I don’t venture this far into Mixed Media normally but I needed to break away from the madness of Christmas Card Making (yes, it has begun). There’s nothing like getting almost all your crafty stash out on your desk in order to choose bits and bobs to team together so you can make a bit of Mixed Art, to stop you from becoming stir crazy when trying to produce many greetings cards which are all different, but on the same ‘theme’.
I began with a plain tag. The tag itself is quite a large-sized plain Kraft tag, from a book of Tags made by Craftwork Cards – which I bought quite some time ago, and am just coming to the end of the book.
To begin with I applied Gesso all over the tag, followed by; crackle medium; paint; some gauze; and once dry, I added a variety of doodads, trinkets, baubles, etc, in wood, metal, plastic and added a variety of sizes, shapes, and colours of pearls and glass beads.
I then used Brusho’s Crystal Powders (which I’ve talked about before on the blog here so won’t bore you to death banging on about how brilliant they are) to add colour and give the tag added depth.
The ‘Live Your Dreams’ message looks like a printed bit of paper in the photos, but in fact it’s actually an acrylic cabochon, which has a ‘diamond cut’ effect. I managed to take a close up with the flash on and I think you can see it a little better here….
…. all those white diamond lines are the ‘cuts’ of the cabochon.
I know the finished tag looks like it would be really thick and very weighty, .. but it’s actually not. Take a look …
I don’t often wander into Mixed Media Art, simply because I have no idea what to do with the art after it’s all finished! Although I love to play and make it … it doesn’t really ‘suit’ my wee cottage . . . so I have no idea what I’m going to do with whatever I’ve made, and … there are only so many bits of stuff that I can pass onto family before they begin to groan at the words: “I’ve made this thing … and I wondered . . .”.
So … I have another bit of artwork to add to the box labelled: ‘Pop it in here for Now’.
Anyhoo . . . HAPPY MONDAY! Thank you so much for coming for a visit. 🤗 Monday hugs to you. …. and … a joke: What do you call a tick that lives on the moon? A lunatic. Think about it … think some more … THERE Y’ GO! (I heard the penny drop from here!!)
I hope you have a truly great start to your week. May the rain (if you get any) be soft on your skin. May the sun warm up your world in such a way that it makes your mood bright. And may you find plenty of places to discover joy, love, kindness and gentle words.
Be nice to each other. It makes the world a far happier place to live in.
I wanted to send a card to a fellow blogger – Berverly of More Ink Please – not for anything in particular, but ‘just because’. I couldn’t share the card until she’d received it as it would have spoiled the surprise. But, I got an email from her at the end of last week telling me that the parcel of ‘Happy Mail’ had arrived, so I can now post details of the card here on the blog.
Because I live by the sea I wanted to send her a card which made her think of the ‘Seaside’, and that’s why the card itself is all about the seaside.
It has a little Tibetan silver bicycle leaning up against the Beach Huts.
And someone is flying a kite …. which has a tail of ribbons! . . .
Two smaller pictures featuring Beach Huts stand proud of the card itself, by being mounted on foam tape.
The fun, and colour, continue inside with a teeny bit of zentangling and a little bow.
The Bunting and sentiment (‘With Love and Best Wishes’) were added to the front, and a silver metal airplane – ‘flying above’ – was fixed to the card, in the skyline.
Finally a little brassy coloured (metal) vintage style post card finished off the front.
And that’s all there was to it!
For those of you who don’t know the song which is the title of this post, I’ve been and collected a YouTube video… but if you know the song by heart, there’s nothing to stop you clicking and enjoying. The song was written in 1907, and this version was sung in 1909 by a music hall singer called Mark Sheridan.
We have beach huts here where I live, but they’re not quite as fabulous as the ones on the card. . . .
However … a couple of years or so ago a designer (who some of you may have heard of) did a Random Act of Kindness – but she called it: a Random Act of Kidston . . .
… and she covered some Beach Huts in her fabric designs, – she made matching deck chairs, and put matching bits and bobs in the Beach huts. It caused quite an impact. People were coming from miles away to see them. This following hut is my personal favourite…
It’s a typical Cath Kidston design and so me. I love it.
But … if wishes came true …. I think I’d want a Beach Hut like one of the ones on the card I made for Beverly. There’s something so friendly and smiley about them.
Thank you so much for coming and spending some time around the kitchen table and sharing a coffee with me.
Have a truly lovely start to your week. Be good to yourself, and each other …. and may your God go with you.
Sending love from me in my corner to you in yours ~
P.S. . . . Dear Lord … hello, it’s me again. Ummm.. it’s about the weather. It’s hot. Very hot. VERY, VERY HOT indeed. It’s causing me some problems. One of which is that I appear to be melting. I know I can’t be sweating … because my mom taught me that ladies don’t sweat. According to my mother, ladies ‘glow’. Well … I’m really glowing here. REALLY glowing. So … I’m wondering … could you please turn the heating down a little bit? A little biggish bit? Not just for me but also for my plants, and for my three fur babies. Alf Capone, Maisie Dotes and My Little Fat Bitch aren’t coping well with this level of hot. I’ve just taken a look around my living room and down the hallway …. and it looks like a murder scene. All my four-legged companions are ‘as if’ dead. Now if I’m hot and I’ve only got shorts and a t.shirt on, then these four-legged babies must be SO uncomfortable because they’re all wearing fur coats!
I’d be so grateful if you could turn the heat down. Thank you. ~ love ~ Cobs. x
Regular readers of my blog will remember that I have already blogged a Recommendation on Anita’s 3D Clear Gloss many moons ago. However a fellow blogging buddy [the wonderful and immensely talented] Astrid, wrote and asked me how well Anita’s Gloss stuck things. I couldn’t answer this truthfully as I hadn’t tested the Gloss for ‘stickability’ so we’ve been testing it (via emails – as she lives at one end of the UK and I live at the other) – and I’m back here sharing the results with everyone – so that you all know too, – and I’m Recommending this product againas Craft Product of the Week, simply because of the great results I got from this ‘costs way less than that other particular brandof Glossy stuff which you can buy from the hobby retail outlets‘.
I’ve taken before and after photo’s … but … they aren’t brilliant in standard. It’s dark and dingy weather here, and no matter what lights I had on or off, I couldn’t get a decent photo. So … my apologies for the rubbish photos, but they’re the best out of a bad bunch of over 40.
The ‘before’ photo – so that you can see what types of things I chose to stick with the Anita’s 3D Clear Gloss:
Combination of items I experimented with to test out the ‘stickability’ of Anita’s 3D Clear Gloss
You can click on all of these photographs in order to make them load bigger – but remember to click ‘back’ in your browser so that you come back to this page to continue reading.
I scribbled on the scrap card so that I could show you what I stuck and where I stuck it.
The Glass Beads selection of 7 types, are (as you’re looking at the photo) bottom left and bottom centre.
All the 8 various different metal charms are top left and then trailing down into the middle of the card.
Top right are a mixture of flat back plastic (pink) pearl. Flat back glass Dew Drop (in clear pink), and a little mix of plastic gem type stones.
Bottom right is a green plastic button
The metal charms: Some are flat, but others are undulated or are more of a rounded back, and the Angel (in the top left corner) is hollow back – but I wanted something larger so that I could pour liquid all over it to see what happened – so this seemed like a great one for that test as it was all bumpy.
The Angel you can see close up in this ↑ photograph, and you can see how I totally smothered it – just so that I could see what happened. The two ‘Made with Love’ little heart charms – I put a smaller dot of medium on the uppermost one, and a large blob of the medium to stick the lower positioned heart – just so that I could test one against the other for stickability. The ‘doughnut’ or ‘polo mint’ embelli just had three tiny little dots of medium on it.
The glass beads: I chose two different sets to squeeze a little (and it was only a little) of the gloss over them, to see how it behaved and so that I could compare it to the to the other glass beads which I simply lay on top of some of the 3D Gloss which I’d squeezed out a tiny bead, and spread it slightly, then popped the glass beads on top of it and with my finger, I gently pressed to make sure that the beads were in contact with the medium. I then left them all over-night.
The following day, everything was stuck firmly. I turned it upside down and gave it a darngoodshaking. Nothing fell off. I set it flat and holding on to the card, I pushed each of the items very firmly. Nothing moved. I took my index finger and flicked each one repeatedly with a good flick, over and over, and I know that with some other glues this action would have been enough to send some of those things flying across the room – but nothing moved.
The Glass Dew Drop was a real surprise to me, as I’d not found anything (up till now) which would stick those little b*ggers securely – but this 3D Gloss had done the job.
But the real test was to try some really rough handling. So since I hadn’t been able to move any of these things by the type of basic rough handling (which I would say they might possibly encounter on a postal journey) … now I wanted to really tug on them. I wanted to force them to part company with the card:-
The smothered Angel… she really was very well stuck and I broke a fingernail getting her off – but she didn’t come off the card, the card came off the card with her. She was still stuck to it.
The little metal heartwhich was stuck on more lightly than the other – also stuck fast. The metal hand– again so well stuck that it pulled the card off rather than it was pulled off the card. The metal charm I thought would be the easy one was the irregular shaped open heart with the arrow through it – but again – it pulled the card off with it.
The Dew Drop was probably the easiest – but that didn’t part with the card, it again took the card with it.
I couldn’t get the plastic gems off at all. (and didn’t want to risk another fingernail).
The glass beads… the only ones I got off ‘easily’ (but not really) were the big charcoal coloured round ones – but again – they brought the card off with them.
If you click on the ‘after’ photo above it will open up much larger so that you can see the results for yourself. (remember to click back in your browser again though so that you come back here).
All in all – I was stunned and amazed at what a great job it did of this ‘stickability’ test, and because of that I’m repeating my Craft Product Recommendation so that you can see for yourself the results of this test which Astrid and I decided needed to be done!
Thank you so much for sharing a little of your time with me, here today. I really appreciate your company, and if you’d like to leave a comment, please do – even if it’s only to say hello! I so love to hear from folks who come for a read.
Have a truly fabulous Tuesday. Do something today which makes you happy!
The Art of Cobwebs 