Rubescent Reveries

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Cards, Cards, And More Cards

©Stampin’ Up! 1990 – 2012

The past month I have been busy making cards for the Barnabas Ministry Team at church and to fill an order from a friend of Tim's for birthday and all occasion cards. It has been fun getting back into this area of creativity. I am so grateful for sites like Splitcoaststampers.com where I can find inspiration from so many talented card artists. Many of these cards were CASEd from examples that I saw on that site and others. I've pinned 300+ examples to my Handmade Cards Pinterest board. You can check there for the originals that inspired these cards.

©Stampin’ Up! 1990 – 2012

Monday, February 27, 2012

I've Been Off Exploring

Life has been busy lately and I have let the time fly by without posting anything. I have added a number of pages and updated them, but just haven't been inspired to write a new post.

This is what I've been doing:

Searching the whole house for all of my art & craft supplies which have been scattered everywhere.
Sorting through said supplies and corralling like items into containers and cabinets.
Cleaning and revamping my craft room. (This is a huge project!)
Exploring new ways of expressing myself creatively: art journalling, altered books, collage.
Discovering Pineterest. WOW, what a revelation!
Discovering many new blogs and websites. What did we ever do without the internet?

The result of all this activity is an intense longing to hurry up and finish my craft room so that I can start playing and making a creative mess all over again. I will post pictures of the transformation of my creative space when I get a chance. I forgot to take any pictures before I started, but I'm trying to remember to do that as i go along now.

My craft room is in the basement of our house; which we bought about 12 years ago from my great aunt's estate. My aunt Lou had a canning kitchen built in the basement and that is what I have appropriated for my craft room. Saturday we tore out the counter and cabinet that separated the "kitchen" from the rest of the finished side of the basement. My younger son, Caleb, was thrilled to be able to tackle the job of demolishing the cabinet. We salvaged the 8 drawers from this cabinet and will upcycle them into a cute shelf/bulletin board and a bookshelf. See my inspiration below.

Seen at Better Homes & Gardens

Seen at Crafty Nest

I have scavenged a desk from my son's bedroom that he wasn't using anymore and we moved our old computer down to my craft room. My wonderful husband, Tim bought me a new flat screen monitor and has been working to get it all working properly.

There is much more to be done down there. In conjunction with the craft room redo, we are also turning the area next to it into a workout room. Complete with a recumbent exercise bike, weight bench, flexible flyer, my heavy bag and speed bag. We still have to take up the old carpet in this area and put down a new floor. I think that we will also paint the paneling on the walls and the rest of the cupboards in the craft room. I can't wait to get all of this finished. But at least the exercise bike is now out of my craft room, yeah.

More updates later.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Just Playing Around

My First Foray Into Making Paper Cloth

After reading a number of tutorials on how to make paper cloth, I knew that I had to give it a try. So yesterday I gathered up all of the supplies and jumped in. I didn't have to buy a thing, I had everything that I needed on hand. When you've been doing various arts and crafts for forty years or so, you have a lot of stuff laying around, just begging to be used. I even got out my rubber stamps, I hadn't used them in a couple of years.

I won't give you directions for making paper cloth; there are so many tutorials out there that do that much better than I could. So I will share links to the sites that I found helpful.

iHanna's Blog has a great tutorial that I followed pretty closely.

Katherine Sands also has a nice tutorial on Art Journal--A Creative Journey. She shows some neat things that you can make with your paper cloth after you make it.

Kelli Nina Perkins has a book out on the subject and judging by the number of mentions and reviews that I've seen on other blogs, it must be really good.

Anyway, I'll share a few pictures so you can see the progression. I forgot to take pictures as I was first getting started, but you can see some changes.

This Photo Shows The Glue Still Wet.

The photos of the paper cloth while it was wet were taken at night so that explains the difference in color, The light overhead gave everything a yellow-gold tint. I used a garbage bag cut open underneath, it worked really well.

Left lower section while the glue was wet.

Lower left corner glue dry, but not painted.

The glue is dry, but I haven't added the stamping, or paint.

Lower left corn with metallic
acrylic paint, ink and stamping added

Lower left corner with metallic
acrylic paints, ink and stamping added.

Upper section while the glue is wet.

Right side glue dry, but no paint, ink or stamping.

Upper section with metallic
acrylic paint, ink and stamping added.

Close-up of upper section.

Upper left section glue dry, but no paint, ink or stamping.

Upper left corner with metallic
acrylic paints, ink and stamping.

Another close up

Close up of poem

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Playing with Color: Poetry For The Eyes

Today I found the Colorapi website and I have had fun playing around with it; coming up with words and phrases to put into the search for photos and color palettes. You don't see the color palettes unless you are actually on the site. So you'll have to try it out yourself to get the complete experience. It is a really interesting experiment, especially if you are a lover of words and of color as I am.

Here are some of the treasures I found:

Icicle Blues