Lots of New This New Year!!

 

First; I'd like to thank everyone who supported Crafty Day Dreams, your support means so much to me!

Second; I want to wish everyone a very happy and healthy new year. I decided not to partake in the New Year's resolutions this year for a few reasons, the biggest one being that I normal do not succeed very well at them. I have decided to take on some goals for myself instead. One of these goals is to try to blog more and show maybe more in progress stuff. I'd like to maybe do some videos too. Second goal is to get everything that I have made photographed and listed in my stores. Surprisingly I have a ton of items made that I just have not found the time to photograph and list.


Third; Be on the look out for some great new items coming your way this new year. There will be a wide variety of new items appearing in my stores.  Booklaces will be making a appearance after a some good feedback from the lucky person to receive the prototype.  Adjustments have been made and the original improved upon. Start looking for these in the up and coming weeks.  Be sure to keep checking back to see what's been added to the store. :)

Day 44 & 45 - Craziness

Yeah I didn't post yesterday...first time I've missed in well, 44 days. Not bad. Well actually it is bad. Have you ever had one of those days where everything is just wrong? Can't find anything to save your life? I did yesterday and am still there. I miss placed some cards and for the life of me can't find them. I've been tearing the office apart trying to locate them, with no luck. I can vaguely remember the conversation with my hubby about how I had to press them because they were curling really bad. Now I can't seem to find them. It's like they vanished into thin air. I've even been asking St. Anthony (you know that thing you say when you lost something...Dear St. Anthony come around, somethings lost and can't be found) to hurry up and do his magic a little faster. (I found my Hello Kitty sticker book, it was lost, but it's not what I really wanted to find.) Even pleading with St. Anthony hasn't worked to find these cards. I'm at my wits end and it's really getting to me. I'm going to lose it....soon.

***Deep breath***So yesterday, while in the midst of searching for these darn cards, the oldest wants to work on a piece of art for the art gallery. They are hosting a Children's Exhibit. I worked with her on her water colors and how to not press so hard on the brush. She, for some reason, wants to push the brush all the way to the paper so that the metal end is scraping on the paper. I tried to get her to use the tip of the brush, how to get different shades of the same color and how to even out the paint on the paper. She's doing good. I can't wait to see how it looks when she's all done.

Today, but of course, you guessed it, more card craziness. Still can't find them. Still driving me NUTS!!! To take my mind off the craziness I decided to decorate some garden stakes. Thinking about the garden makes me happy :) I plan on putting quite a bit of work into it this year and over the next few years. I really want it to be something wonderful. I found some garden stakes in one of the dollar bin at Michael's and picked some up. I took some Mod Podge and affixed some decorative paper to the fronts of them, trimmed the edges and sanded them down. I aged them with some vanilla paint and sand paper. The border around the yellowish one was done with water colors and a detail brush. The lettering I embossed on with wet embossing markers and clear embossing powder. Finally I sealed them with a couple of layers of Mod Podge and once it is nice enough outside I'll give the whole steak a good cover with some clear coat.

Day 9 - Wire Writing

Yep you read the title right and it's just as it sounds. Writing words with wire.

I had some time today so I figured I'd do something a little more involved and time consuming. Wire writing was it. To do wire writing I place different size pegs with different shapes on to boards. Then I take the wire and wrapping it around the pegs. Sometimes after I take it off the pegs and the board I give some of the loops a little twist. These little wire words are great embellishments for cards and scrapbooks.

No Garden is Complete Without Signs

I decided since things really started sprouting in the garden that it was time to make the garden pretty and actually make some signs for the boxes. Right now I am using the empty packet from the seeds to mark what is planted where, and those poor little packets are getting ratty from rain and water. We have tons of polymer clay laying around the house for those....I've gotta sculpt something urges.  We I got the urge to sculpt some little signs for the veggies.  I figured I would just do signs for things in the long boxes to start and see how that goes.


I found some sticks that I could use as holders and started sculpting. I kneaded and kneaded and rolled out and rough cut out some rectangles. I stamped the clay rectangles with letters and designs. They got put in the oven to bake then cool over night and this is what came out.


I decided to leave them rough because I felt that it would be a better fit in the garden if they weren't so polished looking. I want them to look a little imperfect. I went ahead and brushed a white coating/primer on them. (Wishing now that I had used the airbrush or a spray primer for a more even coverage. It might not have taken so many coats of some of the colors to get them even looking.)

Once they looked all peaked it was time to decide on a base coat for each of them. This was the tough part. I wanted to color them to go along with the veggies but with SO many green veggies I was at a loss.  I used a few different shades of green that I had to give some variety to the green. There were also few that ended up with odd colors like pink and blue grey.

 Then I had to paint in the details. This was the tough part as some of the stamped parts were small. I had to use a really tiny brush, my favorite a citadel 0000, and lots of Liquitex Flowaid.  If you've never used Flowaid it's great. You mix it into your paint and it allows your paint to flow easily. I use a drop of paint to two small drops of Flowaid, mixed well, to get the paint to flow nicely from the brush and into the tiny indents of the stamped clay. Each one is different from each other. I didn't stamp any two the same.   The one problem I did have toward the end was that during the baking process some of the stick holes shrunk. To fix this I had to whittle away at some of the sticks till they fit in.  I must say that I am very happy with the way they turned out.


                                      They really brighten up the boxes and the garden!