Melting Crayons

Here's a quick video of me playing with the timelapse on my phone and melting crayons.

Latest Journaling

This has become my favorite thing to do. The feature image is something I recently painted in here, and I'm pretty pleased with how it looks. This journal is the one with all the rolled up magazine pages on the cover. It's heavy! And it was also kind of my first time doing it, so some of the colors are sloppy and all the strips aren't facing the same way. But oh well.

I used watercolor pencils to draw these flowers on old book pages (I stock up on old books to destroy via crafting) and then carefully painted the outline with black acrylic paint. I cut out a whole bunch of them and wanted to make some kind of frame like this This is what those magazines strips look like if you just mod podge and tri-fold them. They end up pretty thick and of course add some weight to my book, but I love the way they look with the fold. A regular magazine strip just isn’t the same. So I never learned how to sew. Then, one day, it was imperative that I reattach a button to a blouse of some sort. Lots of threading and stabbing and poking, but I guess I made it work in my own way. Then I wanted to play with embroidery, but fabric always irritated me with its flimsiness. I’ve sewed several designs into more (so many) book pages over cardstock, watercolor paper, junk mail, etc. These little exploding flower things were fun for about the first half of the process. I love geometric shapes, but sometimes I forget how to draw them. I do the same thing with shading letters. The perspective will always be wrong on just one little piece of the word. My mom tells me this is because I have no patience. Got these puzzle pieces for less than a dollar at Goodwill. I think I painted them when they were together as one piece (but I could be wrong). The more tedious thing was cutting out all those random words (again with the old book pages) and gingerly placing them between the pieces. Zentangle was one of the first things I started looking at when I wanted to expand on my doodling skills. Recently I started checking out the dangling ones, and I dig ’em super hard. This is barely anything yet. I printed that background out (citation needed) and stamped the phrase “wait til they get a load of me” onto the design in white acrylic paint. I don’t suggest using acrylics with stamps! It sucks! You have to be so careful and apply the perfect amount of pressure. Like in the previous photo, a lot of the time I get inspired by quotes or just write down things that I like (you should see when I'm reading a novel; I'm constantly highlighting) and then hope to turn them into something I like even more. This is pretty sloppy as of now. You can see all the zentangle type design and just doodling that I've done around the edges. That's what most of my notes in school look like. More colorful magazine scraps. You should see my collection of ripped up mags. When I finished the background I went to seal it and accidentally grabbed my gel matte instead of the transparent gesso and ended up with this. So. Pending. Another (citation needed) background I printed out and doodled on. Again, I love geometric shapes, and they always provide a nice outline for doodling. Mandalas! Well, kind of. More zentangle inspiration, really. People in my classes know that I am obsessed with my multicolored gel pens, so that's what I used here alongside the Dr. Seuss quote. It's about duckies. So this isn't pretty but I really wanted to share it. I love this tidbit from a translated poem I read. It was one I chose to talk about in an English class, and this line just stuck with me. I hope to do something more with it. Heh. Another demonstration for my love of profanity. I don't know if there's a better way to express oneself. Oh, I love this one. Don't really know where it came from. I was pretty into making these flowers for a while. I used several kinds of paper here: sheet music, old book pages, cardstock, etc., and either cut the pieces out individually or had the help of a stencil. I think it's pretty. More of a practice page than anything. We'll see what becomes of it. These mandalas are a it more mandala-y. Again I used my gel pens here. The other side is just pieces of cardstock. Don't really know what I was going for there. I appear to love gel pens. This is on more old book pages. I love the contrast. We'll see where it goes. I cut these letters from an old book and pasted them on this background I'd had in here for a while. The background is made from pages of a different (newer, whiter) book that I'm pretty sure I colored with watercolor pencils. I didn't quite get the contrast I was hoping for here, so I may add borders. If you look closely enough here you can see that part of this design is the result of a printer jam. Our printer is angry and old, so sometimes it gives me these interesting results. I thought it looked really cool so I hoped to do something with it. Ah! This is one through my phase of cutting random words out of magazines and drawing sharpie shapes around them and coloring them with watercolor pencils. "Oatmeal" was one of the particularly silly words I chose. A piece of this got torn out somehow, but I still dig it. Talk about mixed media. The background here was made with coffee stains, and the rest of it is actual petals from my garden. It's super bland and not nearly as colorful as I had hoped, so it definitely needs something. I got into drawing these shapes after a biology lab where we looked at ameobas and were instructed to draw them out. They were super fun and easy so I ended up doodling them some more. The petals on the outside are much more clean cut that some of my other ones because I used a nice little cutter-outer thing I got from AC Moore. Here's another example of sewing into book pages. I like this little flower. The background was first made with modeling paste; I swirled it around in a pattern that you can kind of see in the photo. I covered it with tissue paper. This is another page that is making my book super heavy. The cutouts here are an eyeball looking thing and "they will never let go". I think the background is alcohol ink over a bit of gesso. Needs something? I would do embroidery a lot more often if I had the patience for it. I remember how long this took and how sick of it I was by the end. I believe I even started to do different colored borders and then gave up. I've loved this phrase for so long, at least since high school when I read Macbeth. Would love to do something more with it. Another phrase I adore. I cut these out with basic stencils. This might as well be my code of honor. This is a fun thing to do. Basically just take a straight edge and make random lines across the page and then a whole bunch of circles. I used acrylic paint to color in the spaces, and then did a bit of zentangle in the leftover blank spots. Really good creative vomit. I tore this page out of some old book I got out of the McKay free bin. I just liked the look of it. So I colored some bubbles on it! Random flowers. I like these too. I tend to always draw these damn thing over my notes and whatnot. I saw something like this on Pinterest, I believe. So I made it into my own little lettering scheme. I like lettering. Wish I was better at it. Boy do I love these profane inspirational quotes, though. Whatever the background is here (I think it was with shimmer spray, but I haven't really found a way I really like to incorporate that stuff), I think it was covered up with something biblical, but it must have fallen off. Otherwise this quote is just something I always try to remember.

Lamp For A Lampp

One of my favorite teachers in high school has the name "Lampp" and loves all things silly and creative. She'd seen the cover of one of my art journals (covered in those rolled magazine strips) and adored it so I decided to make her a similar decoration.

It takes a lot of time to roll these things up. First you have to decide if you want a color scheme or if you just want to use random magazine pages. I, of course, had to pick the difficult option and go for specific colors. A friend let me have all her old Cosmos, and I had tons of luck! Girly mags tend to have more vibrant background colors.

I cut each strip about an inch and a half thick (I use my straight edge paper slicer thing so I don't have to mess around with scissors) and then fold them into thirds. Mod podge works best to slather them with and then roll into these little circles, but I've also used a glue stick.

     

So I love the way the colors turned out, and I dig the rhinestone flair, but I'm unsure of where to go from here. I considered framing it somehow, but otherwise nothing has really jumped out to me idea-wise.

What do you think?

Harry Potter Drinking Game

We've been snowed in for almost two weeks now. My labs have still been running, but all my other classes have been cancelled by professors on the days the university wasn't closed. Last night we got the most snow that we've had (about six inches), and everybody was on campus in the middle of the night having snowball fights and doing everything from sledding to skiing and snowboarding down The Hill. It was magical.

But UT decided not to close today. Most of my classes were indeed cancelled, but both my roommates had to go to work. This is particularly a shame because we had planned to stay in all day and watch all the Harry Potter movies. We got through Chamber of Secrets last night and started our drinking game.

Now I'm not much of a day drinker, so I'm a bit pleased that I don't have to take part in this today. But we'll finish it eventually! Here are all the rules in a more readable format:

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DRINK ONCE:
- any time the phrase "he who must not be named" is mentioned
- any time Gryffindor wins points
- any time Hermione corrects someone
- any time Nevil Longbottom is injured
- any time Harry catches the snitch
- any time anyone uses the spell "expelliarmus"
DRINK TWICE:
- any time Fred & George say the same thing at the same time
- any time anyone speaks parseltongue
- any time Slytherin gets points

And finally, anytime the name "Voldemort" is actually said aloud, everyone must use their index fingers to make a devil's horns gesture (two fingers behind the head, like bunny ears but with both hands). The last person to do so must drink three times.

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This went pretty well for the first two movies. There was a LOT of parseltongue in the second one! Hopefully we'll get to pick this back up this weekend. I'm pretty proud of it.

Stay warm and be merry.

Redesigning My Nightstand

I have grown so tired of my current bedside table. It was just a cheap piece of furniture that I've had since I've lived in this apartment (so almost four years?), and I had tried to add my own touch several times. But it was all shit. First I tore off the cabinet on the front and tried to utilize it as an open space. Hated that. Then I think I tried to attach something to the side and completely failed and just ended up with ugly holes in the side. After that I glued buttons on the drawer. Hated it. Plus it made it harder to open.

The next couple of times involved various acrylic paints and glitter (which is always a horrible, horrible idea; my personal ring of hell will have excess glitter stuck to everything). It was just a disaster. So today in the middle of class, I became inspired.

I wanted to build something crazy. So I started at Goodwill.

I got this old stool for ten bucks. The base of it is obviously super cool but the seat is made of some disgusting cardboard-like matter that I've never dealt with before. Definitely had to do something about that.

This old wire crate is much more impressive in real life. I bought this at one of my favorite antique stores in Knoxville called Nostalgia. It was pricier, but as soon as I saw it I knew it would be perfect. I had already gotten the stool, and my original plan was to find an old piece of luggage or some kind of drawer to attach to the top. But somehow I knew that this would be more versatile.

This is Milo. She was on top of me the entire time I was working on this project so I had to include a couple glamour shots.

Back to this nasty stool. Again, whatever the hell it was made of was completely foreign to me, so I really had to work hard to determine what to do with it. I figured I couldn't fail with good-old-fashioned glue, so I mod podged this bitch up.

I'm really into the aesthetics of old book pages. There's a great place in TN called Mckay; I've talked about it before. They have a free bin outside the store, and sometimes there's some great stuff for crafting.

The nearly-final job. It was so messy and didn't stick very well. Took a lot of glue.

Hi there, Milo.

I didn't get a shot of the crate by itself after I painted it, but yeah, it's that color. I used a messy, bristled brush and just kind of dabbed it all on. It made sense with the antique vibe.

I was going to strap it on with hemp, but I couldn't remember where I put it. So I found some old guitar strings (that I had saved years ago, knowing I would need them eventually!) and wrapped them tightly around the base of the stool and weaved them into the crate.

This was just something I attached to the base of it. Pretty simple velcro job.

Then I attached a book cover to the bottom, so I could easily set things on top of it. Used distress ink to distort it.

More book covers for the top. I wasn't going to use anything here, but it was way easier to set things on top of a solid surface.

This is pretty close to the final product! Trying to fit in all the stuff I had in my old nightstand.

The great thing about the crate is the potential for attachments. S hooks are everybody's friend! Also, it's all made of metal so I can stick magnets to it. I'm already addicted to my makeup magnet board in my bathroom, so I had some extra magnets lying around. So far I've attached them to a couple sticky notes and my handy dandy back scratcher.