Experimenting with ... Mica tiles

Hello again.

This may sound sad to some, but I've just spent my bus journey and walk home in the snow thinking about getting home to a cosy house, a cup of tea and ... some blogging. Seriously, I really do enjoy thinking of things to share here then scurrying off to take the photos and craft the sentences ... and now I've got that off my chest ... I'll get on to the business of my first experimentation with mica tiles.

My Copy+Paste consort Kirsty [Neale] and I occasionally swap with each other a box of random crafty-bits which we no longer want. It's an act based on the combined theories of:

[a] Using what you have / recycling / shopping at home [even if the items come from someone else's home!] and;
[b] someone else's stash is always more interesting than your own and is always worth a good nosey through!

This time, amongst the fabric and paper 'new-to-me' treats in the box, Kirsty had included a packet of 'Mica Tiles' which both intrigued and bamboozled me as I had no idea what they were for.

So I asked turned to Mr.Google and enquired as to what on earth one does with a mica tile. Then, after much trawling through things I really didn't want to do with a mica tile [or with anything else for that matter!] I landed upon a lovely project on Sarah Anderson's blog 'The Art of Moodling' [do hop over there to see the inspiration behind my experiments]. And with her method of trapping a collage between the tiles in mind I ended up with this tiny wall hanging fixed to a card for my sister's birthday:

I began by prising apart a mica tile [which, is a natural mineral substance consisting of various layers] and applied some Glossy Accents to one of the laters. I then placed a vintage paper napkin [decorated with a Converse boot rub-on from Cosmo Cricket's 'The Boyfriend' collection] and an ArtChix image [both from 3DJean] into the gloss smoothing it all out with a glue-spreader.

A few hearts and a final layer of gloss were added before pressing another tile ontop of it to seal in the finished collage, amber-like, between the tiles. Once it was dry I punched a hole in the top, gave it a wire hanging loop and temporarily fixed it to the front of a card using 3D foam:

I think it's worked pretty well and there's something about it being a natural product that I really like, it has some really interesting colours and markings of its own which contribute an additional element to the finished result. They're probably better seen on these ... my subsequent mica experiments:

This one consists of a dressmaking pattern, a quote and a few magazine snippets:

And this last one is the one which taght me that using Stickles on top of a select area of the collage doesn't really work [it eventually gets watered down by the glaze and spreads everywhere!]:

But allis not lost, the bird stamp is still cute and .. the back looks nice!:

What with these mica experiments, my badge making and the mini paper collages I'm working on for my etsy shop I'm definitely in the thrall of small-scale art at the moment.

Maybe it's due to, as the saying goes, small being beautiful... but maybe at 5ft 2in I'm somewhat biased on that front ...

Thanks for looking in on me today - if you have any links to other mica projects, throw them this way - I still have most of a packet left.

Julie x