But I tell you, I saw something under that foot. I like drawing elephants. Their trunk and ears define them so well that just a few lines can bring an elephant to life. I used a yellow marker for the base of the squiggle then I used colored pencils to add the details and the shading. The browns are layers of yellow, blue and red.
I have never believed that elephants are afraid of mice, but this elephant has seen something under her feet that she wishes were elsewhere.
-Cheri
Lynne: I did this little horse using just markers to see how well they blended. I like his patchwork design and his happy-go-lucky attitude.
Lynne: I have been experimenting with my markers this past month. This squiggle is done with several layers of marker and colored pencil. I have found that on this paper I can only use two layers of marker and two layers of pencil before the paper stops accepting any more color. I just end up pushing the bottom layers from side to side with any additional layers. I like this notebook, but I am beginning to experiment with different papers.
This squiggle girl is running to or from something. Maybe it’s a representation of how fast Christmas is coming and how I would like time to slow down a little.
-Cheri
Cheri: I love ballet. I like to watch it. I liked to dance ballet when I was younger. And I like any art form connected with it. When I decided to make this collage I wanted to convey this in this piece.
The idea for this started when I bought a book at a garage sale that was a child’s book of ballet. The book was from the 60’s and it had a very stylized look to it. As I flipped through the book I came across this picture of a dancer in an arabesque. This picture was going to be the focal point. After I cut the picture out I flipped it over and felt the reverse side with the text was the better option.
I went through my scrapbook paper until I came across a pattern that I liked. Then I chose a frame. (I have several to choose from). I used spray adhesive to glue the paper to a mat and sized it to the frame. The frame says a lot about the piece and often if I can get the frame correct the rest of the piece seems to fall into place.
The fun part begins after that. I colored the dancer in and then I took little pieces of newspaper wrapped them around the end of the pencil to give them the form of flowers. I then dipped them in glue and placed them as the skirt for the dancer.
As I have said before I have all kinds of odds and ends that I picked up and sometimes these pieces just kind of call to me to be placed in a picture. The round paper disc was one of those. It has a vintage feel to it and I felt that the placement of it made it feel like the dancer was balancing on the tag. The butterflies were cut from tissue paper and have a really nice light, pastel, look to them.
Last but not least is the dancer that seems sad in the corner. She was another figure that I cut out from the book and I chose not to have the complete figure show for this. The piece does say some things about life to me, and I think that is what really makes me love collage so much.
Crafty challenge number 3 is no one’s fault but my own. While I was making my hardware-store handbag for the last challenge, I began to think of a challenge that would be mostly confined to materials that were incidental to an item I had bought. Things that you do not buy to use, such as packaging materials, plastic sacks, and styrofoam drinking cups.
There were two materials that had particularly caught my fancy. One was sales slips. Every time I clean my car, I cannot believe how many slips I can accumulate in just a few days. The other was the paper wrappers that hamburgers and breakfast sandwiches come wrapped in. These materials are perfectly suited for their original purpose, but could I think of a secondary recycled purpose?
The sandwich wrappers are plasticized on one side and I thought that perhaps they could be used as an element in a plastic fused-fabric, but the sales slips proved harder to recycle. Sometimes when I don’t have any deposit slips, I’ll grab a sales slip from the floor of the car to write my information on, so I decided that they could be made up into some kind of notepaper.
Since I could only think of notepaper as a use for the sales slips, I knew I would need to make a notebook. I could use other types of wastepaper for additional pages and the various plastic items I had been saving could be used for a plastic fused-fabric cover. One unintentional consequence of this challenge was the ever rising pile of junk on my work table. Just as I found myself putting something in the recycling or the trash, I would think: “wait that may be useful.”
I decided that my “fast food folio” notebook would be composed of three signatures of paper. A signature is a sheet of paper which folds to page size and is then bound with other signatures to form a book. My signatures would be made from sales slips, paper fast food sacks and sandwich wrappers. I glued the sales slips into 8 1/2 inch by 11 inch sheets and cut the paper sacks and sandwich wrappers to the same dimensions. There was just enough material to make eight sheets of 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper per signature. When folded those 8 sheets gave me 16 sheets of 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 inch paper and with three signatures that gave me 48 sheets of paper in a notebook that would be approximately 6 inches by 9 inches with its cover.
I decided that I would make the cover from layers of plastic bags, bubble wrap and sandwich wrappers. I wanted the bubble wrap to give the cover a honeycomb texture and to make the cover stronger. The plastic bags would provide the graphics and the sandwich wrappers were unique in that only one side is plasticized and I could use them as a protective layer on one side and a fusible layer on the other.
When fusing plastic into fabric some people use wax paper to protect their iron, but I believe that parchment paper is sturdier and less likely to become a part of the fused fabric.This fusing plastic bag tutorial has excellent instructions. The one thing to remember is that when you start mixing different types of plastics, you can have unexpected consequences. Not all plastic materials melt at the same rate and at the same temperature. You have to keep experimenting and have some back-up materials in case a “shrink and shrivel” happens.
When I had the cover and the signatures made I sewed them together with a large-eyed blunt needle and cotton kitchen twine. I used beeswax on the twine to make it slide easier through the holes in the cover and the signatures. This youtube video ‘simple bookbinding part 1 and its companion video part 2 were the most helpful to me in explaining signatures and how to sew them to a cover.
Most of the time we keep our projects secret from each other but Kristin was in town and I did not wish to spend our time together alone in separate rooms while we worked on our projects. So Kristin saw my project and had some helpful ideas. I wanted to use drinking straws in my project and had experimented with melting them onto a sheet of plastic vinyl. The straws do melt, but not in the way I wanted. Kristin suggested slicing the straw into small circles and then melting them onto the cover. As you can see below, the idea worked extremely well and is quite decorative. She also suggested using a straw as a bookmark. I connected it to the end of the binding twine and used beads as stopper knots. That is the one problem with these challenges. We miss the feedback and suggestions from each other that make our projects just that one step better.
I am surprised by how good the plastic cover feels and by how sturdy it is. I was also very curious how the different types of paper would respond to ink, markers and colored pencil. The brown paper works very well for my squiggles and surprisingly so does the plastic side of the sandwich wrappers. However, the sales slips are treated to accept the ink of their cash registers and are hard on markers, pencils and ink pens. I am thinking of covering them with gesso and if that doesn’t work, a few collage pages will look very good in my notebook.
Our crafty challenges have challenged us in ways that we never anticipated. I have been surprised and amazed at the results. Enough so that we are already working on crafty challenge number 4.
-Cheri
-Cheri
-Cheri
the crafty sisters 