Plant Pots – The Art of Cobwebs

I love making cards for people, but ‘once in a blue moon’, the card I made might not feel like it ‘fits’ the person I’d made it for. And that’s exactly what happened last week.

I made a card to say ‘thank you‘ to my blogging friend, Hannah (she of the wonderful hat pins), but somehow the card didn’t feel right to me. There was nothing actually wrong with the card, but it didn’t seem to ‘fit’ the person I was making it for. I wanted something which was fun. Something with a smile. One that sort of held a visual ‘squidge’ from me, sent in a card, over the miles. So I decided that I’d have to start again. I looked around my craft room for inspiration and my eyes rested upon a stamped image held in a big peg, at the back of my desk, and suddenly a LIGHTBULB MOMENT happened! I knew the card to make.

Readers may remember an image I stamped last week, in Part One of the Guide(ish) to Stamping … this is one of the images I stamped:-

I’d put that stamped image in one of those big fancy looking pegs which holds notes, receipts and ‘stuff’, and I knew instantly that the card I needed to make was going to be made using that image of the Mommy Rabbit hugging and giving her baby a squidge.

Mr. McGregor’s Garden (from the wonderful ‘Tales of …’ stories written by Beatrix Potter) popped into my mind as I looked at the rabbits hugging, and that’s where the idea for the bit of fun I wanted the card to have, came from!

I got my air dry clay out … and made four flat backed plant pots and a little trowel to go with them. The clay is white, so, when the pots and trowel were dry, I chose two colours of acrylic paint for the pots – but instead mixing them together to make one new colour, I kind of swirled them into each other, in a figure of 8 kind of swirling motion, so that when I picked up some paint on my brush, I picked up both of the colours at the same time, in a sort of smudges of each colour way, rather than just one colour. What I was hoping to achieve was a set of pots which looked as if they were old; pots that had been through the wars; a little battered and looked like they really did belong in Mr. McGregor’s garden.

5 Mr. Mcgregor's garden pots — I wanted pots that looked old and a little bit battered. Kind of like the ones in this photo.

While the paint on the pots dried, I worked on the stamped image. It was stamped on snow white card, but I wanted it to sort of suggest that we were peeping and looking at a tender, private moment of the mummy and baby rabbit having a cuddle together (or as my Grandson calls it … “a tuddle.”). I blended two tones of browns using Memento stamp pads, (one a soft caramel brown and then went in again using a deeper brown colour), and blended them around the sides of the card which the image was stamped on so that it drew your eye ‘into’ the image and make you feel that you’re looking through or ‘into’ something … A port-hole? A window? Nooo… you’re looking down a rabbit hole of course!

4 Bottoms Up Down the Rabbit Hole — if you scroll up and compare it to the original stamped image on white card, you can see the difference.

Next … making rabbit bottoms! (There’s a phrase you don’t hear every day!) I wanted to do three different sizes of rabbit bottoms, (ok, this is making me giggle now. ‘Making Rabbit Bottoms’ … that’s what I should have called this post! LOL) … and in three different colours. I didn’t want to do the accepted tan, brown, black or white which you would normally see as colours of rabbits, but wanted to play up the ‘fun‘ so made rabbit bottoms in unexpected colours. I had to trim down the purple woollen pom-pom for the middle rabbit … and that, I’m tellin’ you, is easier said than done!

Twice I cut through the little bits of wool in the middle which holds the whole pom-pom together!, (talentless or uselessness on my part I fear), and at this point I had just ONE purple pom-pom left so the pressure was on! I had to try really hard to not cut through this last one! By now my desk was covered in bits of purple woolly fluff, and tons of tiny purple wool fibres floating in the air. Nightmare! It was stuck to my hands, to my face, to my eyelashes. It was going up my nose (and making me sneeze) and . . . My clothes looked like I was a purple bunny murderer!

But … I got there in the end … in a fashion. lol 🙂

I added bunny feet in contrasting colours – dotting on ‘toes’ using some fine liners, and then adding tails made from fibres of the same coloured felt I’d used for their feet – (just cut up a bit of felt into tiny little bits, then chop them as much as you can with tiny snips until eventually they give in and become fluff). However … the little yellow bunny on the end … her tail was easy to make. I had enough purple fluff to make purple bunny tails for all the rabbits of the world!

I chose some pretty pink with cream dots background paper from my stash – which began life as a 12″x 12″ sheet, and I trimmed it to size. It was already slightly vintaged, so all I had to do to it was add some light(ish) caramel brown ink, but with its toes dabbling in a terracotta colour, into the outer edges of the paper. I added this same paper to the inside of the card too, to carry the colours through the card.

I fixed the bunny bottoms to the pots, and added the pots to the card. To finish the card off … I added the sentiment, and voila! A smiley, fun card for my blogging friend. It was just as I wanted. Something to say ‘thank you’, and send warm smiles, and a squidge, through the post.

My blog friend has received the card, so I can now share it with you without spoiling the surprise.

I don’t think I’ve missed anything … but if I have please do ask about what you need to know, – by just putting your ‘want’ into a comment. I promise I’ll reply.

(Incase you’re new to the blog here: you can post a comment really easily – simply click the little speech bubble at the head of this post – just to the right hand side of the title – and that will take you directly to the comments)

Aaanyhoo … Happy Monday, and Happy 1st of August! When it gets to August my thoughts always turn to …. the dreaded C word.

Yes, you guessed correctly … Christmas!

But … I shall stop right now (as the Spice Girls once famously sang) because before the C word can be dealt with I have a birthday to deal with… or rather …. a couple or so birthdays – so I should concentrate on those first. (Apart from the one birthday … I never send a card for that particular birthday girls special day because .. well because it’s me and my birthday. LOL. Ha! just when you began to think I was being mean to someone!) LOL 🙂

Well that’s me done and dusted so I shall shut up – and you can stop your bottom from going numb. 🙂 …. are you singing that Spice Girls song now? “Stop right now, thank you very much, I need someone with a human touch. Hey you, always on the run better slow it down baby, better have some fun.”. Well if you weren’t, I bet you are now. [cackling laugh heard through the corridors]. ut ohhhhh…. I’ve given you an ear worm! If it gets too annoying start singing the ‘Happy Birthday to you’ song … over and over until you forget to sing it. And .. if that ear worm comes back, simply repeat the singing of the Happy Birthday song. Eventually it will push off and leave your brain song free!

May today bring you warm smiles, happy moments and, remember to . . . have a memory making moment at some point today.

Sending you ‘tuddles’ and squidges ….

As any gardener will tell you, gardening doesn’t stop when the summer sun does, and it was this thought that made me realise that there were very few gardening or ‘plant growing’ cards for gardeners in the autumn/winter months to be seen on the high street (or on hand-made card makers blogs that I’ve come across) at these times of year, so I thought I’d make some cards for those of us who garden and pot all year round!

Card one:

I decided upon warm terracotta and copper tones for this first card and hand painted the little pots on some Neenah card then cut them out and shaped them (just with my fingers) to give them that dimensional look.

The deep ruby-red flower is made from felt with three glass beads in the centre, and I teamed it with two lovely burnt orange skeleton leaves.

The little Bumble Bee actually started off life as a photo corner – ones which I’ve had for a gazillion years! (ok, I might be stretching that a little, but I’ve had them so long that I can’t even remember when I bought them nor where from).

The rim of the pot is made from coppery coloured corrugated card with the addition of a little brown and dotty ribbon, which brings a bit of happy whimsy to the pot rim.

I added a little smile to the inside by adding another hand painted pot, to which I added a ‘seed packet’ – cut from some cardstock which had little seed packets all over the page. I fixed the seed packet at an angle so that I could ‘sprinkle’ seeds falling out of the packet and into the pot. The addition of the sentiment ‘Sow Lovely’ finished the little inside scene off.

Card number two:

The second card began life in the same way (as a Craft Card terracotta pot shaped base) but for this card I cut out papers for the rim and the base then coloured them up so that the pot took on a much deeper colour than a normal terracotta pot in order to give it a more autumnal feel. I added three half daisies along the rim (with Candi to the centres) and added the Happy Birthday sentiment so that they looked as if they were tucked behind it.

The watering can at the bottom of the card is actually a wooden one, which I coloured silver by using a silver marker pen, and added a flower to the centre. The dragonfly, (like the bumble bee in the first card), began life as a photo corner – and again, I’ve had them for ever so can’t tell you where I bought them from – but they’re so adorable and I’ve used them lots of times. I hope that I can still get those from somewhere because I’ll buy them in a heartbeat. They’re perfect for that little accent when you need one).

This time, the inside of the card was a pop up – in the shape of some flowers….

These flowers started life as:

…7 x 2″ square pieces of decorative cardstock, folded and then trimmed to shape, then cut, coloured . . .

. . . and then glued to turn them into ‘cone’ shaped flowers . . .

Then they’re re-folded and glued together in a specific way in order to make them close up and open again as ‘one’ pop up. Once the flowers were in place I added the little heart shaped sentiment to the inside, on a belly bar, over some printed gardening themed text paper.

And that’s all there is to it!

Two cards, both really simple, but both with friendly little smiles to brighten the birthday of someone who still likes to garden even when the sun isn’t there!

Thank you so much for taking the time to visit and check out my blog, it’s really lovely to see you here!