Thank – The Art of Cobwebs

Daughter No.2 is Little Cobs’ (my Grandson) Mummy. She’s not been too well and I knew she was in a pickle to get out to buy thank you cards for teachers and helpers at the end of term time for Little Cobs. (Why she doesn’t just get all her cards from me -f.o.c. – is a mystery!). So I offered to make the cards. She needed three altogether and she left it up to me to design and make them. (she trusts me! Yup, she’s crazy, I know!)

So for his teacher, who he loves, worships and adores to the moon and back … I made this card….

… Made using Altenew Stamps (roses). I decided upon the wording first, – oh, and where it says ‘Little Cobs’ on the photo there … in real life it actually has his name there, in the same font as the one I used for the sentiment, just smaller in size. It says beneath his name, if you can’t quite read it: aged 6 – because he is! See … he and I are so close in age (’cause I’m 7 as you know) and this is why we get along so well and understand each other. 😀

Once the sentiment was printed, I stamped the images – 6 roses and some leaves, and then onto some spare card, I stamped two more roses, and fussy cut those out then added double-sided foam tape to the back to fix them to the card, in order to give it a little dimension.

To finish the front off, I added some Aurora Borealis sequins and a sprinkle of pearls in three different sizes.

The back of the card … well I resisted the urge to write: Made by Grammy Cobs …. and instead did the proper thing …

… if you can’t read it, try this one – I blew it up a little ….

And that … is all there was to it! To be truthful, it sounds harder than it really is. There are two more cards, but I need to re-size photo’s of those so it’s just ‘Show and Tell’ for this one today. 😀

There was sadly no painting going on over the weekend as I had a doozer of a headache and even the thought of painting was too much. I doubt I could have come up with an idea to make into a picture other than black, black and more black.

But normal service is resumed today. I began to paint earlier but then ended up having a mega chat via text messages with daughter. It would have been so much easier had I spoken to her on the phone – and darn quicker too.

These kids now, they have this monkey thing going on with their thumbs and can type out a chapter of a book quicker than I can find my smilies on my phone to add to a three word message! I’m just tooo s…..l….o…..w at texting. Typing on a proper key board I’m fine at. I’m a trained touch typist. (not bragging, just tellin’ ya) But longish nails combined with teeny tiny keys and then add a sprinking of idiot to the mix – all that, in charge of a cell phone, – well let’s just say it doesn’t make the perfect scenario!

So anyhoo… … I began to paint, but ended up having to pack things away and continue the hour-long texting session. However, … I’ll be back in my craft room tomorrow and hopefully finish the painting off and photos will follow.

For the girls reading: It’s a watercolour life study of a naked man – Mr.Cobs posed.
For the men … it’s a painting of a Kentucky Fried Chicken Family Bucket, with a bottle of Coke sat next to it.

… (and if you believe it’s either of those things then you’ll also believe I can knit jelly!)

In the meantime … Have a Happy Tuesday. Be kind. Be brave. Be beautiful. Be you. For you are truly amazing, just the way you are.

Thank you for coming. It means the world to me to see you.

Have a good day, where ever you are. And where ever you are, may your God go with you.

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!