halloween trees - spooky and sparkly

first off, this weekend was AMAZING. i'll post more about it once i have time to edit photos and write everything up, but Trish was a wonderful teacher, and there are so many incredible things that you can do with encaustics. i have a million ideas running around in my head, of course, the day before i go to pick up my new embroidery machine and software! too much inspiration at the same time. it's too bad it can't be bottled and kept in reserve.

in the meantime, halloween is getting closer and closer, so i thought i'd post another halloween project.

trees!

i saw a variation on these in a christmas magazine, and immediately thought "white?! they'd look even better in black!"




i did mine a little bit differently. i used 3/4" dowels, because that's what i had, and i painted them after i drilled them. i can't imagine painting them first, as they chipped/splintered a bit when they were drilled, and i had to sand them smooth. you'd just have to repaint them anyway. i also didn't make my trees as tall, i cut the dowels at random lengths.





and instead of the foam in an urn base, i used blocks and triangles that were leftovers from a recent project. i drilled a hole in each block with a 3/4" drill bit, and the dowels fit in nicely. after i painted them, i used white glue to coat each edge lightly, and pressed them into black glitter.



i used a spray adhesive to apply the glitter, and that made them look a little more matte than i'd like. i think i'm going to spray them again with a gloss, to bring out the glitter, and to help it stay on. but i like them.



and i can't wait to make a tall silver one for xmas!

sparkly 3-D sacred heart challenge entry!

i missed thursday again!

this past week has felt so damn busy, time's just flown by! i decided to make myself be crafty, regardless of how i was feeling, which kind of backfired. i got a bunch of stuff done, but damn, i'm feeling it today!

one of the things i did was create an entry for the papercrafts challenge on craftster.org. i had my project all planned out, but didn't think i'd have time, so i wasn't going to enter. then racky got on my case, and started nagging... i'm so glad i did it, and i finished in the nick of time!



the challenge was called "chinese menu", and the idea was, like a chinese food menu, you could choose between various supply options in each category. you had to pick one thing from column A, and two things from column B. these were my options!

Column A
take out menu
newspaper
junk mail
old postcard

Column B
magazine or catalog
phone book
childrens' book
sheet music
advertisement flyer
brown paper bag

as soon as i saw the criteria for the challenge, and read newsprint, i thought papermache! that's what you do with newsprint! (i also used sheet music, phone book pages, and fliers)

keep in mind that i can remember only 2 papermache projects i've ever done in my life - a big pig shaped piggy bank in grade 5, that never dried and eventually they all got moldy and we threw them all out, and a giant 2.5' tall (yes, 2.5 feet!) boot that i made in high school, over 10 years ago now (i'm old, i know! ;D).

but i remembered the basics. i started out cutting a heart shape out of heavy duty cardboard, and crumpling up balls of newspaper. i used an excessive amount of masking tape, and taped all of the balls to the cardboard.


then i hauled out the flour and water mixture and went to town!

i was really trying to avoid pages with a lot of images or ads on them, so i ended up using the classifieds. this step took FOREVER to dry, i didn't think i'd get this done because of it! i would have liked to have done another layer or two, to even it out a bit, but there just wasn't time. of course, my sister told me the "put it in the oven" trick AFTER it was finally dried!

once it was dry i sanded it to get rid of the sharper edges of dried papermache, and painted it with watered down acrylic paint. i wiped off paint, so that you can still see the newsprint below.

(i used Kroma cadmium dark red. kroma's a fabulous local paint manufacturer)

after the paint was dry, i sprayed the heart with a matte medium and sprinkled it with glitter. glitter makes EVERY project better! ;D


then i started prepping the non-heart pieces!

i took a piece of cardstock and sprayed it excessively with walnut ink (tsukinek antiquing solution) on both sides. i wanted the brown shade to be mottled, so i rubbed the ink around with a piece of scrap fabric. once that was dry, i printed sheet music out on it that i'd found from google images. i didn't use any of the sheet music i already had, because i needed the paper to be sturdy, and because i needed it to be printed landscape for the extra length to fit around the heart. as it was, i had to join two 11" pieces for each twist.

i cut the paper into 1/2" strips.

i ripped some pages out of our very old yellow pages for the flames, choosing to use the pages that listed churches and other places of worship. i thought that was fitting. i brushed the yellow pages with a watered down yellow paint (kroma arylide yellow).


then i went through the fliers in the recycling bin and ripped out pictures that were red, yellow or orange in tone. they all ended up being from supermarket fliers, tomatoes, oranges and a beef roast!


i brushed the flier images with a watered down combination of the red and yellow paints.


once the flier images and the yellow pages were dry, i ripped them into slightly triangular shapes for the flames. i gathered them together and crunched them up, and used even more masking tape to attach them to the back of the heart.

then i sprayed the entire piece with a few layers of satin gloss.

seriously, DON'T do this inside, even if it IS 2am!

once that was dry, i added the thorns/vines. i took the 1/2" strips of brown paper and started twisting each end in the opposite direction. because i didn't want to wait for glue to dry, i attached two stripe together with fiskars photo mounts! (it was 2am, okay?). i wrapped the sheet music vines around the heart, adhering them with yet more masking tape.


and then i sprayed the whole thing again, multiple times, with satin medium! i would have preferred gloss, actually, especially with the glitter (it really popped when the paint was wet!), but i can't find any in my disater of a studio!

and it was done!


hanging in my bathroom, where it was intended for!


(if you want to see more pics of my bathroom, there are some older ones here!)

so what do you think? i had a lot of fun making this, and i think i'd like to play around with papermache more. voting will start tomorrow! voting has started!

crafting of last night and this morning....

props! my mom's in a play (did i mention it starts TODAY?) and by dress rehearsal last night, she still didn't have all her props!. enter me, her favooouurrite child!

so here they are. i really had no clue exactly what these were supposed to look like, so it was google image search to the rescue! are they recognizable? do you know where they are?

copper wire, copper coloured embroidery thread, and a bit of white bobbin thread as the string

i added a bit of glossy accents on the ends too - it won't read from the audience, but i couldn't find any sandpaper to smooth out the ends of the copper.



shrink plastic and black embroidery thread



i know the hooks are wrong, but i didn't have the right ones, and i just needed something to pick up the stage lights. it really won't read from the audience.

she was happy with them, and it was fun to take a break from my usual stuff and make such random items!