Experimenting with Mica tiles Pt2

Hi there. How's things?

Me? I went into work for an hour then did a spot of arm-lengthening Christmas shopping. Whether or not I succumbed to buying myself a few things [like a t-shirt, some dark chocolate and wire-bird ornament for example] remains to be confirmed ...

Do you remember my post last month where I shared my first attempts at creating collages trapped between two layers of Mica Tile? [If not you can catch it here] Well I thought I'd update you with another example.

There's birds involved here too. I'm nothing if not predictable:

I cut the two little sparrows cosying up to each other on a branch from a page of an old Edwardian Lady book and added a fragment of an old dictionary page in the top right. You know me .... I've always got to have text on my work somewhere or else it feels to naked ... or rather it feels too quiet. I especially liked how the particular scrap of dictionary began with the word 'fragility' which I felt suited the little birds.

So that's what I used as my foreground 'but what', I hear you ask, 'is that lovely softly blended colourful background?'

That, my friends, is an alcohol-ink-effect technique which I fell upon entirely by chance ... and I love it! It uses up something which would otherwise be thrown away - which is a shame - and it's not only me who thinks that. I've heard several people express much the same thing.

And I'll tell you what that thing is tomorrow when I'll post a full photo-tutorial on a little item I made using the technique and explain everything.

So, how about meeting me back here tomorrow when I'll tell all? Oh, but one last thing ...

... have you got alcohol inks and Mica tiles handy? No? Good! Because you won't need either of them ...

See you then then.

J :-)

My Month in Numbers: November

Hi there.

That noise you hear? That's the sound of November exiting into the chilly air and swishing by ... on skis ... Which can only mean that [a] it's a touch snowy out there and [b] that it's time for another round up of my month ... in numbers, so here goes ...

Minus 5 = the temperature in our garden [in N.E England] last Saturday afternoon: 7 = the number of days in a row ... so far, that it's been snowing, which is why the hills out my window [my 'nab view'] looked rather like a Swiss ski resort yesterday afternoon:
One 4X4 = the vehicle which had to transport the clothing and craft supplies of 3 crafters for a 3.5 day retreat PLUS enough food for 3 meals per day for all 7 crafters attending. With all of that to fit in, is it any wonder that the boot looked like this:
Getting everything in the right place, without crushing anything was like a challenge from the Krypton Factor! However, there is 1 item I wish we'd left behind ...

Somewhere, in amongst all of that luggage there lay, darkly and sharply brooding, an evil smelling cheese. Being in the back seat for the journey, my nose sensed something odd from the offset ... but to be honest, I was too polite to ask the others what the smell was.

Cut to two hours later when, after returning to the car after a break, I was the first to open the door ... which led to my being almost knocked clean off my feet! While we'd all been eating lunch, the car had turned into a missile fuelled by vile gases! It was like a wall of stench.

Inexplicably, once we reached our destination, rather than throw the offending item in the bin, it was left on the window ledge for our entire stay: Perhaps it was to ward off evil spirits? Speaking of which ....

12 = the number of days after Halloween which we were hosting our own Halloween-themed crafting weekend away. Here's a small glimpse of how we transformed the charming cottage interior: And here's what we did to the outside:
What with that banner and the 7 skull embellished goblets we were storing on the inside window ledge ....
... it did cross my mind that the guests in the adjoining cottages, who had to pass by all our ghastly trimmings to reach their front doors, may just have toyed with the idea that they were holidaying in the vicinity of a cell of devil worshippers ...

All-be-it highly creative devil worshippers, here's a sample of what we all made:
2 x '12 Days' = November saw the second time Kirsty [Neale] and I ran our online workshops '12 Days'. And, although it feel like forever ago ... 9 = the page in the newspaper supplement in which 12 Days was featured and 2 = the number of years I've been blogging! All of which I wrote about in an early month-in-numbers post here.

12 weeks = approximately when we'll begin our next class! [Which seems scarily near - I think I really ought to be making samples instead of talking to you about cheese and snow ... but nevermind ...] For a hint at the theme of our Spring class you can have a peek here. We've had lots of guesses as to the theme on the secure 12 Days blog, none of which quite hit the nail on the head, so feel free to speculate!

100 = the number of blog followers I've reached - a kind of 'oh someone out there likes me' - milestone I was hoping to reach! My 100th follower even took time to leave me this lovely comment:I know we shouldn't measure ourselves by things as arbitrary as blog followers ... but we do and I'm grateful for those little signs that I'm doing something right over here some of the time!

So, seeing as how the batteries on my blog-follower-confetti-machine must be flat let me just say thank you to you Irma and to the 99 before you ... maybe this can make up for the lack of confetti:

And, last but not least ....

Tens of 1000s = the number of roosting starlings we saw on a guided walk, offered by our local RSPB reserve, to see the 'murmurations'! Isn't that an amazing word?

The murmurations are where the roosting starlings all flock together and sweep and merge across the sky ... and give you goosebumps and make you grin like a child ... you know the ones:

20 items of clothing = what I bundled myself in preparation in for the 2 hour-outside-in-the-snow escapade! This isn't the most glamorous photo of me I've ever shared here: But I really don't mind. It was necessary. And so worth it, for views like this across the frozen water alone:Even though the extreme weather made the starlings less fond of giving us a full display, we did see thousands of them flocking in, merging and them plummeting down into the same area of the reed beds until you couldn't believe they would take the weight. And the snow made the whole experience extremely magical.
So 'Goodbye November', with your cold,cold days, dark afternoons and freakishly early snow fall and 'Hello December' ... with .... your even colder days, darker afternoons and oh so heavy snow fall [I can hardly hear myself type it's blowing so hard against the window!].

Here's wishing you all a safe and warm run up to Christmas. I'm off out to measure the drifts in the garden ... just getting a headstart on my December Month in Numbers!

Julie x

p.s: As always, do feel free to share your own numbers with me, so I can see how your month added up too. :-)

If chance will have me King, why, chance may crown me ...

OK, now that I've got the Shakespeare [Macbeth] quote out of my head and into my post title .. I'll move on ...

I had half a snow day today. Which is to say I only worked in the morning as the University decided to close at 1pm due to the sheer amount of snow we've had.

Trust me ... there's nothing half about the snow itself. Even now where I wait with baited breath to see if I get a full white-stuff day off tomorrow. [Fingers crossed!].

But today, rather than run home to make snow angels in the back garden, I was good and stayed in town to start my Christmas shopping. And while mooching around The Works I spotted this little gem amongst the super-cheap jewellery:

It cost £1:00 ... so I didn't need to debate for too long whether or not to buy it.

And, while it does actually fit my finger:

I mainly had this sort of thing in mind when I bought it:

It really does make a splendid crown for the little porcelain head I found at a carboot sale for 50p in the summer.

So, if you have a branch of The Works near you, and you like making shrines or angels or any altered characters [yes, I do mean you Effie!] you might want to rush down there and buy up the remaining stock of crown/rings ...

... weather permitting!

Take care out there.

Julie x

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

Plastic bags, patterns and a small gavotte to finish.

At the start of the year I chose 'pattern' for my word of 2010 and I began taking photos of the interesting surface patterns around me. The main aim was to take and upload 365 of them to my 'Chasing Patterns' set on Flickr but I'm afraid I've stalled somewhere around 122 ....

This isn't due to running out of patterns to photograph, that would indeed be a dark day, but rather I've run out of free time and brain space to keep up!

However, the things occupying that spare corner of my brain now are the very things I referred to in my original post back in January. There I mentioned that 'pattern' also meant wanting to create and stick to a way of working which could help me achieve the things I wanted this year ... building on my freelance work, running online workshops, opening an online shop etc etc ... and I'm happy to say that those patterns are still decorating my life, day to day.

I'm managing to make new items for The Carousel Zebra [my etsy shop] - not at the rate I'd like to ... I'd need staff for that! - but I am updating the shop at least once a month so I'm pretty pleased with myself for that.

Did you hear my inner over-achiever trying to force her way out there with a begrudging 'pretty pleased'? I did! So ... quickly, before that happens ... I'll try to distract her with something pretty ....

My latest shop update happily combines both versions of the 'pattern' theme:

• they're evidence of my working pattern as I managed to upload these to etsy during a break in my day job - yay me!
• plus, the brooches themselves have a layer of pattern interest from the printed plastic bags they began life as:

Furthermore, while making these four I developed a technique which, while extremely low-tech [it involved, amongst other things, some tweezers, a lolly-stick and a plastic place-mat] it really did streamline the process for me.

Another thing I've missed about not updating my 365 Patterns, is the biut where I would blog about them with an appropriately themed musical interlude ... so today I'm bringing it back ...

While I was making these final two brooches:

... which meant staring at that black and white pattern for quite a while, all I could think about was the Ascot Gavotte scene from My Fair Lady ... bear with me ....

I [foolishly] said to James "You know that scene, where they're all dressed in black + white at the races and they're all singing about it being exciting but they don't lok excited?"

Needless to say he didn't know that scene and was mildly bemused that I'd thought it at all possible that he might ...

Anyways ... my point was, that all the way through making them:

.. the words "What a thrilling, absolutely chilling running of the Ascot opening race" would simply not leave my head!

And now you can have the same:

Enjoy the show [and those amazing costumes] and you know, if you ever need a brooch-shaped stocking-filler ...

Thanks for reading me today.

Julie :-)