Thursday, November 28, 2013

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?


Sunday, November 17, 2013

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!


Friday, November 15, 2013

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.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

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.







Sunday, November 03, 2013

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.