Spanky does Zetti Julia

So Spanky wanted to try her hand at Zetti, and I have to say I like Julia better this way, she's a sparkly shimmery hottie now, even if I do say so myself.

Do you think Spanky is the only stylist to use splendid gold rollers when setting hair?
I would image Posh Spice will require them when she reaches a certain age but right now, Julia is one spoilt unique lady.
Most of the time I wouldn't have the brass nerve to go out in public in rollers, but when the wind is in my fur, well anything is possible. :-)

Click on Julia to make her bigger. I don't think I would use this phrase if Julia was Julian.




How Spanky made her

Once again out came some DCWV Pocket full of Posies card for the background and all the extra bits. I cut out some patterned blue circles from another sheet of the same pack of card. I used Sakura stardust clear pen to add lots of sparkle to things. I also used a mini butterfly punch to punch out the mauve butterflies of yet another sheet.
I edged as much as I could with a white gelly pen to tie everything in together. I used DecoArt Rich Expresso metallic acrylic to paint her hair and then painted Splendid Gold (what a brilliant name) curls.
Her crown is a green size Woodware punch and edged in white gelly pen.
I drew her dress on watercolour card. Cut it out. Painted it acrylic Viridian Hue (which is a lovely mid green blue colour.)
Painted Ice Blue Glitz-it glitter glue over the top. For large areas I prefer using the big bottles of Glitz-it glue either by squeezing it out thick straight from the bottle (watercolour card is firm enough to cope with this) or by spreading it around with an old nylon bristle brush that I wash out straight away afterwards with washing up liquid. For little glitter details, blobs and thin lines you can't beat Ranger Stickles.
If you spread the glitter glue with a paint brush you don't get such a dense amount of glitter and you can therefore change the shade of the glitter glue by painting the background in different acrylic colours. (Watercolours won't work because the glue contains water that will reactivated the paint and smear it about unevenly, unless that is the effect you want.) You can achieve endless combinations of glitter colours this way with the same bottle of glitter glue.
I used a heart punch to decorate her dress, again white edging around each heart. Do the edging before you stick them on the picture. I used various round "jewels" stuck on with white PVA.
The black and white border is a black fine point Sharpie and white acrylic paint applied with a straight edge shader no. 3 paint brush. A straight edge shader brush gives you a straight line without even trying. A no. 4 works as well.
Julia's legs and arms are bugle beads. Thread them on some sewing cotton, lay a thin line of Anita's 3D Clear Gloss down and then lay the line of bugle beads on the top. Straighten the line up with two cocktails sticks one on either side of the line then remove the sticks. After a minute or two carefully pull the sewing thread out of the bugle beads and voila, sparkly limbs!
I ummed and ahhed whether or not to colour her face with make up, and chickened out in the end with the fear of spoiling the picture. I think I quite like the contrast.

I still find the massive head a bit creepy, but the shiny certainly lessens the squick factor a bit for me.

Happy Crafting everyone!

Gini

Opus Gluei Challenge #27 Copy Cat

Well I've chosen Zetti style for my Copy Cat for the Opus Gluei challenge this week.

I've been too scared to try Zetti before, mainly because I get so upset when I mess up on a project. You don't get to sketch with pencil 'til you get it right; you just pick up a pen and go for it. {{{shudder}}}
You know when you "add" a bit extra or try something a bit different and then you want to cry 'cos you just ruined it!!!
And you have to go to bed to recover even if it's 10 in the morning and chocolate won't make it better. (Maybe some Nice n Spicy Nik Nak's when you get up though...)

But do you know what? I don't think you can mess up with this style, as it seems anything goes, and if in doubt, you just add some more to it, how excellent is that!

My internet connection was down when I was working on this so I wasn't able to research it and had to rely on my memory (Never a good idea).

What I could remember was lots of stripes particularly black and white, in borders and arms and legs, lots of doodling, people completely out of proportion in their bodies, lots of strange parts added to their bodies. I couldn't remember seeing any shiny, but overlooked that fact because Shiny Zetti works much better for me! Now that I've googled "Zettiology", I'm glad I didn't have the internet doing this, as I'd have been overwhelmed and probably stalled again.

Click on the image to make it bigger.



How I made her

She's a A6 card (roughly 6x4")

Background paper DCWV Pocket full of Posies 12" card stuck onto card with double sided tape.

The black marker is a fine tip Sharpie, which has me very impressed with it.
The white is white acrylic paint and also White Gelly Roll pen by Sakura or SourKraut if you can't remember but still need to have a stab at the name regardless :-)
The rest is Sakura Stardust pens which are great but the ink comes out quite fast so you can't hesitate or muck about dithering.
The finer flow Asda gelpens allow you to dither as much as you like. 25 for £2. I think you could buy three quarters of a Sakura pen for that money but I like having both :-)
I'm pretty sure I bought my posh work shoes in the sales and topped up on Sakura pens with the money saved. Maybe a similar justification will ease your conscience too?

The lovely lady is Julia, a Cherry Pie Stamp from the Julia Plate.
In this picture she is looking more like Nora Batty but Nora wore American Tan wrinkled round the ankles tights and my Julia is posh with her trendy stripy stockings.

Although I do think patterned tights looked horrible in the '80s and they look horrible in the 00's as well!
I'm too tall for tights, unless I fancy wearing the crotch around my knees, so in the '80s I wore stockings, but not being a morning person I would often go to work in mis matching stockings, and it wasn't just that the patterns were different, sometimes the colours were as well. Too much information? Probably.
Sheesh why can't fashion be flattering to a person?
Have they learned nothing from Spanky ;-)

Happy Crafting Everyone!
Gini
xx

P.S. I no longer do Fashion, I now do Comfy - but don't tell Spanky.

Opus Gluei Challenge #26 Bling it on...

How could I possibly resist this challenge, everything I make could be entered here, apart from my last post in which I tried to make something without shiny, but couldn't quite manage it. :-)

So I have made the lady with no name and no story (gasp), she was stubbornly silent about herself, which I can only presume is because I was making her especially for a friend and I think she must be saving up her story for her predestined human and her new home!

Without flash so the detail can be seen.
Click on her images to make her bigger.




With flash so the shiny can be seen.





I made her in much the same way as Hoity Toity Kiora.


Happy Crafting Everyone!
Gini
xx

ABAA Challenge: Keys. September 2009. Cornflake Girl. Rabbit where'd ya put the keys girl?

The key thing is......... can you yodel as well as Tori Amos??

You mustn't sing this lyric, to get the full benefit of it you must yodel it with feeling.
Don't fret yourself now, as I promise, you will undoubtedly yodel better than me.

I love this song; Cornflake Girl by Tori Amos.
Especially once I had got over the whole "but, but she's doing Kate Bush, no, no! it's a KATE BUSH rip off" and then had a lie down in a darkened room for a little bit. :-)

I've wanted to do a picture based on this lyric for a good while now.
In preparation for this post I looked up the song lyrics on the web as they made absolutely no sense at all to me, even though I am word perfect in yodeling along; but of course.
I was still none the wiser having read and re read them.
Himself happened to mooch by, as is his way, and said "Oh that, she's talking about changing kiddy gangs in her childhood."
Cue the tumble weed rolling across my craft room floor (well, dining room really).
Yes! You're right my face did look just like that!
Then he smirked and admitted that he had read that somewhere.
Men gotta luv 'em. *cough*


This is a 12 x 12" picture. Click on it to make it bigger.




Can you find the two keys?


How I made it.


The background paper is one from DCWV Old World stack. Edged in brown chalk ink.
I used double sided tape (the strong bond one with the red backing) to stick the background paper to the cardboard.

I used the gorgeous My Mind's Eye 6x6" Bloom and Grow papers to make the trees that I drew.
The trunks are stuck to the foliage with white PVA.
Everything is stuck on the background with foam pads.

The big butterfly is a Debbie Moore clear stamp from a set of butterfly stamps which I think are rubbish quality (they are sticky as hell, rubbing over with a soft rubber doesn't help all that much and some of the stamps are uneven in thickness so it's almost impossible to get an even stamped image) however, the images are really nice which makes the quality issues such a shame. I stamped onto a DCWV pocket full of posies card. I used versafine vintage sepia ink to stamp the image and am so impressed with this ink pad, it's mighty fine to use. I stuck some gold bling gems on the wings with white PVA. The key is grungeboard (courtesy of the lovely ABAA Linda) and I painted it with Dark Bronze Cosmic shimmer watercolour paint. I had to have a little bit of shiny somewhere, I was getting the shiny withdrawal shakes really bad by this point.

The key in the tree trunk was painted with acrylics mixed up to match the patterned paper.

The little butterflies in the trees were some white embossed butterfly embellishments that came free with a cardmaking magazine. I painted them with cosmic shimmer in Dark Bronze, Tropic Yellow and Twinkling H20 Indian Copper. I tried to get the look of our British woodland butterflies.

Isn't the rabbit adorable? She is a Jo Kill design that she made for Papercraft Inspirations magazine Oct 2009, page 45 called Autumn Card Toppers. She designs wonderful animal cards and has done some fabulous ones throughout this year in the magazine.

I used some shiny embossed papers for the rabbit. There isn't a template for her in the magazine, the idea is that you use different sized round hole punches that of course I don't have.
But I made a set of circle templates out of 300g watercolour paper using a set of compasses. The trick to using a pair of compasses is firstly that your pencil is very sharp. You turn the paper not the compass to make the circle. If you want a very small circle you line the nib of the pencil up with the compass point so the pencil is shorter than the compass point. For a large circle line the pencil nib up so that it hangs lower (longer) than the compass point.
To cut without little jags, you never let the blades of the scissors cut right to the end of the blades. X-cut make scissors that deliberately won't cut to the end of the blades, so you can't do it by accident. Good on X-cut! And turn the paper not your scissors.
Thankfully I do have the right size circle punches for the eyes because cutting circles accurately that small would be torture.

The words are stamped by the individual wooden alphabet stamps made by Studio G which are excellent. I recently bought the same alphabet letters in clear stamps from Studio G which I think are awful, I can't get a decent stamp out of them not even after rubbing a soft rubber over the surface and then inking (I tried various different ink pads as well) which usually works with most clear stamps.
If I think it's rubbish I'm going to say I think it's rubbish, and yes I probably do sound a bit belligerent about this today but if your going to shell out good money for something then an honest review is surely a necessity, isn't it?

Happy crafting!
Gini

Hoity Toity Kiora

Aren't Paper Dolls just the most fun to make?!

I've got the squealy "Oh the possibilities" going on in my body.

And the clothes!
One doesn't even have to consider whether they will wash well, or whether one can get away with not ironing, or whether they really mean dry clean only or are the manufacturers just copping out, never mind "Does my bum look big in this?" (no way of course).
Fantastic clothes that fit like they are made to measure. Booya!

Click on the images to make them bigger.




The card says

"I am Queen" thought Kiora, but just for once let me blend into the background like a Commoner.


Oya!
What a cheeky Miss!



How I made her.

I found the most marvellous site The Enchanted Gallery that has a free paper doll template

Unfortunately she doesn't ship outside the US, as I would so like to buy loads of her stamps. Boo hoo!

The owner,Kimberly is also not very well at the moment so
big {{{{{{{{{{{ healing vibes}}}}}}}}}}}}
across the ocean for a full recovery for her :-)

At full size the doll is 9" high.
I shrank mine to 4.5" as it is then fits nicely on a standard A6 card size and upwards sizes.

I printed her out on card. Cut her out and used little brads to assemble her.
I then used tracing paper over the template to draw her clothes.
If you draw a fine line vertically down the tracing paper, see photo, you only need to draw half of the outfit.

Fold the tracing paper very carefully along the line and retrace onto the other blank side.
( I use this method with tracing paper to draw anything that is symmetrical.)
If you pose her asymmetrically then obviously you can't use the fold method!







For Kiora's picture above I used her template head size as a guide to finding a suitable head image.
Alternatively you can use the template head measurement to print a head image off at the correct size from your computer.
I only needed to use copies of her arms to make Kiora's picture. To paint her arms I used DecoArt Flesh colour Acrylic paint.
If you want your doll to look like a suntanned flamingo then go ahead and use Reeves Flesh coloured acrylic, *#%!## what were they thinking???

Paper dolls apparently don't need their body parts to be in proportion, but I haven't quite been able to embrace that concept yet.
I have always found dolls with over large heads give me the collywobbles so I'm sticking with the 1/8 rule for heads for now.
A Beetlejuice pin head is also too weird. Micheal Keaton is looking a bit peeky in that shot. That film came out 1988, where has the time gone?? I watched this film over and over...

See Body proportions for further details of "correct" body size proportions.

Happy Crafting!
Gini

Spanky does Jonathan Dodgson Carr in 1895. ATC Bad Hair Day.

We are each responsible for our own happiness aren't we?
Well, I nearly peed myself laughing making this one.
(I don't think I should be admitting this but hey.)

I saw on The Artist Trading Club blog that September's theme is Bad Hair Day.
Spanky's eyes lit up and she wanted to have a go.

We (?) were eating lunch of crackers and cheese.
She held the knife and I held the fork. (Run Away Now)
We got to looking at the box of crackers again with a crafter's eye this time.

This is what we were eating.
Click on the pictures to make them bigger.





If you can't read it from the picture, it's my photography skills not your eyes, (your age is just fine, honestly)

It says:-

"Biscuits of Distinction
Carr's Table Water in their original form first appeared in the late 19th Century as a refinement of the ships biscuit. Water instead of fat was used to blend the dry ingredients in order to keep the biscuits fresh on long voyages. Carr's cabin biscuits with their delicate, crisp texture proved extremely popular with seafarers....."

Seeing as we had polished off the packet I cut up the box and Spanky made this.
Click it to make it bigger.



It says:-

Spanky does Jonathan Dodgson Carr in 1895

Mr Carr Esq was not a happy chappy, he asked for a light trim and got... well he didn't know quite what it was, but it was not good.

On his way home the seagulls had dive bombed his monstrous hair but after glumly staring at his reflection in the mirror he had the most marvellous idea!

"I know" he thought "I'll use water instead of fat in ships biscuits and rename them Carr's Table Water, biscuits of Distinction."

Disclaimer. Please note: This story is based on absolutely no facts whatsoever apart from J.D.Carr establishing the Carr's Table Water. The rest is just the product of an over active imagination.

It's one of those conundrum things, if Carr hadn't invented the biscuit then Spanky being a time traveller couldn't have taken them back in time to him, but if Spanky hadn't gone back in time and put biscuits on his head, would Carr have invented the biscuit???
It's all complete tosh of course but it entertained me no end!


But I don't think I can bear to part with it. I think I need to make a set of these.
Actually I might be getting a bit ahead of myself, I haven't even asked if I can join in yet. Oya!

How I made it.

Brayered Andirondack inks in pool and sunset orange on white card. Stamped circles in watermelon and a rubbish white ink from ink it up that hardly had any ink in it and went straight in the bin, what a waste of money.

I use 230 g/m Watercolour paper for any shapes that I stick onto projects. In this case his body and his hair. I find that watercolour paper can handle any applied medium and at this thickness I get rigidity but I'm still able to cut it into intricate shapes quite easily. The 300 g/m (thicker) watercolour paper is better as a background for much larger projects.

Buying watercolour paper. For this sort of thing you don't need expensive brands of paper.
I get 18 sheets of A3 in a pad from "The Works" for £4. It's made by Boldmere.

I painted his water biscuit hair in acrylics. His body in blue metallic acrylic and heat embossed a stamped image in glitter gold on his coat. I edged the piece in eggplant in Versamagic chalk ink.
I glued everything with white PVA.

Happy crafting everyone!

ABAA A story in a box. Challenge September 2009. Incey Wincey Spider.

It was foolish of me to say to Linda that if she did a Spider challenge I couldn't wouldn't play.
Now I should know better than to say things like that, because I'm contrary enough to prove myself wrong.
Thankfully common sense can prevail with me, like when I gracefully declined to take up the dare to grow a willy.

I have arachnophobia that varies in intensity depending on how many big uns I've seen lately and also how much therapy (I use the term loosely) I have had recently.

When this challenge was posted I thought "oh good just my cup of tea"
as I see a story in every piece of art whether it wants one or not.

Then, when I started thinking about it, I thought I would do one of my favourite books "The Little Prince" by Antoine De Saint-Exupery. A marvellous heart warming, heart wrenching then heart warming again book . He also did the loveliest illustrations for it.
I saw a secret or featured e mail, can't remember which now, on post secret where someone said they had had a very expensive school and university education but everything worth knowing they learnt from reading "The Little Prince".

But Mary, Mary quite contrary was saying do a spider in a box.

So I ignored her and carried on with planning The Little Prince and thinking that alternatively I could do another favourite "Welcome to Temptation" by Jennifer Crusie, although I have already done this one as a postcard so it wouldn't really be a challenge.

Mary Mary by this time was getting louder, do a spider in a very small box, because small is hard for you, a spider, a spider in a matchbox, do it, do it!

So the next three weeks past.
The Little Prince VS Spider in a Matchbox, and I had not even picked up the glitter glue to make a start.

Then one morning I woke up and thought OK the only spider I can do has to be very small and shiny. So Incey Wincey Spider came into being.

Click on the pictures to make then bigger.

This is the fit in your pocket matchbox which makes ATC's look enormous.
This is the front and inside the drawer.




In the Land of Shiny even drainpipes sparkle!

On the back I wrote the verse.



I put a brad through the end of the draw and turned the pronged bits over making sure I left a space between the head of the brad and the edge of the drawer so fingernails can grip and pull the drawer open. To keep the brad in that standing proud position I used my favourite welding glue Anita's 3D clear gloss finish to hold the bent brad prongs in place on the inside of the drawer. Then I stuck a panel of card over the top of the glued prongs with double sided tape.




Making spiders cute and sparkly has taught me that even ones worst nightmares can be made shiny. So I wrote on the bottom of the drawer "All fears can be made shiny".



How I made it.
I used the matchbox itself as a template to draw out each flat side. I didn't fold around any sides with card, each side had it's own rectangle of card.
(I do have other papers but can't get enough of this DCWV Pocket full of Posies card.)
For sticking inside the drawer I used double sided tape. Decorate the inside card before assembling.
The outside pieces I glued with white PVA, because it dries slowly it gives plenty of time to slide each card panel into just the right place. Golden gel medium would have dried quicker but once it's positioned it won't budge, so there is no room for fine adjustments.
The two long outside edges and the outside bottom of the draw I painted with metallic acrylics.

Happy crafting everyone!

Edited to add:-

Linda's post told the sad story of Pia de Tolomei.

Linda said "Pia de' Tolomei who had been imprisoned in a fortress in Maremma (Tuscany).
Ghino has fallen in love with Pia, wife of his cousin Nello. When she refuses his love, in revenge Ghino informs Nello that he has discovered a secret message proving that Pia is having an adulterous relationship. This is untrue but Nello imprisons his wife and leaves her to die. "


I don't like sad endings so I'm changing it.

Send Nello my way and I'll glitter glue him into submission and sense. If he proves recalcitrant I will bring out the big guns in the form of embossing powders and "The Heat Tool".
The shiny way will prevail.
(Oh the irony - I'll torture you into a shiny happy person!)
Once he has seen the shiny light he can go rescue Pia and spend the rest of his life making it up to her in many romantic and ever increasingly inventive and novel ways.
Ghino can stand in the corner facing the wall for a very long time, we'll let Pia decide when he can come out of the corner.
Ghino having had plenty of time to reflect on the error of his ways made reparation for his cruelty by becoming a highly successful and adept matchmaker. The world is now full of happy couples who all have a little shrine on their mantelpiece dedicated to Ghino the Marvelous Matchmaker.
And they all lived happily ever after.
## Ta Da ##
Shiny happy ending :-)

Epilogue
The fortress in Maremma has been transformed and is now a remarkably popular crafting retreat. The tower in which Pia was held is now used as a wailing arena where everyone can vent their crafting and glueing woes.