dmnh's creative endeavors: Butterflies, Chatter, Critters and Other Stuff too

Hello Readers!

Not much in the creative mode has been happening here of late. Not as much as in the past anyway. I do try to do at least one creative thing a day but that sometimes carries over to the next day. And some days it carries over for a lot of days!

My muse is quite fidgety this year for some reason.

I have lots in my head but getting the hands to cooperate in seeing those ideas to fruition is a whole other thing!

I plug on though.

I found a tutorial for paper butterflies the first week of the month and have made a boatload of them.

I don't know how many there are on that paper plate...somewhere around a hundred of them. I made them in one evening sitting in front of the computer watching reruns of this and that on hulu.com.

Remember, I don't own a TV. So watching tv consists of sitting in front of my computer. That's quite fine with me, I'm always in front of this pc anyway!

These butterflies are exactly like the single butterfly I showed you all in the last post. That one was 2 inches across, these are only 1.5 inches across. I used up my stash of little bits of wire on these guys.

I got that little china dish for Christmas from my Mom. It is the most useful thing!

This one and the blue one above are both made from magazine paper.

This one is made from book page paper. That's Russian text on it.

The magazine paper is flimsier than the book paper but both make nice sturdy butterflies.

I had no idea what I would do with a hundred (or more) little butterflies. I mulled it over for days.

Then....

it hit me!

Make a garland! So I glued 10 butterflies to a length of thread and ended up with a not-so-great garland. It tangled up something fierce when I picked it up from the table top after the glue had dried. But I got it untangled and (temporarily) hung it in the kitchen doorway.

Now to figure out what to do with the remainder of those butterflies!

I'm thinking a few magnets are in order. I have a bunch of magnet fragments that would work wonderfully with these light little butterflies. Won't take much of a magnet to hold them to a metal surface as they weigh next to nothing!

They really are cute little things and so very easy to make!

My new journal for 2013.

I didn't like the way the covers turned out so I decided to just keep this book and use it for my day book this year. It has 14 signatures with 5 sheets in each signature. Copy paper. I can never remember how to determine just how many pages a book has. There are 20 surfaces to write on in each signature so if we count each surface as a page that would give this book 280 pages? It's a nice fat book.

Sometimes the pages don't get sewn tight enough and you end up with a wobbly book but this one went together quite nicely and the wobble is at a minimum.

I really don't like the look of the covers though. That glitter paint didn't cover evenly, even after getting two coats.

This one is 6x4 inches and about 1.5 inches thick.

I told you all about the wood veneer I found at a yard sale in the summer. I finally got around to doing something with a couple of pieces of that.

Wood cover book. I need to sew this one together still. It's 4.5x3 inches with 8 signatures of handwriting paper. That would be the paper kids use to learn how to write their letters. I get pads of it for a $1 at the dollar store.

I will probably sew this one with embroidery thread as I have a length of it left over from another project that will be perfect for the size of this little book.

I varnished the wood surfaces of the cover. This one will remain plain.

Another wood cover book. I painted the owl in acrylics then varnished the whole thing; front and back covers both. It is 4.5x6 inches with handwriting paper (same as the little book above). 8 signatures of 5 sheets each.

I sewed it together with regular sewing thread. I will have to remember to be a bit more careful in sewing the wood covers. One of the holes on the back cover was breached in the sewing and it's a good thing it was the middle hole cause that hole is useless now! It doesn't really distract from the book in any way cause the other four holes hold the page block in place. I was just a little heavy handed in the sewing! Good thing is that this little book is not wobbly either!

That wood veneer is more fragile than I first thought!

I think the next wood cover book I'll line the covers with chipboard....I don't know. I really like the look of the wood and if I cut it correctly it will be OK with just wood. I ruined one sheet of the veneer by cutting it the wrong way. Those pieces will turn into postcards with a chipboard backing for mailing.

It does take varnish and paint quite well though and you will see more of these little books in the future. I have a wonderful array of 50+ different woods to choose from. Large books, like the owl won't be as prevalent as littler books, like the first in this post because I only have 8 sheets of veneer large enough to make a book more than 4 inches square.

There are some beautiful woods in the smaller size though and I will be making some little books! Lord knows I have enough paper to make the page blocks!

My eldest son came up with the idea for the letter openers below. I'm uncertain just how many letter openers we still have out in the burnt house. I'm thinking there were two boxes of them but after moving all that stuff around out there, I really don't remember. I went out there to locate the letter openers and found a five gallon bucket and a cat litter bucket full of them. I'm thinking there are around 1000 of them.

He called me on the phone the other morning and woke me up to tell me about it. I got busy and came up with these designs later that day.

Acetone took the BROOKE logos off the letter openers with no trouble at all. I did an experiment to see what would be best to paint on them with.

Acrylics stuck to the plastic but it scratched off too easily so I dragged out the box of fingernail polish and used that instead. It seems to be quite durable. I'll be sending these to my son and he will show them to his buddy who I am hoping says, "That's exactly what I'm needing!" I'm going to paint a few more with different designs and send those along to my boy as well. The more there is to choose from, the more likely the man will find something that appeals to him. The boy did say though, "I need something 'girly'."

I'm not real crazy about the green and pink one up in the corner.

This is the beginnings of a 5x5 canvas painting. I'm not sure just where it is leading to. It stopped talking to me mid stream and I abandoned it for the time being. Perhaps it will show up again in the blog as a finished piece.