In memory of Ian

This portrait was made in memory of Ian, one year on.

I completed it in November 2010, using Dudecraft's excellent tutorial.

Australian native flower-press

I had some flowers fading fast, so I decided it was time to do some flower-pressing!

I love the design & colours of this flower-press, which is from my childhood. It still has bits of paper & cardboard from back in the day wedged inside it...

After a few weeks, I could wait no longer and prised open the press.


Results as expected! The white flower wasn't very pretty, but the jonquils turned out really well.


Unsure as to what I actually wanted to do with the flowers, I whipped this up. You can spin the wheel for different early-morning remarks!

Bearded man ATC

My honours thesis is due in under three months, so expect a lot of procrastination crafting!

This afternoon, in between readings on survey-based experimental research via the web, I whipped up a Frankie Magazine ATC for a Send Something letter. Isn't the picture of the bearded guy awesome? It's made by the lovely lady over at the handmade romance blog.

I definitely need to carve a rubber stamp for the back of ATCs... could be a bit fiddly though!

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Related post: Magazine collage ATCs

Send some sparks of fun through the postal system!

Next time you send a letter, pause and consider the envelope.

If you haven't made the envelope yourself out of recycled pages, consider jazzing it up with a few scribbles or cut-outs... it makes receiving mail that much more fun! No doubt for the people delivering the mail as well...

These two envelopes were made for a penpal swap I hosted on swap-bot. The first was made with scrapbooking paper, and the second one is a drawn patchwork of vintage fabric.

I was inspired to start doing it more often after receiving a lovely map envelope from Communikate and many a hand-decorated envelope from bobberdilly (along with mail art & other drawings). If you have a moment, check out his blog - it is chocabloc full of amazing drawings.

In fact, this envelope was not just based on, it is pretty much a reproduction of one of the lovely pictures he sent me.

And this is an envelope I sent him... You can't tell from this scan, but the front of the envelope had just the face & the sea snail. And when you flip it over, you see that the face is attached to the body of a fish!

It's been fun, and I'm glad he's encouraged me to draw again (and not just copy other drawings & make collages). In turn, I encourage you all to decorate that next letter, or slip in a quick drawing you've done! Go forth and sending some sparks of fun through the postal system!

(Psst...If you're stuck on who to send to, or want to send out a drawing anonymously, don't forget about sendsomething.net)

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Related posts:

• Tutorial: envelopes from recycled paper
• Junk mail collages
• The envelope project
  

Magazine Collage ATCs

Hot on the heels of my junk mail collages, I participated in a Magazine Collage ATC Swap over on swap-bot.

I spent a while poring over old Frankie Magazines to find inspiration, which wasn't hard because it's full of cute and quirky backgrounds, drawings, photos & articles :)

The process went something like this:

1. Rip out magazine pages with interesting pics
2. Carefully cut out around individual pics with an exacto knife & cut out various background prints
   
3. Spend an hour or so rearranging all the little pieces around on a blank ATC until happy with the arangement
4. Desperately try and glue all the pieces down whilst keeping them in place
5. Look at all the bits and pieces which didn't make the cut... and repeat steps 3&4
   

As you can see in the pics above, I actually cut out an ATC-sized piece from the magazine's cover to use as the 'blank' canvas.


And we all know I'm a sucker for coordination, so the card & envelope also had to be made from Frankie magazine cut-outs!

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• Related post: Tutorial: envelopes from recycled paper

Junk mail collages

I have not swapped on swap-bot for a little while now. But I did meet some great people through the site who I have projects on the side with.

One guy in particular, Robert Joy (Bobberdilly), sent me a fantastic letter with a decorated envelope and some drawings. We have been sending this "mail art" back and forth. It's a lovely, non-judgemental way of having a go at drawing.

He also mentioned that he and some friends are trying to make art out of junk mail. I don't know if it qualifies as art, but I thought I'd share my collages with you!

I'd love to see what other people come up with, so if you've had a go please leave me a comment with a link so that I can check it out.

Matching zipper pouch and pocket tissue holder

I couldn't resist trying two more of cindylou's tutorials:

• How to make a lined zipper pouch
• Pocket tissue holder

The tutorials were easy to follow, and I conquered my fear of the zipper! I remembered a trick from Michelle's zipper tutorial - the one about stopping halfway down the zipper, lifting the foot whilst the needle is down & moving the zipper head to the other side before continuing. It didn't turn out perfectly, nor did the lining, but all in all it was fun and looks fine! And both coordinate with yesterday's tote bag... How much coordination is too much coordination?! ;)

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• Related post: From "singlet style" to "reversible" tote
  

Tutorial: envelopes from recycled paper

The semester's exams are finally over! My pile of unfinished and wishlist projects has accumulated at an alarming rate these past few weeks. In between finishing final assignments, I made heaps of envelopes. I have been recycling magazines, maps, calendars, ads, forms, discarded one-sided printing and even my old class-notes... I find it satisfying to turn all this waste into something fun and useful. If I run out of interesting paper or inspiration, I might make my potato pig stamp design into a rubber stamp. Then I'll be able to make even the most boring envelopes made out of printed drafts of assignments interesting!

There are plenty of templates available freely on the web, but I ended up making my own template in Inkscape. Feel free to use it:

• Template for A4 paper
• Template for US letter paper
  

I chose this shape because it fits standard 4x6" photos, postcards and A4 sheets folded in four and it is the perfect size to make envelopes out of A4 sheets and magazines.

Use this template, or carefully unstick any envelope you fancy, and trace it onto a piece of cardboard. The cardboard from old notepads, or even old cereal boxes will do nicely. This sturdy cardboard template will make lots of accurate tracings a breeze.

Next, you need appropriate paper. Newspaper and the such tends to be too flimsy - you want the envelope to be fairly sturdy, so it's worth having something at least as thick as a standard sheet of office paper. Next, an eye-catching design is best. This is up to your discretion, but remember that you want people to actually use the envelopes, so eye-catching is good! If the paper is bigger than your envelope template, then you have a little bit of choice about where to cut. Hold the paper up to the light and place your template behind it. This will create a shadow where the cut-out will be.


Shift it around until you are happy, then carefully bring it down to your table and trace the outline with an ordinary pen.


After cutting it out, fold in the side flaps (left and right), fold up the main body (bottom), then fold down the flap (top).

You're almost there! I use a regular gluestick to stick the flaps under the body of the envelope and then I stick some double-sided tape under the flap so that it can be closed easily later. This gives them a professional touch.

Place the envelope under some heavy books to dry and have a cup of tea.


At the end of it you'll have a beautiful envelope. Then go get some more material and repeat!

Package them up and gift them to friends, or save them for yourself. If you want to brighten a random person's day, head over to sendsomething.net and send someone a surprise.

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Also see: angry chicken's homemade envelopes - lazy style.

Flower person ATC

I must admit, I was a little stumped for this ATC. I took it as a challenge to myself - that's what I like about Swap-bot: other people think of the ideas, then you have a deadline to do them by. It's what makes the difference, for me, between thinking "oh, I'd like to do that one day" to "you need to do this now, and make it good because it's going out to somebody!"

Anyway, the swap stipulated the following:

The idea here is to use a flower, be it stamped, prima type, paper etc etc, and put a face in the middle and give it a body and have a beautiful little flower person.

I had some lovely flower stickers I wanted to use, but was a little bit apprehensive about the body.

In the end, I traced a baby picture from a book I picked up at Abbey's bookshop: Anatomy and Drawing, by Victor Perard.

Ideally I'll be drawing my own figures, but I'm not quite ready yet. So I traced the picture in pencil, and then went over it in a felt-tip pen. I wasn't sure how I was going to colour it - it didn't look right in b&w. Then I remembered how at school we'd make old-looking "parchment" by rubbing a wet teabag on paper.

So I wet a teabag in a small amount of hot water, squeezed most of the water out, and dabbed the picture with it. It made the felt ink run a little, which I liked - otherwise I could have done the pen outline afterwards. For good measure, I dipped my finger into the instant coffee jar and dotted them around the wet picture, which left little brown spots. To stop the paper curling, I placed it between 2 sheets of paper and left it to dry under a heavy book.

I recently picked up some blank ATC cards at Eckersley's Art & Craft store, which has made life much easier. For my last ATC, I used some cardstock I had lying around, but my cutting was a little wonky. Anyway, I used some green scrapbooking papers for the background, and... voilà! Not exactly Ann Geddes, but still!

Recipe swaps: vegan & scavenger

Two recent swaps I sent off were mmmmm Favorite Recipes - Vegan and Recipe scavenger hunt on swap-bot. As a vegan-leaning vegetarian, I was all too happy to share some of my tried & true vegan recipes, and to receive some other people's in return. The scavenger hunt was also fun, and required each participant to choose recipes from ten of the following fifteen categories:

1. uses leftovers
2. contains no meat
3. is for a soup
4. is for a dessert
5. contains corn
6. was found in a magazine
7. you've never tried
8. is your favorite recipe
9. can be made in a crock pot or slow cooker
10. is for an appetizer
11. contains cheese
12. is for bread or muffins
13. contains fruit
14. is for a dip
15. is really bad for you-but tastes soooo good

I sent only veggie recipes (and my swap partner for the scavenger hunt is also kindly sending me only veggie ones), including the following yummy soup from The Canberra Cook, which is great for winter:

Roast Tomato and Red Lentil Soup

Ingredients

• 1kg tomatoes.
• 1 litre good vegetable stock
• 180g red lentils
• 1 medium onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 tablespoon olive oil (or just a teaspoon works)
• 2 tsp oregano
• salt, pepper

Recipe

1. Halve the tomatoes, arrange in a single layer on a deep sided baking dish, roast in a moderate (160C) oven for 40 minutes. They should be well done, but not dried.
2. Gently fry the onion & garlic in the oil until onion is golden. Add the lentils (washed & picked over as needed), stock, tomatoes and oregano. Also add any juices from the bottom of the tomato baking dish. You can slip the skins off the tomatoes at this point if you so desire.
3. Simmer until lentils are done - these are the type that go to mush, not the whole ones. Run through a blender to get a smoothish texture. Thin down with water or more veggie stock to your desired consistency, and add salt and pepper to taste.

The format was sender's choice, and my partners didn't specify whether they wanted cards or sheets or anything, so I ended up printing on to letter-sized paper (by that I mean I printed on A4 and tried to trim it down to letter dimensions...! See this wiki article for more on North American vs the International standard!)

For one thing, I don't know what a standard recipe card size is, and also my recipes were quite long, and there were many of them. Still, I got out some coloured paper and decorated them best I could. Aside from the tomatoes, I also made some more vegetables.... including eggplant, carrot, lemon, peas and spinach amongst others!


It was fun! So much fun, in fact, that I got carried away and decided to make a tomato magnet too... here it is!


It is slightly raised & filled with pillow material. It was the first time I had used blanket stitch, and it works well to seal the edges of flat felt objects! :) The magnetic strip was adhesive but I found that I also had to stitch it on to really stick (luckily it is thin, and the needle pierces it easily).

In the meantime, I need to improve my photography & digital editing skills somewhat!

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• Related post: Incoming: vegan recipes

One-Day Swap

I made this ATC for the One-Day Swap at swap-bot.

The original sketch was for a dotee doll, but I didn't have enough nice fabrics to pull it off. However, after spreading all of my craft supplies out all over the floor to take stock of my supplies (they're all still scattered about, ahem), I decided that I had enough appropriate paper scraps to give an ATC a go.

ATCs are a concept that, like dotees, I had not come across before joining swap-bot. So this is my very first ATC. I'm still not comfortable with my drawing skills, preferring to do simple collage-type things for now.

You can't really tell from the scanned image, but the ATC is layered:

• The red hat-band & dress are made from corrugated red cardboard
• The hat itself is made from textured black cardboard. The brim stands out, because I stuck a piece of felt under it.
• The "button" is a "flat" wooden bead
• The face is made of felt, with embroidered eyes & mouth.
• The fringe is also made from felt, but the hair that hangs down is braided embroidery thread (they move around freely)
• The shawl's fringe is green Yarn
• The shawl and hills are made from some scrapbooking paper & the sky was cut out of an advertising catalogue

I love all the different textures & recycling all the scraps of paper & material I have been hoarding for what feels like an eternity!