Someone asked me if I'd have little notebooks as wedding favors since I was giving pens for a favor. At first I was a bit upset. the pens were expensive, but then I got to sitting here looking at all the left over paper from my wedding cards and just started folding to have something to do.
This things are crazy simple to make and really are very pretty favors. Plus, you can't say no to free.
I had these little books of card stock papers. You can find them in the paper aisles of most craft stores. Usually I use these as bases for my cabochon necklaces, but I figured it would work well for this too and I had a few too many booklets.
Anyway, if you take one of the card
stock and fold it in half it's the perfect size for little note books. I then took about 7 pieces of blue paper, which I had a ton of left over from out wedding invites, and folded them in half long way, then shot way, or hot dog and hamburger. I cut them in half, stuffed them inside of each other, stuffed them inside of the card stock and stapled them down.
What you get is something like this:
Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, etc. I"m always up for a chat!
Ok, I lied a tiny bit. i was sure I wouldn't be able to post but these last few days I've been out of wedding things to plan, so I've been doing busy work.
At my bridal shower I was given some very awesome and much needed household items like a shower rack and a new bedspread. We only had one bedspread big enough for a bed before this one. The box was wrapped in some very pretty paper so I saved as much as i could and brought it home.
Today I wrapped a bunch of old ugly notebooks in the paper. I keep all my note books because I'm always writing stuff down, but some of these books are kinda banged up and really ugly.
Wrapping books is very easy. I learned how to do a lot of this when i was in high school and primary school, but the skills stayed with me even into collage because collage books are damn expensive and if you keep them in good shape you can get some of that money back. Further more, I use the skill a lot in repairing books for people.
Long story short, it's a simple ability, but a good one.
All it takes is a note book, some good glue. I used either E6000 or Elmer's book binding glue. Either works well. Even basic Elmer's glue would work, but I'd recommend using a brush to spread the glue. You want to avoid bubbles from big pools of glue.
Then all you need is the paper.
I cut a piece of paper about an inch and a half to two inches wider than my book. Honestly you can make this wider or small, whatever you want, but I wouldn't go much shorter than an inch or the paper might not hold.
Then I started gluing the paper to the notebook.
What you get is this:
Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, etc. I"m always up for a chat!
So, if I have viewers, then many of you will notice my weekly post hasn't come out in a while. It's because I'm getting married and we're down to the wire. I'm doing most of the wedding decor, planning, etc myself with the help of my fiance, family, and close friends. I haven't had much time for making things. I do have a few things to add, like the veil I made, the hair pins, and some little notebooks we made as favors, but I just don't have the time right now to post anything big. I'm so sorry. I promise that after May 12th I'll have new stuff for you.
Till then wish me luck. So far I've made it to the two week marker without going into bridezilla mode.
Hair clips for my brides maids. I don't recall if these even got used?
This weeks project might take up a few posts. As I've mentioned before I play in a LARP game called Dystopia Rising.
Check it out, it's a good game. http://www.dystopiarisinglarp.com/
A friend of mine and I decided that we wanted to play a different character recently. We settled on Natural Ones. They are a kind of primitive people that have survived by going back to the basics in the broken world. We chose to design a pair of sisters from the Crow clan. What I am designing is our headgear which are short antlers I'll be dangling things off of.
What you'll need for this is:
Tin Foil
Wire
Fimo clay in three different colors of browns, tans, and some whites.
Here I'm using brown, tan, and caramel
Elastic, and a strip of think leather or fabric to hold the weight on the horns.
I first formed the insides. I wanted these light so I made the insides out of tin foil.
You can see the basic deer antler form here. Tinfoil forming is never pretty. Just do it!
Here I got a bit lax on my photos sorry. I tend to forget photos when I'm working with clay. as you can see these have been mixed and wrapped around the tin foil forms giving it a bit more of an antler form. I'm not very happy with my clay mixing here but it'll do. worse comes to worse I can always spray paint it. I made two pairs, one big one small.
From the shine you can see if glazed these too. I used Sculpy gloss glaze mostly because it air dries and I didn't have any matte glaze left.
The next part of this head gear is to drill the holes near the base and add on the strap to hold these on the head. I'll be doing a separate post for the strap because it'll have some designs to it.
Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, etc. I"m always up for a chat!
I'm working on another set of light armor. This is for a character more interested in running away rather than fighting. She needs something light and easy to move in.
These are the "metal plates" I'm making for her coat. They are those thin foam pads you can get for making cutouts. I just call them foamies. I wanted them to look like rusty, pock marked metal since it's her starting armor and should look beat up. As you can see the paint soaked int t he foam pads I used to make the shapes, but over all I think it still works. the games are dark anyway so it won't be too scrutinized. If the player decides to keep playing I'll add more to her outfit as time goes on.
These two pictures are of the back and from of her coat. It's an old long vest i made long ago that doesn't fit me too well but fit her perfectly. I'll be adding little clips to the front for her to close it. Then I'll add the foam pads all around the coat.
This is a pic of the foam pads tacked into place temporarily. I'm not sure if I plan to sew these down or tack them down. As I said, if the player decides not to keep using this then I want to be able to recover the coat.
Once I sewed down the foam pads. I added a simple snap closure to the front and that's it.
I'll try to get picks of both her and my armor over the weekend. For now, I'm off to kill zombies!
Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, etc. I"m always up for a chat!
Today is going to be a simple blog. I seem to have torqued my left arm which is my main arm. I can't lift much more than a thin magazine without pain so I sat down and started putting together my guest book for my wedding.
I didn't want a book that only got the first page filled with rushed signatures. I figured it'd be nice if I could set little cards down at the tables and let people fill them out at their leisure. I hope it works.
Tools:
Ink stamps I cut myself
Gold ink
Scissors
Paper
The left and bottom stamps I cut myself. They make little cutting tools and flat blanks for cutting your own stamps at most stamp places. THis was a scary procedure because the image I printed didn't want to iron on to the stamp. I had to use a bright light to see the fine imprint it left and cut carefully. Also cut deeper than you think you need too. If it's shallow it won't leave a good stamp impression.
This is my ink pad. Joann's sells these and so does just about any craft supply.. It runs out fast though.
My guestbook card blanks that will go into the little envelopes. And the little envelopes before stamping.
THe guestbook. We decided we didn't want a plan white book. We wanted something with meaning and came across this book. It has tons of shakespear sayings on each page of the book and is really fun to read. I'm also writing little letters to my future husband in them.
Items to be worked on:
Guestbook
Envelopes for guests notes
Invitations
Thank you letters
Here is where the main body of work began and why this post is so late. The book is sent to the page where the envelopes would begin to be glued in.
I had to stamp each envelope with either a feather or an inkwell then glue them into the book. Stamping is one of those things that is easy but also take precision. I had to make sure the stamp was set within the borders of the paper or it would get on the table, and a lot of this sis done blind in a way because the stamp with a backing makes it hard to see where the actual stamp is going. I messed up a few cards this way.
These are my inkwell ones. THey came out pretty good at least i liked them.
This is a picture of the envelopes glued into the book. Some of my envelopes puckered cuz the glue was thick. I had to use what i had on hand because my glue stick had dried up. I was not happy about that.
These are the cards from above with the stamping on them. This was the hard one because i couldn't see the stamps placement due to the block it was attached too and it was attached in an offset placement so it took quite a while to do this right.
Next up on my list of paper works to get finished are my thank you cards. I'm trying to get this all done at the same time so it can be set and ready to fill out then mail. These I wanted something on the envelope as well as the cards.
The ink well went on the envelopes. I began to run out of ink here and had to supplement in gold paint. I don't recommend this. Paint is a fickle medium for stamping with. It's goopy and messy and takes a bit of work to use. I ended up with some blotchy inkwells but overall they looked fine. The benefit to paint over ink is that once the paint dries it won't smear. The ink needs to be sealed, but I'll go into more on that near the end.
These are the inner cards, the Thank You's themselves. They are a very light blue. Originally these were supposed to be my guestbook cards and envelopes, but they were way to big so I decided to use them for the Thanks yous. They work out well that way.
Finally we got our invitations and rsvp cards printed. The middle is our card, the blue will get glued inside and the card on the left is the rsvp which has a madlibs on the back for them to reply with.
Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, etc. I"m always up for a chat!
I dabble in a lot of various crafts. You'll see a lot of different things from me over time on here. It all depends on my moods, my interests, what's needed from me, what's wanted, who's asking for something, etc.
At this moment I've had a request for mini dragons out of clay. Now if you do any sort of searching on etsy, deviant art, or any crafting site, various types of dragon statues will show up.
Some amazing creators are http://dragonsandbeasties.deviantart.com/, http://angeniac.deviantart.com/, and http://ninafimocreations.deviantart.com/ to name a few.
Furthermore, with a little patience, and some help from tutorials on deviantart you can make anything. For the dragons I'll be making I used this tutorial. http://www.deviantart.com/art/HTTYD-Toothless-Clay-Tutorial-238606963
In my attempt to have fun and learn to make a few of these for friends I may have...gone a bit over board! :)
Since I linked the tutorial above this will be less of a tutorial in it self and more of a I just had fun post. When I make these I generally work on the heads first. In this round I figured out different styles of eyes. While i was using dots before, here I used slits.
After the eyes I work on the horn designs. There are so many different ways to do these it's really up to your imagination. Dragons and Beasties linked above has tons of different ways she does horns, but I don't recomment copying styles. Lookign to learn is good but coming up with your own horns and spots can be fun too.
After heads were done with horns and eyes the heads got put on the bodyies. Then I began exploring different styles of designs on the bodies.
This one got little purple stripes and the bottom one got black stripes.
In this pic I show these little guys after firing. It doesn't change much in looks, but they are fairly solid now. I put them in at 275 degrees for about 30 minutes.
This last pick is after they've been glazed and I let them sit overnight to dry. I think I might need to reglaze them or something. I'm not very sure one coat is enough? maybe it is.
Overall, there's many different styles that can be done and this is really easy, with a little patience, to build.
Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, etc. I"m always up for a chat!
