A First art collage

V made her first collage from magazine pictures.

What does a four-year-old find interesting? Other little girls and boys her age, food, and balloons. There’s a picture of a family on a beach and when I asked her what she found interesting about it, she said the little girl’s bathing suit. And the woman with little girl in the stroller? She said she liked that they were both wearing funny hats.

I encouraged her to write some letters over the washi taped pieces and helped her assemble some of the illustrations, but she made it clear to me that it was entirely her own project.

Good girl.

I’ve been busy

It seems like I haven’t been posting frequently. Maybe this is so, but it isn’t because I haven’t been busy working on projects. Actually, I’ve got a lot on my plate, craft-wise.

I’ve subscribed to an internet group that works on collage journaling using illustrations that mainly come from magazines. I’m not interested so much in using it as a kind of diary, as many of the participants do, but want the practice of assembling a collage that has a kind of meaning behind the illustrations, that they are not random, and practicing with using a source that I have in abundance — catalogs, brochures, and magazines that I get in the mail. Basically lots junk mail. (You would not believe the amount of stuff that comes to new home owners. For example, I’m receiving subscriptions to three magazines that I never contacted.) Anyway, I’ve made a few collages so far. Nothing I’m awed by, but I really like the practice.

Then I’m creating from scratch a journal geared towards young children. I’ve taken a blank sketch book and am slowly filling various pages with writing prompts, doodles, collages, and other things to get a child to think creatively and expressively. This is a longer project that is going to take me at least a year to complete. I’ve got so many ideas for pages on this but just don’t have the time to do them. At least I’ve made a list of my ideas so I wont forget them.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet.

The third thing I’ve got going on is my creation of an altered book. Basically, you take an old book, tear out some pages, prime the rest of the pages, and then paint, draw, glue, collage, decoupage, stamp, stencil, or do whatever to it. This will be a longer-term project as well but I’ve finally begun. I’ve wanted to do this for years and just haven’t gotten to starting. This one I want to use entirely for experimentation of techniques in applying color and layers to the pages.

Am I wasting the little free time I have on hobbies and crafts when I could be doing something more productive? Maybe. I love my kids but they wear me out physically and mentally. I’m not complaining, it’s just a fact. These projects distract me from everyday stress and give me a sense of completion, even if they come in little tiny steps. And it makes me happy.

Cork board makeover

I wanted a cork board for displaying V’s and T’s art, somewhere in the kitchen. The only spot it really could go would be next to the hutch by the small kitchen nook table.

I found a style of cork board that I liked but I knew I would have to change the color to match the hutch. Not a problem since we still have half a paint can of the stuff. I did some sanding and painted it in one afternoon while T was sleeping.

I don’t particularly like the look of cork. I knew I wanted to cover it with something and thought about using some kind of material, but I didn’t want anything too busy. I eventually went with burlap in a nice cream color.

How did I get the burlap on there? I wanted to remove the frame and staple the burlap on to the cork board but the frame wouldn’t come off. So plan B was using a butter knife to wedge the burlap under the frame. I glued on the material first and then did the wedging. That was the hardest part.

Now I just have to think about changing out those ugly blinds and I’ll be done in this corner of the house.

More 12 inch pillows

V has teacher appreciation this week and I wanted to make something for the awesome ladies who run her class. They are three really wonderful people. I had the idea of making more pillows because they are so colorful and fun to make.

I realized I hadn’t written down any of my numbers so had to go back and remeasure. These notes are more for me than anything. Just so I have it for the next time I go to make these.

• 4 squares at 6.5″ each
• 1 piece at 10 x 12.5″
• 1 piece at 8 x 12.5″

 

There’s nothing tricky to these. You have to do a lot of pre-ironing to get the seems and hems just right. That’s about it.

New keys

I have a saved search on eBay for a Helason key. I have one that I bought at the flohmarkt in Vienna when I lived there and wanted to have at least one more of them. 

They are very unique keys. They are also hard to find. I don’t know the story of Helason keys and locks, and even if they are still being manufactured, but I do know they have an Austrian patent (it says so right on the key. You can’t miss it).

I never get eBay notifications of one listed on auction, but then one day I did. And it was for three keys. Wow! There were already a few bids on them but we were at $5. I had no idea how much they’d go for but I was willing to pay a little bit.

I won them at a little above $8, and with shipping from Canada it came to about $13. So worth it.

They arrived in their natural state of tarnished brass. Many would say I should leave them as is, keep them authentic. I say shine ‘em up, baby. I want them to sparkle. So I polished them with a concoction made up of vinegar, baking soda, and salt. Aren’t they beautiful?

They’ll tarnish again over time anyway. What am I going to do with them? I don’t know. I’ll do something with them, but right now I don’t care. They’re in my possession and that’s all that matters.

A Hutch cabinet for the kitchen nook

Just before we moved from our apartment to our house, I bought a piece of furniture from the clearance section at Ikea. It was a Leksvik buffet with cabinet originally priced at $249 on sale for $99. Why so cheap? This model is being discontinued at Ikea. Three were left.

I had been secretly looking at buffet tables and hutches on and off for a little while. IM doesn’t care for non-essential furniture in the house and wouldn’t have gone for the idea, but I love the way they look and their usefulness.

Well, since this buffet was on clearance and I was by myself with no one to influence me, I decided on the spot to get it. It was an ugly brown color and wouldn’t have matched anything in the house/kitchen so we decided to paint it the same color we have our mural wall in the living room, a dark grey. I say “we” at this point because I bought it and IM had to move it when we moved into our new house. Then he sanded the pieces down for me, and by then, well, it wasn’t just mine anymore. It was ours. Still, he hadn’t seen what it looked like assembled yet.

Here’s the before and after.

I painted it, papered the backing behind the hutch glass, and when IM assembled it it fit right in with the house.

I also painted a bird on a branch on the lower cabinet just to make it a little more interesting and have it work with out trees theme in the living room.

I have to say that I didn’t have the idea to so completely change this cabinet until I saw this picture of the same piece of furniture done in a beautiful blue. This convinced me that I could customize our own.

Since it’s in our kitchen nook area we use it mainly to hold V’s craft tools, coloring books, etc. Above in the hutch I’ve got a few things that make me happy to see. And front and center I’ve got my painter’s box on display.

 

Lastly, I’ve got my favorite key hanging off of the handle. It’s my Helason key from Austria. The tassel I found in my grandmother’s box of buttons. It works well here.

Making a rainbow cake

In V’s class, her teacher approached me about making a cake for St. Patrick’s Day. It’s called a Leprechaun Trap Cake. I had never heard of such a thing but said sure, I’d have a crack at it. She pointed me to the directions she found online and I was amazed. I had never seen such a thing. I had also never seen anything with so much food coloring!

I was actually hesitant to make it, simply because I would be using so much artificial food coloring and I always try to bake with natural ingredients, even to color my cakes, but in the end I decided to go ahead and make the cake anyway.

After I read the blog post on making the trap cake, I did another search for the same cake and found another blogger who made it. She used a different cake recipe. She used a cream-cheese pound cake recipe where as the original blogger used a basic box cake like a Duncan Heinz or Betty Crocker. I liked the idea of the pound cake and was really glad I chose it. The texture came out beautifully and tasted just fine. I’d use a half cup less sugar next time, but all in all it’s a good recipe.

With the batter, the way to proportion it out is to keep 1/3 plain white color and with the rest of the 2/3rds divide that into 6 incremental portions. In other words, in one bowl you’ll have the most batter, probably red, and then slightly less and less over the next 5 bowls, ending in purple.

IM helped me with the preparation since we needed to do it at night when V couldn’t see.

 

Purple was last. There wasn’t very much of it.

 

After I baked it (It took 1 hour 45 min to bake!) and I leveled off the top, I cut the purple out entirely. Oh well.

 

V’s teacher was in alt! She loved it. She said we “hit it out of the park” with this cake. And yes, we frosted it and filled the middle with chocolate gold coins.

I’m not sure I’ll make it again, but it did look pretty cool.

Still with coins for more wall art

Since I’ve been looking into my stash of coins lately, I found a bunch of random coins that I wanted to make into something I can display.

Some of the coins I held on to from trips to Europe in the 90s, some IM’s grandmother gave me this last visit to Slovakia when I asked her if she had any still lying around, and some are ones I picked up at flea markets over the years. I like the ones from the former communist countries. There’s some from the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. There are even some from former East Germany.

I liked the idea of a picture frame and found a floating frame that holds the coins between two pieces of glass. I’m not sure if it allows more light to show off what’s inside but it’s a cool effect. Plus, if you turn the frame over you can see the back sides of the coins.

After I gently washed them with a little kitchen soap and warm water, I placed as many as I could in the 6 x 8 frame.

I showed it to IM and we decided a good place for them would be our guest bathroom. It’s a teeny tiny bathroom but still it needed something on the wall in the blank space above the toilet.

After I hung it there, it looked so lost, even within that small piece of wall. So I decided I’d lay some outlines around the frame with washi tape. It helped.

 

It’s hard to miss the frame now since there is practically a bulls eye pointing it out.

Project craft – Button tea kettle

Recently I went through an old tin box of buttons that used to belong to my grandmother. She used to do quite a lot of sewing starting in her teenage years all the way up to her 70s and 80s.

Her buttons are in a beautiful tin with what looks like an illustration of a European town. If I had to guess, I’d bet it was Nuremberg, my grandfather’s hometown. I’ll have to see what I find in a Google search and see if I can match a town or the town/city flag on the cover.

Inside are a ton of buttons. I’m not sure how old they are but my dad says he remembers playing with the buttons in the small clear container when he was a little kid, some 60 years ago.

On one of the packages of unused buttons are imported Austrian glass button from the US zone, so that’s allied occupation between 1945 and 1955.

Some fastenings are so old I have absolutely no idea how they were used. These must be a clasp of some sort but I don’t know how you would attach it to clothing.

Well, I wanted to do something with some of these buttons. I don’t want them to just sit in their tin and never see the light of day. So when I saw a wood cut out of a tea kettle at the Michaels store I knew what I wanted to do.

I got V to help me out by first painting the wood a solid ivory cream color. Then she helped me pick out the prettiest and most colorful buttons she could find.

After that we laid out the buttons on the background and I started gluing. This was a lot harder than it looks. I was trying to get as many buttons on the kettle as I could, which meant they had to be as close to each other as possible.

I tried buttons in different combinations to find which ones sat best closer to others. At first it was tedious work but then it became relaxing, almost like doing a puzzle. It took me a couple of hours to complete.

Many of the buttons are so unique like the blue one right at the very top, below the ribbon. Also this pink one at the foot.

It will be displayed somewhere in our home but I haven’t found a good spot for it yet. Sometimes these things come in time.

Sewing project – Fat quarter pillow case

Last year I made some cool pillow cases for my nephews using 4 fat quarters of material. I forgot to take pictures, of course. I wanted to make a pillow case for their sister, my niece E, and a few weeks ago I found perfect coordinating material to do so.

The idea comes from a book on fat quarter quilting that I enjoy going through. It’s by Sue Penn and a great beginner book for sewing and quilting. This pillowcase required 4 fat quarters of coordinating fabrics.

 

I love how you can flip the pillow over and have a new pattern to look at.

 

Putting on the sleeve around the outside was the most challenging since the hem is finished on both the outside and the inside. I had to do lots of folding, ironing, and pinning before I got this just right to sew. It came out nicely though.