French Boxes, A Few Stars and Some Fishes

Hello Readers!

Same old same old going on in my life. More or less at any rate. I'm not complaining by any means! Same old same old works for me at this point!

I've been busy with creating things, like usual.

Those felt ornaments are still waiting to be sewn and that pink monster is still not born. But progress has been made in the creative department! It has indeed!

Enjoy the fruits of my labors!

:)

I tried to make some collage inchie houses.

I got no further than these four before I remembered I don't like doing collage inchies. As you can clearly tell from the picture, I'm not really all that good at it! Yes, I know, it's not for me to make that decision, but sometimes, just sometimes, I am not pleased with my efforts at all!

But there ya go, four inchie houses. 

I thought perhaps I should try twinchie houses instead. 

There was an athon for houses...inchie, twinchie and moo houses, going on over at AFA and I'd never made houses of any size before.

Twinchies didn't turn out any better than the inchies if you're to ask me.

But there ya go...four twinchie houses.

I've been working on some more fishes.

The start out as the exact same template I've always used for fishes. I believe these six put the total count on fishes at 10 now. I did these a bit different though than the last batch of fishes. I didn't make them all the same shape. I redrew around the template lines before cutting them out. This way they all look a tad different from one another.

They were covered with homemade gesso, texture added while the gesso was still wet.

A couple days later I put some pretty colors to all of them and we've got some nice fishes in the making!

They're painted with pan watercolors of the school kid variety.

I put another layer of cardstock on the backsides of these and put them under the book press for about 24 hours to let the glue dry and to keep the fishes flat.

This afternoon I added a coat of gesso to the backsides to give me the same surface as the front side is and to give the fishes a bit more substance.

Once the gesso dries overnight, I'll put some more color on the backsides, add my info and all that. I'm not sure if the backsides will be fish-like as the front sides are, but they'll be more than just stark white.

My sister came to visit over the weekend. She brought me three different books written in French. All three of them better than 50 years old each. I folded a couple of little boxes out of some of the sheets of paper from two of those books. No glue, just paper and ribbon holding them all together.

This is the same box as in the picture above. She also gave me a couple of books written in German. I don't need more books, in any language, but I didn't have any books in French or German so I accepted them happily! 

My next big project, probably after the beginning of the New Year, will be to weed out the bookshelves lining the hallway.  I've run out of storage for books in those shelves. Things must go!  Considering I haven't laid eyes on some of that stuff in a few years time, it's past time to get busy and do something about that!

These are the paper stars I told you about a couple posts back. I finally got around to taking their picture.

This is a piece of silk fabric totally covered with sequins. It used to be a prom dress. I intend to turn it into a monster or two. We'll see how that turns out!

I just loved the way this picture turned out!

Bead Soup.

I've been sitting at the workbench in the cutting room going through beads. So damn many beads, I'm sure I couldn't even count that high! I'm seeing the end of that tunnel, but it's still quite dark in the tunnel. I think another three or four days of going through beads will be in my future. Things are looking good on that front though! 

Beads are being separated into groups by color, type (such as these wooden ones in the mushroom box above), size....I have charms, tree of life beads, seed beads, big beads, little beads (bead soup), and such. 

The wire basket is also in the tote where the remaining beads to be gone through are located. Eventually, they'll all find their place on the shelf in the desk room.

Thanks for stopping by to see what's happening!

Be good to one another!

Peace

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