Dreaming Spirals

Every few hours, one of the treasuries on Etsy is chosen to be the featured treasury for the Etsy home page.  Today a treasury that one of my Gocco prints was in, curated by Sara of SilveroftheValley, was in the prime spot!  I missed it but someone kindly did a screenshot and here it is - see if you can spot mine!!

Woo hoo!! It is so exciting!  (Sorry, I’m a saddo…).  Do check out Sara’s shop, though - she makes absolutely exquisite jewellery from art clay silver.  (If you want to know what that is, she explains that, too, in her shop profile. 

The wisteria is out at the front of our house at the moment and it smells absolutely gorgeous.  The weather has been really warm and sunny (mostly) so the smell has been wafting through the house through the open windows.  Here is a photo I took of it last week just as the leaves were opening but before the flowers emerged.

I just finished Journal 4 of Sue’s course last night.

The cover is made of brown wrapping paper painted with acrylic paint!  It is similar to the first journal that we made in that there are sewn signatures inside.   I stitched them all in, and stitched on the button, which is an old wooden vintage button and some twisted cord made from Colinette Point 5 yarn - and discovered that the cover was inside out and I had sewn the signatures to the outside instead of the inside!

So… hmm… what to do?  Do I undo it all and start again?  Hmmm… not me!  build on mistakes, incorporate them into the general scheme of things, that’s my philosophy…. 

When I was painting the brown paper, I painted everything in sight, including some Japanese newspaper which came with the Gocco machines.  Here is a pic of it all drying by the way…

Here is the brown paper ready to be made into the journal:

This is the finished journal.  I cut strips of the Japanese newspaper and stuck them around the joins.  Luckily the inside of the cover was the same as the outside apart from the joins.  I like the vintage look it gives it.

There is a pocket on the inside - I made mine with textured brown paper - this just came as packaging with something and I painted it.  I love how it picks up the fold patterns.

I put a mixture of cardstock, handmade paper, lokta paper specially cut for the inkjet printer and ordinary paper inside.

This is the lokta paper.  It is very strong and can be stitched.  Here I have stitched a pocket made of painted and stamped lutradur.

This is handmade paper which I stamped into when it was drying.  After it was dry I painted the stamped bits with Aquawax (a sort of resist wax which can be used on paper - I actually bought it by mistake, meaning to get acrylic wax…) and paint.

This is some more of the lokta paper, which I printed in my inkjet printer.  It is a photo which I took on a walk near some waterfalls in the Brecon Beacons.  I love the mossy trees and rocks. 

I put some little concertina books up for sale on Etsy earlier this week.  There’s a link to my tutorial for it in the left sidebar.  I made these a while ago with some of my painted and stamped papers - inside it is a sort of origami technique.

Sometime I’m going to write a ‘how to’ for buying on Etsy - it’s quite easy once you’ve done it once or twice (and addictive, alas!) - if you are in the UK, just remember that the pound is worth about 2 dollars, so just halve the prices to find the prices in pounds.  And you don’t have to have an account with Paypal to pay with them - you can just use a credit card and pay through them.

Here are some of the books:

The cover of this one was painted with Brusho powder paints which have a very ‘inky’ look to them when they are dissolved in water and the inside pages are painted and decorated with melted metallic wax crayons!

The covers of this were made with tissue paper and metallic paint, believe it or not!  And the insides have a mixture of cartridge papers, some decorated with combed acrylic paints.

This one is covered with purple Nepalese lokta paper and stamped with an Indian wooden block stamp which I bought at The Pier in Cardiff when they sold them.  I’ve also got a camel and an elephant!  The insides are stamped and sponged.

And last, but not least:

This cover is decorated with paints using salt to produce the striking effect!  It has black and white cartridge paper inside.

Finally, I’ve just joined the ranks of Myspace - I have heard so much about how it helps people find your shop, that I decided to plunge in, as if I haven’t got enough fingers in pies…. Here is the link to my profile page so please add me as a friend if you have one too!

I just realised that I haven’t put any photos of last week’s journal from Sue’s journal course up on my blog. 

It is a loose leaf journal which is held together with screw posts.  I bought these in November on our trip to London, meaning to use them, so I’m glad of the opportunity. 

The fabric for the cover is some of the marbled fabric which I made and blogged about a couple of years ago.  You can read about it here and here.  I hadn’t used any so far, and these pieces are just the right size for these journals so I can see that I will be making lots now.  I have cut more pieces of pelmet vilene ready but am now waiting for Joggles to send me some more Misty Fuse.

This is the front of this week’s journal:

And the back:

I put lots of different papers inside, some painted, some exotic.  Here is the inside front of it:

That is either mulberry or lokta paper, can’t remember which, with leaves embedded into it.

Tonight I made a start on Journal 4, which involves painting brown paper.  As usual, I mixed up too much paint so the workroom floor is now COVERED in painted paper… I think I will have enough to make several more journals!  I am loving this course - all the journals are different and it means that my interest has been maintained so I haven’t fallen behind, which is what usually happens at this stage of an online course!   The real test will be whether I finish the very last one - thinking back, it will be a first for me in my online course history….hmmm….

Once I have finished the preparation of the papers, I will be stuck until the Misty Fuse arrives (of course, I could go out and buy some bondaweb locally but I LOVE Misty Fuse now I’ve tried it - it is really easy to work with and to stitch into.  Come on, post office, speed the MF to me ….

Oh dear, this blog entry is starting to sound like a commercial….

Yesterday I had a fun day - I went to visit Gill of An Elegant Sufficiency to deliver the Print Gocco she had bought from me a few weeks ago.  Sue of The Magic Armchair Traveller was there too.  You can see photos of what we got up to over on Gill’s blog.    Sue had fun on Gill’s embellisher machine and I got to play with Gill’s Bind It All!!  This is what I made:

Amazing, just with a piece of cardstock, some cartridge paper, a guillotine and this little machine…

And Gill got going with the Gocco - from photo to finished product…

Here is mine:

And this morning I got something special in the post.  One of the members of the Etsy Boomers Street Team put up a ‘fairy name generator’ on her blog a week or so ago.  This was mine:

Your fairy is called Bramble Icedancer
She is a bone chilling bringer of justice for the vulnerable.
She lives in leafy dells and bluebell glades.
She is only seen when the bees swarm and the crickets chirrup.
She wears bluebell-blue dresses. She has icy blue butterfly wings.

The fairy names were so popular and the descriptions so evocative that Joan painted us an ACEO to represent our fairy.  This is mine!    You can see the rest of them on Joan’s blog.  Thank you, Joan!!

Last night I managed to get an Etsy Treasury and I decided to fill it with Bloggers whose blogs I’ve been reading for ages and who have Etsy shops.  A Treasury on Etsy is like a showcase of people’s favourite items from various shops there, and every few hours one of them is chosen to go on the Etsy homepage. 

Here is a screenshot of mine:

If you log in and click on all these items and leave a comment, it will help it up the treasury lists and may even reach the front page!  If they like it…    Here is the link to the Treasury - but be quick!  It only lasts another two days!

I have now put my list of Gocco links on to a blog page - Here it is!

If you know of any other good links please leave a note in the comments section for that page, or email me. I have left several links out, such as the Save Gocco site and the actual Gocco website, because they are in the links on the DIY Definitions article, which has the most comprehensive list of links I know, and is well worth looking at. That is the first link on the page.

I will leave a permanent link to this page on the left sidebar.

I’ve just had an email from Sara of Sarastexturecrafts that my Etsy Profile is on her Etsy Profile Blog!!!