Doodled flower inchies

I was feeling a little crafty, so a doodled a few little flowers for a mingle on my favorite inchie group. If I am building a stamped inchie on a colored cardstock background, I will layer the cardstock for a base, but if I'm going to draw or paint an inchie, I prefer the diecut inchies I get from Inchiearts. They have a really nice surface for drawing and coloring of all kinds. They have a really nice thickness and weight, too. These little doodles wouldn't look half so nice on GP100.

Cog charms

I'm playing in a charm swap, and I just got a new punch yesterday, so I decided to use my punch to make my charms.


It is an odd punch. Most punches can't make a shape with a hole in it, but this one does, twice - it make two sizes of gears. Unfortunately, in order to do that, the punched piece doesn't fall out of the bottom like most punches; you have to shake it to get the cog out. For that reason, and because you can't see the entire outline of the shape from the bottom, it is a little harder to use this punch, but not so hard that you should avoid buying it if you want it. Just expect to waste a little cardstock making sure you have a whole shape.

Anyway, I only needed the little cog for this project, and I managed to get over 120 cogs from a single sheet of cardstock, so I can't complain too fiercely about waste. It took four cogs punched out of SU gray cardstock to make each cog. After I glued them together with matte medium and let them dry, I heat embossed both sides with a mixture of gold and silver embossing powder of two different thicknesses. This gave me the tarnished/corroded look I hoped for.

I tried different wires and colors of beads, but I found that colored beads tended to draw attention away from the cog, so I stuck with clear glass beads. The glass bead helps, too, in that paper beads don't generally hang well because they are too light.

Like the Maya Road bird, this might be a little too unfussy for most people's tastes, but I usually error on the side of "too little". If my cogs can't stand on their own, adding more stuff to them won't make them better, it will just hide them. I hope that they aren't so bad that they need to be hidden!

Maya road bird

I had so much fun doing the Mary Engelbreit chipboard teapots that I had to join another chipboard shape book swap. This swap is for the Maya Road Bird chipboard coaster books, which the swap host found on sale for only a dollar a book. Each book has six pages and the first page has diecuts. We are to keep the diecut page and the ball chain that connects the whole book, and decorate the other five pages to swap.

This is what I have so far:



The other pages look a lot like this, with slightly different doodling and coloring. The detail coloring is done with glitter pans. The background paint job is done with metallic paints, so it looks a little different in real life - glitter and metallic paints don't scan well.

What I am wondering is whether I've done enough. Will a few layers of paint, some doodling, and some glitter qualify this page as complete, or do I need to add some deeply dimensional elements to add texture? Is the doodling enough, or should I add more detailing?

If I were sending it to you, would you be pleased?

Wired bracelet

I was sorting out my beads yesterday, looking to see what I could use to make my entries for the county fair this year; I thought I'd whip up a little something while I had everything out. I also had a 3 in 1 wire tool I had picked up recently, and decided to give it a test run while I was at it.

I want to say right off that the 3 in 1 tool was a huge waste of money. It did none of the three things it was supposed to do very well because the other two functions kept getting in the way. I do not recommend a tool like this, no matter how hugely inconvenient it is to keep swapping tools (which is why I bought it).



The thing that distinguishes this multistrand bracelet from others like it is that there is 24 gauge wire in the whole piece, rather than thin beading wire or cord. This was nice because I didn't need to use a needle, and it is firm enough to rest well on the wrist. The single large bead adds weight to the clasp side so that the strands stay on the outside. The only thing that I don't like about the bracelet is the rough wirework - the hook is lumpy, and the winding is crooked, and there are barbs sticking out - these are all problems with the wire tool I was using. I will try to fix it with my other tools, but I expect that I will need to make a better one for the fair.

New Catalogs!

All the new stamp catalogs are out! This week I've seen the latest SU, CTMH, and TAC catalogs, but I think the TAC catalog has the most exciting stuff in it! I already have my hostess club purchases mapped out.

One of the really cool things that The Angel Company catalog has that the others don't is the Copic Caboodle sets. I know, you can get Copics online all over, but TAC sells them with matching cardstock! Seriously, this has been my biggest problem with alcohol ink coloring - after I color, it doesn't match any of my paper! Plus, the sets coordinate with the designer papers TAC sells, so you end up with colored images you can USE!

Secondly, they sell stamps that fit perfectly with Nestabilities (yeah, they sell the Nesties, too!) They also sell stamps that fit their punches (okay, SU does this too, but TAC does it better for less money)

I was at Chris's house today, looking at the catalog and doing a couple of make and takes. Here are the cards she had for use to try:



On this card, you can see the frame stamp is designed to work perfectly with the Nestie. You can't make out the damask medallion on the background, but it looks very sophisticated with the speckled paper.



This isn't a new stamp, but it's a great set, and on this card, we colored the image with pencils and blended it with OMS. Chris designs such great cards - It's a pain to drive to Springfield just to stamp, but she makes the trip worthwhile.