The Cat sculpture!

Oh man I loved making this and it turned out a lot better (and BIGGER) than I imagined.

How cute it that??

What I can say about the process:

As mentioned, the SVGs won’t open in Scan&Cut. As the various lines also don’t appear, nor the numbers, I wonder really how easy it is to cut them on a machine if you then have to transfer over all the lines and all the numbers, or keep referring back to the PDF as you fold. Plus keeping all the pieces straight is a challenge! Not so pretty inside, is it?

100% the only way to do this is with Art Glitter Glue and a micro-tip bottle!

In the final joining, you need to sneak the glue into crevasses that are nearly closed already. The micro-tip is invaluable for that, but even normal sticking, it give a very controlled line of glue. The fact it grabs quick and dries both clear and also quickly, means you can hold a tricky join together till it dries and it won’t take you hours. The angles are never really flat so it isn’t like you can clamp them…

While I bemoaned the fact the SVGs would not open on my Scan&Cut in their actual size, to be honest I am not sure how much that would have helped. If I could have worked out how to print the files (assuming I did it on white card) that included both the numbers and the red and blue dashed lines (indicating an inward or an outward fold, very important) then maybe, but honestly the cutting was not hard. But then I like cutting out…

There are just about 50 pieces. It took me just about five A3 sheets of black cardstock to cut. To be fair I made a couple of errors where I cut a pattern piece twice and I doubled up on the biggest piece, the base. I cut one piece then cut off the tabs and cut a second piece inside the lines and stuck it to the tabbed piece. That both gave the base more weight and made it sturdier. Having said that, it seems to be perfectly balanced as is so not required, but I thought it might help.

So yeah, that piece nearly fills an A4 sheet. But as I was using black A3 card, I printed the pattern pieces, stuck them to the black card, snugging them up or interlocking the bumps and gaps to get as much from my (limited) supply of matching cardstock as I could.

I am wondering about doing it using hammered or leather finish card. It might make an interesting effect.

I would love to get a shot of the cat next to my cat – it’s way bigger LOL! If I manage it I’ll slip a photo in when I can.

So yeah, I think I will carry on and make Stretchy Cat out of white card and see how that goes, and how much easier it might be.

Or not…

Truly embracing the whole crazy cat lady thing…

As is my way, I have dashed off along a tangent. I was browsing thru Creative Fabrica when I saw this 3D sculpture and I was smitten!

I mean, how cute is that? It comes with SVGs, but, typical, they won’t just open and cut on the Scan & Cut. On the designer site, they talk a lot about Cricut so I guess they think that is the most likely platform. The SVGs don’t open in my old program, but luckily they DO open in Affinity Designer. But it is all a bit of a palaver. I have to open not the PDF, where I can print the whole thing with one click (which does not have the red and blue dotted lines that tell you you need an upward or a downward crease) but have to open each SVG in Affinity then save it as a .JPG, and when printing click Fill Entire Page to ensure all the bits are the exact same size.

I have to say I was a little worried the resulting sculpture might be a bit on the small size but in truth it is looking like it is pretty much life-size!

Of course I shifted mine to be a black cat with white paws (Like my pretty Poppy girl) and that is adding a whole new layer of annoyance, as I have to print on plain paper then stick that to black card to cut, then add the numbers in white pen to keep things organized.

I already feel like I need to do another one using something like linen-effect cardstock, as the black card is really just that bit too thick and there is at least one join that is pretty bad (of course on the face) but I do want to complete it anyway just to work thru the whole process and identify the problem areas and the right order of things.

There are so many 3D sculptures to download, I think I will get my yearly fee to subscribe just from them! My next one?

I’ll share when I am a little more along with the process…

Waiting for a test….

Well. The Hubster tested positive for Covid and we have been keeping him isolated since then. Hoping that he might have his first negative test soon and then a second, so we can relax a bit. Typically, we spent the entire day before he started with any symptoms in close quarters in the bathroom, re-caulking the shower. Thus far, I have managed to avoid getting ill and hoping to keep it that way. We shared the meal by having him in a Zoom meeting on the iPad, propped up on the table while he ate in isolation and the rest of us ate together. Weird, not what we planned, but effective enough to make it feel like we were all “together” to celebrate.

The problem is that usually we make a pretty effective team for things like big celebratory meals and he was not available to help out for either the Christmas Eve or Christmas Day meals. The kitchen looked like a bomb site by the end of the cooking and serving!! Luckily I had a new clean-up minion in the form of Dear Son. And I didn’t even need to threaten him…

It has also meant that I am not getting any arty stuff done at all. Which is annoying. I do have the final iteration of my fabric and momigami bowl to share – I managed to add additional layers of fabric to the inside – first plain fabric just for strength.

I hadn’t unwrapped the bowl I used as a mold so it was easy enough to just plunk that down into my bowl to make sure it kept the shape. Once THAT dried I added another layer of decorative fabric so it looked good inside too:

I then slipped the cling-film wrapped bowl BACK into it to keep the shape solid. With each layer on all the PVA the sides get more soft and floppy, so putting the rigid bowl inside maintains the structural integrity of the fabric bowl.

I coated the outside with an additional layer of PVA and it is now pretty strong and has enough layers that I am happy to call it finished.

I really enjoyed making this. I think I would make more, so long as I had a use for them. I do think the prosess could easily be used to cover something rather than create a free-standing item like a bowl. It might be un to cover some waste cardboard box to storage, or organization. Lord knows we have lots of them after the holiday shopping, shipping and unwrapping, right? I might have to give it a go!

You may or may not see me in the next couple of days. It very much depends on the course of The Hubster’s recovery. Really want Darling Daughter to feel like this is still a fun Christmas, so she will lead the days. We’ve seen a few Holiday movies, of the Mom+DD variety (she likes holiday rom coms, with a touch of romance, in the Hallmark vein – me? not so much, but I indulge her) but she has quite a long list.

{sigh}

It dried! Fabric and paper bowl

Well I love it, it’s so very pretty, but as I feared the walls are a bit on the thin side. It’ll be great to replace the broken bowl it was built around, to hold little stray knitting bits near me on the sofa sidetable, but it isn’t super strong.

I am toying with the idea of adding some more layers to the INSIDE, but darn it it is so very pretty, I really hate to do that

The outside looks great too and I have no more of those specific momigami papers and do not want to cover it up. I’ll dither on – now entering full Christmas mode and far too busy with the family for crafting. See you on the other side!

Fabric and momigami paper bowls

So, one of the mods of a mixed media group I am part of shared a video for these lovely fabric bowls. as soon as I saw them I knew I had to give it a go. I had a bowl that got knocked off a table and cracked, held together with washi tape. I covered that with cling film … but was a little worried about that dip in the bottom. My solution was to cut a couple of cardboard circles to fill in and wrap that again with cling film.

From there is was adding layers of fabric. The video shows adding what you want to be seen inside the bowl as the bottom layer

then adding more layers to give it thickness in plain boring fabric. I did that but not enough. I also added the net layer more up and down instead of around. You can see some of the boring brown material under the momigami papers in the next step, but I feel like I rushed to that layer and more fabric layers would have made it more sturdy. My final touch was some printed fabric with stark black text.

Then it is a waiting game! PVA does dry pretty fast but not fast enough for someone as impatient as ME! But honestly, it does mean I can get on with all the pre-xmas cooking and wrapping and the like, while it dries int he background. I cannot believe Christmas is here in just a few days, and we will celebrate as a family all in one place for the first time in forever.

If it dries, I’ll see you tomorrow for the “big reveal” then going silent for a few days.

One paper finished.

Yeah so the whole getting Son + Cat home thing seems to have kicked into high gear. Flights booked, exit tasks in progress, and we have a busy week leading up to his arrival. His room is clean and tidy, but there are three appointments for Darling Daughter (one a drive away) a mammogram for me, and endless daily Zooms for The Hubster (three to five a day) as well as DD’s birthday party.

Still need to rehang the curtains after washing and yeah, an American king-size bed is bigger than a UK super-king so it dominates the room. But there are two large wardrobes and a dresser behind that partially open door so hopefully not too cramped a space.

All that is by way of explaining why I’ve made so little progress on finishing the papers I shared on Friday. Shocking, really. While I had intended to work on all of them kinda at the same time, in the end I was most inspired by one of them so I focused on it instead.

There are three PM Artist Studio stencils here (gears, asemic writing and the blue bit at the top, I forget it’s name) and I really like them a lot. As the plan was always to cut the sheet up, I wasn’t too bothered at how it looked as a full sheet. I ended up making one of the pop-up cubes that I shared ages back. I printed the template on A3 heavy weight cardstock and used a proper rubber band rather than the linked loom bands like the smaller printer paper version, and it pops a treat. I do have a video of it but adding a video doesn’t really work here. This MIGHT work….

https://www.dropbox.com/s/grbc86sd8atlucq/IMG_5777.MOV?dl=0

Anyway, the sides ended up looking pretty good, to my eye, although I might add more surface decoration to it. Making an “art cube” was from a You Tube video shared in a private group and this was how I chose to interpret that. Sadly, in my box o’blocks under my desk, cubes are in short supply.

I still absolutely love that circle of numbers, a very old Banana Frog stamp set for making calendar embellishments for scrapbook pages, and I use it a LOT.

Now, I still have three more sheets to complete. DOH!

Card ball done, but….

…at some point I realized I had gone past the point of taking decent photos of the assembly. Grr. I looked back at the original post and thought it was pretty clear using the plain black cards so I might just have to do another one using that method for photography. But I will show you how I completed this one first.

I was using a set of printable papers from Roben Marie. I love them, and they were the perfect colours for my decor. I printed the “washi tape” strips and joined them into double-length strips. That was perfect to wrap the ball. I wrapped over each large open square.

That was the one part of this variation that I was not super keen on. But the next fewest cards was the..octohedron, I think? I made one using paint chip strips at some point

and that one has a much smaller opening. Anyway, once I wrapped it, the opening were pretty well hidden. But the joins if the two lengths were very visible – yeah, that wasn’t the bit I focused on for this photo but you will have to trust me, it was.

THEN I had to decide what of the few options would look best to hide that and further soften the cube-ish shape into a more ball shape.

In the end I went with the squares across the wings of the two cards, and both the square and the circle topper pop-dotted with dimensional tape to give it some further interest. Then I had to wiggle the hanging string thru. Another bit I really need to highlight is the need for holes punched in the middle of the cards at the top and bottom. You CAN use the natural holes but it might hang a bit wonky.

Thank goodness for knitting needles and Tunisian crochet hooks is all I can say. I will work out how to do this while you are in process for that tutorial.

In the end I thought it looked very pretty, and looks great hanging in the window. Of course the light ain’t right, as usual, but I hope to get a snap when it is.

So tutorial Monday, I expect, as it will give me the whole weekend to make it a good one. Well, in addition to all the planning for son stuff….

A new Card Ball

I was looking thru some of my gel printed items, and came across a stack of the “old wall” ones that all fell into the same colour range. They were just crying out to be used in a cohesive project. As I kinda promised more on the card ball (the easier version that is more cube-like than ball like but only needs 12 cards (vs 30!) I thought it might be an idea to use them for that. These prints were done on the…is it the 6 inch plate? The original Gelli Arts one. If you printed a large sheet, either by printing bits of the plate all over say an A3 sheet, you could perhaps stick all the cards in one go. I had to do 2 or 3 per print.

But I think they look great together, and a dusting of Archival Ink really finished them off!

From there it is just cutting the slits in each card – four per card and it is critical they be in exactly the same orientation! I made a printable template, but in using it for the last ball I realized I stuck some to the BACK rather than to the FRONT of the card. With this set, given that I only had exactly enough prints to do what I wanted, I could not afford to make a mistake so I edited the template to the text would remind me LOL!

Now the tedious part is out of the way, I have a plan to add a bit more colour – you might have spied it yesterday on my WOYWW post.

I hope I can manage to capture the assembly in a clear and helpful way…That part up next!

A few projects on the go…Spirit Doll first.

FINALLY, my back is approaching normalcy. And FINALLY the Cat + Son transport is getting sorted and an arrival date for both should come TODAY. Well, I hope so anyway. I have been working on a challenge for an online group, to make a spirit doll. OK, yeah, so if yo have spent ANY time here you know I do not buy in to all that airy fairy, mystical, goddess, moon cycle stuff. If you do, I am glad you gain comfort or strength from it. I don’t. But from a purely arty viewpoint, making a spirit doll seemed … fun. At one point, a friend of my MIL was going to make one for darling daughter. Her work was amazing. But she had a change of circumstance and stopped all her art while we were still in the planning and picking fabric stage. Anyway, I thought I would have a bash. First off, I was thinking about an embellishment. Weird angle to come at it, but hey ho. I had stumbled across something I made, easily 20 years ago. A little beaded mermaid.

I think she is adorable, still, but she wasn’t quite right. I dragged out my Beadlings book and found the Damselfly, which I thought would be nice made form the slightly larger beads I had on hand. About the same size as the mermaid, butI think larger beads kinda play with the scale, so the spirit doll looks…smaller, I guess.

It’s a simple process. You get a couple of sticks, wire them int a cross, add some toy stuffing then start wrapping loose strips of fabric around to build a body. You add an “intention” inside – and I did but somehow those photos disappeared into the ether. It was a small open-frame circle charm, stuck to fabric, with my intention added in typewriter font. Looked cute and hangs around her neck, under the wrapping layers. Annoying. As did most of the stages-of-wrapping ones. Bah! Somehow she went from the left photo to the right, with no steps in between.

There is a lot more embellishments to be added, and building the face/head part deserves a bit more time and thought so I’ll share more detail tomorrow – provided my ancient iPhone/camera cooperates. Grrr. I am enjoying it and have lots of ideas so hope you enjoy my process.

Gutted to have missed the WOYWW crop but will hope to see many photos on the hop on Wednesday!

Another gelli ball

We just found out we have about 2 weeks less than we expected to get my boy home with his cat. Cue full on panic mode.

I am also still not totally healed so I will just slam this up for a Friday and hope to be able to offer some instructions, warnings, and templates over the weekend for next week. Let’s see if I can….

This has been in the making for a bit. I kept screwing up my cutting and then I had to set it aside, and yada yada yada…

I quite like it, and it is the way easier “cube” version from my long ago post here. Click the link for the template to read the article. Pay attention to the CRITICAL NOTE in my post when cutting the slits! If you make one do share! I’d love to see it and they are a great, unique way to use of sets of prints.

Off to get my 6th (!) does of the vax, but the new one this time. AND a flu jab. Yeah, so maybe my hope of doing anything over the weekend is a pipe dream… time will tell.