S.....

Craft Barn Alphabet challenge time again. Not much time and a letter with a huge number of words but can't fall so close to the finishing line .... my first thought was Serendipity, because it is such a lovely word to say and that's mainly how I work But my old dictionary had a different definition to the normal usage of " happy accident" that we have now.  It said "the liking for old books and ornaments.  Mmmm! I thought about it for a few days but nothing was happening so I delved into the dictionary again and it opened at the snow page, very seasonal.    Out of all the snow words I chose this because the definition made me laugh. "Snowstorm: a storm with falling snow."  Right. So here we have Snowstorm.

 and with tag

 The little houses are Memory Box die cuts and the snowflakes are a mixture of die cuts and punched. The paint is  Fresco Ice Blue and Baltic Blue with some acrylic white added.
I have also finished the cover for the book where I am keeping all the letters but I am keeping that secret for now.  Thought occurred, I wonder what I would have chosen for S if it were July instead of November?

Tissue prints

I have to thank Paper Printables  for ending my long search for an easy way  to print on tissue paper with my inkjet printer. I have tried so many other ways fighting with adhesive tape etc.and always in terror of jaming my printer.This one is relatively quick and easy and so far 100% successful. Yeah!

Q...

is the latest letter in the Craft Barn Alphabet challenge.   I chose Quartette,  my dictionary tells me it is anything in fours so at first I was thinking of dividing the page and filling it with the seasons, suits of cards, that sort of thing but then there was the musical connection.  I looked in my Dover Desk Gallery of clip art, I was now thinking silhouettes.(this blog is called altering thoug
hts!), at first I was looking for musicians and then I found this and given the season I thought it perfect.
I cut a mask with the intention of stencilling the image, I liked this one but as you can see I had trouble with working out which way round the stencil should go and  when I tried it the "right" way round I couldn't re-create the textures.

 After ten rejects  I decided to use the mask itself which by then was nicely coated in paint.

Here it is with word tag.

Only three letters left now.

Just a little ...

bit proud of my daughter. Don't usuall do family here but I wanted somewhere to keep this.  She plays the part played by Deborah Kerr in the film.

N.....

is the letter as the Craft Barn Challenge nears the end. I was surprised to find relatively few words beginning with N. I chose Needlewoman.   Like the letter L below I have chosen this for more personal reasons. There are quite a few seamstresses and a milliner  in my family tree and I have enjoyed many hours stitching with friends or on my own. I looked for images of needlewomen and chose the one by Velazques as I  thought it gave a sense of the way woman have plied a needle stretching back through time.  I painted two pieces of paper and used one for the background and one to cut out the stamped images. None of my die cut alphabets seemed to fit so I sewed the name.

Just to prove my point I am having fun with crazy patchwork at the moment.  I turned the piece here into a cushion. I wanted to do some more and decised to make a throw for the settee, I wanted it to look aged so I made up the block and then sprayed it with brown Seta colour.  This should keep me busy for a little while.