Bzzy Little Bee - Crafting Adventures in Southern California by Carmen Flores Tanis

My Dream House In The Clouds

2012-01-21T23:08:22-08:00

My Dream House

One of my favorite magazines is "Cloth Paper Scissors." It's my monthly treat of inspiration and ideas. Every month or two the magazine has a readers' challenge where readers are invited to contribute projects for whatever topic is announced. A few months ago the challenge was "Home Sweet Home". This looked like so much fun so I decided to make my own little "dream house."

A template was provided so that everyone's house would be the same size. I wanted a strong structure so I made mine out of balsa wood and then decorated it with acrylics.

Little Wooden House On The Prarie

Sketching Design On Gessoed Box

Filling In The Background

Finished Sides

I added little floating fluffy sheeps and a dancing bear topiary. The other two sides are a door within a door leading to promise and opportunity and a little tiny me sailing a tiny boat in the skies (I've had that dream before!). I topped off the little house with a metal roof embossed with swirly swirls. Dreamy!

Happily, my little house was selected as one of the ninety-five little houses published in the November/December issue! Here's the page that I am on:

I actually made a second little house featuring - glitter!!! I'll post pictures of that later. And don't forget that CHA starts next week! It's the Craft and Hobby Association Winter Conference and it's a craftapalooza! If you have a chance to attend, you must - you will leave inspired and full of fire!

Magic Box of Intentions and Goals

2012-01-08T21:31:00-08:00

Time for this month's CHA Designer Crafts Connection Blog Hop! This month the theme is Journaling. I love journals. I love buying them and dreaming about how I will fill them with thoughts and plans and musings. But I never seem to get past the first entry in a new journal because once I close the covers of the book, it always seems to end up hidden and forgotten under a stack of more pressing items all vieing for my attention. So my journaling never gets very far each year. However I do love love love to make To-Do lists and I love to organize anything and everything! So this year I decided to make a sort of recipe box in which to keep all my intentions and goals for the coming twelve months. This way I can organize and shuffle the cards around and then pull out and display specific cards which I want to focus on that day.

I've also had the Cat in the Hat on the mind a lot lately so I wanted to play around with the colors from the book - orangey red, blue, yellow and lots of black. Remember how the Cat in the Hat opens a box and Thing 1 and Thing 2 leap out to cause havoc? I love that image! So here's my 3-D journal of sorts - all inspired by Dr. Seuss and the Cat in the Hat!

Ready for 2012!

This was a simple hinged wood box which I gessoed and then decorated with Copic markers. Super easy. The great thing about outlining everything with a black marker is that it hides all the boo-boos and really makes everything pop.

Look at all those cards just waiting to be organized!

I cut cards out of super heavy white chipboard. Then to make the fun top edges, I used a Fiskars stencil and craft knife on half of the cards and an Accucut scallop die on the rest.

Intentions on the Left, Goals on the Right

Once the cards were all cut out, it was time to start the writing. It was so much fun - like coloring in a coloring book! Using the Copic markers, I wrote really simple thoughts on the front of each card and then wrote the details on the backs. That little character with the hat is me and the little bird who cracks wise is my smart aleck inner self.

Reverse Side of "Move More!"

Drinking 64 Oz. Every Day Is Not That Easy

Close Up Detail of Corner

One Fish, Two Fish

This project was a blast!! Now I have a place to keep track of all my plans for the year, play with markers, draw fun little characters and I can keep adding cards and reorganizing. Now that's my kind of journal!

-----------------------------------------

Be sure to check out all the other fabulous journaling projects in the Designer Crafts Connection Blog Hop! Just click "hop forward" or "hop backward" on the DC Connection badge to visit the other blogs.

[ DC Connection ]
[ hop back ] [ hop forward ]

Bonus! The Designer Craft Connections has a new Facebook page! Come LIKE it so you'll be sure to find out about all our fun challenges, announcements and giveaways. Tell your friends! https://www.facebook.com/DesignerCraftsConnection

A Few Projects Released From Isle-Finish-it-Layta Pile Isle

2012-01-03T00:00:06-08:00

Happy New Year! Time for a fresh start filled with new goals and resolutions and new projects waiting to be tackled. But what about the projects that started 2011 (or even previous years) with such promise and just got set aside for one reason or another? Well, last week - the final week of 2011 - I decided to try to at least make a little dent in my pile of half finished projects. Here's what I got done:

1 - Heart Tile Glaze Samples - You can't really tell the true color of ceramic glazes until they are fired so I had been wanting to make up some sample tiles of my collection of glazes for a long time now. I had made lots of white clay heart tiles a while back but had never gotten around to actually glazing and firing them.

Hearts A Fire

I used a ceramic pencil to jot the glaze details on the blank back of each tile. It took about two hours to glaze a tray of sixty tiles and then another four hours to fire in the kiln. Now it'll be easy to select my colors next time I start a ceramic piece!

Hearts A Fire

Total time of project spent in half-finished project pile - 12 years for the glazes (how long I've been meaning to make samples) / 3 years for the heart tiles (how long ago I actually made them).

Ay-yi-yi. Is that ever embarrassing.

2 - Finishing Up Resin Stained Glass Mirrors - These little guys had been languishing on a shelf practically done except for needing some final finishing touches. I had already done all of the hard parts of making the mosaics and pouring the resin coating. All that was needed was to remove the resin drips along the inside openings so that the mirror glass could lie flat against the front of the frame. A few minutes with a craft knife removed the drips and then the mirror glass was able to fit beautifully. I secured the back of the mirror glass with a bead of hot glue and then covered up the back of each mirror with a piece of black paper. The last thing to do was to add the hanging hardware. Hooray! These babies are finally ready to hang!

Mirror Mirror Mirror On The Shelf Wall

Total time of project spent in half-finished project pile - 5 years.

A long time but not as bad as those dang heart glaze tiles!

3 - Hot Foil Pen Experiments - I purchased this "Hot Foil Pen" by Staedtler eons ago but had never actually played with it. It is a battery operated pen that heats up to melt plastic backed sheets of foil onto all kinds of surfaces. Boy! What took me so long to try out this great little tool?

Oooh Shiny!

I tried the pen and foil on paper, wood and leather and was delighted with the results. It takes a little bit to get used to but now I've got tons of ideas of things to make!

Total time of project spent in half-finished project pile - 4 years.

Although to be fair, this was more of a tool test than a project and although it's now off my to-do list, I have now added to the project list at least three things that I want to make with this pen and foil.

4 - Leather Color Swatches - OK, this one wasn't on the half-finished pile for very long but I was just in a leather crafting mood and this was a good excuse project. I painted purchased leather rectangles with all of my leather stains and dyes and then strung them with bead chain to make little color sample sets.

I Want Shoes In All These Colors!

I stamped some of the leather pieces with the names of the colors and all of them I labeled on the back with a Sharpie. Aw man, now I want to go make some leather items!

Total time of project spent in half-finished project pile - 6 months.

Whew! It felt good to get some of these projects done although I only wish that the interest paid on my bank accounts compounded as quickly as my craft list seems to grow. Happy New Year and may your year be blessed with lots of adventures, laughter, joy and welcome surprises!

Designer Crafts Connection Sock Monkey Blog Hop - Send In The Monkeys - I Mean Skunkys

2011-12-05T02:02:48-08:00

Time for this month's CHA Designer Crafts Connection Blog Hop and this month's theme is Sock Monkeys! The "sock hop" challenge was sponsored by the wonderful Ana Araujo of When Creativity Knocks along with FoxRiver, Rit and Judikins. Each designer received a pair of the iconic red-heeled socks that are give sock monkeys their distinctive look. Rit provided bottles of liquid dye and Judkins supplied a fabulous sock monkey rubber stamp. To get everyone started, Ana sent each designer a copy of the When Creativity Knocks video book Sock Monkeys Go BanAnas. In the video, Ana and her lovely daughter, Megan, explain step by step the construction of a sock monkey. I learned so many tips and sewing secrets! Thank you so much, Ana, for arranging this fun challenge!

Before I continue, I have to explain that the last couple of months, I have been obsessed with skunks. Skunk crazy! You see, whenever Bruce and I have a weekend afternoon free, we love to drive through nearby Griffith Park. Several times we were there at dusk and just happened to see a fat little skunk waddling across the road and up a trail. It has now become our habit when on our Griffith Park drives to roll down the windows and yell "Skunky!" in the hopes that we'll run across our fat little skunk again. (Who knows - it might work!) Thus inspired, I decided to do a variation on the Sock Monkey and make it a Sock Skunky!

I Smell Pretty, Oh So Pretty

Wanting to get a really dark color, I dyed the pair of FoxRiver socks with a whole bottle of Rit Black dye. The socks took the dye very well with the interesting discovery that the red heels stayed red! (Originally I kept the red heel as part of the nose and mouth but ended up trimming it to get the right shape of the snout.)

The skunk is made of three parts - the front half which is the head and front legs, the back half which is the torso and back legs then the tail which is added on at the end. Ana's video is fabulous in its instructions - the front half of the skunk is constructed basically the same way as how she constructs the main body of the sock monkey.

With a little textile paint for the nose and stripe and bits of blue felt for the eyes and corsage, Skunky was transformed from warm long-lasting footware to beaming little stinker.

This was such a great creative challenge in which to participate. For me, it was one of those projects where you have to just let go and trust in the process. A lot of the construction was done inside out and flat. It wasn't until the very end when the body was stuffed that I could really see the little skunk starting to emerge. Even then, it took a lot of whittling here and there to get the shape right. Originally he started out looking more like a deer! This was such a fun challenge and I had a blast. And now I have my own Skunky!

-----------------------------------------

Best of all, you can enter to win your own Sock Monkey prize valued at over $40! Here's what one lucky reader will receive:

Sock Monkeys Go BanAnas WCK VideoBook
One (1) sewn Sock Monkey body ready to be stuffed
One (1) pair FoxRiver: Oringal Rockford Red Heel Socks
Button Eyes, needle, floss and stuffing

Just head over to the When Creativity Knocks website and in the Member Log In box click "Create An Account". Then enter "Sock Monkey" as the entry code along with your info. I hope you win!

Ana is also offering all blog hop readers $2.00 off the purchase of a Sock Monkeys Go BanAnas WCK VideoBook plus a free copy of the 2012 WCK Sock Monkeys Go BanAnas eCalendar with purchase of the video! The coupon code is "sockmonkeybloghop". Hooray for sock monkeys!

-----------------------------------------

Be sure to check out all the other fabulous Sock Monkey projects in the Designer Crafts Connection Blog Hop! Just click "hop forward" or "hop backward" on the DC Connection badge to visit the other blogs.

[ DC Connection ]
[ hop back ] [ hop forward ]

Designer Crafts Connection Blog Hop - Polymer Clay Holiday Trees

2011-11-07T05:00:00-08:00

Time for this month's CHA Designer Crafts Connection Blog Hop! This month the theme is Thanksgiving / Fall so here's a look at one of my favorite projects - fun little trees made out of polymer clay.

Gobble Gobble Gobble!!

Figuring out the engineering is probably my favorite part of designing a craft. For the tree, I set a piece of armature wire in a pot full of plaster to act as the trunk. Then I constructed some cones out of half circles of paper to act as molds for the polymer clay tree "skirts". I also rolled out some clay balls and logs to act as spacers between the "skirts".

Plaster filled pot, clay spacers and paper cones

Basic Shape A-OK!

Once I got the design of the structure right, it was time to go to town! To form the skirts, I rolled out sheets of white polymer clay, added texture and draped each sheet on a paper cone to get that funnel shape. I added a few clay cutouts and then into the oven they went. I also made a little turkey tree topper by adding a clay tail and head to a tiny gourd body. Once the clay came out of the oven, I painted everything with acrylics. (I also painted the pot and used paint pens to write text along the rim.) Once all the individual pieces were ready, I assembled everything with just a little glue to hold each part in place.

I Can See Your House From Here!

And of course, I couldn't stop there. I went on a crafting spree and made an entire collection of holiday trees!

My Holiday Forest

From left to right above - Thanksgiving/Fall, Winter Wonderland, Halloween, Partridge in a Pear Tree, Valentine's Day.

Holiday Inn

All the trees are topped with tiny gourds with extra clay details like the snowman's hat and scarf. Oh! I almost forgot - each tree stands about fifteen inches tall so they make fun centerpieces. Now that's some Holiday Whobee Whatee for you!

-----------------------------------------

Be sure to check out all the other fabulous holiday projects in the Designer Crafts Connection Blog Hop! Just click "hop forward" or "hop backward" on the DC Connection badge to visit the other blogs.

[ DC Connection ]
[ hop back ] [ hop forward ]