Well blow me down! I remembered to make another (the 2nd) ‘Friday Post’! (I hope you’re impressed… because I’m stunned!)
This weeks subject matter is . . .
INTERNETVEXATIONS
I don’t get ‘vexed’ very often. I try to have calm, peaceful kind of days, because those are the very nicest of days to have. However, sometimes there are some things which will make me have a strop like a two-year old has a tantrum and since I can’t have the abdabs and throw myself on the floor, screaming until someone gives me an ice-cream, I’m doing the next best thing; I’m sharing two internet vexations with you.
Vexation of the week Number 1. . . Websites which are programmed to bring down or pull up a window over the window you actually want to look at, asking you to join their email list. It used to be just store websites or places who had something to sell which did this, however I’ve encountered some blog sites this week which have this pop up page asking me to become a follower, and unless I filled in the box and joined the e-mail list it wouldn’t let me look at the site because the page wouldn’t close unless I became a follower! But here’s the thing:How did I know I wanted to become a follower if I couldn’t look at the site to see if there was something there for me to be interested in?What a daft idea! In the end I had to close the whole window in order to get rid of the pop-up. It’s a bit of a shame because they looked like they had promise … but I’ll never know.
Vexation of the week Number 2 . . . Websites which continually have a little window which shoots in from the left or right side of the screen, asking if you’d “like help from one of our advisors?”. I don’t mind them asking once. But once I’ve said ‘No thank you‘, I expect them to be polite and leave me alone until I decide that I might want to take up their offer – or not – as the case may be.However some of these sites bombard you every time you change page, or sit reading for a nanosecond longer than the site is programmed to feel acceptable. Even my Banking-on-line is now set up with this type of ‘let us help you’ window. Grrrr. [sigh]
Well … that’s my 2nd ‘Friday Post’, over and done with.
Do you have any pet hates about the internet? Do share! I’d be interested in having a read.
Anyhoo …. I’m hoping that come Monday I’ll have something crafty worth sharing with you. I’ve been ‘out of sorts’ this week, (despite it being my birthday week … how very dare my rubbish body put a hex on the fun!), and crafting hasn’t been the glorious joy it normally is. So I’m going to try to buck up and get some proper crafting in over the weekend. If you happen to look down on Dorset via the satellite floating above us in the sky, you’ll hopefully see plenty of glitter, puffs of embossing powders, heat spots from my heat gun, and all sorts of bits of paper and card – the rubbish from die cutting – floating up, up, up into the sky. And if you do see that … then you’ll know who’s doing it! 🙂
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.
I’d put that stamped image in one of those big fancy looking pegswhich 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.
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!
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.
But here’s the thing: How did I know I wanted to become a follower if I couldn’t look at the site to see if there was something there for me to be interested in? What a daft idea! In the end I had to close the whole window in order to get rid of the pop-up. It’s a bit of a shame because they looked like they had promise … but I’ll never know.
However some of these sites bombard you every time you change page, or sit reading for a nanosecond longer than the site is programmed to feel acceptable. Even my Banking-on-line is now set up with this type of ‘let us help you’ window. Grrrr. [sigh]
The Art of Cobwebs 