WINDOW ELEMENTS, GLUE WOES UNSTUCK AT LAST, AND A MILESTONE BIRTHDAY
I’ve been pottering in the studio and office, tidying up a bit and finding stuff I can make use of, and I’ve finally sorted my glue problems! I’ve also had an important birthday…
Window elements
I wasn’t sure what to call these. It’s nothing to do with Microsoft Windows, at any rate!
I needed to tidy my office desk before doing the monthly accounts, and I also needed to put in another order for stoma supplies. For some reason I had kept all the packing slips from every order I’d made to my supplier, and all this paperwork, after one order a month for over eight years, was bulking up the file to an unacceptable thickness, so I decided to use the backs for scrap paper.
The recent ones are just printed on the front of an A4 sheet, so these simply went straight into my scrap A4 printer paper stack.
Some of the earlier ones were also printed on half the back, so I guillotined these in half to create scrap A5 paper, and ditched the rest.
The very earliest ones appear to have had a sticky label on them which had been peeled off, leaving a window with a piece of waxed paper adhered to the back. I discovered that this small rectangle of waxed paper was very easy to peel off, and underneath, surrounding the back of the window, was a bead of very sticky glue. Ideal, I thought – I could use a piece of the waxed paper as a pattern to cut out rectangles from scrap vellum and acetate. I have a pizza box full of scrap acetate from packaging etc., and there was also an envelope in there, containing several sheets of coloured acetates which someone had sent me years ago. I thought I would use these, and also some of the clear acetate. I also dug out my envelope of scrap vellum and used some of that – several pieces were printed, from a project I made many years ago – something was obviously wrong with these sheets so they weren’t used, but they are fine for this current project.
This is the stack of completed packing slips (top half only) – the top one shows the window replaced by a plain piece of vellum.
On the right are all the rectangles of waxed paper I had peeled off the back of the sheets. I expect I can find a use for these, too.
Here is one of the printed acetates. I cut the piece out to include the two butterflies.
This one was a piece of acetate printed in green. It was the insert from a box of chocolate. I deliberately stuck it onto the back of the window so that the reverse of the printing showed through on the front – I just wanted to add a bit of texture and the text isn’t meant to be legible. The dark bits at the bottom are pictures of individual chocolates.
Some of the red and orange coloured acetate being used to cover the windows.
Green and yellow acetate.
Blue and clear acetate.
The paper is normal 80 gsm printer paper. This will get thicker and reinforced once I begin to collage over the printed parts.
I think these window elements will make interesting additions to albums, maybe as pockets, or fold-outs, or even whole pages.
Glue woes unstuck!
I have always struggled with glue. Either the bottle is too hard to squeeze and nothing comes out until a whole lot comes out at once, or the glue dries in the nozzle and won’t come out. A little while ago I had got to the hair-tearing stage and found a video review of various glues – fortunately this was a UK based video so I knew everything would be readily available here – unlike so many excellent US videos which teach you a lot, but you either can’t get the particular glue here, or it’s under a different brand name so you can’t possibly know what to look for.
Sam Calcott, who made the review video, recommended Collall All-Purpose glue as the best – it is solvent based, so it smells a bit, but it causes absolutely no warping of the paper, is super-strong, and dries clear. I decided to buy some, and am absolutely sold on it!
However, the nozzle on the bottle is far too thick for my purposes and so far I’ve found it pretty difficult to control, ending up with great globs of glue where I don’t want them! I looked at loads of fine needle applicators online and finally decided that the best seemed to be the Fineline Applicator from the US.
I ordered a pack of two of these from Amazon and waited, and waited…. for their arrival. The tracking of my parcel suggested that it might be lost, and I could apply to the seller for a refund, but I thought I’d hang in there a bit longer to see if it turned up, and just after I’d more or less given up hope, and ordered some other fine-tipped applicator bottles elsewhere, lo and behold the parcel turned up a few days ago!
I immediately poured in some of the Collall glue and it works like an absolute dream.
The great advantage of this bottle (and it seems to be the only one of its kind) is that there is a pin fixed inside the lid, which goes down inside the hollow needle tip of the bottle, preventing any clogging.
Also, the bottle itself is not too thick, so it is very easy to squeeze. Ideal. I am totally fed up with wrestling with glue bottles and getting nowhere fast, and so envious of people online, being able to apply thin, even coverage of glue with ease. Now I can achieve this, too!
My Fineline bottle #1, filled with Collal All-Purpose, and duly labelled. I stuck the label onto the bottle with – you’ve guessed it – Collall All Purpose glue!
My milestone birthday
On 30th May I celebrated (well, not quite – I’m not at all sure how I feel about this massive milestone year yet…) my seventieth birthday. Yes. Shoshi is seventy. Seventy… SEVEN-OH. It’s a much more difficult milestone than 60 was, and I really haven’t got my head around it yet.
My hubby asked me what I wanted for a present, and I simply couldn’t think of anything! I’m always buying new art supplies but nothing like that really fitted the bill, and in the end I just said I really didn’t need anything, and we could just have a fun day out instead. We’d already had a kind of joint birthday outing at the County Show recently and I was happy with that, and he is arranging for us to visit a local observatory and planetarium in July.
I was therefore very surprised on the day that he produced this large parcel! I am so glad I didn’t have any idea what I wanted, because it was then up to him to choose something I’d like, and which would be a surprise. Much better all round! He has rarely got it wrong – nearly everything he has chosen for me I have absolutely loved, and this was no exception. He found it in a charity shop of all places!
It is a box frame enclosing a gold-coloured necklace. He said I could take the whole thing apart and extract the necklace so I could wear it, but I said no – it is so perfect and beautiful, and the frame complements the necklace so well, and the whole thing is so unusual and striking that it would be criminal to wreck it!
I have now decided where to hang it (I may change my mind again later) and have removed the picture that hung there previously.
I am super-thrilled with this most unusual present.
He also made me a hilarious card based on Jeeves and Wooster which we both love watching (I have the whole TV set) – Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie who play the characters, are both accomplished musicians and in many of the episodes, they play and sing a variety of songs from the 1920s, most of which are incredibly silly and have us in stitches! The one my hubby chose was “Forty-Seven Ginger-Headed Sailors,” and made a card with the front representing the cover of how the sheet music might have looked, changing the “Forty-Seven” to “Seventy” – never mind that it no longer scans – my hubby’s not the best at that sort of thing haha! On the inside is a picture of a whole crowd of sailors “raising their hats to the little lady” lol! I just love it!
Because my birthday, as usual, fell around the bank holiday weekend, several people missed the post for the actual day. I really like this, because the cards continued to arrive after the event, so each post was a surprise for several days. I’ve had a great collection.
May is a busy month for celebrations: firstly, my hubby’s birthday on 19th, then our wedding anniversary on 24th, which is also the kitties’ birthday (six this year!) and then my birthday on 30th. This means that the cards go up and come down in quick succession, but mine can stay up for as long as I want – till Christmas if I so choose! (How unfair is that…)
Today I also received yet another surprise – a beautiful bunch of pure white flowers by post.
Gorgeous, aren’t they.
Perhaps being seventy isn’t so bad after all…
