Check This Out

Here's what I am working on this week....

I made some presents for my co-workers for our annual "belated" holiday party the other evening. I really enjoy giving handmade things to these crafty gals because if anyone can appreciate the work put into things like this, they can! This year I made them a "glitter station". While antiquing this past year, I found some diminutive wine glasses, and small apothecary jars to hold glitter. 

I first started decorating the wineglasses with tiny pearls or seed beads individually glued around the rim. I used a variety of adhesives: Super Glue (if it can hold up a construction guy by his helmet, wouldn't you think it would hold a bead on to the edge of the glass???), then I switched to clear Liquid Nails. As I picked up the finished glasses, invariably I would knock loose a couple of beads. Very frustrating. I fixed these with Glossy Accents, dripping the adhesive between adjacent beads to secure them not only to the glass, but to each other.

Unfortunately the super glue made a super mess, dripping down the edge of the glass. But like most mistakes in crafting, the solution I came up with added greatly to the overall design. To hide the drips around the rim, I glued lace, trims, and rick rack from my stash.

I added the words "glitter me" that I typed out using my vintage Royal typewriter, and sponged them with a little matching Distress Ink before cutting apart the individual letters and glueing them to the glass with Glossy Accents. I tried to add details to the individual glasses that I thought fit that person. 

For the apothecary jars, I glued more pearls around the rim of the jar, and added some torn pieces of vintage paper doilies around the sides of the jar, again sponged with some Distress Inks. Finally I tied on some scraps of ribbon, attaching a charm to each that is etched with the word "create". 

I packaged them up in little clear bags, each sitting in a cupcake paper liner and a fluffy bed of shredded paper. I tucked in a small bag of tinsel glitter and a vintage demitasse spoon to sprinkle their glitter with.

I have also been finishing up a project for the annual Altered Art Show at Ink About It this Friday and Saturday, March 4th and 5th.

I started out with this plain paper-mache mannequin, that I passed out to participating members of the Altered Art Club round robin project group. 

This is my finished mannequin (At least I think it's finished). 

I am calling the piece "I Just Found Out That Lady Gaga Is My Half Sister".

I am also including another piece called "Frida's Closet" which is inspired by my favorite artist, Frida Kahlo.

This was a challenging project as each of the ten members brought an embellishment, and from those ten embellishments, we had to use seven of them in our project which was housed in a cigar box. 

Please come and see these and many more fabulous works of art made by our members, at our show this weekend.