WOYWW – out of practice!

LOL! I am SO out of practice doing WOYWW that last week I totally forgot to add the link back in my post.  THIS week I was so consumed with cleaning and reorganizing my space to move all the beads and things I had front and centre for making knitting stitch markers and shifting my art journaling supplies to a more usable location and FINALLY (after only 4 years!) trying to get the rest of my stuff under control that it kinda slipped my mind that I should pre-prepare a post for today.  Shocking.  I almost skipped it totally, but what kind of track record would that be, a run of ONE?

So I have not one, not two, but THREE desks on show, none of them in good shape.  My knitting friend who was here yesterday for a quite cold, socially distanced knitting session out in the garden, asked me what the heck WOYWW was.  I explained.  Now, if she sees this, she will realize the full horror of my craft room. Words are inadequate to describe it. (waves to Kirsty….)

Desk ONE:

Not as bad as it could be – my desk where my monitors sit.  Usable, just about.  You can see my 2nd hand Cricut, a first gen one that still has 1.1 firmware so I can still use SCAL on it.  Yes, yes, I could probably buy a new Silhouette and be the better off for it, but frankly, I have this one and it works well enough. Mostly I cut the occasional paper stencil or mask. To be completely honest, the Cricut is actually on desk 4, but right now you can’t actually see that.  Maybe one day….

Desk 2:

Holy crap.  This one is what I might call my primary desk.  At the moment it is littered with stencils (bought ones and my own) and things like the texture plates I made AGES ago from textured wallpaper stuck to cardboard.  I am in the process of sorting them out and organizing them into usable storage, like binders, etc. It’ll take me the rest of the week, I’m sure, to accomplish that! Much of my art supplies have moved there, but they are just out of frame.

Desk 3:

This is the one in front of the window.  My plan is to have it ready for Gelli plate printing and deli-paper stamping and Copic colouring.  The lighting is crap at the moment but the little unit on the window ledge is full of texture tools and foam stamps, etc.

With any luck at all, next week will reveal a much more organized and tidy space.  I can dream, right?

Apologies in advance for visiting without commenting to any who have their Blogger blog set to disallow ANONYMOUS comments (or ones where you can comment with a name and, if desired, a URL) – I could comment if I wanted to create a Blogger account and log in to it, but frankly, Google gets enough of my personal data that one more cross-reference point for them is just a step too far.  Feel free to click away if reciprocal comments is your requirement.  Trust that I enjoyed seeing your desk even if I wasn’t able to say so!

Have a lovely Wednesday! Off to examine desks much more organized and full of actual creativity than MINE….

WOYWW – OMG it has been so long…

Wow.  I can’t even think when was the last time I joined in with WOYWW.  I think about it often, read the posts when I have the time, and miss the community that was built around it.

Medical issues forever altered life.  Now there is the Covid.  Ugh.  It’s all just a bit much.

I won’t dwell on that.  There is little point.  ALL the WOYWW folk have had their struggles over the years.  Some soldier on, some drop out, drop back in, drop out forever.  We all deal in different ways.

When we moved, and I was diagnosed with a debilitating and rare myositis, my strength and energy levels were nil.  Getting up to my craft room was harder and harder.  I basically shifted completely over to knitting.  Something I could do sitting on the sofa and even on very low energy days.  I recently had a small window of improvement (sadly, now heading in the other direction, but with another new treatment to try perhaps soon) and it made me anxious to take up my art journaling again.

AGES ago (2018!) I made a journal based around inspirational quotes to do with strength and illness and the like.  It was prompted by the Permission to Play workshop by Carolyn Dube (there is a link in the sidebar if anyone is interested – I loved it BTW!) and you can see more about that here. That was really one of the last times I did anything arty.

Last week I made TWO (!) pages.  Wow am I out of practice.  The first one had a couple of elements I really liked but overall was a hot mess.

Too many colours, too dark, overwhelming text… I loved the stencil I cut from a magazine image.  Just lucky the wingspan matched the sides of the page pretty well! The figure also will work as a mask.

I scanned the photo and changed the contrast and saturation before printing on heavy cardstock to make a more substantial stencil.   The other item I loved was the stamp. Made up of the numbers for the whole family’s birthdays, cut from sticky-backed fun foam and mounted on a strip of plastic placemat.  Some of the numbers are a little wonky but overall I love it and expect I will use it a lot.

Those of a sensitive disposition, click away now.  Warning of a rude word on what I see as the better of the two pages:

Happy with the more limited colour palette, the limited stencils and stamps, the increased white space.  Not perfect, nothing to crow about, but not bad and not hot mess.  A few more pages and I will reclaim my style…maybe.  Pretty sure the leafy stamp is from a Scrap Magic crop class about a million years ago, the Anyone Home? bit is a section of a Teesha Moore stamp, the circle of numbers is from…Banana Frog, maybe? The Mona Lisa is from ….can’t recall the name! Some mail order only online stamp maker.

Not having taken part in a long, long while, I will have to see what happens as I try to comment.  I have a dim recollection that one of the reasons I stopped was commenting issues, but I’m hoping that has been sorted.  It will be quite nice to catch up on the work of some of my favourite WOYWWers. Fingers crossed.

 

Two days in a row?? Elephant, Blogger and Books

It seems like it’s been ages since I managed to blog two days in a row.  Awaiting the plumber so I thought I might as well.

First, let me wrap up WOYWW stuff. Here is the elephant, finished.  I had to pop to Lidl yesterday afternoon and mine still has plenty of these kits available and they have dropped the price to under £2.  I picked up one I previously passed on, a rhino.

I am super happy with how he turned out.  You can;t see but the tusks are coated with Rock Candy stickles.

I am happy to be trying WOYWW again but there seems to be a problem – is it me or is it everyone or maybe just WordPress commenters? I commented o a number of blogs yesterday and still am not seeing comments from me posted.  Blogger labelled blogs seem to be ok, the ones that ask me to tick from a selection to verify I am not a robot.  But Blogspot labelled ones don’t seem to work.  I get a weird error screen:

How wrong is it that the problem is with Blogger and yet they want me to clear MY cache, and deal with all the problems that creates.  Harumpf. It feels like the equivalent of the IT Crowd folk saying Have you tried switching it off and then on again? 

Lastly, I am still sending out loads of book folding patterns by request.  One of them, requested and folded by Bette, won a prize at her local fair!

Apparently it won First Prize and a special ribbon.  All down to her folding and not the template – her two-line fold looks way better than mine!  Nice job Bette and thanks for sharing.

WOYWW 385 – long time, no see!

Happy WOYWW day!  Oh it has been so long!  I drastically underestimated the impact of

• the move to a new house that needs a lot of work
• the move to a new county and the impact on DDs SEN status
• dealing with the ridiculous amount of stuff left by DS after he moved to California
• getting my ridiculous amount of craft stuff organized

I haven’t managed WOYWW for AGES – every time I think maybe THIS week I can do it, SOMETHING comes up and I end up being tied up with contractors or needing to be away for the day and therefore unable to take part. And I won’t take part unless I KNOW I can at least return visits.

But I do actually have something on my desk this week and I am home awaiting a couple of deliveries and a pick up for return, and only have to pop out to collect a prescription at the pharmacy.  I may get a text from the plumber (almost all the downstairs radiators fail to heat up at all) but that is about it.  Seems a good week to take the plunge.

Remember this?

 

and my Gelli print version? It is a post or so back.

Well, I did wind up buying a stack of the kits from Lidl and in tidying up I came across some lovely tissue paper from our trip to the Bombay Sapphire distillery:

So I have been covering the bits of an elephant with the tissue paper

and misting the centre brace pieces with Glimmer Mist

The nice thing about tissue paper is that you don’t need to X-acto knife around the pieces, just scrub along the edges with an emery board or nail file.  And the emery board fits inside the tricky slots to make it super easy to remove the tissue paper from them.

It just needs some ink dusted on the edges and it can join the deer head.  I still have a rams head and a bull’s head (maybe a rhino too, the only one I am sure I didn’t buy is the bear!) but am not sure what other technique I might bring to it.  I did consider doodling on the white pieces but I’m not that good at it, to be honest.  And the mountain of scrapbooking paper I have on hand would make that an obvious choice, but maybe too obvious.  I might go for stamping with my Teesha/Zetti stamps but I’m just not sure how visible they will be once the piece is assembled.  Time will tell…

So have a wonderful WOYWW day and I will hope to manage a few visits before it all goes pear-shaped.

Pessimistic? Me? Nahhhh…..

WOYWW 351 – lots of stuff

Hello WOYWWers! I very nearly didn’t even try to take part this week, cause I am struggling with time, but I figure I have to just try to make time for the things I love.  So here’s me, tryin’…

I have a few things on my desk, and my desktop.

I was making a template for a cut&fold book, cause I am still just a huge fangirl of TWD.  Yes, even at my age…  There is also the cut&fold I did yesterday, adding to my Me as a stencil and Me as a stamp collection.  A closer look:

Of more interest, probably, are the flowers.  It seems to be a thing to decorate folded books with the kusudama flowers.  I’ve made the standard version but they take AGES, lots of folding, etc.  I have an easy version bookmarked, that creates a quicker, but still effective flower.

They end up looking like this

But I went on and experimented further with making the flowers using a number of different Nestie shapes, as well as the 4-petal version:

There are a few tricks to the scallop and spikey circle versions, which I will share probably tomorrow. But for today, I will just say Happy WOYWW and hope to get round for a few visits at lunch! I wonder what I will see?  Oh the antici……………….pation!

WOYWW 347 – making time….

Hello deskers!  It has been ages since I even tried to join in. I am so out of practice, the shot of my desk is more a shot of the project I am making.

I get a LOT of requests, 99% are for calendars or book folding templates This project is in response to a commenter who wanted a 2015 calendar updated for 2016.  It turned out to be more work than it should have, because I’ve upgraded my Mac, moved up about 6 versions of the operating system, and have a new version of the software I use to make the calendars. I kinda figured as long as I was going to make it, I might as well make a project, cause I know some people can;t think outside the box, as they say, and if I can show some other way to use the printable, other than just cutting it n popping it in a CD case, well, so much the better! And it gave me the perfect excuse to use the Press-cut gazillion circles dies I bought a year ago!

Honestly, I would have bought these instead of multiple sets of Spellbinders circles and been able to buy the ovals and squares for less than they cost.  I will say the embossed edge isn’t quite as thick or as nice as the Nesties, but 20 dies in a set for some of the sale prices I’ve seen (under £15!) makes them a bargain.

I had to hack up a chunk of a Post-it note pad to get it to fit – I know they sell a variety of sizes but I only ever seem to buy the squares.  It works, but it is a bit wasteful.  Shame on me.

I have to make time to organize the photos that explain what I did, but that may have to wait a day! So I’ll link up to WOYWW and hope I can make the time to return visit at the very least, but start off by popping off to a few old favourites to catch up.  That could take a while, it’s been so long.  So here I go, down the rabbit hole……

WOYWW337 – hats galore!

What’s on my W this W is still hats.  I am over half way to my goal of 100. Such a colourful array!

And the hats!

I also created another new pattern – well, not created so much as worked out the details of a simple texture stitch.  But it’s so cute!

And I love the floppy pom pom even more than the tiny fork ones. Another colour…

Even floppier LOL! easy too, but the explanation will have to wait.  Busy day today.

HAPPY WOYWW! and I’ll be popping round to yours later……

WOYWW 336 – The Big Knit

I keep trying to find the time to join in with WOYWW, and keep failing.  I decided if I wait until I feel confident I will have a block of time to do the visits, I may wait forever.  So I am just taking the plunge and vowing to do my best.

What is all over my desk is knitting.  Little tiny hats for Innocent Smoothies.  It’s called The Big Knit, and every year the campaign raises money for Age Concern.  You can buy a Smoothie, with a hat, at stores, and a portion of the price goes to the charity.  You can read more about it here.  Last year they raised over £215,000.

As you can see, my desk is littered with yarns.  Lots of bits, old, leftovers from past projects, as well as a few fairly new skeins I bought in a sale, for knitting baby beanies.  A few random googly eyes.

Here are some of the hats I showed a few days ago, and a few new ones.

 

 

So, you are probably wondering about that odd-looking lump on the right. I thought you might.  I had seen a full-sized hat, years ago, that I thought was an absolute hoot.

I was never going to make it, but I admired it for sure.  Get the pattern here if you would like to make one! I thought I could figure out a way to make a much MUCH smaller version for the Smoothie bottle. Basically I made a basic mini-hat, then made two 18″ 3 stitch i-cords and coiled them up in a brain-like fashion.  Well, what *I* thought looked brain-like – I’m not a doctor, and I don’t play one on TV, so I have no idea.  It turned out OK, despite the small surface area.  Ideally I feel like a cord made from fingering weight/ baby/ sock yarn would have been better but this is what I had.  My own rules are that I can’t buy anything for this, I have to use up stash yarn.

I wonder if they will accept it or if it is a bit too “out there,” alongside all the cuter hats they show? I also have a trio of plain ones on the go.  My goal is 100 hats.  I am not sure I’ll make it before the December 11th deadline (so maybe the 8th or 9th for the mailing deadline) but I’m having a go.  I’ll need a bundle of plain ones to go with the novelty ones that take longer to knit!

So that’s my desk. Messy as ever, just a different sort of mess… Hopefully I’ll be round to see yours soon.

 

WOYWW 330 – easing back in

WOYWW how I’ve missed you!  I was just saying to Julia yesterday that I was hanging back from WOYWW because I was just a little worried I would find the pressure (that I put on myself, not from the lovely WOYWWers) to get lots of visits done too much at the moment.  But as I thought more on it I decided if I didn’t at least give it a go it would be all to easy to just drop out totally.   And I can’t let THAT happen, not can I?

So this morning, when I got up and got the family off, I did a bit of exercise, then snapped a photo of my desk.  Nothing has changed then – still as bad as ever LOL!

Sorry to say the wide view was even worse.

A mere 3 hours later and…

On my desk is something that I feel super guilty about – at some point I got a lovely little package from Pearshaped Chris, including some die cuts and an envelope template and a card and the sweetest little moleskin notebook.

I never properly thanked her for it.  So thoughtless.  No excuse, really, except you can see the state of my desk.  I kept moving it to the top of the pile then it would get covered and another week would go by before I unearthed it again. Now, I can finally share and acknowledge her kindness.

As to visits, all I can say is I’ll do my best to at the very least return visit.

(If you have no idea what I am talking about and curiosity is getting the better of you, you can see a brief about it here. It’s not super dramatic (minor heart attack) but carries a lot of time-consuming appointments, etc  with it. )

WOYWW 324 – long time missing

Happy WOYWW, all!  Wow.  It’s been WEEKS since I was able to join in.  My desk is in a shocking state.  That much hasn’t changed!

That sheet in the front?  Math. Ugh.  I have been trying to work out a printable planner thing and I am trying to figure out some rules.  The thing is, I want to create one that can be printed two-sided without jumping thru hoops (think I got that figured out) but I am also trying to figure out how to print the right number of pages in the easiest way!  I want to have the week begin with a “week at a glance” page, then be followed by seven DAILY sheets, then another WaaG sheet, etc.

That is a single page.  You can see that if you cut it down the middle you get two A5 sheets, with room for punching the holes to the left on one sheet and to the right on the other.  Printing double-sided give you three Daily sheets her printed page and one WaaG sheet.  What I want is the WaaG page always on the LEFT with the first week day on the right.  I calculate 53 Sundays in 2016 so what I think I need is 53 pages like the above (with two side-by-side Daily sheets on the back) then 52 pages with 4 Daily sheets) and I’ll get what I need.  This is the sort of planner I used back before I used iCal and I miss it. I’m not one of those people who use their phone for everything.  I like the comfort of pen&paper so am keen to get this sorted out so I can use it along with the online shared calendar.

 

Also a few knitted baby beanies, some loom-band stuff for DD, and some 2016 calendar stuff.  first task is to excavate down to some clear space!

So that’s me this week.  Lots of craziness on all fronts at the moment, including some dodgy internet issues (AGAIN – damn you BT! just dig up the line and replace it, what’s £20k as long as I have a good connection LOL!) and probably shopping for a new car (mine’s been in the shop for a month and still no resolution) and DS coming home for a visit.  But I have been missing WOYWW so much I had to make the time to join in, just for me.  Can’t wait to catch up.  I think I may be browsing back a LOT so it’ll take some time….