At least a bit of X-mas crafting...

...happens over at my place too.

But as I struggle with some severe health issues concerning my thyroid (obviously overfunctioning right now) like being nervous all the time (sometimes even panic attacks), not sleeping, shaking hands and trembling inside until all my muscles ache, crafting isn't too easy at the mo. But as I promised myself not to let this get me down or hold me back from enjoying the pre Christmas season as much as I can, I managed at least to do some tags and presents wrapping.

And yesterday I also received two lovely (and the most awesome) parcels from two of my best (crafting) friends! They came in just at the perfect moment as I was really upset and sad and panicing yesterday - fearing that I might not be able to enjoy X-mas eve after all and ending up in hospital instead with no one knowing exactly why.

One came from dear Sandra - my dear friend and co-owner of SanDee&amelie's
Steampunk Challenge blog (honestly without her this blog wouldn't exist!) and the other was a swap I made with A...err, well, you will have to wait until after X-mas I am afraid (*chuckle) to learn more about that.




But I can already show you the parcel Sandra sent me for X-mas. (honestly I cried all the time while unpacking all the treasures she put in the parcel - I was so overwhelmed.) She and A. really saved me yesterday from a day mostly filled with dark thoughts and anxiety.

Oh my, Sandra really knows what makes my heart sing! Look at all the brilliant stuff! There were some awesome stamps in there as well as some wonderful stencils, die cuts, tags, embellishments... well, honestly I am still overwhelmed and soo happy!
And the swap parcel from A. contained a lot of loveliness too!

Thank you so much, Sandra and A.! I am so happy to have wonderful friends like you!

But back to the X-mas tags I made...

I cut small tags from light brown manila card using the Sizzix Tim Holtz "Tiny Tags & Labels" die. I stamped my favourite X-mas stamps (from Red Lead, Tim Holtz and mariannedesign) with black jet archival ink and a X-mas stamp I bought at Depot with red ink. Then I sprinkled some Distress stains "tarnished brass", "brushed corduroy" and "picket fence" onto them using a small brush. Done.

The names of the recipients will be stamped onto the tags too - using my letter stamps from HeroArts. Here are some finished parcels to show you how they look like when in use:

I hope you are all doing fine out there and enjoy the Christmas preparations and Advent joy!

Hugs and take care!
Claudia x

A Very Vintage Christmas! - Our Creative Corner's December Challenge

Welcome back , dear readers, followers and crafting friends,

to another edition of Our Creative Corner's challenges!!! Laura, who is your lovely host for this month's challenge, chose

A Very Vintage Christmas

which means you are to use neutral colours only!

Seems the 1st of the month will be a double-feature day over here in the future as it presents TWO new challenges - the one over at Our Creative Corner AND at SanDee&amelie's Steampunk Challenges! So, please, check out both as they are really worth a look and I hope both provide a lot of crafting fun and inspiration for you. 

Back to the Very Vintage Christmas:

I admit this was a rather hard job for me to do as I rather seldomly dare create "vintage" combined with that touch of delicacy neutral colours add to this sort of makes.

I used a lovely stamp from Red Lead for the cones and a script stamp with X-mas greetings for the background. The flourishes were die cut using the Tim Holtz "mini flourish" Alterations Sizzix die. Some sprinkles of dark brown and gold for more texture and a velvet ribbon added to the bottom for a more festive feel. I also added some tiny blots of clear stickles for a bit of "snowflake bling" - done!

I hope you like it and you definitely should check out the vintage X-mas makes my awesomely talented teamies have prepared for you over at the challenge blog!!!
I so look forward to see your entries (which will definitely put me in a very merry mood ;)

As usual some close-ups:

If you also want to know the new challenge over at SanDee&amelie's Steampunk Challenges, scroll down to the previous post. ;)

Hugs, happy crafting and enjoy the pre-Christmas period!!!! (I definitely will ;)

Claudia x

I enter this tag to the following challenges:

Fashionable Stamping Challenges - In the Holiday Spirit
The Artistic Stamper - Anything Goes
Simon Says Wednesday Challenge - Anything Goes

Santa's New/Pimped Up Vehicle! - SanDee&amelie's Steampunk Challenges

Ho, Steamin' Ho!

Time for a new challenge over at SanDee&amelie's Steampunk Challenges!

This month - what else could it be - we go for a X-mas theme, but of course with a steampunk twist to it! ;)

We want you to create a new vehicle for Santa - or to pimp up his sleigh and thus create

 Santa's New/Pimped Up Vehicle!

But first let me thank you all for your awesome entries to our last challenge! You rocked it again! :)

Back to Santa's vehicle - in my case Santa decided to spare his reindeer the hard labour of pulling his overloaded sleigh and switch to something more modern - a rocketship. ;)

And of course he has his reindeer with him still - only on board of the rocketship instead of pulling it. (Thanks to the new and totally silent propulsion engine he still won't be heard when flying over all the homes of children, waiting for him to come down the chimney ;).

For my tag I used a background I had treated with some dry embossing on aluminium foil (which was glued to a piece of card) first and alcohol inks afterwards. I created the stencil for my rocket's shape by folding a sheet of plain card in half and drawing only half of the shape to the front. Then I cut it out and unfolded the card - voila - a symmetrical shape of an air and space craft!


The holly leaves on the bottom are meant to be the flames bursting out of Santa's rocket. The mystletoe looks a bit like smoke... so how does this new technology work? (Of course this will be kept a secret ;).

And look - there's Rudolf sitting on Santa's lap, peeping out of the rocket's window ! Seems he enjoys his ride too (or maybe he is helping Santa with driving the new modern vehicle?)  ;)

I hope you enjoy the pre-Christmas period and have fun creating a new vehicle for Santa (or simply pimp up his old sleigh to turn it into a steampunk wonder)!

Looking forward to see your creations entered soon!

Hugs and happy crafting,

Claudia x

I enter this tag to the following challenges:

Fashionable Stamping Challenges - In the Holiday Spirit
The Artistic Stamper - Anything Goes
Simon Says Wednesday Challenge - Anything Goes

beauty in decay

Ever visited pinterest and searched for the word "rust"?
It's incredible what a large number of people have pinboards over there showing rust in all its various kinds - and they all are (at least to them and to me) sooo beautiful! I often ask myself what it is that attracts us this much with rust or even other kinds of decay...just think about drift wood, pebble stones, fallen leaves, condemned houses, old theaters with wall papers peeling off and revealing a lot of layers underneath! 


Is it that feeling that we are allowed a glimpse through time - back in time but foward to the future as well? As if rusted objects - worn by time and nature - take us on a time travel at high speed. How will I look like when I will be seventy? Which kind of traces will time have left with me then?

I honestly love faces of people that show their wrinkles. From seeing them you can tell if the person has been leading a happy life or one filled with a lot of sorrow and bitterness. There's hardly anything more beautiful than smile wrinkles, isn't it?

Wrinkled faces of old people also often evoke some deep respect in me. They tell about experience and wisdom. Maybe I feel this kind of respect too when I look at timeworn and rusted objects that have been withstanding ages obviously.

During the summer holidays we visited my husband's uncle, who is a dedicated collector of timeworn and old things that tell stories too (and who has revived and renovated an old car all on his own during six years of searching and restoring).

He gave me a lot of rusted treasures from his shed for my creative work after taking a look at my blog - and I guess he was happy that he had found someone who shares his love for old and timeworn things. We spent a long time in his shed where he showed me a lot of the treasures he had found at flea markets and we enjoyed it so much.

 The two keys I used for the two panels were just one of his generous gifts (thank you so much, Uncle Helmut! :).They still have the labels on them that indicate their former purpose.







I also found (and fell in love with) a wonderful watchmakers cabinet on ebay some weeks ago and immediately knew that I wanted it for Christmas. As my wonderful husband loves what I do and supports me in it wherever he can, he immediately said "yes" and we were lucky to win the object. It's filled with over thousands of watch glasses in various sizes and I can't wait to incorporate them (bit by bit) into my future artwork!


He generously allowed me to already use two of them for this two panel project ;) :-X

But back to beauty and/in decay. We seem to mingle our idea of history and time with the look of timeworn objects, don't we?

They touch our souls and I love to question myself why.
Time travel, time that changes us and everything (but cannot be changed by us in return), time as our companion (and sometimes enemy), time as our (healing) friend, .... if you take a look at the incredible lot of ways humans deal with the phenomenon of "time" you get an idea about the power we attribute to time (and about the power it really has upon us).



And where does time ever get visible? In decay - caused by weather, water, wind, air or constant use.

One of my arts teachers at university (who taught "design" among other things) told us that the best working and most loved tools reveal themselves by their traces of use and wear...

...handles being "sanded" down by a thousand times of being held in sweaty hands, steps of stone stairs being sanded down by the feet of millions and billions of visitors walking on them, .... "You will recognise the most beloved tools by their signs of wear and abrasion" he said and I still love this saying as there's so much truth in it!

As I took a lot of pictures this time and I want to spare you the endless scrolling down I decided to offer you a closer glimpse on my two panels via a slide-show. I hope you like them!

 




You can click through the images of the slideshow by using the forward arrow button if the slideshow is too fast ;)

Hugs and happy creating,

Claudia x

Materials used: painting board, fine sand texture paste, two clock glasses, Adirondack Alcohol Inks, Ranger Distress Inks, DecoArt Traditions acrylic paints, eyelets, wire, rubber stamping (Prima) and embossing with Ranger embossing powder "Rust", stencils (Tim Holtz and TCW), scrapbooking papers and dictionary pages, copper plates and a Sizzix metal embossing folder, Artemio letter stamps, Ranger black jet archival ink

Last minute selfmade presents: colourful notebooks with DecoArt acrylics

Still in search for some artsy last minute selfmade gifts for X-mas? Well, how about making some really easily and quickly made colourful notebooks?

If you are as addicted to collecting unique booklets to write or doodle in as I am and/or you know other people who are too then this is the right project to make ;)

All you will need for making notebooks like these are:

- DecoArt Americana acrylic paints ( I used Bleached Sand, Yellow Light, Bahama Blue, Coral Blush, Olive Green, Green Mist, Dark Chocolate, Pumpkin, Golden Straw and Navy Blue)
- a spray bottle filled with water
- a brayer
- some sticky tape and some glue
- baby wipes
- kitchen roll
- a pack of white dividers (available at any bureau shop) - which will spare you a lot of cutting to size
- a transparent sheet (from your bureau stuff) and a white sheet of paper to stuff in
- thread, scissors, a punching needle, a sewing needle, a punching mat
- a label stamp
- a brush

I recently bought a Gelli Plate (after half a year of rolling all the pros and cons in my mind), but before I owned that really fun and easy to handle tool for monoprinting I used a lot of different surfaces for the monoprints I did with my pupils.
One of them was simply a transparent sheet fixed to the table with some sticky tape (and filled with a sheet of white paper so the colours can bee seen more clearly).







 1. Well,  let's get started: get your transparent sheet and fix it to your table too. (as I know me being a very messy crafter I fixed it to my craft sheet first).

2. Get a stack of dividers ready and the DecoArt Americana acrylics. Apply dots of various colours randomly onto your transparent sheet.

3. Now comes the most important part: the trick with the brayer!

Don't roll it over the whole sheet in different directions but keep moving it with hardly any pressure(!) from left to right only (or right to left only if you are left-handed) and do only very short distances at once - then lift the brayer and put it down some centimetres further to roll on...and so on.
That way the colours will not mix too much and a lot of space will remain uncovered (which will let the white of the paper you print on show through). Don't clean your brayer after this - put it aside. You will need it in a sec. Your transparent sheet should look like this now:

4. Place two dividers onto the transparent sheet and use the colour covered brayer to press them down. Roll the brayer firmly over the whole sheets, then lift them off the ground (if you brayer too long some of the paper might stick to the transparent sheet as the acrylic colour then works like a glue once it has dried too long).

The sides you covered with your brayer will become the insides of your booklets' covers. They will look like this:

The outsides should kind of look like this: bright and colourful. Let dry (or speed up with a heat tool). Clean your brayer and surface with some spritzes of water and some kitchen towel.

5. Take a pile of dividers (depending on how many pages you want your notebook to have), put one of the prepared covers on top and cut off the side pieces where the two holes are.

Use one of the dividers to create a stencil for the holes you will have to punch for the sewer binding. Fold it in half and mark four spots.

Punch holes through all the layers using a punching needle and a punching mat.

6. Choose a thread of a matching colour for your colour design of the cover and take a large sewing needle. Use doubled thread and the length of about your arm. This should do for sewing the binding twice.

Start with the second hole from the left and from the inside, then slide the needle through the hole left to it from the outside to the inside again. Then through the hole you started with to the outside again and through the third hole to the inside and through the fourth hole to the outside again. From there through the third hole to the inside again... then repeat the whole procedure.

This way you should have done a kind of weaving  and the thread should be doubled everywhere. Tie the ends together on the inside of your booklet with several knots. Then cut off the excess thread.

Now you can carefully fold your booklets. The only thing left to do is create a label.

7. Get a label stamp (mine is from Red Lead), the DecoArt Americana Navy Blue, a soft brush and the transparent sheet again and spread some of the colour on it. Dip the stamp into the thin layer of paint and stamp onto some white card.

8. Cut out your labels, do some handwriting on them (or leave them plain for the person who will receive this lovely gift) and glue them to the covers. Done!

Hope you have a lot of fun making your own and will be giving away a lot of these colourful booklets! They are so easily and quickly made!

Hugs and happy crafting!

Claudia