Almost time to get going again.....

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......

Catch up

I haven't stopped doing stuff, my creativity is being channeled into the school summer holidays - so far I have given my children more camping trips than I ever had caravan holidays when I was a nipper.

When I return I should have ideas and pics about shrink plastic, upcycling, craft fairs and all manner of things.  Ooh, and my *art room*.

Sneak Peek.....

This weekend I'm off to spend some time with my parents and help my dad celebrate his 65th birthday - actually, his birthday was back in February but we haven't been able to get together as a family until now due to my sister and her husband doing so much traveling for their jobs.  Before I go and get ready I thought I'd offer you a sneak peek of some of the necklaces I've been assembling recently;

There's a sort of Steampunk styling to these pieces that I love because I hope that my particular eclectic style still shows through in them and of course each one is unique and will never ever be exactly repeated.  I just adore to assemble these, adding unusual elements like the mica pieces I've stamped and embossed, and the teeny bottles that hold potions (or poisons, depending on your point of view).

To have an art room.....of my own??

When I first moved into this house 15 months ago one of my friends saw the attic bedroom (the third bedroom) and said, "Ohhh, you should make that room your workroom.  You could go up there and work away to your hearts content...."

I took no notice of her words and filled the under-stairs cupboard in the living room with my...well.....everything....fabrics, trims, threads, paints, papers, canvases, jewellery findings and stashes of broken jewellery and stones and ..... well just everything is shoe-horned into one (big) cupboard.  So when I make stuff I sit on the sofa and I surround myself with stuff and I make.  And when it's time to go to bed I put it all away until the next time I can get it all out.

But if I were to have a dedicated room I could leave it out until I was able to return.  I think what stops me is that I've made the attic room into a spare bedroom and some of the kids toys are up there and sometimes they play up there. Plus, even when my daughter is at school my son is still around until he goes to nursery in the afternoons and we are out most morning and.....and.....

Ooooh, just think though......if I put all of my art stuff up there I could play to my hearts content when he was at nursery and leave it all out and go back to it when they were in bed and just have a space to play and be me..........I think I need a place to play and be me........

Long time no blog....

Despite my best efforts to blog at least once a week I've managed to let more than that time slip away from me.

Last week though I was making sure my son was comfy as he came down with a nasty virus that totally wiped him out.  Despite the fact that slept a lot I wasn't able to get much done creativity wise but I did catch up on a lot of house-work!

By Friday he wasn't properly right again but he was a lot better and so I went camping (!) as the trip had been bought and paid for some time ago and I had the feeling that despite the weather forecast saying otherwise we might be in for a spot of good weather.  I was right, and although he was still tired he enjoyed the trip immensely, as did my daughter and as did I.

Here's our tent on the second night:

The coloured lights you can see are all from the 99p Store (anyone who knows me IRL will be able to tell you how much I love the 99p Store) and the big bright light in the middle is a water carrier (from the 99p Store, where else?) filled with water and with a halogen head lamp (£3 from Ebay) stuck into the handle so that he light shines through the water.  It's an awesome light.  Anyway, I was right, the weather was fab all weekend and I'm glad we went.

My garden - hmm......the plants in the garden are kind of okay but not that great.  This is our second summer in this house and tbh the garden is quite dark, it has trees on all sides and it's a Victorian terraced house so it's not very wide.  All of my veggies are growing in pots down the side of the house as that's the place that gets the most sun (ha ha) and even the plants there are "reaching" for the light.  Chard? Hmmm, had a small crop and now it seems to be bolting.  Carrots - getting there.  Spring onions are very slow.....  Peas and beans are doing okish so far and I seem to have flowers on my potatoes so I might have an earlies crop very soon.  At least with the summer we're having so far I haven't had to water anything but the tomatoes.  The toms aren't doing so well though...

Dance-wise things are winding down as they always do in the summer.  Tonight's class was cancelled for myriad student non-attendance reasons and there are just two classes left before the holidays (my children would never forgive me it I didn't stop the classes in the holidays).  Sunday classes have three sessions left and on Friday I teach the last session before the summer break with my learning disability group.  The summer break is a hard one but I'm good at putting money aside so that we don't starve through August!  What has been nice though is that sales have been going well and it's always a pleasure to get emails from customers telling me how much they love their purchases.

So what else is going on?  Well, I am planning a few more adventures in the world of altered art, I need to find some new and inspiring music as I'm totally hacked off with my old music destination since they changed their search format and I'm hoping (foolishly) that the festivals I attend with the children this year will be drier than they are wetter....

As always there is lots to do, lots to think about and plan for and lots of things to try.

Vintage Image Domino Pendants

Last week I finally got my vintage image domino pendants finished and added them to chains or cords so that they are ready to wear.

Here's one of my favourites:

  

Above is the original image, and here's the digitally altered version I used for this particular pendant:

Once I shrank the image down to the right size I added it to a small wooden domino, and put a green rhinestone on the image before adding a layer of Glossy Accents.  And then, after waiting a day or so for the Glossy Accents to dry I was able to drill a hole into the top to add an eye-pin and another hole in the bottom so that I could add a bead accent.

The image is often said to show a belly dancer but in all honesty I think that this is just a very evocative image that has inspired many a dancer to create a costume and mood that has then been attributed to belly dance.  To be honest I do love it myself and have made more than one pendant version of this with different colours and accents.

And tonight what do I find as I'm wandering around the Internet but a new blog I can link to, who are looking for vintage images used in lots of creative ways.  Yay!  So make sure to go and look at the work of some very talented people over at Vintage Artisans and maybe even take part yourself!