Easy Candle Holders

Walking through Micheal's (or it could have been ACMoore) I found these awesome rub-ons in a section where they had all kinds of wall decals and such. They were so pretty I purchased several of them. Not only are the images lovely, but they are glittered! Who doesn't like flowers, butterflies, birds and dragonflies!

They have been sitting in my sticker drawer since. When I cleaned out my craft room, I pulled them out, placed them on my desk and vowed to use them. After racking my mind for a few weeks, I decided to use them on some candle holders I got for $1 at the Yankee Candle Shop.

Here is a close up of one of the rub-ons on a candle holder. Can you see all the pretty glitter! Love, love, love it.

 I found that since these rub-ons are quite thick, I needed to pre-heat the glass before rubbing them. WOW, was my hand sore from rubbing before I figured this out. The only hard part after that was touching the glass while it was still hot. The rub-ons practically adhered themselves, so I did not have to hold the candle holder long!

There are a couple of "cracks" in the image since it had to be wrapped not only around, but curved around the upper lip. They are so small that you can't really see them though.

This is what they look like next to one another. I am not sure why the tall one looks crooked. Must have been the angle of the camera. As you can see in the above pictures, it really is straight. I made each one slightly different because I really like them that way...AND...I did not have enough identical rub-ons to make them all the same even if I wanted to anyway.

You can't see the images on them to well in this photo, but in real life they really came out so pretty. The best thing about them is that the flowers match the ones I have hanging on my walls.

I have not lit them yet, but I have tried this before and did light them to make sure the rub-on's would not melt or warp. The did not, yayyy! I am guessing it is because they are quite thick. I do suppose they would have softened and been quite easy to rub off, but who would want to try that, lol

Well, I am off to try my hand at quilling again, sigh. Since I paid for the class I at least want to finish all the "homework" and get some advice on how to make it "easier". I did find that my problem with getting the twirled paper to behave might have been the weather. Sonya, the "teacher", told me she has the hardest time getting hers to behave when they have a drought. I am so hoping that was the problem and not that I have just stubborn paper.

Hugs,

Ideas and Quilling

Well, here I am with my very first paper tole "homework" finished. Only a week late. As I am so far behind in my crafting, I am really proud that I finished it this soon!

I have to admit that it was much harder than I thought it would be. As you can see I do need a lot of practice. Getting those twirled strips of paper to behave is like getting my 2 year old grandson out of a tantrum. I did the leaves last and for the most part, they all came out the same. Only 1 gave me a hard time which is the top left one.

For the "homework" the "teacher" gave directions for making a card with these flowers. I did not like that idea since the flowers are quite big. So I decided to make what I have wanted to do for quite some time. An idea book.

Another thing I changes was the center of the flowers. They were supposed to have a tightly wound strip for the center. I did not like the way it looked as it stood out to much for my taste. To make it more to my liking, I used some tear drop pearls and a tiny orange pearl for the center.

The hard bound notebook was in the $1 bin at Micheal's months ago. I certainly know why it was only $1, it was REALLY ugly. Figuring I could cover it easy enough, I purchased one certain I would do so really soon. Ha ha ha, it was not meant to be. The notebook was meant to be used for this very project!

Here is the back side in which you can see the paper I used quite well. I had purges 2 piles of paper about 6" tall each when I redid my craft room. These papers were among them. I have no idea why I remembered these 2 papers out of the hundreds of papers, but down stairs I went to find them.

The burnishing of the back did not come out very well because I tried some plain card stock before this paper popped miraculously into my head. It had begun to dry by the time I decided to pull it off so some of it stuck to the back. This made burnishing the paper over it a bit less than smooth. BUT since it is for me, I really don't mind at all.

I also covered the inside since the original color was kind of a cream/orange mix, yuck. The front page was the same color so I simply used my craft knife to cut it out. I also gave it my very personal touch by making it upside down. You can see the bottom line should be the top line. That is sooooo me!

 I have had these self adhesive letters for years. I used them once and that was it. The problem with buying stuff like this is that you use some letters all the time and other practically never. Though they came with 2 of each vowel, I still just couldn't find enough left over letters to make a proper word. Low and behold, there was actually one of each of these letters.

Since they were cream or vanilla (which ever you like to call it) I patted my Certain Celery SU ink pad over them and it ended up matching perfectly.

I separated the pages into 5 sections and made small tabs for each one. One section each for ideas I think of (that is a small section, tee he he), ideas I glean from blogs, tips I glean from blogs, my ideas for egg art and the last section is for ideas my mother has for egg art which she asks me to remind her of (ya, right!)

HUGS,

Not Months, But Moments

These are 2 of the very first unmounted stamps I had purchased. Of the gazillion or so unmounted stamps I have bought these are only 2 of them that have not touched ink. I have decided to pull out all these unused stamps and bring some life to them. Going through my image book, I found this image and sentiment went really well together.

I absolutely love the Memorybox Dies. They cut so perfectly. The border is called Butterfly Chain and the flourish is Elegant Scrollwork. I was quite unsure about purchasing the flourish since it is such a "thin" flourish with lots of swirls. I could just picture ripping it trying to get it out of the die. It never happened! The flourish just falls out of the die perfectly on it's own.

I am not sure if I said this in other posts, but just in case...The best way to adhere intricate die cuts is to use a spray adhesive. I use the 3M Spray Mount which does not become permanent right away, so you have time to get the item placed just right.

WOW, check out this card stock! I am soooooo in love with it. I found it at a scrapbook store about 1 1/2 hours from my house. I so wish I could find it local or even on line. It is kind of expensive, but the emboss and shimmer of the card stock is stunning. Hmmmm....wonder if there are more embossed designs out there beside the butterflies! OH, how I wish I knew how to Google it!

These flowers are from the wedding isle at Micheal's. They come in a huge bunch for 1 or 2 dollars. I took the yellow center off of them and added rhinestones to match. The pink tear drop things are part of the bunch and easily come apart to use.

I have the hardest time getting a good picture when I used the shimmer paper (well...actually...I only use shimmer paper, lol) I have been playing with the white setting on my camera and that seems to help a little. I have tried to edit the photos with Microsoft Picture Manager Editing Program, which really does not do much at all. I have tried editing in my Photoshop Elements and that does work much better. I have yet to figure out how to get the colors to remain the way they really are as I play with the lighting though. I guess there is always something new to learn!

I just signed up for an online Quilling class through My Creative Classroom. I have taken a few classes from them and have learned a lot from them. For the next few weeks you will probably be seeing quite a few quilled project!

Have a wonderful weekend...HUGS

Paper Tole Goose Egg

Well, here is another Goose Egg that I made. I made one like this a while ago which you can see here. There are 6 eggs to this set , 2 of which I have purchased so far. I hope they don't stop selling them before I get the other 4.

As you can see, my impatience got the better of me again and the Swarvoski crystal slid down the bow, lol. This is the first time I was able to make a multi bow with my bow maker. It never occurred to me to wrap the ribbon around the dowels in an eight pattern until my mother mentioned it. It really works great that way.

The image is made from 2 identical prints. The first is added to the egg flat. The next one is cut out to add the dimension. Each grass blade and flower petal have to be cut separate, giving lots of tiny pieces to work with.

This kit came with the image already to cut by pre-covering it with mod podge. I was a bit frustrated with this one because they added too many layers of it, which made it quite difficult to cut. Toling the pieces was another chore all together. I would tole them and they would just go straight again.

The first egg I made like this took only 1 afternoon from start to finish. This one took 2 afternoons just to get the image cut and toled. For the next kit, I am going to ask for the print not to be prepped so I do not run into this problem again.

Each side was pre-cut for the pattern. I will be purchasing the tools to learn to cut this spring. Until then, I depend on pre-cut eggs in the kits.

Each side is glittered and outlined with a thin gold cord. Before attaching the cord, I run it through some mod podge that I had on my fingers. This makes the edges not fray and much easier to make it "curve" around the pattern.

I am having a blog created, called Egg Transformer, of course. It should be ready next week. I am excited about it because the name and blurp under the header will make it come up when people do searches for egg art. I have tried looking for other blogs myself and could not find one! The only thing that came up were online stores which sell supplies.  I would love to see other blogs though.

I hope you will follow me there too.

HUGS

Butterfly Swirls

Don't you just love the pre-made flourishes out in the paper crafting world. I surely do. The pearl and rhinestone flourishes were simply more money than I wanted to spend on just one item, though. Then I found out that Bazzill had these really neat flourish templates. Only paying once for flourishes sounded good to me.

I purchased 2 sets, the Fantasy Flourishes and Mystical Flourishes. The description says that they are to be used with self adhesive pearls and rhinestone, but I prefer to use non-adhesive ones as they seem to stay better on paper.

One of the great things about having these templates is that you can use the whole flourish or just part of it. For this card I used 2 parts of the Mystical Flourishes. What I decided to do is place the template where I wanted the swirl and add a pencil dot in the center of each hole. Remove the template and add my pearls.

The pattern paper I used was too pretty to cut, so I ended up making the card 8 x 5"! Not sure where I will find an envelope this big, but oh well, tee he he. The pattern paper did look a bit plain to me, just too much white space. The paper was so big though, that I could not find an embossing template big enough to work. I ended up using a SU texture plate instead. It did make a gentle impression on the paper, making it look less plain.

The images I chose are from Hero Arts Antique Flowers and Butterflies Dies Cut Set. I went back and forth on whether to go around the edges with a light grey (C01 or C02 copic) and decided to do so. I ran out of time that day so it had to wait. Of course the next day I forgot, lol. Next time I will have to try it to see which way looks best.

The paper still looked a bit plain so I searched my images for something to stamp on it. I found the unused little saying from the Angel Company that I bought a couple of years ago. It is funny that they don't all start with a capital letter, but oh well...I thought they went together well anyway.

I know it is really hard to tell that I colored the dogwood flowers, but I did. They are a very light brown with darker brown shadowing and an even darker brown outside petal center. And, grrr...what I difficult time I had coloring it. First I used Momento ink and it smudged horribly so I tossed that one. For the next one I used Staz-on and that still smudged. I was like..."what's the deal with this!!!"

What I ended up doing was just kind of dotting the colors and not blending them at all. So strange, I have never had this kind of smudging before. The butterflies did not smudge at all. I was even using the same paper I use all the time...hmmmm.

The inside was left quite plain except for the gentle flourishes from the SU template. It was nice to spend some time in the craft room as it seems time has been taken up with to many other things. I have 3 different projects in my mind that I am dying to do. Again, the choice is cleaning or crafting...guess what I am going to do, bwaa ha ha.

Hugs