Altered Pen Case

For my birthday, I got some lovely Clarins products in a plain white soft case :

I've been enjoying Alisa Burke's lessons in her latest online class, Redefine Creativity, where she encourages you to think about how you can use your creative skills to transform a variety of different surfaces. I've been wanting a pencil case for my black and white pens, so decided to give the white case some pen treatment. 

One side - click on any photo to see it larger

view from the other side

End view

And I decorated the bottom as well :-)

original closure tag

Replaced by butterfly tag closure

Using black pitt pens (they are permanent markers) and a couple of hours in my evening, I now have a very funky and unique pen case :-)

Printing on fabric

In the online fabric collage workshop which I'm doing with Deborah Boschert, Lesson 2 was printing on fabric. When we chose our fabrics we needed some plain ones that would be good to personalise with some painted patterns. These were my choices of plain fabrics

I decided I'd try out a variety of designs and methods on different fabrics. Not very big pieces, but they probably won't need to be for the collage, and if I really like something it will be easily repeated.

Here are the details of each piece for my future reference and your interest. I actually did this piece in January and gathered it as a prospective addition.

Starburst sprays through stencil.

Fabric from the envelope of my stencil parcel.
Rest the fabric on an old mouse pad when you stamp to get a good impression.

Found objects are fun. The marks on the left are made with the end of a nerf gun dart.

Glued foam strips to a linoleum sample for a hand made stamp.

Pouncing paint through a stencil

Foam stamp

This method of using shiva sticks through a freezer paper stencil came from the Kemshall's "The Painted Quilt" book.

The inside of a cash register receipt paper roll

Lid and cork used together

Corrugated cardboard

Hope there's some inspiration there for you. Talk to you again in November!

Fun printing

How much fun can you have using these materials?

Glued foam shapes left over from the plates I made for gelli printing, some rubber bands, and a piece of old cricket bat grip to cardboard rolls.
Place over a foam roller and roll onto paper

Fun and quick - will have to experiment more with this.

Call back tomorrow and see the printing I've been doing on fabric.

Velvet & Bleach

I love Angie Hughes' work - you may remember that so far I have made a bookwrap and a foiled velvet bag using her techniques. Yesterday 3 of us had a play day and tried out something new following instructions on this dvd (lovely selection of DVDs available from Minerva).

Have a peek at the contents on the YouTube preview
As with much of Angie's work, there are a variety of layers built up. Because of the limited time we had available, Katherine kindly did steps 1 and 2 for us a day before. This is my piece sprayed with silk paints

followed by quink ink

This technique works well with wooden printing blocks - we pooled our resources and had a lovely lot to use.

Then we went about the business of applying bleach gel to the printing blocks

and pressing them onto the coloured velvet.

You can see in the above photo that found objects like lego and bobbled coffee cup holders joined the wooden blocks for mark making with bleach :-)
This process discharged the ink, and revealed the paints below.

As we built up the layers we created pieces that look like gardens at night.

Once we thought we'd used enough of the bleach, we then overstamped areas using a variety of metallic paints. Here are the 3 pieces at the end of our playday.

Mine

Katherine's

Rhonda's

Next step is maybe some foils and definitely lots of stitch.
Check out this post by Angie of work by students that were lucky enough to have her take a class for them in person.
And see more of Angie's beautiful work at her website or her blog
Have a lovely weekend - thanks for stopping by.