helps tremendously but they are not always on the right colour background etc, they just don't fit the bill on this occasion. Hmmm ok my next port of call is go to a bag of snippets that I have called 'Household Snippets' and see if there is something there that will make me happier. I peruse through all the small pieces that have been cut from ....

Old Maps

Books

Stationery, particularly posted envelopes.

Packaging - this was the result of just two small boxes.

Other general household items ie new clothes tags, parking tickets, fruit boxes or nets.

They can't be classed as vintage (old books can!) but they are great fillers for when you need them.

What do you use to create little fillers like this?

xx

Supplies

TH - Stampers Anonymous -Tidbits CMS488, Curator CMS493. Paint by Numbers CMS483, Correspondence CMS225, Ornate Trims CMS326

Book It! A Vintage Journey challenge and Eileen Hull Passport Book

I Just love creating handmade books, mini albums and journals etc and as  a child I was an avid reader but all I seem to read about these days is new techniques and craft ideas etc. :o) x

There is nothing better than curling up with a good book to take us away to another place! This month over at A Vintage Journey we'd like you think about books - perhaps you will make a book, or a journal, create a journal page showing a scene from one of your favourite books (do please tell us what book!) or a card showing someone reading or made using text stamps, stencils or word stickers. Just remember to create in one of our preferred styles of vintage, shabby, mixed media, art journaling, industrial, timeworn or steampunk.

I attended a workshop with the lovely Antonis Tzanidakis last weekend and bought some of his papers and stamps to play with. I decided to use these to make a little grungy, mixed media passport style book.

Process steps

1. Cover some black card with patterned paper - I used Mechanical Fantasy from Stamperia by Antonis. Cut two covers from the die.

2. Cut a spine from mountboard, stamp it with the typewriter from Tim Holtz Inventor set.  Daub some paints over it, stamp it and dip in some watery colour washes using the same as you just used.

3. Add some additional colour to the papers and spine, seal them with matte medium and give a coat of clear crackle glaze and leave it to dry naturally.

4. Paint the back of the covers with the titan buff paint. With a palette knife drag over cobalt blue and quin gold and dry. Stamp. Repeat the dragging over with white gesso. Seal with a coat of matte medium mixed with both the quin gold and cobalt blue and when that is dry again give a coat of the clear crackle glaze and dry naturally.  Also crackle glaze the spine.

5. Brush everything (inside and outside of the covers) with oil paint to get into all the cracks, then rub back with a baby wipe and dry kitchen roll to leave the cracks and crevices aged with the paint.

6. Stick the covers to the spine and add embellishments to the front. It was here I swapped the inside and outside covers over. I prefer the painty layers to the patterned papers.

7. Die cut pages with patterned papers and watercoloured papers and insert them as three signatures  into the booklet using elastic.

My book is now ready to use tor any "Stuff, ideas and things"

I hope you will be able to pop over to AVJ to see some other wonderful creations from the members of the team posting this month and maybe we'll see you joining in as well?

xxx

Supplies from Country View Crafts

Stamperia Mechanical Fantasy paper pad - Antonis

DecoArt premium acrylic paint- titan buff

DecoArt Media acrylic paints - Cobalt Teal Hue, Quinacridone Gold
DecoArt Clear Crackle Glaze, Matte Medium

Tim Holtz stamps - Inventor
Eileen Hull dies
Tim Holtz supplies

Media board for Andy Skinner

I have been having fun with chipboards for this project. I love layering up greyboard shapes but sometimes they end up protruding too high especially if you want to use some in a journal or on media boards. So for this project I have soaked some of my Andy greyboard shapes and pulled them apart and it's amazing how you can then play with distressing the layers of the greyboard and even get to put some back together again to create different shapes as I have done here.

I am using a piece of greyboard cut to the size I want as a page for the Andy book I am making.

Process Steps

Paint the greyboard with gesso but do not have too much on the brush so that this almost becomes a dry brushing technique.

Repeat with cerulean blue and prussian blue keeping the edges darker.

Scrape over some gesso with a palette knife keeping it horizontal to the board and getting a distressed look. Dry.

 Repeat with some white crackle paste and this time leave to dry naturally.

Take your chosen greyboard shapes and soak the ones you want to split into thinner pieces and distress. These can be dried with a heat gun.

I split the industrial wings into 4 pieces and took the two thinnest ones for this project. When they were dry I glued them together to create a new shape with a hole in the centre and decided to use a retro palette for the rest of the colouring up.

When they were dry the small rectangle and the heart got a coat of quinacridone red and a wash of carbon black over them.

The industrial wings had cobalt teal hue, titan buff, a tiny amount of yellow oxide stippled over them then a random wash of red iron oxide.

Back to the backboard now it's dry and cracked. Mix a watery wash of turquoise blue hue and prussian blue, paint it over and rub away immediately with a piece of dry kitchen roll. This takes the edge off the white and tones it in with the colours we originally used. It also gives us some nicely defined cracks. Seal it now with a coat of matte varnish.

Use transparent red iron oxide and yellow oxide washes to layer more colour over the background. Dry between each layer.

Use paynes grey as a thick wash to go round the edges use a water spritzer and heat gun.

Stamp the words, add your chipboards using heavy gel medium and finish them with a coat of matte varnish.

It didn't quite look finished to me so I added a few remnant rubs, then I was happy.

The colours are pretty good too. It's not a palette I've used before but I'm loving the retro feel to it.

I'm sharing a shorter version of this over on Andy's blog today for my April DT piece.

xxx

Supplies

Andy Skinner stamps - Stampendous - Curiosity and Unexplained

Andy Skinner greyboard shapes - Tando Creative - Industrial Wings, heart and miscellaneous pieces from kits.

DecoArt Media Fluid Acrylics - cerulean blue and prussian blue, quinacridone red, carbon black, cobalt turquoise, transparent red iron oxide, titan buff, yellow oxide

DecoArt Media Speciality - white gesso, white crackle paste, matte medium, heavy gel medium, ultra matte varnish

Follow In My Footsteps - Fossil panel plus.....

Firstly, although she doesn't read my blog I wish my gorgeous daughter a wonderful and happy birthday.

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I used the instructions for one of the panels I made for Stitches, back in February, and created this Andy Skinner fossil fish tile with a computer generated caption to go with it. To follow the footsteps you need to see the panel I made here. This panel was made around the same time as the linked one and has been sitting in a box so I decided to give it a second lease of life and used it to make a hand made / hand bound sketch book / journal. The paints and mediums I used are all DecoArt media line and the stamps are by Andy Skinner.

I revamped an old technique that Tim Holtz got me into I think in 2011. I revised it when I first started teaching workshops but now updated it again.

I started with this previously made panel.

Using my technique it changed to this ......

.... and then this.

I call this Pitted Enamel and I'm keeping the written steps for a DecoArt Media Team contribution which will be sometime in November, so please keep your eyes peeled for an update.

Once the front cover for my sketchbook/journal was finished I moved on to making the insides. I cut media paper to size, folded the pieces into folios and put two folios to make a signature. I repeated this four times and then sewed the signatures together making a text block using a kettle stitch
binding. I found this video HERE pretty useful but I didn't go on to gluing the edges of the signatures.

 I covered the spine with a gaffa type tape before adhering the front and back pages to the front and back covers.

Just some simple coloured twine for holding the book together ......

.... and what started out as a simple panel has become the cover of a useful sketch, watercolour, note book and is in my shop space to sell.

Thanks for stopping by.

Trust your wings