Debbie here with a transformed trug.
I found these ugly boxes at a local shop, I sanded the surfaces and painted with two coats of white emulsion paint.
I made my own texture paste and using a stencil made some texture hearts to decorate the trug.
Once dry I started covering the trug with acrylic paint mixed with water to give it a washed out effect.
I used more acrylic paint on the edges to give a slightly darker effect.
Thanks for stopping by its a Creative World.
Debbie x
The time has come for the tooth fairy to start visiting our house again. Rosa (that's her name) has collected Emma's first tooth and will return it to me when she has removed the magic,so I need somewhere to store these little treasure!! Enter an old Altoids tin that has lurked in my stash for some time.
I wanted a magical little place so have filled the tin with pva beads and a delicate little blossom.
Once it has dried it gives me a lovely sparly base to store the teeth!
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I've decorated the lid with buttons and various embellishmentsand a little stamping.
Now I have a lovely little trinket box for Emma to open one day and marvel at how tiny her little teeth were, although I;m going to be doing it myself until then!
Hope the sun is shining for you,
Lau xx
I have had this thimble display case for a couple of years and decided it was time to alter it.
After two coats of white paint the dark brown wood was still showing through so I decided to go with a light blue colour.
I thought the wooden roof was particularly awful, so used it as a template to make a replacement chipboard roof.
I filled each section with a mixture of patterned papers ( a really good way of using up your scraps) and stamping.
The edges of the shelves were made using a border punch.
I haven't filled all of the sections but may add more as time goes on. The two characters are Milly Molly Mandy from one of my favourite books as a child, and Nurse Nancy from Twinkle magazine. I traced the images and coloured onto shrink plastic before shrinking with a heat gun.
I hope I have inspired you have a go at altering your own thimble display!
Thanks for stopping by It's a Creative World
Debbie xxx
Hi everyone – Dolly here.
I think I must have a bit of a reputation amongst my friends for the person who hoards boxes of every shape and size to ‘alter’ and transform. One of my friends brought a notelet box in and aid that as it opened in a really unusual way she thought I would like it.
And I did.
It as a really unusual box – approximately 4 ½” square – that opened by pulling the little ribbon at the corner to reveal three little trays, perfect for holding three little mini books.
We have three favourite hotels that we have been lucky enough to stay in many times and so that was the theme I went with – one mini book for each hotel.
I made the three mini books as 10 page (5 each side) accordion albums cut from cardstock.
I kept them simple but themed each one in keeping for the hotel so lots of pastel coloured tropical flowers for the Caribbean Beach resort and of course playing cards, dice and money for Las Vegas
You can see how the box opens in the picture with the three books nestled in their individual trays.
The problem was how to decorate the box as due to the way it opened, covering it with paper was not going to be an option. I knew that just painting it would be difficult as the box was very shiny and that paper covering would crack as it had to bend in several places.
In the end I coloured it with alcohol inks to try and give a sort of tortoise-shell effect using five different colours and building up the layers.
I decorated the top with a piece of leather effect thick paper I bought a sheet of in Michaels years ago. I added a couple of stamped images and a leather word strip and finished it off with some paper roses.
Finally I printed suitcases on glossy card, mounted them on really thick chipboard and then stuck them to the sides using foam pads.
I'm glad people know they can give me their 'rubbish'.
Hi Dolly here.
I admit I am an impulse shopper and that was certainly true when I saw this chipboard bird and cage.
It didn't look like this, obviously - it was just plain chipboard.
I had no idea what I would do with it, but it was just so cute I wanted to have it and play around with it.
And it just goes to show what you can achieve with cheap embellishments.
I covered the cage with walnut stain and then different colours of distress inks. I added green as I wanted the cage to look like it was old and worn and had a sort of patina to it.
I added some gold glitter in places as I wanted a sort of tarnished gold look – not all over shiny and glitzy. I guess I was going for the bird in a gilded cage look.
The bird was covered with patterned paper and then I used distress inks and a text stamp on the top and inked the edges.
I added stickles round the heart and for the bird’s eye
I had a small ivy wreath I had bought a long time ago. I had hoped it would work for my dolls’ house, but the leaves were just too big and out of scale. I carefully unravelled the wreath and then wound it round parts of the cage, using glossy accents to stick it in place as the wire it was made of wasn’t really strong enough to hold it.
I then took apart a necklace I had bought from Primark several months ago. It was made of an old gold colour and had huge leaves on it in an old gold filigree pattern. It was bought purely to take apart and was just what I needed for this project. At £1.50 it yielded not only the chain but a total of 18 leaves – plenty for numerous projects.
I looped some of the chain round the cage and added the leaves to some cheap paper roses I had bought a while ago.
It was quick and simple to make and although I have no idea what I am going to do with it, it was fun to do.
Hello to you all, Virginia here with a post about Alice on what hopefully will be quite a big day for me (my birthday the big (gulp) four zero - but we won't mention that).
Alice has always been my favourite children's story, it was the first story I ever read with no pictures in, at the age of 7, it was only years later that I found all the beautifully illustrated versions. This project has been twelve months in the making, and it has taken a huge effort to finally complete it, but complete it I have.
This is the final article.
It started out as a children's board book, in fact this goes beyond upcycling, this little delight was actually saved from landfill. Why? well this particular board book was of the 'jigsaw' variety, you know the ones that have mini jigsaws on each page, the problem is often the pieces get lost or don't go back in the book as securely as they did when first bought. This particular 'donation' was given to a charity shop minus every single jigsaw, so there was no chance a parent would purchase it for their child. However my Mum (who works in the charity shop) had a feeling I could probably do something with it and so this story starts.
Now I am a Mum who adores spending time with my 11 year old son and in the summer I'm fortunate enough to be able to spend less time at work (I work less hours in the school holidays) and more time at home. Each summer we have grand ideas (or maybe I have grand ideas and he just rolls his eyes) that we are going to be really creative during our time off together. However, one thing often stops us, his idea of creative and my idea of creative are extremely different (he wants to build lego and I want to paint in a book) so this was going to be a challenge for both of us.
We set too trying to find a middle ground and we came up with making an Alice themed altered book complete with our own characters and a new story.
We sanded the book, then painted the same with gesso followed by a blue colour wash to provide a base, then we painted some water colour paper and stamped paint and ink over it, none of this was precise, it was fun and it was messy and this we both 'got'.
Then said 11 year old sat down with the original story book (complete with illustrations) and tried to use it as inspiration for some new drawings, we talked about the film, the original story and the general ideas that came somewhere in the middle and then he was off, creating absolute gems in a large pad of paper.
He got frustrated with the 'people' drawings and so I was left with the task of creating Alice and the Red Queen - that'll be me that can't draw at all. But hey I'd encouraged him so he enouraged me. After we'd completed our drawings, I scanned them into the computer using a black and white text image setting (rather than a photo setting) so I didn't get any colour issues from the paper and then I had some blank images to tackle the book with.
Here are two of the characters he created I think you should be able to guess who they are
All absolutely unique and perfect in their own right, I printed them onto cardstock, cut them out and coloured them (one of his least favourite tasks), I mounted them on card and painted paper and then it sat on my desk gathering dust for almost a year. Until this summer holiday where we decided to complete what we had started. We both chatted about how the story could unfold, using the characters we'd produced and with the inspiration of the Olympics we were off. Having a fabulous time creating the finished project. And here it is finally finished
We had such good fun completing this together it will be something that we both cherish for a very long time. So the next time you fancy being 'partners in crime' with an arty project and having a go at something collaborative, why not ask your children or grandchildren to get involved, you'll be amazed at their imagination, what they can draw and how fabulous it can look with a project like this.
Hello everyone!
Just a quick post from me today, as I'm creating some things for later in the month... Wonderland style!
But today I wanted to share a little story:
I'd spent a while musing on some sort of papercraft patchwork, inspired by the quilting crossover we had seen early 2012. I was thinking that a technique patchwork would not only be decorative, but also useful, in that I could showcase my Stampin' Up! wares to my customers. (I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I'm on a bit of a mission to prove SU doesn't have to be all fairy cakes, watercolours and sprinkles... I'll let you know how that goes!)
Anyhow, on researching the techniques, I came across this little beauty:
Yup, someone had beaten me to it! I was both awed by the lovely work and composition, and miffed she'd got to it first!
So there's two lessons for the day (I'm doing Shimelle's LSNED too...)
1. Make your arty creations into tools, rather than having lots of pretty things you never use
2. Just because someone else has done it first doesn't mean you shouldn't
My take on all this debuts on 1st October, ready for a new catalogue launch, but I've already run a swap of a similar nature, which gets home soon, where everyone picked a different theme to decorate their pieces- I can't wait to see it all assembled soon!
I'm also kee to do an advent version... Can you tell I'm really enjoying this?!
UPDATE: I finished it the same day- here's our version!
Full details are here, on my other blog: http://craftaholicleanie.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/papercraft-patchwork.html
Oh, and there's the third thing- share the love! Get friends to join in, and if you like Annette's collage, leave her a note to let her know- I'm sure it would make her day- just let her know how you found her!
Best wishes for a creative day!
Leanne xxx
www.beautifulimpressions.co.uk
Hello, Eleanor here, introducing a series of posts with a theme of Alice in Wonderland. Over the next few weeks you will see many different styles and interpretations of Alice from the creative girls, and I hope there will be something you are keen to try.
To start us off, I've made a domino triptych necklace.
I drilled through top and bottom of each domino, added images, diamond glaze and inked edges, before threading with waxed cord:
And you know me? Yes of course I made another one:
Back soon with some more Alice inspiration.
So, whilst making the teacher gifts this year, I spent a little more time on Luke's Teacher - after all, she elected to have them for the second year in a row (crazy lady!) and got him through his SA-Ts with much better results than anticipated, plus 16 A's across his school report!
As you can see from the first picture, I made a co-ordinated set - card, envelope, keyring, picture-frame notice board and pen. Feeling very pleased with my little self (and wishing I'd kept the noticeboard!) I decided that we could do with one at home, a tool to keep track of everything.
We already have a calendar, and special dates on a small board, and a shopping list on the fridge, and a running to do list around the house. So I decided to try it with a multi-aperture frame, chopping the background paper to mix it up a bit...
No pretty bows and such yet, and still the cheapie multi-pack IKEA dry-wipe pens - I'm trying to get my husband to warm to the idea. But once he's onboard this frame will be a permanent fixture and possibly a little prettier, with a calendar in one place.
Plus, another version will be coming in to house my lists of craftiness (you can see them at the moment in two of our quadrants) so I can seperate out swaps, my Stampin' Up! business, other crafty committments (like here at IACW!), and cards or gifts I need to make for upcoming occasions.
I think these have a multitude of uses, with small or large, desk or wall frames - Christmas countdowns or last-minute gifts , Birthday presents, Teacher gifts, something for new Students, Mother and Father's day desk presents, use a plethora of them for Easter hunt clues, Valentine's messages, Wedding presents (or a more unique guestbook, given a permanent marker and space for a photo of the happy couple), Seed markers in the garden (with more permanent markers), Halloween countdown or treat-pot messages
You can use pre-printed jotter paper, digi printouts or real jotters if you're feeling thrifty - oddments of stash, stamping and journalling cards... Why not try it with a mirror?
Ooh, just noticed I can knock another item off my list - this post!
A bientot - until next time - Thank you for reading, Leanne x
www.beautifulimpressions.co.uk
www.craftaholicleanie.co.uk
It's cyclin' Sunday here on IACW
I've always been fascinated how things work and when our computer keyboard became defunct I decided to take it to pieces.
It's amazing how many "useful" bits you can find.
My brother-in-law is 50 this year and works in computers so what better start for creating his card.
I used distress inks to color the background, added a tissue Union Jack and then layed over some pieces from the keyboard, using brads to hold the silver layer in place.
I then added the keys (I used a small hacksaw to cut the back off them so they sat flat on the card) spelling his name and an arrow and 50.
Having enjoyed creating this card so much I then made an altered canvas to use as a birthday card for a friend.
I painted the canvas and stuck on a Union Jack tissue again
I then built up layers with, stamps and stencils
You can see from this image I've added some wires (they were cut from the cable), I bent them.
Then I added a piece of bling, a capacitor, a resistor and Happy Birthday.
Thanks for looking, do try using something different in your crafting.
Lynne x
