So the last three weeks of my life have been about concentrating solely on the children as the school summer holidays are long and with our typical British wet weather and our inability to let our children wander as freely as we did (well me anyway) potentially boring. Hopefully I'm not the only person here who, as a child, was able to play out (in the garden, the park, in the local fields) every day and it's true that I would love to be able to say to my children, "Off you go!" but the reality is that I would wonder what might have happened to them, and they would soon be back. maybe I'm thinking about the times when I was 10 years old......
Anyway, we've done a lot of camping because that is one place where they can make friends and wander off and do as they please as well as having time with me. And I made sure to camp with friends so that I had someone to talk to and I have to say it's been a lovely summer so far. Anyway, I've been home since Sunday and now that the tents are all dry and the washing is all done and ironed and put away and some shopping is done and the shock of my car going for its MOT is almost over (don't ask) I kind of feel as though I can get back on track.
I've got some craft and vintage fairs booked between now and Christmas and so I need to get my commercial head on - ahhh, I'm not sure I have a commercial head.....ooops.....
The thing I've been playing with this week is shrink plastic. Yup, good old shrink plastic. In fact I can remember shrinking down crisp wrappers when I was a kid as the make-up of crisp packets when I was a child was different than it is now and if you put the packet on the grill you could shrink down your Wotsits or Snap packets with the heat from the grill flames.....(gulp - if I caught my two doing that I'd be beside myself!)
Anyway - shrink plastic - if I was rich I'd have a melt-pot and ton of Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel (UTEE). I am not and I don't but I do have a small pot of UTEE and have been researching ways in which to use it with shrink plastic. I'm going to have a play with this over the next couple of days and if I am a good blogger I shall take some pics to show you what I'm up to (cos mostly I play and don't get pics.)
Another thing I'd have if I was rich would be ink jet printable shrink plastic so that I could print some of my vintage and digitally manipulated images onto the shrink plastic and then cut them out and shrink them down and make purdy little things from them. Do you know what though, I've just had an idea.... maybe I can paint some shrink plastic with gesso and then let it dry and print on that? I've seen a tutorial where you can sand ordinary shrink plastic and print on that and I've printed onto the frosted side of frosted shrink plastic but it all goes wrong once you try and seal the image....
I'm still trying to work from a place of *use what you've got* and as the only thing I've bought recently is some shrink plastic I think I'm doing pretty well. I've also been playing with plastics that are in the house in the form of packing and I'll let you know how that all goes once I get a good result that I can replicate....
So all in all, it's not entirely quiet here, things are getting thought about and sort of done. There are another two weeks of the holidays left so feel free to kick my behind if it looks like I'm slacking.
And by the way, I don't think art journalling is for me........maybe I haven't given it enough of a good go though..... oh, and I still don't have a dedicated art space but I think that in practical terms (two children under the age of 9) that's just a pipe dream......
