I may be a bit quiet ......

I might be a tad bit quiet on the arty crafty side of life for a little while we are tackling a makeover in the garden, plus keeping everything ship shape on the allotment - and now I have a vast amount of pricking out and potting up seedlings galore.

All you which you can keep track on here 

Or look at the posts in my side bar under Allotment Lady

I can't keep my eyes open - had a tiring day.

Yes you've guessed - another bird on a newspaper page

Yes - we get chaffinchs too in our garden

Close up of the layers of paint and the paint stamping

The page in situ - copied print on white paper, torn, and painted with water colours to make it look a bit more original

This is the last one for now - but I do intend to add lots more to this book

Thank  you for looking at this so far and for your very encouraging comments

You either love them or hate them - but you have to admit they are stunning

Yes it is the Starling.

He's coloured with copics over watercolours

So, are they thieving thugs in your garden?  Or gorgeous shimmery irridescent rainbow works of art?  I do have a love/hate relationship with starlings.  I marvel at their gorgeous colours in the sunshine, and their sharp brain - but now and again I do despair when they arrive in 'gangs' and 'hog' all the seeds!

Another newspaper page - painted with acrylics in layers.  Image printed onto white paper and painted with the hope that I have captured his colours.

I rather like him anyway

Off to make another

Have you guessed yet which book the images came from?

I'll tell you tomorrow

Great tits and Blue tits - newspaper pages.

These are visitors to our garden too - and we have fledgeling blue tits in the bird house right now!

Another page for my book of garden birds

Created the same way as the others - 10 pieces of newspaper glued together and painted with a mixture of acrylic paints. 

 

Over-stamped with acrylic paint.  Image printed onto white paper, painted with water colours, and the birds and twigs painted with a mixture of water colours and acrylic paints.

Another page tomorrow

More recycled newspaper pages for the book

Layers of paint on the newspaper page

Then stamped with thick acryllic paint

Although the picture is copied from THE book -  I have painted all over it, the bird, each leaf, each flower, each stem - to make it look more like an original

I am pleased with the texture on the backing pages - like thick oil painting.

This bird is another regular visitor to our garden, and I hope that the image looks like a vintage watercolour painting

Craft Stamper - May magazine

 In the May issue of Craft stamper, there were some great projects - and I have been working on one of them on and off for a while now.

It was to make a book out of recycled materials - by Katy - very inspiring, and the great thing is that you can keep adding pages, to build up a nice journal.

The covers were made out of a cut up cardboard box.

Here is my effort.

This is part of a sheet of pre-printed paper.  What you can't see is that it has lots of texture where I have painted over it, stamped, and embossed - and have used a gold spray in parts too.  I tore up scraps of paper and stamped and painted those, and made them into a distressed flower and added a button.

I did the same with the back cover - you can see on this a bit better the colouring and metallic paints.

The butterfly I stamped onto painted paper, and the body and the spots are made from layers of stickles and sparkle in the light

The cardboard is rather thick, so I have punched holes for book rings.

I have also made a start on the internal pages.

This is the inside cover - I have painted it with metallic paint and experimented with stamping with paint.  I was quite pleased with the paper 'bag' I made with the little blue egg 'in' it.

This is really fun to make and a great opportunity to try out all different techniques.

You need to tear sheets of newspaper to just under the size of the book covers.  It takes ten sheets of paper for each page - then glue them together.  They are meant to look 'ragged'.

I used different layers of paint combinations.  I did the gluing and sticking over a few days as they needed to be left to dry - ditto the painting of each one of them.

This is the book made up - I had to balance it on a box so that you could get an idea of the fringing.

The pages look askew as I have had to  open them to balance the book.

I decided to make this book to celebrate the magical moment a little while ago, when I sat in the shade in my garden and heard all sorts of bird song.

These pages are to celebrate the thrushes that visit our garden.

I painted the pages before I decided on a theme - so they are not very colour co-ordinated - but great practice experimenting.  I have tried to make the paper look vintage and aged, and the thrush in the nest I have copied from a book, and sketched over it and shaded it.  I bet you can guess the book I have used.   If you can't today  -  you will absolutely know when you see the other pages I have made.

Same - but different

I made another flower arrangement yesterday - the same basic style but in a modern fashion - two extremes!

The previous one was in a traditional style and this one arranged in 'modern' style.  I found this one really hard to make.  I used Aspidistra leaves - four of them, and had to manipulate them to cover two blocks of floral foam, by curling them and weaving them - and that ended up looking like a sculpture before I added the flowers and texture foliage.

The tulips I wove in and out of the swirled leaves and pinned them in curves - and yesterday they were all flat.  Then this morning when I got up, they had decided that they wanted to look at the sunshine!

So gradually turned their little heads right the way up!

I guess they liked looking at themselves in the mirror.  It's quite a nice effect as I only used one bunch of ten tulips, but the reflection makes it look as though there are double the amount.

Here is the traditional arrangement.

Totally different.

Nothing gets wasted - I even made a simple vase arrangement out of the scrappy left overs - the stalks I took out of the leaves in the modern arrangement, the left over flowers and some Eucalyptus from the garden.  I have even pinched out some little 'stalks' and hope to grow them on as cuttings.

All this for £18.50 - plus £5 for my share of the cost of the village hall I went to - a bargain I reckon!