Monsters, Some Flowers, the pink sea and Dinner (of sorts)

Hello Readers!

Yeah, I know, I was just here yesterday!

Things happened.

It's 5:40 p.m. I've been awake right at 24 hours now so if some of this makes no sense whatsoever, pay it no mind, take your laugh and leave it at that. I'll probably laugh tomorrow when I re-read it myself!

Monsters were on the early morning agenda.

I made this orange fella while watching re-runs of Antiques Roadshow around 4 this morning. He's about 13 inches tall, made from an ugly orange/rust sweater, felt for his eyes and fingers (yeah, that's something new on a monster!), velvet for his horns and nubby yarn for his hair.

He REALLY needed hair. My goodness, his head looked like a zombie had gotten ahold of him and then a mad doctor sewed him back up! His hair hides my terrible stitchery! 

The fingers were an experiment. It was a failed experiment, considering I sewed half of his fingers in the seam at the end of his arm. I'll give fingers another try to see if I can get them to turn out how I think they should turn out. This ain't it, though!

You see that big gouge in the door on the left side of the picture? I have Fred dog to thank for that big hole! Who'd a thunk a dog could tear through a fiberglass door? If he'd a worked just a tad harder, he'd a made it clean through that door! No one was home at the time this happened. He wanted in the house and apparently there wasn't anything that was going to stop him! Except the screen door latching when he took a break from trying to get in the house.

I have only myself to blame for this fiasco. I didn't latch the screen door when I left that morning to go to Hays with Ma. We were gone for a good 6 hours that day. It was nice outside though... not terribly hot out. I've no clue why that dog thought it was paramount he get in the house. He probably would have gone all the way through the door had the screen door not shut completely when he walked away from the door.

One monster wasn't enough for the morning....

I sewed this fella between 10a.m and noon, waiting on Ma to show up to take my hide to town. He's made from black velvet, his horns are t-shirt with flower print, eyes are felt and his hair is nubby yarn. He too needed some hair, but not quite as badly as ol' Rusty up there did! This one is about 8 inches tall. 

I told you all about these flower balls yesterday.

Here's some pictures as proof! :)

Beaded Flower Ball

magazine paper, glue and wooden purple beads

It took me a few days to actually finish this ball. I could only glue one bead at a time on. Had to wait for glue to dry completely between each so the beads would stay attached. They aren't really stuck, stuck. They're stuck, but a good bump and that bead IS GOING TO FALL OFF! I kinda like the flower balls with beads!

And here's one without any beads. I made it five or six days ago.

magazine paper

There will be more of these in the near future. I have almost enough units made to put another one together. If I get down on my hands and knees and search the floor under the desk, I may find I have plenty to put another one together. 

That fool cat, Lola, knocked the little box off the table by the desk that holds all the units while I make enough of them to assemble a finished ball. They went everywhere! I picked up a lot of them, but I didn't look really hard for any that I couldn't reach from sitting in my chair.

Progress was made on the Fish Picture! 

This is what it looked like yesterday.

This is what it looks like at the moment.

I didn't do anything to the upper part. I added a bunch of stuff to rock shelf though.

I have not really worked much on it throughout the day. I should have been figuring something out with the fishes, but it will have to wait till later. Not much later...I have to have it completed...that means DRY GLUE by Monday afternoon!

A bit of detail added since yesterday.

Gemstones, natural freshwater snail shells, failed bucky ball units, styrofoam rocks left over from the last fish picture, and little gold rocks.

My sister Jeanny hooked me up with the gemstone beads. 

The failed bucky ball units are those hexagon shaped things (there's one about in the middle of the picture and I count nine of them showing...they're folded of paper [origami] with gesso piped into them and a fake pearl stick in the center. I then painted them with red and blue ink and  early this morning I put some purple dots around the fake pearl).

The freshwater snail shells were a gift from my grandsons. They brought me a boatload of them from Webster Lake a few months ago. I put a dent in the cache with the ones  used on this picture.

The little gold rocks came from Ma who bought a jelly jar full of them at a yard sale for a quarter. There are enough little gold rocks in that jar to last me and ten other artists for a lifetime! Someone took coarse sand and spray painted it gold. Least that's how I think they achieved that effect. I'm really not sure how, nor even why, they got that sand gold, but that is what it is! Gold sand. It worked great as a filler in of odd spaces on this fish picture though!

Pay no attention to that fish! He's not supposed to be there!

I had all the fishes laid out on the canvas where I thought they should go to see if I had enough fishes and when I took all the fishes off, this one got away from me! I didn't notice he was there till after I'd taken about 6 or 7 pictures!

Fishes. 

Ma thinks I have too many fishes. She said take away one blue one and three black ones. I think it needs all of the fishes. At least all of the fishes of one kind. I'm rather partial to the left over blue fishes from the last fish picture. They're a different color on the other  picture. 

To be honest...even though I am at the eleventh hour, I'm not sure just what will happen with the fishes. I might just make a whole new school of them. These fishes just don't act like they want to be in the pink sea.

I am leaning towards green fishes....but it's still up in the air with the fishes. 

Stayed tuned!

I was ranting about food earlier elsewhere. Guess I'm not quite done, yet.

This stuff tastes like something one would throw out in the garbage! I can't believe I actually paid good money for it!

I used to LOVE this stuff! Could eat it by the case....now it isn't fit to eat.

I think they changed the formula.  That ingredients list should of been my first clue to leave it on the shelf where I found it! 

Let's see if I can spell these $5 words right....

INGREDIENTS: Tomatoes (tomato puree, water), enriched wheat flour (wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate [vitamin B1], riboflavin [vitamin B2] and folic acid), beef, crackermeal (bleached wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), less than 2% of high fructose corn syrup, textured vegetable protien (soy protein concentrate, caramel color), sea salt, salt, modified corn starch, soybean oil, carrots, onions, caramel color, potassium chloride, ammonium chloride, citric acid, flavorings, enzyme modified cheese (cheddar cheese [pasteurized milk cultures, salt, enzymes], cream, water, salt, sodium phosphate, xanthan gum, carotenal [color], yeast extract, lactic acid

It's ravioli. Why does it have to have all this crap in it that I can't even pronounce? 

ConAgra and Monsanto are in cahoots!

If that was beef, I'd hate to see the cow it came from! Cause it sure the heck does not taste like beef!

I ate five raviolis out of the bowl and gave the rest of it to Fred. He gobbled it right down. He's a dog though, we can't even consider his recommendation. Trust me on this one! I know this dog! He will eat shit!

I had a nice fresh chunk of cantelope instead!

My spell checker says that is not how you spell cantelope. One of the suggestions it gave me is "can't elope". Nope. I sure can't! One needs another to elope with if one is going down that road! It made me laugh!

I've rambled on enough for one day! 

I think I hear my bed calling....gotta fix my fan before I climb between the sheets though. Dern thing died on me this morning when I turned it off. It won't turn back on now. I knew it was on its last leg...I need the fan to sleep though.

You all behave yourselves, be kind to one another and show a little more love today than you did yesterday. Love comes in a never-ending supply. All you got to do is hand it out and it comes back ten-fold!

Peace, my friends!

831

Little Bit of This, Little Bit of That and Probably Some Other Stuff, Too!

Hello Readers!

The County Fair starts next week. Monday, to be exact. I started a fish picture the day before yesterday in hopes of completing it before the 5pm Monday deadline to get entries registered and at the fairgrounds. 

Nothing like cutting it close....

I believe I may just hit that goal!

I don't think this is enough fish and I know they need a different color applied to them for them to work out right on that bright pink canvas you're about to see.

Luckily there were only two of the fishes totally annihilated when the lid blew off the rose colored glitter glue I was trying so hard to come out of that bottle. It went:

POOFT! Like a big fart and sprayed glitter glue in a giant blob on my paint pallet, on my fishes I was painting and on the front of my red painting smock. 

Didn't hurt my pallet or my smock but three of the fishes took a direct hit and they must be fixed. 

They're about 3 inches long, just paper painted black with dimensional paint and then with green glitter glue. I do like me some glitter when fish pictures are taking shape!

I believe another half dozen or so of them will be required for the finished picture. 

I'm thinking blue fish with red and green stripes. 

We shall all know what they look like when I get them made!

Some detail at the bottom of the picture. There's a lot of different things on this canvas. Those blue things are crewel embroidery. There's some red netting from an onion bag. wooden beads. lots of glitter glue! 

I strung up some copper wire and glass bead thingamabobs and laid a gazillion different types of yarn on the painted canvas.

I started out with a pink tree...you all saw that thing some posts back....I painted the whole thing black and started over again. I was thinking on a pink hue for the finished picture so the background painting was a bit reddish, more than pink. It has three or four coats of different acrylics....there's yellow, red, a bit of green and whole bunch of gorilla glue that was painted over once it dried. Gorilla glue is some great stuff when you're in need of some texture in a mixed media piece. It takes awhile to dry, but it's well worth the wait!

There are green crewel embroidery urchins as well as blue ones.

Along the bottom of the canvas is a shelf of 'rocks'. Those rocks are really styrofoam balls broke into chunks and then glued to the canvas. I let the styrofoam chunks dry for about an hour and then I cut pink silk (used to be a blouse) into rough 3 inch squares and covered the 'rocks' by saturating the silk in a mixture of watered down white glue.

After the silk had dried and all the remaining holes were covered with another layer of silk, I hit the pink silk with three or four different colors of glitter glue. 

The silk draped beautifully around the rocks while it was wet and dried rock hard! Lots of peaks and valleys to tuck sea critters into.

Wooden beads strung on copper wire. You can see the red onion bag netting and the different kinds of yarn and strings used on the background.

If you click on these pictures they will get bigger.

This is what it looks like at 3 a.m. on the 10th of August. There will be progress tomorrow for sure. That bottom blue urchin that's hanging off the canvas isn't there anymore. I moved it up and over to the right some. 

The canvas is 16x20 inches.

There's still more crap to add to the seafloor before the fishes get put on. Then there will be another two, maybe three different kinds of string over the fishes so it looks like they're swimming IN the water. 

Fear not! You'll get to see it when it's done!

Those of you who know me, know I am not a one project kind of girl.

I did these two ATCs on the 31st of July.

Madame Lazonga

ATC

markers on cardstock

She's really not this orange in real life. I took pictures instead of scanning these two. I'm lazy sometimes!

The All-Seeing

ATC

markers on cardstock

Inspired by Mexican art.

A few weeks ago I was at the gas station in Pburg with my sister and there were half a dozen or so political signs on the corner there. I walked over the grassy spot where the signs were while sis filled her car with gas. I wanted to see what they were made out of.  There were hundreds of them littering yards and curbs all over the darn place for the last three months or so. I figured if they were made out of something useful, they were free art fodder!

Thursday morning, two after the elections were over, Ma brought me three political signs made out of corrugated plastic board. I'm flush with book cover material for awhile. (Not that I wasn't already flush with book cover making supplies before Ma showed up with more...)

I cut 1/3 of 1 sign up and made 5 little book covers from it.

This one I zentangled the front cover with black sharpie and sewed it together with roughly 80 pages of copy paper. It's sewn together with white crochet cotton and the spine edge has been glued because my sewing wasn't the tightest and the book wobbled a bit. Gluing the spine corrects bad sewing to some degree. This book is 3.5x2.5x1 inches

Football playing Barbie is a magazine picture glued to some of that signage board and then painted in acrylics. I liked this girl's hairdo.  I really liked it before I made her look like she's wearing an old-timey leather helmet! She had it all pinned up with bobby pins. Must of been 200 bobby pins in her hair. It looked really cool!

Something got lost in the remake.

I'm leaving her as is cause to try to fix her hair would just muck up the whole thing! She will become the front cover for a little book. This one is 3.5x5 inches. The back cover is painted blue like the background on this here lady.

I was really surprised that plastic took the acrylics so nicely! 

I'll be playing around with that plastic board. Don't be surprised if you find a box or two here on the blog in the coming weeks.

I'm sitting here at my desk and I look over to my left and there sits a paper flower ball I made a few days ago and another paper flower ball I made last week that I neglected to even take a picture of when I was taking pictures. 

There's also a felt flower hanging off the old 8mm movie camera to my right that I neglected to take a picture of. Next time!

My sister, Kathy came to visit over the weekend and brought me a big box of things made out of velvet. I've spent the last few days cutting those shirts and skirts apart so I can use the velvet in sewing projects.

Velvet monsters are quite soft and huggable. 

I have enough velvet to start cutting out 4 inch squares in preparation of sewing them into a quilt top. Most of the velvet will probably be turned into monsters of one kind or another though. 

That blue box hiding under the stack of velvet on the right was an excellent find while digging through the cutting room last week. It's a set of craft knives with a bunch of different blades. No clue where it came from. That cutting room is full of stuff I don't even know I have! One of these days those shelves I've been asking for for 4 years now will materialize on the wall above the paper cutter and I can start to organize things in that room. Someone really needs to sort through the closet and the boxes under the work bench as well. 

I suspect that will have to be me cause no one else knows what is useful and what is not. 

As soon as Fish Picture 6 is done and delivered to the fairgrounds on Monday, I am going to make a batch of paper clay and finish that flamingo! Pink seems to be the color for August!

You all be good to one another!

Thanks for stopping by!

Peace

831

Monsters, Books, Rugs and Let's Go Camping!

Hello Readers!

Thanks for stopping by to see the newest creative endeavors I have been up to.  Grab a cup of something good and settle in for a long post. I'm rather chatty today. 

I think some times I go too far out in left field in the art department when it comes to an All Types of Art Athon, also known as an ATART. I know that sounds impossible to do in light of the title of the Athon, but this last athon...the one going on right this moment, seems to me to be less accommodating to my muse than previous athons have been. 

This doesn't stop me from creating, it only stops me from offering all of these creations up for trade. This doesn't mean they aren't up for trade (though some of these are not up for trade because I never intended for them to be for trade), it just means they aren't up for trade in the athon. It isn't any fun to participate if you feel unwelcome to do so.

This being said, I am feeling rather down these days and this may be some of the reasons I'm feeling this way today. No one person participating the athon has caused these feelings. They come from within me, not from something anyone did or did not do.

My daughter-in-law brought me a giant smile early today with her news via telephone that I will be kidnapped come the middle of September. I will enjoy that kidnapping tremendously, especially if both of my sons are involved in it! That remains to be seen though. 

In addition to the creations in this post I have been working on polish stars, paper flower balls, mug rugs and other sewing projects. There is always preparation for the next project in progress. I have way too many projects in progress....that's a whole other story though and we are not going there today!

On with the art.....

I hope you enjoy the journey!

A lesson in cartooning a giraffe. Markers on cardstock. ATC

I never have been one to stick to any kind of rules. Giraffes are some times purple in my realm. 

I was cleaning in the cutting room...OK, I was digging around in the cutting room a few days ago and ran across a small box filled with 5.5 inch floppy disks. Floppy disks from the age of the dinosaurs (in computer terms anyway). Books have been on the muse's radar for a couple weeks now and when I picked up that box of floppies, took a good look at them, it hit me that these would make fabulous book covers with a bit of altering, disguising and innovation. 

I wasn't disappointed.

Sorry for the terrible goldfish pictures.

I took 13 floppy disks to the kitchen table where I proceeded to cover them in book pages with white glue as the adhesive. This process stiffened those floppies right up! The next day as I watched hour after hour of America's Got Talent on hulu, I stuck stickers all over both sides of each floppy to stiffen it a bit more and to use up those stickers and to give me a good surface for painting on. I still have three floppies laying naked on the kitchen table, waiting for their tranformations.

I have to tell you about the stickers. When RJ came down to see about the water pump, month or so ago, we went to the Dollar Store for something or other. While T and I were in the store, he looked in the dumpster to see what might be there. Well, he found a bunch of 'good' stuff! These stickers were among the 'good' stuff. Six, maybe seven rolls of these little tiny blank price stickers. They have Dollar General and the word price on them in black ink. Mostly white though. 

He was just certain I could use them for something. I covered five floppy disk books with these little white 1/2 inch by 3/4 inch stickers and I still have four and half rolls left to figure out something to do with.  Wish me luck on that....

The boy also found a broken clock and about 150 little plastic fasteners. The clock is useless, but the hands and the clockworks themselves...ain't a thing wrong with them. You'll be seeing a clock in one of these posts soon as I can figure out what exactly to make the clock out of!

The blue and gold book and the goldfish book are both painted in acrylics. There's a fish picture on the inside back cover of the blue and gold book too but it is a terrible-TERRIBLE- goldfish painting so there's no picture of it.

The finish on them is a technique using acrylics and 91% alcohol. I found the tutorial for it somewhere...I forget just where....and finally decided to give it a shot. What you do is thin acrylic paint down to a watery consistency and paint your surface. While the acrylics are still quite wet you spritz 91% rubbing alcohol on it and it does some wonderful transformations! I laid down the dark blue, black for the goldfish, and let it dry before putting a layer of gold metallic acrylics and alcohol on. 

The texture of the stickers kind of takes away from the wonderfulness of the painting technique but it's still quite a nice effect. Both books look much better in hand than the photographs make them appear! 

For the owl book and the two cat books, I drew the animals and then painted them with watercolors on paper. They are outlined in black sharpie. I cut them out and adhered them to the front covers and colored the black around them with a big sharpie marker.

The back covers are simply the stickers showing. 

I've a feeling the price stickers on these three books won't last near as long as the ones on the fish books simply because I neglected to seal these with anything before I sewed the books together. I'm not sure if the adhesive on the stickers is going to hang on as long I am hoping it will. The fish books, I'm not worried about the stickers coming off. I painted over those with at least two layers of acrylics. They're not going anywhere!

They're all sewn in coptic stitch with crochet cotten and have copy paper pages numbering 50. They are just over 5.5 inches square.

A few monsters were born.

This one is orange sweater material, green velvet and felt. I found some new nubby yarn for hair for the monsters.

This guy is green cashmere sweater material and green velvet. I found four different colors of the nubby yarn at the thrift store for $2. 

These two monsters are under 10 inches tall.

Art is insisting he likes the monster photo shoots so we will continue to allow him to hug monsters for the masses to see! 

I sewed a few mug rugs day before yesterday.

My sewing skills are improving with all the monsters and mug rugs I've made. 

I FINALLY finished the red mountain board book.

I added the red, yellow and orange beads to the orange braided ties that hold it all together. 

I can't tell you when I made this little book. It's made from a piece of plastic that came off a hard floppy disk. I've made lots of little books out of the hard floppies and I've always removed that black square of plastic that wraps around the edge of the hard floppy. That's what this is made from. I drew the cat on book cloth with sharpies and glued it around the thingamabob. I've no clue what to call the dern thing! I'm not sure how many pages it has....probably around 20 or so. The pages are a grid paper...graph paper. Vellum-like paper. I glued them in with white glue. The book is usable though it doesn't open at a comfortable level to do any serious writing in it. Though if you were determined to do so, it could be done! 

I can't tell you when I made it cause I found it on the shelf above the scanner the other day. It was buried in crap that covers the surface of that shelf at the moment. 

Been months since I last laid eyes on it! Had forgotten I'd even made it.

While digging around in the cutting room the other day, I ran across a take out box filled with fabric pieces I'd acquired somewhere, sometime. Five fat quarters of flannel and two other hanks of material I'd bought brand new sometime in the past. I made flowered monster out of half of one of those fat quarters of flannel. You can't see them well, but he has green velvet horns also.

Today is Evelyn's birthday.

I sewed her a mug rug last night.

And finally a chunky page!

It's collaged. I don't do well with collage. Someone sent me the paper used in the background. The orange trailer is part of an envelope. The text comes from a medical text book, as does the door and the window and hub of the wheel. The ground is scrapbook paper with more green dots added with a sharpie marker. The wheel is just black paper and the hitch is drawn with a marker. I used the remnants of the braided cotton string from the Red Mountain Book along with the the same wooden beads used on it. The base is recycled chipboard from the back of a pad of drawing paper. Backside is just orange envelope paper with my info written in black marker. 4x4 inches.

Thanks for taking a look!

Be good to one another!

It matters!

Peace

831

Some Bookmaking, Stars, Baking and a Monster

Hello Everyone~!

There's been a bit of creating happening at my house. 

I have a couple boxes full of these drug pamphlets. I used a few of the pamphlets on the paper mache cat I went on about for weeks late last quarter of last year. There are 10 pamphlets in each box and I probably have close to 60 of these boxes still to work with. My son gave them to me. He got them from the police cheif in the town where he lives. Each pamphlet deals with a certain drug or alcohol. I don't have a use, other than making something else out of them, for all these pamphlets and the lovely little boxes they are housed in. 

The pamphlets are printed on newsprint, each pamphlet a different color as you can see in the picture. The box is made of lightweight coverstock and has that wonderful little velcro dot attached to it! The boxes are a bit over 6x4 inches and 3/4 of an inch thick. 

I figured out how to make books out of the boxes and I went a tad nuts with it!  

scrapbooking paper inside and out, sewn with cream colored crochet cotton thread in the long stitch. This one has manila drawing paper pages, I think.

scrapbooking paper, sewn in long stitch with crochet cotton thread. Pages are refill pages for a Day Runner Planner.

Scrapbooking paper, sewn in long stitch with crochet cotton thread.Pastel colored unlined writing paper pages.

scrapbooking paper, sewn in long stitch with crochet cotton thread. Linen stationary paper pages.

scrapbooking paper, sewn in long stitch with crochet cotton thread. Refill pages for Day Runner Planner for pages.

Painted orchard paper with red glitter, sewn in long stitch with thin blue crochet thread. Manila drawing paper pages.

Painted orchard paper with red glitter and gold glitter, sewn in long stitch with thin blue crochet thread. Manila drawing paper pages.

Painted orchard paper, sewn with long stitch in white crochet cotton thread. Kitten stationary paper for pages.

Painted orchard paper, sewn in long stitch with white crochet cotton thread. Manila drawing paper pages.

Painted orchard paper, sewn in long stitch with white crochet cotton. Manila drawing paper pages.

Painted orchard paper with red glitter, sewn in long stitch with white crochet cotton. Manila drawing paper pages.

Painted orchard paper with red glitter, sewn in long stitch with white crochet cotton. Manila drawing paper pages.

All box books have 50 pages.

Acrylic Painting

I did this sometime last month. It will end up on a book cover. I plan on making another paper mache board book.

A series of shots of the four star and beer cap garlands I made a couple months ago. I don't think I ever took a picture of them. So here they are! 

I sewed another monster. 

Art thought Monster needed a hug and insisted a photoshoot was necessary! Art is 12 inches tall so that makes the monster right at 10 inches tall. Monsters body is made out of a felt Santa hat. His horns and eyes are felt as well. 

I still have a few Santa hats so expect to see a few red monsters from time to time.

Perhaps Art will decide hugs are in order again sometime!

I made some more polish stars with glittered points. 

Glittering the points is a pain in the neck. I haven't decided if the extra work is worth the results acquired. I've only made six of them that have glittery points and they do shine like the dickens when the light hits them just right! I imagine they'd shine really nice on a Christmas tree lit with many little lights. 

I rather like the plain jane variety of polish stars too. They look smashing on a lit Christmas tree!  I gave my son a little polish star and he hung it on the rear-view mirror in his van. They look quite cool hanging just about anywhere! 

I played Betty Crocker.

Homemade Hot Pockets filled with seasoned ground beef, onions and a bit of cabbage. Some of them have cabbage, some of them don't. This isn't all of them. I already ate three of them and I gave my sister another three of them.

No, I did not make the bread dough. I cheated on that. I got it from the freezer at the grocery store.

I made rolls out of the leftover bread dough. 

Hot out of the oven, they were to die for! I ate three of these too! 

With REAL BUTTER!

Oink, oink, oink!

I know I have more pictures of this cat than this one! I couldn't locate any others though. This must be the last one ever taken of Billy....:( I haven't seen hide nor hair of this cat for the last 11 days. That means one of two things;

Billy has gone on a walkabout and he'll be be back as soon as he's done with it.

or Billy's not ever coming back again.

I really don't know what's become of him. And not a thing I can do to make him come back home, either. 

I tell Fred dog, "Bring that cat back with you." every time I send let him out the door. He has yet to bring this cat back.

Lola cat is fine as frog's hair though! My left hand bears the marks of mean little claws that got a bit rambunctious in play yesterday. I wanted to simply pet her. No, she wanted no part of any petting business. She wanted to bite and play.

I shall keep praying that Billy comes home.

I don't have much of anything other than polish stars in the works at the moment. 

Something creative will happen around here, I am sure! 

You all stayed tuned!

Be good to one another!

 It matters!

Peace

831