What’s On Your Workdesk this Wednesday?
More fun in my revamped studio!
Die cuts
I’ve been using the ToDo to do lots of die cutting this week. Several years ago I went to a craft show and bought quite a lot of new dies, and immediately afterwards, I was taken ill and never got round to trying them out. I got a few new ones recently too, so I’ve got plenty to play with.
Here is the first lot that I cut.
The plan is to cut half a dozen or so of each one and put them in individual baggies. These will be put into larger pouches together with their respective dies and filed in a box under separate categories as I’ve seen others do online. I’ve just had some Avery Elle pouches delivered and I’m going to cut heavy cardstock inserts for each one and add some magnetic tape to the back to hold the respective die(s), and the insert from the original packaging will also go in, along with the baggie of die-cuts. I am going to make dividers so that I can sort them into categories, and they will all go in a box together.
I hate the original packaging for most stamps and dies – those awful bags with the sticky strip on them that sticks on everything as you try and get stuff in and out of them, and several of my dies are in horrible clamshell-type packaging which I loathe as well! I need a system that is going to be easy and fun to use, and not something that is a constant struggle.
My stamps will have a similar storage method as well, in due course. When I didn’t have so many, I had them in bags suspended from a rail, but as the collection grew, this became unmanageable. I’ve got a couple of zipped folders but this hasn’t proved very satisfactory either, because they really only work for thin clear stamps, and I have quite a few cling-mounted rubber ones that are too thick. I think having them in individual pouches and filed according to category in a box is going to be a lot easier to manage. One of the folders is full of lovely clear stamps – a friend got this in a charity shop and gave it to me last year. I don’t know if the stamps originally came in the folder or whether the previous owner had just filled it with miscellaneous stamps – there’s a good selection of image ones, sentiments and backgrounds, and I’ve weeded out the ones I know I shall never use.
I hope by next week I will have made a start on this and have some photos to show you. I’d be very interested to know how everybody else stores their stamps and dies.
I did some more die cutting a few days later. This is the complete set so far, minus the lattice one. These are all new ones from Ebay – unbranded dies.
There are still quite a few to do.
Backgrounds
Having recently made three small backgrounds with my Distress Stains:
I decided to make some more of the same colour on larger pieces. They didn’t come out quite so well so I added some layers of Distress Oxides and spritzed them.
I thought I could add to these in different ways. I began by brayering on some white acrylic paint onto one of them, which wasn’t desperately successful! I tried making spatters with my Distress Paint dauber (Picket Fence) and all it did was make rather messy circles, but no matter… This is the one on the right.
For the one on the left, I spritzed it well with water and sprinkled coarse grained salt on it. This made the spatters a bit indistinct so I added some more.
The next picture shows the white brayered background with a white die-cut frame laid on top (not stuck down) – this was the border cut from the lattice background die I cut, shown above.
Here is the same piece with that lattice die cut laid on top. Definitely some potential in this!
Here is the salted one with the white frame laid on top.
Here it is with the lattice die cut.
The final example is a couple of the leaf die cuts laid on top of a background that I added some water spatters to and then blotted off.
I think there is definite potential in all of these.
Gel press printing – my first attempts
When I’d finished brayering the white paint there was quite a bit on the brayer and on my glass media mat, so I unpacked my new gel press and decided to have a go with that. I really didn’t know what I was doing but just messed about with some different acrylic paints on scrap printer paper, and also on a piece of cardstock that I’d die cut some of the leaves from, and this was the result. I used a stencil to get the radiating design. The one at top centre was the final ghost print, cleaning off the gel press with successive spritzings with water and putting the paper back to lift up a bit more each time. The one at bottom left was one of my inked backgrounds mopping up a bit of white acrylic paint.
With a bit of practice, and mugging up again on some YouTube videos to find out exactly what I should be doing, rather than just messing around, I think I will get some better results!
New pens
My gel pens all seem to have dried out. Some of them dried out really quickly after I’d bought them. Does anyone know how you can revive them? I can see there is still ink in them. I often want a fine pen to write in a card using a co-ordinating colour so I decided to get myself a set of fineliner waterbased pens. The reverse end on my Tombow Dual Brush Markers is not fine enough unfortunately. I got these new pens from Amazon. There were so many different ones to choose from, with wildly differing reviews, and in the end I came down on the side of a recognised brand (Staedtler) which had good reviews, and which are finer than most, being .3 mm instead of .4, and they were also on special offer. This set has a good range of colours.
The hard plastic case is quite clever. You can fold the top part back on itself and click it into place, and it becomes a stand.
Thank you card for Cindy
Cindy, who recently gave me the ToDo machine, should have received this card by now, so I can show it. I made it using all the techniques the ToDo can do (apart from embossing) – die cutting, letterpress and foiling.
To save space here, you can see the details of how I made it on this post.
Persian Tiles redux
High time, I decided, to get crocheting again! Although I’ve been busy in the studio, I’ve spent far too much time with idle hands while on the recliner downstairs, just watching TV or YouTube. It’s weeks since I’ve picked up my crochet and I had to remind myself exactly what I was supposed to be doing! I’ve got a crib sheet to tell me what colours to do each round, otherwise the pattern is very confusing because it keeps telling me what colour to use and I’m using different ones! Anyway, back into the routine of it now. I’ve completed a couple more tiles.
Food
Last week I went back on the stoma forum that I hadn’t visited for simply ages, to give them an update on what’s been going on with me recently. I’d expected that most of them would have forgotten me by now, but no – a simply wonderful response – everyone was delighted to welcome me back, very sorry to hear about my breast cancer diagnosis, and thrilled to see photos of my latest art work – they all said how they loved seeing that in the past.
I told them about our whole-food plant-based lifestyle, and now much I enjoy my cooking. One lovely lady has given me her recipe for Gazpacho and it includes home-made Worcester sauce – it is impossible to get it without anchovies in the supermarket, and this is a vegan version. I made half-quantities of her recipe and put it in an empty maple syrup bottle which is just the right size, and wrote on it with my white acrylic pen (Derwent Fineliner).
I am hoping she will give me permission to share these recipes as recipes of the week on here. She hasn’t been back on the forum since I asked her. If she does, I’ll post them in due course. We had the Gazpacho at the weekend and it was delicious, and very easy to make. Highly recommended.
Kitties
Coming in like little lambs after playing in the garden, all hungry and ready for their tea.
Ruby continues to love lying on my neck pillow, and alternates this with the little house on the cat tree, the blue cushion in the basket chair in the flat, and being a heavy lump on my legs, but has she found a new favourite place? This chair in the flat really gets the warm sun.
Ruby on the cat tree.
Lily doing her Shameless Hussy act. Expose it all, why don’t you, Lily? They’d not been in long from the garden and I think she was tired out! Funny girl.
Her fur is the softest ever. When they come in from the garden, they smell so fragrant – a wonderful sweet, fresh scent like new-mown hay.
Garden
The second pink lily came out this week. The two flowers together look so beautiful.
I’ve been hoping all week that the orange gladdy would come out before the red one faded!
As you can see, it looks as if we’re going to get a bumper crop of apples again this year. It does give me a bit of a sinking feeling, though, as it involves a lot of work (at least my hubby does all the chopping, and it’s just down to me to cook it), and I just hope I’m going to have room in the freezers for them all! We’ve still got some left over from last year which I think was the biggest crop we’d ever had. We do give quite a few away as well. Unfortunately they don’t keep well unless you cook and freeze them. Now I’ve got my juicer, I am planning to make some juice as well.
Computers
You may remember that just before I had my operation, the hard drive on my main laptop failed and I had to have another fitted. My old laptop which lives in the office upstairs, and is only used for office stuff and any printing I need to do, has been slowing down dreadfully over recent months and I mentioned this to our computer nerd chappy when I took the main one in, and he said when I was ready, to bring that one in and he’d check it for me. When I was doing the accounts on Monday, it took me about twice as long as it should have done because the wretched thing was grinding practically to a halt – on one occasion I restarted it, and then had to wait about half an hour for Windows to do an update, and it was still as slow as treacle. It also wouldn’t copy and paste properly and I was anxious about saving my files before a major disaster struck.
My hubby took it in for me yesterday morning and the computer nerd phoned me to say he’d checked it, and it wasn’t showing any fault, but he agreed with me that it was painfully slow. The motherboard is fine. He said it would be worth replacing the drive because it was showing all the signs of imminent failure. As I don’t keep a great deal on that computer I asked him to put in the smallest SSD that they do, and he said that the difference between the smallest and the next size up was twice the capacity, with only a £10 increase in price, so it made sense to get the larger one.
He phoned later in the day to say it was all in, and he’d transferred everything onto the new drive – he wasn’t able to do this with the other laptop because the drive was completely defunct and wouldn’t spin. This means I don’t have any setting up to do when I get it back later today. He said it was running much faster now, which is good news, and that he was currently running a malware scan which was showing quite a few incidences – he said that the free version of AVG offered only “eggshell protection” and recommended Norton Deluxe which he uses at home as well as in the office. I mentioned that I had recently started subscribing to Mozilla VPN (Virtual Personal Network) which provides complete surfing anonymity, but I wasn’t happy with it because it was slowing my browser down far too much, and it also kept turning itself off. At about £3.50 per month he said this was pretty expensive – Norton Deluxe includes a VPN and he said he had absolutely no problems with performance with it. You can run 5 devices on one subscription, and for a 3-year period, it works out at pennies per month per device. He is installing it for me and I can add it to my other devices and also my hubby’s computer. This sounds a much better plan. He is very efficient, and has good advice to offer, and they are on an industrial estate only about 1/2 mile from home so it’s very convenient.
Let’s hope I don’t have any further tech problems from now on – at least for a while!
Health update
The Breast Unit phoned on Thursday to say that my final bra had at last arrived. My hubby went in to collect it, and at the same time, delivered my two cards, one for the surgeon and the other for the nurses. I hope they like them!
Continuing to do well. I am pleased that the big bruise I developed a week ago is fading at last. I’ve been taking photos so I can see the difference.
Only a week to go till my oncology appointment next Wednesday.
Happy WOYWW. So glad to hear that your surgery went relatively smoothly and you are recovering well. I have only a few dies (if I need a cut design, I tend to use my Silhouette Cameo) and they are stored in the MDF specialist storage unit – which has pull-out shelves. I put the dies on magnetic sheets (cheap from Amazon) and then as many as possible on each shelf. I have got a few larger sets, which I want to keep together, and they are in a storage folder from Aldi. Stamps are in one of my Kallax cubes. Mostly in the original packaging and a few are in some plastic trays. One day I will sort them out into folders perhaps, but ok for now. I love all the backgrounds you have made. It is always fun to do some crafty experimenting. Life seems to be so busy at the moment and I am looking forward to having a free day when I can just sit in my craft room and play! Ali x #6
LOL1 Your blog is super weird today – or at least for me. Can’t even tell if you will see any of this but I’m gonna give it a go. Ignore all typos as I cannot see my typing at ALL. I have many of those same dies, I love the backgrounds, and I am sure you will love gel printing!
Now let’s see what happens when I post this…
Happy WOYWW.
Mary Anne (1)
Sorry my blog was weird for you, Mary Anne! It sounds as if you are having some computer problems at the moment – hope they are of short duration. I had no problem reading your comment, so all is well there, at least. I love the idea for the glue bottles! I’ve got an old wooden tray thing with sections that came out of Dad’s workshop and I use that. Thanks for visiting, and again, hope you hop over here to read this! I’m glad you enjoyed the result of my playing this week.
Happy WOYWW,
Shoshi #11
Love all the play you have been doing this week Shoshi. That’s a great idea for storing hte dies and die cuts. I store my stamps in blank DVD cases (with no inserts) and label them along the spine. I can fitt 77 cases into an IKEA DVD tower. I am now on my third unit but it is easy to find the stamps I want and if I ever go to a workshop again, quick to grab the boxes I want to take with me. You can see an example of one of the boxes open on my desk today – it contains 4 stamp sets and the matching masks are kept between the box and the plastic sleeve so are always ready and available. Meow tho the kitties – hope your impending hospital visit goes well. Stay safe and happy WOYWW. Sarah #3
I love the artwork with the “splodges” and ferny diecuts ( note my technical knowledge – lol”. Your Persian tiles are stunning. Keep well. xx Jo
Loving your die cuts and the ideas for storage and having several cut and available for easy use. The background experiments are fun and definitely have potential as you say. I have a gel press and my results are always completely random, but it is a fun way to play with paint and ink with no pressure and sometimes something good comes out! I hope the Oncology appointment goes well next week. Happy WOYWW. Take care and stay safe. With love & God Bless, Caro xxx (#18)
Hi Shoshi. Good to hear your news and do some catching up. A lovely card for Cindy. Great little shapes in the crochet.
Take care. God bless.
Margaret #8
Those dies are great – the kind of things I like using in my journals! I like the idea of your storage but I would never be disciplined enough to actually do it. My dies are all over the place – I hate those sticky strips as well! They can even ruin stuff if you’re not careful! The white brayering looks great on those backgrounds – gelli printing is always a hit and miss, but that’s part of the fun and even the misses are great for collaged backgrounds, paper piecing etc. I love Staedtler pens! I have several sets – some of them over 10 years old and they still work. I think it you keep them in the plastic case, it stops them from drying out, cause the only one of mine that dried out a bit was out of the plastic case for years. Cindy’s card looks wonderful and Lily’s so funny in that pose. Also funny how they came in together through the door, even though one of them was way behind to start with – almost like she was waiting for her sister to catch up – but when she did she hurried through as if saying “but not before me” LOL! The lilies are beautiful, but you know they’re poisonous to cats? That’s the only reason I didn’t get any – but then I found out several other plants in my garden are also thought to be poisonous, so I don’t know how seriously we need to take the warnings. Nice that your old support group welcomed you back. It’s always nice catching up with people you haven’t seen in a while! Take care Shoshi! xx zsuzsa #25
Loved the little kitty video Shoshi, they are so sweet running in for their tea. My hotel guest cat is very keen to come in for her tea, I can hear her thundering up the path when I call her at night. If I don’t open the screen door in time I think there would be a cat-shaped hole in it LOL. Glad you are enjoying playing and experimenting in your new tidy room. I love my gel press, if you are looking for inspiration or want to learn some techniques you can’t go past Birgit Koopsen, she does a challenge every year, and all the videos are on youtube. She is a designer with Gelli Arts, who also do a challenge, and have a lot of technique videos too.
I just got back from the supermarket, I had to hunt down some mung beans, but luckily Sainsbury had them as the other supermarkets did not. Have you ever tried Khicheri? It’s a dal and rice dish, ayurvedic, very good for you and very easy on the digestion, and vegan of course. Apparently in India it is one of the first solid foods that babies eat lol but it is very good for grown ups too and very delicious. I’m planning to make some for dinner today but now I have to go and put the shopping away. Happy WOYWW! Elle #20 this week
I have to keep your post for when I get home from work so I can browse it properly – the phone screen is far too small! that pink lily is magnificent – what a colour! I hope you find a way to revive your pens, if I knew which box mine were in I would probably find my have dried up too….
It makes lots of sense to do mass die- cutting and keep them for future use. Very organised. Have a good week Helen #4
Lovely thank you card. Your die cutting against your backgrounds are great. I store my dies in mdf shelf system. I glued magnetic sheets on both sides of the shelf. I store the die cuts in a separate folder. As for the gel pens, if you take of the nib end (I used pliers and put it straight in a rubbish bag), blow through the opposite end, the ink will come out. I stored mine in some tiny face cream pots. They need to be airtight to stop the ink drying up. I added some white glue to make it go further. If you have lots of colours, you could do it as needed. Loved the video of the kitties. Have a great week Angela.
I knew when I saw the die cuts that you would make something gorgeous. Nice to see the kitties too. Wishing you a very happy woyww. Hugs, Angela x17x
Wow, lots to see today! I love the abstract backgrounds and those leafy die cuts are beautiful, you’ll find loads of uses for them. The Persian tile squares are fab (very dramatic pic btw:), I’m glad you’ve had more time for them.
Hugs LLJ 5 xxx
Hi Shoshi a busy post, love new leafy die cuts and also the gelly prints well done, cute kitty video too.
Praying very good results at oncology appt.
Thanks for sharing, and may God bless and keep you and all whom you love safe and well.
Prayer hugs, Shaz in Oz. X
{Wonderful Words of Life – Shaz in Oz}
{Calligraphy Cards – Shaz in Oz}
HI Shoshi! You sound happy and busy! The cats are gorgeous, I just want to reach into the video and pet them, they look so soft! How nice of your friend to share those recipes, I wonder what she uses instead of the anchovy? Your dies are fab, it’s exactly what I keep telling myself I need to do! I forget what dies I have, and having things already cut out would be a great help. I store my dies on magnetic “pages” that I keep in a box that I can flip through. I got them on amazon, and the dies just stick to it and the whole “page” is magnetic. I store my stamps in photo binders, by category. Ahve a great week, keep up the experimenting! Lindart #32
wow you sure have been busy, Living the Persian tiles,
Take care and stay safe.
Love the two lilies but have you checked up about lilies and cart – they can be very poisonous. I am sure you have and yours are possibly safe but please let me know if you have made a check.
Love all the craft experiments you have been doing – the embossing certainly looks good on those backgrounds. Looking forward to seeing your next batch of experiments with the Gelli plate.
Love the video of the two of them coming in, so pretty and the other photos too. You have two beautiful kitties there but then you know that.
I store my dies on magnetic paper in cd folders (clear plastic) and then they fit in a long coffee box I got from a friend in America. Some others are in Art Boxes that have magnetic sheets in them. Look up Artbin 6978AB (buty they have gone up in price – wow)
Hugs, Neet xx
cart should have read cats sorry
xx
As usual so much to read and so much of interest!
Your die cut system sounds like a good idea – and those are lovely dies. I especially like the circle ones.
Lovely pics from your garden!
Happy WOYWW!
Stay safe and keep well!
Susan #23
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