365 Cards - Day 304 - Sounds Great

Today's challenge (and it is actually today, I'm doing well this week) is a rather, well, garish yellow & red CD cover.

So I picked up the yellow, red and white and abandoned everything else...

The backing paper is some of that yellow sugar paper that I'd self decorated back in the summer using green, orange & clear wax crayons/ candle & paint - if you're wondering where the green & orange is, I've used the reverse side as I rather like the two tones of yellow where the paint soaked through the unwaxed bits.

The dog & speechbubble is from a Basic Grey card sheet - June Bug Aggie 1814, which is full of very cute dogs, bones & bubbles etc. I bought about 6 sheets and spent a happy evening fussy cutting them all out of one sheet back in the summer. Although with it being card my fingers were a bit sore afterwards...

365 Cards - Day 296 - Wreath

Still in the right week, but three days late... This challenge was to make a wreath card, I've bought a couple of sets of stamps from the Rubber Stamp Tapestry range - this one is Shell Border SAQ00001. It has 6 separate stamps, 3 large shells, a seaweed and 2 small shells. I'm not too convinced by the colour ways, but it turns out I don't have quite the range of stamps pads I thought I did.... Serves me right for trying out new colour ways!

Anyway, this is a great opportunity to use this set (which I've had for a couple of months) and whilst I think I could have done with a bit more practising to get them pointed in a less random direction, I really enjoyed it.

I used the circles from Fiskars circles template and stamped inside them so that I didn't have to draw a circle and rub it out again. But it took a couple of attempts and increasing circle sizes and looking at it in the mirror upside down to get it looking balanced - like Topsy, it just growed!

PS I am ridiculously thrilled to have won one of the Top Trio Card of the Week Blinkie Prize for this one. How exciting! and unexpected.... Maybe I should do more cards on the right day after all, na, it's a once in a lifetime experience I think!

Finished Projects 1: Rabbit Wool Rug

I started making this wool hooked rug in oh probably 2003, having bought the rug canvas in about 2000 and the wool itself, well back when I was a student in Wolverhampton in 1990.

The rabbit/ hare motif is taken from a cross-stitch book - The Art of William Morris in CrossStitch by Barbara Hammett (David&Charles 1996). Where it's used on a picture as a pair of Brer Rabbit's with a scottish thistle rising between them with the suggestion you could use it to do a family tree. In the book, the finished size (including the thistle) is 14"x20". But by using rug canvas instead of on 14 count Aida, the rabbit itself is about a foot square-ish.

You can see the rabbit more clearly from the back, but I rather like the slightly formless shape given by the texture of the rug wool. I was originally going to do two rabbits facing each other, but then I liked the empty space without the second rabbit. When I started the rug, it didn't take long to do the rabbit, but I didn't fancy the slog of hooking the plain area, which is what I've been doing in the last few weeks and now it is complete!

Most of the wool is 80% wool/ 20% nylon quite coarse weaving wool which I bought for the princely sum of £1.54 for 11ozs at a crafts hall in Shrewsbury in the spring of 1990. I used most of two 11oz hanks of the blue and maybe half a red hank of a similar size plus some of the dark red, so it probably comes to about 26/27 ozs wool in all.

The Shrewsbury wool is : the background a Royal Air Force blue, the main Pillar Box red and the dark blood red shadows. The highlights wool is a fancy yarn I got from Texere Yarns mill on an huge cop, a mohair/ nylon mix with bits of shiny filament in it - it's a sort of golden and red mix. I used two strands of Shrewsbury wool and 6 strands of fancy yarn per stitch. The colour values aren't great, but I wasn't going the sweep the yard just to photograph the rug with decent values!

The rug is 14" wide by 40" long (count 46 wide by 130 long) and it took about an hour to do a block of 10x10 stitches of background. I made it as a runner for beside a bed. But am undecided as to whether I will keep & use it myself, give it as a present or try and sell it. So at the moment it's safely encased in plastic so it doesn't get motheaten - I think I've sorted the moth problem here, but in case I haven't....

365 Cards - Day 39 - Wacky Colour Wednesday

Today's theme of Purple, Orange & Green colour scheme was tricky until I started thinking about flowers - crocuses to be precise.

I tried doing a collage/ torn paper type reincarnation of a crocus based on the picture I had of crocuses, but it really didn't work.

So I used a 'draft quality' print of the picture and some dark green Canford paper to give a muted & sombre colour scheme, and just matted alternate layers of the two. I picked different areas of the crocus picture for each layer, so it didn't show as a complete picture interrupted by the green.

I need to practise cutting precise squares and precise positioning, the smaller ones are a little bit out.