ATC's

   I have seen a lot of ATC's on my blog travels and I really like them...it is a lovely idea to swap work like this and have a collection of other artists creativity. At first I found it quite daunting to work on such a small scale, but in some ways it makes it easier not having to find things to fill a space!

  

    One of my first ATC's - Not too keen, but I was just experimenting with the dimensions of the card and what would fit. Finding out what I liked and didn't......









I began to play around with the DI's and embossing techniques and basically see what happened....several cards never made it past the first ink stage, but it is all about learning....Sometimes it goes wrong and sometimes it goes right.















      I was really pleased with how the orange and purple blending went. I have a very limited range of colours at the moment, but it is fun seeing how I can get them to work.

 Here I used the inks as watercolour paints. First I blended Ripe Persimmon, Seedless Preserves and Peeled Paint across the card. I then dabbed the ink pads onto the craft mat, add a spritz of water and mix the colours. The bright orange and purpley pink made a gorgeous red and the peeled paint and gathered twigs provided the colour for the grass.

I decided to emboss the poppies..so I used a paintbrush to pick up the ink from the clear ink pad and applied to the flowers. Clear embossing powder was used and the flowers had a wonderful gloss texture.

   This is a tag that became an ATC. I didn't like the tag very much except for the heart and flowers detail. So off they came and were added to a gorgeous green patterned background.

 

And the same again here. This was a tag, but I felt that the stamp had got lost in the corner of the tag, so by cutting it down to ATC size it looked much better.

  
  Here I decided to see what stamping in bubble wrap would do....and kept layering colours and also inking over clear embossed stamping. I was going to put something else on the card but I didn't want to cover up all the lovely colours and textures.

    

 This is a very special one...This one I wouldn't swap but then really who else would want it but me? My favourite photo of my children surrounded by inked, stamped and embossed card strips and hearts

Hope you like my first attempts at ATC's - Any one wanna swap? ;o) xxx


    I am entering the following ATC's in these challenge -

   Wicked Wednesday - Wing it - Butterfly
   Fun with ATCs - Embossing - Poppies
   ATCs with attitude - Anything goes  - Children

  

A dolls house gift - Part 2

   Now to finish the story of the dolls house gift......


       So at the end of part 1 I had made a few items for the room...I had made the butchers shop and now needed to set up the room....

Here is the room at the beginning - no wallpaper or carpet, but just testing the furniture out! I have no photos of decorating the room at all. I got some dolls house carpet and some Laura Ashley wallpaper (£1.50 for a huge roll!) and it was a nightmare to decorate.

    The box itself is quite small and wasn't very deep...as a scale room it would be smaller than a box room. It had awkward corners and everytime I cut a piece of paper to fit I would find I had cut the wrong angle - however careful I was. Long suffering husband came home to find me in tears and about to kick everything across the room. As usual, he picked me up saying "You can do it" and I had several more goes, cursing every time the paper ripped or I got the measurements wrong - AGAIN!

   As the saying goes "practice makes perfect" - Well, it probably isn't perfect - but I got the walls covered at least!

    So now the really fun part of minatures - creating the little bits and pieces. The room looks nice already but it is the little details that makes miniatures so fascinating. I love the small details that make the room. I could have left it quite basic and it would have been fine, but I wanted little elements like the spilled paint with kitchen roll and vanish carpet cleaner....the mess of paper and wood...I could have come up with more no doubt, but space was minimal!!

 So small items get added....a work mat was easy, scrap of paper - have plenty of those ;o)
   The pencil box came from a dolls house printables site I found....just print, cut out fold and glue and you have a dolls house item!

Fimo works well for minatures. Nearly every craft item here is made from Fimo. I have made paintbrushes with red Fimo, masking tape and bristles cut from old paintbrushes. The pencil is made from Fimo as are the sausages and ham. The PVA glue pot is also Fimo as is the ruler....

It was a shame that the sausages weren't exactly 1/12th scale but that was the smallest I could make without them breaking! The paint pot was a cut up plastic tube filled with acrylic paint that I dabbed along the edge of the table.

    I put a 1p coin in this photo so that you can get a clearer idea of just how tiny some of these objects really were.

And the hinges in the butchers shop do work!

The prints and tiles on the wall are printed from the photos of Gil's butchers shop that I took when I was preparing this gift.

  I knew I wanted mess....So of course in this room the blue acrylic paint has spilled on the beautiful cream carpet (not a good choice floor covering for a craft room!) I made the kitchen roll by rolling up some beige paper in a small roll and then wrapping a strip of toilet paper around it (had to be toilet paper as kitchen roll has too large a texture pattern to be used at such small scale)....I made the Vanish cleaner with pink Fimo and printed the label....scrunched up small pieces of tissue and splodged some paint on the carpet. Was a nervous moment as mistakes couldn't be made!

     A few years before, Gil had given me some mushroom print material. I knew it would work well in this room as she is passionate about mushrooms and I really wanted the room to be about her...hence the butchers shop which is an interest of hers as is the dolls house world. The silver frame has a portrait of her grandchildren and several items in the room came from her dolls house collection...I wanted it to look like a room she would have.

    The cushion was easy to make as it required only simple sewing...and was filled with semolina. Good tip for making dolls house cushions is never fill them with cotton wadding as it makes the cushions look less authentic. Filling them with semolina means they look far more realistic in their 'just been sat on' look.The laptop computer was another printable form a website - just print, cut and glue.

The finished room! - But hold on a minute....something isn't quite right here. Didn't I say I wanted it messy? Right....time to make some mess!!!! Cutting up bits of paper...scrunching paper...planks of wood, the box of scrap paper (we all have one of those!) notes, planner, letters, envelopes, C.D's - everything was scattered everywhere.....

I couldn't resist this little joke!

And here it is....the finished messy craft room...

      I hope you have enjoyed reading this two part blog post...If you have then please leave a comment. I would love to know what you thought of it.


I am entering this in the following challenge -

Simon says stamp and show - House rules

A dolls house gift - Part 1

     I was going to do one blog post about gifts I have made, but after thinking about what to include I realised it would make the post so gigantic and perhaps a bit tedious for people to wade through. So perhaps the best thing to do is to post individual ones. This post is about a gift for my mother-in-law...the preparation for it was quite immense so I will be doing this blog in two parts.....

     
          My mother-in-law Gil, adores dolls houses which you could find out about here

Cestina's dolls houses

I had always wanted a dolls house and nearly 5 years ago Gil bought me one and I am gradually making the furniture for it. I always said to her I couldn't make my own furniture and she insisted I could. Well, she was right - I got well and truly hooked into the world of dolls houses and I adore making things for them. I am still learning how to do it...It can be a tricky job but I love the challenges it presents and, after nearly collapsing when seeing the prices of ready made dolls house furniture, I love how cheap making dolls house furniture can be.

So, along came the time when I needed an idea for a gift for Gil's birthday...In my family there is the general assumption that handmade gifts will be given and I do try to come up with something original each time. 

I did have a wooden box with a glass front .............

............and I had had no idea what to do with it so it had been put up on the top shelf of the art cupboard and there it sat for a couple of years. When I began to develop the idea of making a dolls house room, something Gil had made for friends and family before so I knew she loved the concept, I got the wooden box down again and began to try and come up with some ideas.

    As usual, I went to my sister-in-law Alison for some advice. I said I had this vague idea of making a craft room...perhaps showing the construction of a dolls house? The idea of it being similar to how Gil (and myself) work.....amid total chaos!

      Alison suggested that the room contain the makings of a butchers shop - as this is something Gil really likes and had made one for herself with Alison's help years before. She showed me some photos of the type of shop she was talking about.....

 .....Well, I was going to be making a 1/12th copy of that 1/12th shop!...it wouldn't be as detailed as that!!! But, of course I breathed a HUGE sigh of relief when Alison pointed out that mine didn't have to be...this was a work room and this shop would be being constructed. So it was decided that the person working in that room hadn't got as far as making all those little details......That would work!

  Alison also showed me the butchers shop dolls house that Gil had made years before. I took photos of it, so that I could have some reference to help me construct a 1/12 scale butchers shop doll house. I wanted to recreate the one she had (as close as possible)...

      First thing was to have a plan of what to put in in the dolls house room....I had made quite a bit of furniture for my own dolls house and several items I had changed my mind about after I had made them. So they were the first things to be chosen.......

     I thought the best thing to do first would be to make the little dolls house that will be in the process of being 'created' in the dolls house room....

After constructing the roof, I realised it wasn't going to work...The angle was wrong and was too high...so off it came and the flat roof looked much better

 I decided the room should have a Victorian sampler on the wall. I do love sewing - in small amounts and this is as small as it gets really! So I found some cotton, got out the embroidery hoop and cottons, researched some Victorian samplers and printed one. Placed the material and image over a light box, I then traced the image in pen and sewed! You can see from the £1 coin, the scale of the sampler and how tricky it was to do!

 I made the frame from wood painted in acrylic paint

 For the work desk I knew I would need paints, pencils, work mat and of course, the dolls house makers very important craft tool - the craft knife. I own one myself so working out scale was easy....but oh goodness! Tricky to make such a tiny item.......

 And that IS a metal blade attached!

 A little book shelf was quite easy to make and painted the same brown to match the sampler...I didn't make the lamp (one of the very few things that I didn't make) and the books were made by my mother-in-law for my birthday present which was my life in books....she had a few extras that she gave to me later, so I placed them on this little bookshelf

 I wanted a corner unit....so that was another thing to make...Far trickier than the bookcase as all the shelves have to have pieces cut out so they attach to the legs of the unit....and making sure the glue sticks with the legs straight is a huge challenge and not best suited to someone with my total lack of patience ;o)

 Painted with the same brown paint, here is the finished corner unit...I didn't make the flowers (though I could have done) These were bought for my dolls house and I decided they didn't fit in anywhere and were best used for this project.

 Probably the easiest thing to have made....the bin!!!!! A bottle cap jammed full of scraps!!!

    So that is that for this post about the Dolls house gift....I will be writing 'part 2' soon!

......and for those of you who can't wait I will finish this blog post with a peek at a corner of the finished room........

  Hope you like what you saw - Please leave a comment if you did - I would love to know what you thought of it.