Getting organised!

This evening, the desk in my son’s freshly painted room was set up and while he’s at university, I’m making good use of it! I set the sewing machine up and finally got around to creating some origami bags out of the fabrics I bought when we visited my son up north. Fabric is sold by the kilo. To me, this was unusual as I am more familiar with fat quarters and fabric by the metre 🙂

There was enough to split the stash and give my mum some – not sure what she will create out of her lot, but I hope to find out when I catch up with her in the week. She knows I’m making items to sell at a craft stall on 15th November, so perhaps she will be able to contribute to the fundraiser in some way…

Nikon decided to watch me sew and now and again would run off with a strip of material!

My fabric envelope turns onto a cute origami bag (there is an earlier blog post of how I made them, if you’d like to find out and have a go yourselves).

This one of my favourite fabrics – retro telephones. I wish I’d bought more of it now…

This is a bag I made a few months ago.
What I like about these origami bags is that when you turn them around the right way you can opt to have several layered pockets on one side or keep it even with pockets both sides. The fabric I bought in Bolton is perfect for bags too as it’s quite stiff and therefore keeps its shape.

opening and shutting doors

We had a guest a few years ago who travelled all the way from Europe to spend five weeks with us while she studied English.  Her fascination with the range of cakes and biscuits available at the supermarkets meant we were able to sample something new every night.

While exploring the avenues in Somerset, she commented on the ‘quaint’ or cute little houses , the meandering roads and door knockers!  She wanted to take one back as a souvenir and asked us where she could buy one.  My DH disappeared into the garden and removed the door knocker from the spare door propped up along the side of our house and presented her with the brass accessory.  It wasn’t elaborate, ornate or really that decorative, but she danced around on the balls of her feet as if she’d been given the best gift in the world!

Another visitor who came to stay with us from Italy decided he wanted to ram a full size cricket set, Christmas crackers and a fancy dress policeman’s helmet in his suitcase.  It took a while to explain to him that he couldn’t have cricket stumps sticking out of his backpack on the plane.  He wore the fancy dress helmet and somehow got the cricket bat lying across the inside of his case.

I do like old doors like the one in the picture, but unlike my youngest child, I struggle with keys (she can look at a bunch of keys and select the one we need, while I would have to try all of them!).  She also liked to shut doors while my OH likes opening them – and leaving them open!

I recently saw a post on Facebook about doors of opportunity closing and wondered how many times people are prepared to try going for something, for example, how many times would you be prepared to apply for the same job at the same place if it came up again?  Sometimes it feels as if someone is trying to tell you something: try a different route; a different road; a different pathway to get there.  Have there been any places you’ve really wanted to work and so you’ve applied for everything going?  My sister-in-law did just this: she kept on applying to the same company; she kept knocking on their door.  Nothing stopped her enthusiasm and eventually she did get offered a job at that company.

While writing this, I think back to the times I sent off letter after letter to publishing companies and duly received thank you letters with various reasons why they couldn’t publish my short story or reader’s letter.  Through perseverance and probably a lot of gutsy determination, I started getting pieces of my creative writing published.  I began to receive phone calls from editors and prizes.  The buzz began to happen and I began to believe.

Years later, I look back on the doors that slammed shut and the doors that creaked open.  Occasionally, there were doors of opportunity open to me, but I was the one who shut the door.  Have you ever done that?  It can be scary; you start to doubt yourself and that’s when you decide to shut the door and stay on the path that you know.

This evening, I attempted to make an origami rose. I got as far as this and was stumped! I will return to this another day when I’m less tired.

Yesterday was one of those days where the doors decided to shut. The plan was to take my daughter somewhere special to take her mind off the dentist appointment. Considering there is a minor link between fairies, doors and teeth (the tooth fairy), I’m going to share with you what we’d planned. We were going fairy hunting. Yes, after a discussion at work, I found out there was a woodland fairy trail that contains fifteen wooden fairy doors hidden in the trunks of the trees.

Now, a twelve year old might be a bit old in some people’s eyes to believe in fairies, but when it comes to having teeth out, there is the expectation that the tooth fairy will pay a visit 😉
We will endeavour to explore the fairy trail on a less drizzly day and I will share with you some of the dainty little fairy doors that we find. In the meantime, this was a ten minute sketch I did of one of the door knockers as we are going to keep knocking on those doors of opportunity!

And it’s over to Amber Marie!

Ever drank a coffee, a latte, an espresso or cappuccino at
Costa? Well, my daughter Amber Marie has tried and tested every kind of coffee as a painting medium!
Right from a very young age (she’s only 21 now) she has shown a talent for art and had drawings of her cat published in magazines when she was just 3 1/2 years old. Later, she won an art competition for Mother’s Day and came out of school carrying a bouquet larger than she was! Then, when she had just completed her A level art, her teacher selected a canvas by her for an exhibition in Bath. He loved it because she’s painted it in coffee and it had that lovely aromatic scent of coffee beans. At the exhibition, he encouraged the visitors to stand right up to the canvas and breathe in!
Her art has gone from strength to strength. She’s taken a shine to drawing dogs … in biro … large drawings and most recently held her own exhibition of coffee giraffes and biro dogs for the month of September. Following on from this, she was invited to tutor a class of amateur artists and taught them how to paint in coffee and how to sketch dogs from memory.
Although a fourth year languages student, she draws to relax and fundraise. Many of you may be aware of the World’s Largest Coffee morning run by Macmillan. She decided to donate one of her coffee giraffes to be auctioned off at Hartley’s Bistro in September. The owner, Paul Hartley is the guy who writes food/recipe books using Marmite and Vimto (that’s another story).
Anyway, back to Costa. From 1 Nov -1 Dec 2014 there is going to be a silent auction of two different coffee giraffes at the Portsmouth branch of Waterstones 115 Commercial Road, Portsmouth – why not go and see them in store and add your own bid? :

Need I say the obvious? I’m very proud of my daughter (and equally proud of my other two children and their endeavours).

Hamsters, Fairies and Angels

I’ve posted this tonight as it’s half term holiday and tomorrow we’re taking our daughter on a special morning out – I’ll hopefully be able to share some photographs of our adventure (weather dependent), but as she has to have some teeth out at the dentist to prepare her for braces, she may need a bit of TLC on our return. I hope the arts and crafts event at an outdoors National Trust park will take her mind off things and stop her getting anxious (so I’m praying for lovely weather).
In the meantime, here is a quick sketch to illustrate our hamster stirring things up in the household …now of course, we have Nikon – the kitten who loves to nick my paintbrushes, pens, clothes pegs, tights, drinking straws and likes to sleep in the most awkward places!

Doodling clowns

During my lunchbreak I managed a quick clown sketch, which I then turned into a monoprint.

I found the underside of a lemonade bottle produced flower-like stamp patterns, so started with this as a basis for my print.

Then I added strips of torn paper to give a layering effect like this feather print

And even tried out a trail of cotton in the paint

Now I have several backing papers for journal covers and for a future craft project.
The clowns were sketched onto one of the Gelliprinted backing papers using a calligraphy pen and some Indian ink.

Instead of water colours or acrylics, I picked up some basic kiddy paints from the supermarket and as a cheaper alternative to the tubes I’ve been using, I was quite pleased with the results 🙂

Pear and Strawberry Crumble

5oz plain flour
2 oz margarine
2 oz Special K cereal
Dried strawberries
Three skinned and chopped pears
2-3 tbl spoons of water
1oz sugar

Rub the margarine into the flour and add the sugar.
Sprinkle on top of the chopped pears. Add a layer of Special K and then top with the rest of the crumble.
Bake for 30 mins or until light brown.

Hare today …

It’s been a busy day buying paint pot number three for my son’s bedroom. As you may remember, the first 5 litres of pancake mix coloured paint ended up in the footwell of my car and took more than three hours to clear up. The second pot we purchased was doubly wrapped by DH in plastic (witnessed by myself and my daughter). We bought this time andgrey. It went on as if I were painting a chalk board and I can only imagine my son’s comments. I hated it. Not only was the colour too dark, it was also too matt. Can you get too matt? I tried the grey. It went on like pancake mix … Too thin. I moved out from my son’s room and looked at the landing and stairs. Hmmm. Could work as undercoat! That’s where the grey went. He did tell me he didn’t want grey walls anyway. Nor blue actually (but he is getting one blue wall behind his desk).
So today, we headed over to yet another DIY store and found rectangular paint tubs which stack neatly together. We opted for a blue called … Sky and a cream. Better. Thicker. Silk. One wall is now painted, the rest will have to wait until the morning.

Hare today … I did a quick ten minute sketch in biro of a hare in my journal then had a go at the autumn journal prompt.

Today’s word prompt was ‘GUM’. There are loads of connotations for that. I considered taking a photo of the pavements in town littered with chewed gum marks. I could have considered the gummed edge of envelopes as I prepare the envelope book tutorial. I could even have tried to write around the subject of gum trees. Instead, I thought about our family favourite movie, The Night at the Museum. The late Robin Williams was an amazing actor and we were saddened when he passes away not that long ago. I also saw in the news this week that his daughter had just had a tattoo done – a tiny humming bird along the edge of her thumb. So, I’m not sure whether it was those things that drew me back to the movie when I saw the word
GUM this morning or because we’ve watched it so many times. Anyway, the stone statue who asks for gum from the security guard when everything comes to life at night provided me with the inspiration to create a print. Here is my result for gum:

Sticky Dot Dog – an attempt at pixel art!

Pixel art is all around us so I thought I’d try sticking sticky dots to create some pixel art! There are a few areas that don’t look quite dog-like, but for a first attempt at least I can see it’s a dog! I thought a packet of 850 dots would be enough, but I ran out of one blue and had to substitute it for dark blue on the outline. Maybe squared or gridded paper would help me position the dots more accurately? What does everyone else think?

Cork celebration

We were so chuffed at reading our daughter’s school achievements yesterday that I bought her her own bottle of bubbly. There’s a special celebration Schloer which was wrapped in gold and was corked. She opened the bottle and it made a loud pop noise as the cork came out! She giggled and handed me the cork for my printing!

The cork pressed into the gelli then onto paper

The paint applied to the gelli with cork impressions

A bit of both!

The cork was great as it’s shaped well to grip and creates fun textures – I now have some backing papers ready for embellishing 🙂
By the way … There’s still time to enter my free giveaway – check out my other blog at http://www.theelevatorpress.wordpress.com
There’s a chance to win an original gelliprint of a lion or turtle plus a mystery prize! Good luck 🙂

Envelope book

This evening I had a go at making an envelope book using standard envelopes which interlock (you stick the tab at the top of one envelope inside another and build up your pages). Over the weekend I’ll show you more explicitly what I mean – as I need to practise. The first time I did it I used PVA glue and the envelopes stuck together where they shouldn’t and the smaller version also had issues with glue. I’ll share with you the link to where I saw how to do it originally when I share my attempt at it. As it’s late, I’m just going to show you the prints I did this evening in the book, including a go at printing on felt using the gelli and some silver lino paint.

The white felt reacted quite well with the process – it picked up the impressions I made with a lid (for the circles) and the layers of silver and red. I only used a small piece of felt to try out the material, but was pleased with the results.

The book used eight small envelopes, so a double page spread is about A5 in size.

Then I returned to my drying leaves and did a couple of postcard prints ready for a postcard swap – these just need some embellishing before I post them off 🙂

As you can see, my leaf collection is becoming multicoloured and rather fragile!